Where are the Men?

Chewing on the easter story for our Pre Sunrise Easter Hike; I heard part of the story in a new way.

from Mark 16

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so they could embalm him. Very early on Sunday morning, as the sun rose, they went to the tomb. They worried out loud to each other, “Who will roll back the stone from the tomb for us?”

In other words: "Where are the men? With them hiding in fear: Who will roll back the stone?"

And so it was that it was the women who first encountered the resurrection.  It was a woman who was the first commissioned evangelist of the good news. "Go to my brothers and tell them..."

- Peace

Easter on Nose Hill

Lead a short Easter Liturgy for Calgary Church and some friend from Xalt on Nose Hill this morning.  Told a compressed version of Holy week in 4 stops pairing the stories with our progress on the path.

The ancient practice of going up to Jerusalem / at the trail head before the climb.
Jesus in the temple, washing of feat, last supper / at the stones near the top of nose hill.
Jesus death and Holy Saturday / bottom of valley
Waiting to recognize the Risen Jesus / The large erratic on the other side of the valley.

Took about 45 minutes.  We made it just in time to see the sun appear in the NE.

We followed it with a potluck breakfast at The House in Kensington.   Good food, good times.

Posted 8 shots to flickr.

- Peace

Easter Unedited

Having just read through the four Easter accounts in preparation for Xalt's Sunrise Service I found N. T. Wright's take on the oddity of the four accounts interesting. There are four reasons the accounts are strange:

1. absence of Scripture: they don't quote the law and the prophets the way other parts of the Gospels do.
2. the presence of women as the primary witnesses: at the time they would not have been considered reliable.
3. the portrait of Jesus himself: mixes both the phisical and the supernatural, making no one happy.
4. the absence of any mention of the future Christian hope.

Read Easter Unedited it's an except from N. T. Wright's Jesus, the Final Days: What Really Happened.

- Peace

The Irony of Holy Saturday

Holy Saturday, between the crucifiction of Jesus on Friday and Easter. I wonder if in the shock and the fear of the day before if the first follower's of Jesus thought it ironic to observe the Sabbath, a day rooted in the rest of God, when it seemed so clear that God was resting the day before when they really needed him.

- Peace

Easter Weather

We had strange weather last week. Calgary Strange, it was the same for week. Cloudy with some snow every day. In Calgary we're used to rain/snow/sunny in one day, so a whole week of nothing but the same thing is strange. It started to clear Saturday afternoon, but it was still cold Sunday morning for the Xalt Easter Sunrise Gathering. But Sunday was bright, warm with birds singing out doors. What perfect weather the mark Resurrection and new Life!

I know there are some who will say this is what makes Easter truly a Pagan celebration of spring, in fact there was a Pagan on CBC saying exactly that. His argument, Easter was clearly Pagan as it uses the lunar calendar to set it's date. Leaving aside the issue of the Lunar Calendar being Pagan, I see easter as far more than the celebration of a new Spring Season. Yes we celebrate rebirth as do our Pagan brothers, but Easter takes it to a new Context.

The Easter story is more than the general idea of new life after winter, it's celebrating Resurrection after the Political and Religious powers of the day had conspired to protect their own interests and the interests of national security by executing Jesus. They used the power they had to put an end to this Gospel of loving your enemies, embracing tax collectors and prostitutes and up setting religious commerce. They did their worst, and Jesus submitted to their worst. It wasn't enough. God raised Jesus from the dead giving his Gospel a whole new power. His followers no longer feared the authorities, the Gospel could not be stopped.

Spring weather is wonderful and we should celebrate it. New life in the face of the worst evil of religion and politics takes hope to whole other level, and we need to not only to celebrate it, but to join in with it.

Updated: Mike Todd posted this NT Wright Quote:

What neither modernity nor cynical postmodernity can cope with - and hence what they, like the cultural thought police of the first century, stamp on whenever they see it - is the suggestion that the gloom of Good Friday and the lull of Holy Saturday are the prelude to a new kind of life. This sort of life bursts out and challenges all our power systems (in an electronically manipulated democracy, power follows money and the media), and declares once more the shockingly unfashionable truth that Jesus is Lord.

Easter is about the beginning of God’s new world. John’s Gospel stresses that Easter Day is the first day of the new week: not so much the end of the old story as the launch of the new one. The gospel resurrection stories end, not with “well, that’s all right then”, nor with “Jesus is risen, therefore we will rise too”, but with “God’s new world has begun, therefore we’ve got a job to do, and God’s Spirit to help us do it”. That job is to plant the flags of resurrection - new life, new communities, new churches, new faith, new hope, new practical love - in amongst the tired slogans of idolatrous modernity and destructive postmodernity.

- Peace