Easter Sunday -24 Apr 2011

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Andrew Colquhoun, OHC
Easter Sunday - April 24, 2011

Colossians 3:1-4
John 20:1-18

On Palm Sunday as we began this Holy Week, Brother Robert preached and in his sermon he said something that hit home with me… talking about the Apostles’ Creed he called it “…the barest outline of a cosmic drama that will take us an eternity to comprehend.” I’ve thought about that all week.

This morning we have done some numinous things – standing in the cloister where so many have prayed for more than a century, lighting the new fire, stealing the flame and passing it along. We’ve listened to eternal promises; words that are evocative and almost magical. Words that have sprung from the mouths and hearts of people of vision and rare understanding of the ways of God. We began with the story of the creation of the cosmos and our place in it and proceeded through our wanderings and fallings to this time of mystery and miracle.

We sang a love song to the Light – an ancient melody that recounts God’s chasing after a people and a universe that so often turned away – a song of love bounding back and forth from God to us and back again.

And after the sun rose, we’ve renewed our promises of baptism and washed our faces in the holy water we made when we plunged the Light into the same water and called on the Holy Spirit for sanctification.

Not all of the above are rational acts! We’ve stopped short of painting ourselves blue and jumping over the fire! But we have recognized powerful holy images and memories that go far beyond what our minds can easily grasp. We have allowed our longing for beauty and union with God to soar beyond West Park and Holy Cross Monastery, beyond diocese and Church, beyond the skies and the stars into the cosmic wonder of God’s creative longing that we call Trinity.

Heart boggling as well as mind boggling! Who can plumb the depths of all this?
None of us, I feel.

I love all that wonder, all that connection like a river that flows through the cosmos. I am speechless in the face of that power of the love of the Creator. I am amazed that it is so. And that should be enough for anyone.

But it’s not sufficient for me. Wonder, silence, amazement are not enough. They give me chills but they don’t take me far enough. They can let me off the hook.

They don’t put food on the table of the poor; they don’t penetrate the loneliness of the widow; they don’t push me beyond the mystery to the new Life Christ brings to all by the Resurrection.

That’s why I love this story from the Gospel. A story of another garden and a broken hearted woman and a working man. A story about a cry of emptiness and longing and a fear that grief will never be relieved. A story of a spoken Word that brings more wonder than we can ask or imagine. The man speaks a name and all the cosmos reels with new life.

The Christ speaks and in his speaking he says the right thing. The thing the woman must hear. The thing all of creation longs to hear. He speaks her name and she is recognized and restored.

This is the beginning for us of the Holy – this is when we hear beyond the stars and the galaxies and the seas and the winds, this is when we hear who we are and who we are to be. And hearing, this is when we know Christ lives and we are alive in him. And the call goes further and further. If I am risen in Christ then I must speak the name; the name of love to all the unlovely; the name of nourishment to all the hungry; the name of recognition to the anonymous lost. The name of God to God’s beloved. That is wonder, that is awe, that is love. That is enough! Alleluia!