An Ongoing Celebration
Friday, April 25, 2025
CAC Dean of Faculty Brian McLaren encourages us to make Easter an expansive celebration of resurrection.
What might happen if every Easter we celebrated the resurrection not merely as the resuscitation of a single corpse nearly two millennia ago, but more—as the ongoing resurrection of all humanity through Christ? Easter could be the annual affirmation of our ongoing resurrection from violence to peace, from fear to faith, from hostility to love, from a culture of consumption to a culture of stewardship and generosity … and in all these ways and more, from death to life.
What if our celebration of Easter was so radical in its meaning that it tempted tyrants and dictators everywhere to make it illegal, because it represents the ultimate scandal: an annual call for creative and peaceful insurrection against all status quos based on fear, hostility, exclusion, and violence? What if we never stopped making Easter claims about Jesus in AD 33, but always continued by making Easter claims on us today declaring that now is the time to be raised from the deadness of fear, hostility, exclusion, and violence to walk in what Paul called “newness of life”?
What if Easter was about our ongoing resurrection “in Christ”—in a new humanity marked by a strong-benevolent identity as Christ-embodying peacemakers, enemy lovers, offense forgivers, boundary crossers, and movement builders? What kind of character would this kind of liturgical year form in us? How might the world be changed because of it? [1]
Retired Episcopal bishop and Choctaw citizen Steven Charleston offers this celebratory song for the coming of new light and new hope:
Rise up, faithful friends. Wake up, sleepers in the shadows. Wake up to see bright banners on your horizon. Wake up to see your redemption coming to you, the answer to so many of your prayers, the fulfillment of your dream from long ago. Rise up, faithful friends, to shout the good news to the morning sun: justice has arrived at last, mercy has returned, love has won the day. Rise up, good people of many lands, for this is the moment of change, the time when hope starts to be real and truth begins to speak to every courageous heart. Wake up, rise up, and rejoice! [2]
McLaren imagines the impact of the ongoing recognition that we meet the risen Christ in all we encounter:
I can imagine Easter opening a fifty-day period during which we constantly celebrate newness, freedom, change, and growth. As we would retell each year the story of the risen Christ appearing in the stranger on the Emmaus Road, so part of every Easter season for us would mean meeting and inviting to our tables strangers, aliens, refugees, people of other religions or no religion at all, to welcome them as we would Christ, and to expect to meet Christ in them. [3]
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John Chaffee 5 On Friday
| Grace and Peace, All! First off, let me begin by stating the obvious: I am not formally a Catholic. I was, however, raised Lutheran, and that means that I have many Catholic tendencies. Liturgy has a high value for me, as does the Church calendar, and the place of a pastor or priest as an archetypal stand-in and representative of Christ. Over the years, I have studied many aspects of Catholicism and have been deeply enriched by learning from that tradition. That said, this past Monday morning, I read the news headlines that Pope Francis had passed away. I was surprised by how sad I was for the rest of the morning as I reflected on his character and leadership aspects that I appreciated. As a figure who has taken a vow of poverty, Pope Francis did not do the usual pomp and circumstance expected of a Pope. He often snuck out of the Vatican to give money to the poor while dressed in regular clothes. He only slept in the guest house rather than the normal Papal residence. Although he was a Jesuit, I think he stayed close to the life of his namesake, Francis of Assisi. This week’s five quotes are all from Pope Francis, the first Spanish-speaking Pope in hundreds of years and the first from the Southern Hemisphere. I hope you find his words challenging and inspiring. As always, thank you for reading! |
| (In 2013, Pope Francis embraced and blessed a man suffering from neurofibromatosis in front of the man’s mother, an act echoing St. Francis of Assisi stopping to bless the lepers.)1.”It’s hypocrisy to call yourself a Christian and chase away a refugee or someone seeking help, someone who is hungry or thirsty, toss out someone who is in need of my help… If I say I am Christian, but do these things, I’m a hypocrite.”- Pope Francis The Parable of the Good Samaritan was scandalous when Jesus first taught it, and it continues to be a scandalous now. At a time in human history when we are being pulled back into tribal affiliations while being invited into a larger narrative of solidarity, the Parable of the Good Samaritan points us in a particular direction. Jesus paints the Samaritan, a religious and racial outsider to the first-century Pharisees, as the story’s hero. He encounters a victim of circumstance and devotes his time, energy, and money to caring for the person. The striking thing is that the religious leaders of the day passed the poor man on the other side of the road because they failed to recognize that compassion and love are the higher laws. Since then, the Samaritan has become a symbol or archetype for the person with compassion for the outsider. This same person is also willing to throw religious categories to the wind to help others, thereby actually fulfilling the Spirit of the Law at the expense of the Letter of the Law. Many people took issue with Pope Francis’ insistence on caring for the poor and marginalized. I cannot understand why, though. We must acknowledge that caring for the other, the outsider, the ones we scorn, is less likely a reflex and more of a conscious decision to show compassion and love to them. And not only that, but to insist on having the title of being a Christian, while overlooking the poor and downtrodden, lacks integrity and is rightfully called hypocritical. 2.”A Christian who doesn’t safeguard creation, who doesn’t make it flourish, is a Christian who isn’t concerned with God’s work, that work born of God’s love for us.”- Pope Francis Most people didn’t know it, but Pope Francis had a master’s degree in chemistry. This means he was very well-studied on the processes of nature, atomic structures, and more. Although he was not a Franciscan, he was very much in tune with the natural world. For Pope Francis, it was vitally important to care for the earth. Yes, there is one Earth, and it will outlive all of us, but we have a spiritual responsibility to give the next generation a world that is very much healthy. The Christian ought to be concerned with the wholesale flourishing of the earth. This value can be traced back to the early chapters of Genesis, in which humanity is responsible for stewarding the world, not pillaging it for resources. 3.”The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly human goal.”- Pope Francis What I find fascinating here is that the issue of the “cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly human goal” is considered a form of idolatry. Many of us are willing to sacrifice time, energy, money, family, the environment, and more, hoping Mammon (the false god of money) will shine favorably on us. As I have said at other times and in different places, sin distorts us and makes us less and less human. We should not be surprised that we can become inhumane if we commit devaluing sins against ourselves and others. The word economy has roots that trace back to the language of the New Testament. Did you know that? Oikos is the word for “household,” and Nomos is “rule or law.” Taken together, the Oikonomia is the “rule or law of the household. “One way to evaluate our fidelity to God is to ask, “What kind of economy/household rule have we created?” Does our economy affirm, protect, and uplift human dignity? Or does it do the opposite? Does our economy benefit a select few at the Top at the expense of those at the Bottom? I believe Pope Francis was right to challenge us about our “golden calf,” and all the ways in which we are willing to sacrifice others at the altar of money. 4.”Too often we participate in the globalization of indifference. May we strive instead to live global solidarity.”- Pope Francis Tribalism vs Solidarity. It is the tale as old as time. Perhaps we are all born into Tribalism and find our identity and sense of belonging by being a part of a group. Then, at some point in our lives, we either begin enacting violence on people of a different tribe or tongue, or we transcend our own tribe and learn to identify with others who are different than us.For some people, religion reinforces the ideology of Tribalism, and for others, religion invites them into global human solidarity.It all depends on how you interpret your faith and whether or not you have the maturity to hear the invitation into global human solidarity. 5.”We must restore hope to young people, help the old, be open to the future, spread love. Be poor among the poor. We need to include the excluded and preach peace.”- Pope Francis It’s all about hope vs despair. Hope points toward the world we want to see more of, while despair points toward the world we fear might already exist. Hope, though, is not inactive. It does not mean sitting back on the couch and hoping for the world to improve. No. Hope demands work. Or rather, it reminds us that change is possible, but only if we are willing to put some damn skin in the game. Despair, on the other hand, is futile. Why bother trying if nothing is going to change substantially? That is the damning question that permits our laziness. Young people are encouraged to despair, the old are often left lonely, we have a tilt toward the old and familiar, and we show love with conditions. Many of us hope to be rich in comparison to the poor. We tend to exclude others due to fear, and that same mindset can lead us into war. This cannot continue if the human race is going to fully flourish and become what it is intended to be: unique incarnations of the love of God. The Gospel is not merely the announcement of a message of restoration; it is an invitation to BE that message of restoration. |
