March 20, 2012
Greetings Dear Friends,
I took a long walk this afternoon to celebrate today, the first day of Spring. I noticed the birds chirping, the squirrels dashing about, the trees and bushes budding - things I’ve not paid much attention to lately. For many in our congregation have and continue to be sick, hospitalized or recovering at home since late January. We’ve also had four deaths in the parish, three which were quite sudden. And so we continue to pray for Carolyn Christiano
and Valerie Torres as they mourn the loss of their mother Joyce Lindquist. We pray for Miriam Johnson and her family as she mourns the loss of her husband Ken. We remember Thomas and Yvonne Wright as they mourn the loss of their daughter Rhonda.
Our tears as a community flowed freely yesterday at Kay Tedesco’s funeral. We surrounded Joe, Kay’s beloved husband of 67 years, and the gathered family with our love and prayers.
We did what Christians do at funeral services: celebrate the life of our loved one and remember the hope of resurrection.
Our hope is in God. “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord” (Rom 14:8). We stand on the promise that we who are baptized in Christ Jesus, are baptized into his death. We stand on the promise “that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too will live a new life” (Rom 6:4).
When we profess our faith in the Apostles’ Creed at worship, we affirm “the resurrection of the body” and the “life everlasting,” articulating resurrection hope for ourselves and for those we have loved and lost. This is our Christian hope, our Christian assurance. We believe the promise that God will renew all things.
The good news we proclaim on Easter Sunday is this: all is in the process of being redeemed and renewed – space, time, animals, people, the animate and the inanimate, the sea and the
mountains, the stars and space.
Easter’s grand promise is a newly embodied people in a renewed world. God has set in place a plan that all things will be put right, set free, and remade. We believers, gifted with the resurrection power of the Holy Spirit in baptism, are invited to put feet to our faith and contribute to this new creation. We are invited to build God’s kingdom, here, now! Bishop and theologian N.T Wright describes what it means to be a Christian who trusts in God’s
promises in his book, Surprised by Hope:
Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation,…every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course, every prayer, all Spirit- led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honored in the world – all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make (p. 208).
Easter affirms the resurrection power and promises of God! So we cling to God’s promises, even as we mourn our losses this side of eternity. We cling to God’s promises and allow the comfort of God’s Spirit to soothe our broken hearts and rebuild lives shattered by sickness and loss. We stay connected to God and each other, through Word and Sacrament, in prayer, and in fellowship.
May you and your loved ones stand upon and live into God’s promises, this coming Easter Season, and always.
Yours in resurrection hope,
Rev. Rhonda J. Hoehn
