Hallelujah! It’s Easter! Maybe it’s my age (I’m 88), but my celebration seems to be richer and more meaningful than ever.
Easter always brings to my mind the memory of a friend who was a Benedictine monk. The way we lived our lives has been vastly different, but I feel a real kinship, a oneness of spirit with Brother Sam.
One of the most memorable evenings is the time he and I spent together alone in our home in Nashville, sharing our Christian pilgrimages. The vivid highlight of that evening, still alive in my mind, was his sharing with me the occasion of his solemn vows, the service when he made his life commitment to the Benedictine community and monastic life.
Too few Christians, especially Protestants, know how serious that is. When persons make a decision to become a monk, they make the decision to remove themselves and to be separated from the world for the rest of their life, and they take the vow of poverty, chastity and obedience.
Brother Sam said that on that day, he prostrated himself before the altar of the church, face down, prostrate, in the very place where his coffin will set when he dies. As he was prostrated there, he was covered with a funeral pall and the death bell began to toll, the bell that rings at the earthly parting of a brother, and it sounded the solemn gongs of death. Then there was silence, the deep silence of death.
Then the silence was broken by the singing of the Colossian word, “for you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” After that powerful word, there was more silence as Brother Sam reflected upon his solemn vow. Then the community broke into singing Psalms 118, which is always a part of the Easter liturgy in the Benedictine community. One verse of that Psalms says, ‘I shall not die, but live and declare the wonderful works of the Lord.”
After this resurrection proclamation, the liturgists shouted the word from Ephesians, “awake you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you life.” Then the bells of the Abbey begin to ring joyfully and loudly. Brother Sam rose, the funeral pall fell off, the white robe of the Benedictine order was placed upon him, he received the kiss of peace from all of his brothers, and was welcomed into that community to live a life hidden with Christ.
It is a great liturgy of death and resurrection and I believe is a symbolic reenactment of all the Christian faith and experience is about. The final authentication of the gospel is that Jesus came in the flesh, died and was raised from death.
Hallelujah.,.It’s Easter! Celebrate however you will, but it is not Easter unless you think death and resurrection. To what do you need to die in order to experience resurrection? What thoughts do you have, and what spiritual preparations have you made for that great getting up morning, the final resurrection?
When Brother Sam and I shared, I relived in vivid memory my own baptism, in a rather cold creek in rural Mississippi, in September. That ought to excite some of you Baptists who are here. Paul gave powerful witness to it. Over and over again, I have been crucified with Christ. Is no longer I who lives, but Christ lives in me. To be a Christian is to change. To be a Christian is to change. It is to become new. It is not simply a matter of choosing a new lifestyle, though there is a new style. It has to do with being a new person. Now the new person does not emerge full-blown. Conversion, passing from death to life, may be the miracle of a moment, but the making of a saint is the task of a lifetime. The dynamic process of saint making, which process each one of us as a Christian should be involved in, the dynamic process of saint making, is to work out in fact what is already true in principle. Now get that. The dynamic process of saint making is to work out in fact what is already true in principle. That is in our relationship to God in Jesus Christ, we are new persons. That’s the meaning of what we talked about last Sunday, justification by grace through faith.