Christ is Risen. He is risen indeed!

Jesus calls us friend, knowing we will betray him. If there is an order to salvation, this is it.

“God is love” is a theological statement that is true to the core, but “God is friend,” this is the deeper mystery made real in Jesus. Friendship is salvation. All else is theological pretense and drivel. The Friend that dines with us, and washes our feet, also lays down his life for us. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends…I have called you friends” (John 15:13-15).

“You, heart closed up in a chest, open, for the Friend is entering.” Rumi

Hear afresh these words at the meal of Friendship,

On the night that Jesus was betrayed [by his friends from below, and arrested by his other friends from above], he took bread, blessed it, broke it, gave it to his disciples, and said, ‘Take and eat; this is my body, broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, after supper, he took the cup, blessed it, and gave it for all to drink, and said, ‘This cup is the blood of the new covenant, shed for you and for all people for the forgiveness of sin. Do this in remembrance of me.’

Dear friends of Jesus, we are forgiven—now—completely! May the great befriending of God break our heart’s wide open.

Christ is Risen. He is risen indeed!

“Start the drumbeat, everything we have said about the Friend is true. The beauty of that peacefulness makes the whole world restless…it is time to dance.” Rumi.

Early Easter morning, millions awaken before sunrise with a purpose. The dark skies give faint hint of the sunrise within the hour. A stretch of the arms, a wipe through the eyes, feet reaching downward for temporary covering against the floor terrain, and it is time to get moving. Slivers of remaining moonlight provide faint illumination through narrow openings above the bed. The millions have heard the call, and now respond! The time has come to join the line as men and women, even some boys and girls put their feet in the line to the appointed destination to which they are called this Easter Sunday. There they will see familiar faces, hear familiar sounds, and may even smell familiar odors. It is a dawn of a new day, and they are on their way.

Their destination?  “Chow call” in the prison refectory or “Meds up!” to the cart the nurse brings on the unit for those requiring morning medication. The stretch of the arms relieves some of the tension from the cell’s hard cot, the eyes crusted literally and figuratively by biology and monotony, the floor’s terrain cold on even the warmest day when one’s address is prison. We do not know how many millions go to church on Easter–but we know how many awaken in state and federal prisons: an excruciating 2.1 million men and women arise at Easter’s sunrise to another day when they seem oblivious to anyone on the other side of the prison walls. Another several million arise in county jails, many not physically far from home but incarnations of “out of sight, out of mind” even to those who are descendants of those to whom Jesus spoke just before his arrest and incarceration “I was in prison, and you visited me.”

Yes, millions have arisen with a purpose: count down the days, occupy the mind, anticipate a visit, and perhaps even attend chapel- purpose is a precious commodity for them. They are inmates, prisoners, convicts peopling America’s jails and prisons in record numbers–over two million in state and federal prison alone–and they arise every morning about the time the Easter Sunrise service crowd shakes the cobwebs from their consciousness to face their annual celebration.

The Easter lens well fits any view of incarceration. After all, when Jesus Christ died on the cross, he was an inmate. We celebrate the truth that God raised his only begotten son from the grave–we overlook the fact that the body which breathed its last before burial belonged to a prisoner. He hung between two thieve or malefactors, but “was numbered” with them as well.

Incarceration in America carries more than the punishment of “doing time.” Shame and stigmatization plague an inmate during incarceration and after release. Those twin maladies spread like a virus to relatives left behind, children separated from fathers and mothers, parents grieving for their children, grandparents serving as caretakers for a generation forty, fifty, and sixty years their junior while fathers stretch their arm in the cell and mothers wipe their eyes on the block. Shame and stigma, contagious and infectious as they manifest in symptoms of silence, rendering the affected loved one incapable of sharing the true hurt with anyone at the Sunrise service in celebration of the Risen Inmate!

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For those who don’t follow the church calendar it’s easy to overlook that we remain in the season of Easter or what is known to some as Eastertide. So, the theme of resurrection rolls on until Pentecost Sunday 50 days after Easter. And it’s this season of the year that can serve as a powerful reminder for those who are captivated and called by resurrection to point out that through Jesus everything on the planet is groaning in one great act of giving birth as it is being renovated, reborn, and realigned.

 This past week at Access we practiced our identity as resurrection people as we hosted what is referred to as a “Moment of Blessing.” Recently one of our friends from the street community was found deceased on the bank of a nearby river. All that I remember of her is that she was a jittery, quick moving, and highly intelligent young woman of about 30 years of age.

 The early church recognized their role as resurrection people and would find the deceased on the margins of the empire and offer a dignified memorial and honorable burial. So, it seemed fitting that we gather outside of the coffee house with those who knew her best and read aloud the 23^rd Psalm and the Beatitudes, sing a couple songs and allow her friends to express how they felt about their significant loss.

 It was an awkward and beautiful moment that allowed everyone in attendance whether we knew her or not to acknowledge her life and death as a child of God. We claimed that what was tragically taken by heroin and violence will one day be restored to whole life.

 It’s in a moment like this that I’m reminded that resurrection people see all things through the unique and mysterious lenses of resurrection.

 This is what Paul was so crazy about in his epistles especially in 1 Corinthians 15

It’s resurrection, resurrection, always resurrection, that undergirds what I do and say, the way I live. If there’s no resurrection, “We eat, we drink, the next day we die,” and that’s all there is to it. But don’t fool yourselves. (The Message)

Think dandelions…

 As kids we used to love the fluffy remains of the seed heads. We’d pick one, hold it up to our mouth and be momentarily mesmerized to see how our breath scattered the little parachute-like particles through the air. Then we’d drop the stem to the ground having fully enjoyed it for it was. This was a resurrection moment.

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I asked someone a few weeks back whether they had a resurrection story from this past Easter season that they’d be willing to share with the congregation; what I meant by that is whether they had a reflection on some way that God brought a kind of resurrection or new life to them recently.

The response I got and I quote was, “resurrection my ass”. I laughed. I laughed out loud. It was such a good and honest answer. There was no blame and no faithlessness in the answer, just real human feelings and even humor. Plus, I love it when people feel like they can cuss in front of their pastor. It just makes it all seem more real. I really feel like we have got something going if they can cuss in front of me; it’s a good start anyway.

I needed that laugh and it was a good reminder that the resurrection in our lives is not always that apparent. It reminded me that there are very real prayers being prayed out there that are not answered and that many of us find it difficult to speak about resurrection or to articulate how something new is alive in our lives. Some might say that it is then disingenuous for us to celebrate this Easter season but that would assume some things that bear closer examination. 
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During this recent Lenten season some friends and I spent time reading through John 20:19-29 as a Lectio Divina practice. As I’ve carefully read through this passage several times now, one distinct theme has been coming into focus similar to the way the picture within the picture emerges after you’ve stared at one of those 3D images for a time. Based on this narrative I’d say God gets a good kick out of us when we pay attention to our world via the senses he created within us. I wonder what the look is on God’s face when we resign our theological development only to traditional environments such as church pews and seminary classrooms?

Yes, blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed, but the story crescendoing toward this concluding statement tells of a God who desires to engage the treasured soul of his children through the beauty of their senses…

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Editor’s Note – During this Holy Week, Geography of Grace is publishing thoughts from several Street Psalms – A Community of the Incarnation members. Look for more information on this community in an upcoming post.

“I know that my Redeemer lives and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes—I and not another. How my heart yearns within me.”
Job 19:25-27

WE MADE IT!! For us as a community, this Easter declaration of Job in the midst of his intense suffering, pain and loss is a fitting viewfinder through which to conclude our Semana Santa reflections. We began this Lenten journey 5 weeks ago and have persevered through a long, arduous journey towards and through the cross. Today is Easter Sunday and we resolutely declare with S. Lewis Johnson that “The resurrection is God’s Amen! to Jesus’ statement, “It is finished.” The intense birthing pains and excruciating suffering of Friday has now yielded to and given birth this day to the resolute hope that we find in an open and empty tomb.

Job’s declaration above is a resignation to joy. He has lost all else and thus resigns himself to seize the only thing that yet remains: “I know that my Goel (Kinsman, Avenger) liveth.”Job realizes that while his “friends” have been a complete failure to him and even his wife has told him to curse God and die, Yahweh is his personal Kinsman Redeemer. The kind of suffering that Job has experienced has “gifted” him with the ability to live in an elevated awareness of truth. It is this “gifting” that allowed Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga to describe the murder of his friend, “A Beautiful Gospel Time” - His friend being a fellow priest who had been killed at a police station where he had gone to condemn the mistreatment of two indigenous women.
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