Rectors Reflections APRIL 2006

Living as Easter People

The VA Medical Center in Allen Park, Michigan, had a treatment program for veterans who suffered from addiction disease – in particular, alcohol and drug addiction. One spring just before Easter, during the time I working there as a VA Chaplain, a veteran introduced himself to me and said that he had served in Vietnam . He had come into treatment for heroin addiction.

Over the next week this man began to make good progress in treatment, although he struggled deeply with guilt. In particular, he had deep regrets about leaving a friend to die in the field in Vietnam. He could not forgive himself.

Then, a day arrived when he came into my office and said that his girlfriend wanted him to leave the program – she “needed” him at home. My effort to persuade him to remain in treatment finally ended with him at least agreeing to pray about it and ask God for a sign.

This is the sign he received: a sign of the Resurrection. It happened during Holy Week when he went to play Bingo. Seated across the table from him was another veteran from a different part of the hospital. Before he could introduce himself, this other man called him by his nickname in Vietnam. “How do you know my name?” he asked. Impossible as it seems, he learned that this was the very man whom he had left for dead so many years ago. During an emotional reunion, the veteran, who had asked for a sign, was reassured over and over that he must not carry his guilt any longer.

That is what Jesus reassures us, when we meet him as the Resurrected Christ. We leave him for dead on Good Friday, carrying our guilt and shame, knowing that there is no power within ourselves to save ourselves, and then, when Easter Day dawns, we are given the sign of God’s eternal triumph over all sin and death.

On the day of Resurrection, Jesus came suddenly and stood in the room with the first disciples. He said to them, “It is written in the scriptures that the Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” Those are also his words to us.

Paul wrote the Good News in this way to the Christians in Rome. “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.”

Easter people walk in “newness of life.” Do you know, that as Christians, we are to live as persons forgiven from sin, and as persons free from the fear of condemnation and death? To be a Christian is to claim through faith, and live through grace, the Resurrection hope. This is what Paul meant when he wrote to the Christians in Ephesus, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us, and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” Let us then give thanks, that God has called us, through His grace and mercy, to be Easter people with each other and for the world. May it be so!

Meredith+