Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Octave Day of Easter
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Octave Day of Easter.
Day: April 24, 2022
Sermon for the Octave Day of Easter
“The same day at evening … Jesus came and stood in the midst”
It is as if time has stopped and we are gathered with the disciples in the upper room on the day of Christ’s Resurrection but we are behind closed doors, huddled in fear and uncertainty. The Resurrection accounts all seek to show us how the idea and the reality of the Resurrection comes to birth in us. It comes to birth in us out of our fears and uncertainties, like Mary coming to the tomb in her early morning grief seeking the body of Christ only to encounter the Risen Christ, like the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus fleeing Jerusalem on this same day in fear and confusion only to have Jesus coming alongside them to engage them and teach them. “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” T.S. Eliot asks in The Waste Land; the third is the truth that is always greater than ourselves.
“For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them,” Jesus says (Mt. 18.20). And that makes all the difference and changes everything. It changes our understanding of time. Here is the idea of kairos, time as rhythmic and circular, as gathered and concentrated into purpose and meaning as distinct from time as chronos, linear and extended, as a sequence and duration – one thing after another. This Gospel opens us out to the radical meaning of Christ in our midst.
Christ in the midst is a recurring image, especially in John’s Gospel both in terms of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. “They crucified him, and the two other with him, on either side one, and Jesus in the midst” (John. 19.18). “The same day at evening… came Jesus and stood in the midst” (John 20.19). As we have had occasion to remark, Easter is not the end of the story but its radical beginning, the radical beginning that has no ending because it is the awakening to the essential life of God which is always prior and yet always present; time is baptized and gathered into eternity. “Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and for ever. His are the times and the seasons and the years,” as we heard at the blessing of the Paschal Candle at the Easter Vigil. The awakening to Jesus in the midst is what we contemplate both in the Passion and now in the Resurrection. The Resurrection is the event that awakens us to the greater event that is God himself. In media res.
Week at a Glance, 25 April – 1 May
Tuesday, April 26th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club: Robert N. Spengler III’s Fruits of the Sand: The Silk Road Origins of the Food We Eat (2019) & Linda Colley’s The Gun, The Ship, and The Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (2021)
Sunday, May 1st, St. Philip & St. James / Second Sunday after Easter
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion
The Octave Day of Easter
The collect for today, The Octave Day of Easter, being The Sunday After Easter Day, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):
Almighty Father, who hast given thine only Son to die for our sins, and to rise again for our justification; Grant us so to put away the leaven of malice and wickedness, that we may alway serve thee in pureness of living and truth; through the merits of the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The Epistle: 1 St. John 5:4-12
The Gospel: St. John 20:19-23
Artwork: Hesdin of Amiens, Christ blessing the apostles, c. 1450-55. Illumination, From a “Biblia Pauperum” (Bible of the Poor), Museum Meermanno Westreenianum, The Hague.