Sermons from St. Martin-in-the-Fields:
Apr 03, 2021 |
Here's to You and Me and the Space Between Us
| The Rev. Barbara Ballenger
Here's to You and Me and the Space Between Us
The Rev. Barbara Ballenger's sermon from the Great Vigil of Easter.
Today's readings are:
Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Psalm 136
Exodus 14:10-15:1
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Zephaniah 3:12-20
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net
Transcript:
By Barbara Ballenger, Easter Vigil, 2021
[The Rev. Barbara Ballenger] When I was a little girl attending Catholic School, the main lesson we learned at this time of the year was that Jesus died to open the gates of Heaven. And I have this very detailed image in my head of great locked white gates being opened by a little cross-shaped key with Jesus on it. It must have come from a film strip. I’m sure it was done by the same artist who illustrated my children’s bible and book of saints.
Why did Jesus die on the cross? was the question. To open the gates of Heaven, came the answer. And that served me pretty well back then. It was tidy, bloodless, and put everything nicely in the past. Now I could go to Heaven when I died. Thank you Jesus.
But that story also created an image of Easter that really didn’t have much to do with my every-day life, birth to death. It made Easter about the afterlife. It didn’t suggest that as soon as Easter happened something profound changed on this earth, in this life, and by consequence, my life.
Now around the same time as I was learning those answers in religion class, I discovered an even better theology of Easter – though I didn’t realize it at the time. It was written on a coffee mug that sat near the tooth brushes in my grandma’s bathroom. My grandma lived in a tiny little house on Oregon Street in Lafayette Indiana. For the first 10 years of my life we would make the seven-hour drive twice a year to visit her there. And because it was before the invention of hand-held electronic devices, I had very little to do on those visits. So to keep myself entertained, I explored. And believe me there wasn’t much real-estate at hand. So I peaked in the drawers and hampers, pulled out the few ancient toys that were available, swung on the porch swing on the tiny porch and prowled through the seven rooms that made up her house.
That’s how I found the mug in the bathroom. It was printed with this saying: An Irish Toast. Here’s to you and me and the space between us. Should one of us depart, let it not be you nor I but the space between us.
I think I was about 9 when I figured out what it meant. It made me laugh. And then I forgot about it for about 45 years.
Until a few weeks ago as I was gathering up my thoughts about the cross, like a priest does in Lent, and up came that old Irish toast unbidden: Here’s to You and Me and the Space Between us, should one of us depart let it not be you nor I but the space between us.
And it occurred to me that it was a theology of the cross, or perhaps of the resurrection. Or maybe God actually is Irish, as some of my ancestors suspected I’m sure.
Why did Jesus die on the cross? was the question? To remove the space between us, came the answer. To remove that painful emptiness that can lie between us and God and us and one another. To remove it by filling it with something else -- the presence of God. I think that has been God’s agenda from the beginning, since that first moment when humanity discovered the distancing qualities of the knowledge of good and evil.
This past year the space between us has taken on a very particular quality – it’s at least six feet. It requires a mask. For more than a year the space between us has been cemented between thresholds that can’t be crossed, into hospitals, or nursing homes, or houses where loved ones are and we can’t go. The space between us has been physical and palpable – even for those of us who kind of liked our space, liked some distance. Even for introverts, I’m told.
And we learned again this year that that space between us is also ethical, political, historical – as we struggled again with the impassable spaces we’ve constructed out of race and difference and fear, out of violence, and terror and power. That’s when the space between us is the measure of our sinfulness, that distance that we pace off between us and God, between us and the rest of God’s good creation.
Jesus died to remove the space between us. Which is ironic, since crucifixion separated Jesus from those he loved by the greatest of distances – not the one that God made by locking the gates, but one that humanity made by turning the back. And Jesus hung there looking across the space between us and him, between us and God, and he chose to fill that space, to close that breach, with forgiveness.
His death should have been the final departure, the great cutting of the ties between God and humanity, it should have sent us careening back to the formless void. But instead Jesus’ death and resurrection became a return, a healing of the breach, a re-creation of the world where he could be discovered again and again, recognizable, alive and everywhere.
Each Easter Vigil invites us again to cross that threshold and live into that space, in the belief that what fills the gaps between us and one another and between us and God -- is God. Call it amazing grace. Call it the Kingdom of God. Call it an act of faith that our divisions and distances from one another are healable – in fact might already be healed.
Paul said it this way in his letter to the Romans, people he knew at a distance, whom he never got to meet (Rom. 8: 38-39)
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Paul could have added neither shipwrecks, nor arguments, nor broken relationships, nor jail time, nor stonings, nor beatings, nor temptations, nor slightly oversized egos can separate me from the love of God … for all those things were his to bear. You can insert your own list there.
How might the quality of the wounds, and chasms and distances we might list change if we live in this way – in the promise of Easter, that blessed assurance that God fills the space between us. We know the list itself doesn’t go away, but something about the quality of the space it describes changes. Where there was despair there is hope. Where there was death there is life. Where there was suffering there is beatitude.
To live in this way is a choice – because we always have a choice. It is something we can believe in or not. The very same life can be lived in an Easter way or a non-Easter way. We can live as though at a distance from God. Or we can live in the presence of God.
To live in the presence of God is to begin to see Jesus appearing everywhere. Not shut tight in bibles or theology books or behind church doors. But in faces, and in conversations, in silences and song, in longings and belongings, even written on the side of an old mug, in a bathroom, of a tiny house in a distant memory:
Here’s to you and me and the space between us. Should one of us depart, let it not be you nor I but the space between us. Happy Easter.
Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. All rights reserved.
Photographs and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466
Today's readings are:
Genesis 1:1-2:4a
Psalm 136
Exodus 14:10-15:1
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Zephaniah 3:12-20
Readings may be found on LectionaryPage.net
Transcript:
By Barbara Ballenger, Easter Vigil, 2021
[The Rev. Barbara Ballenger] When I was a little girl attending Catholic School, the main lesson we learned at this time of the year was that Jesus died to open the gates of Heaven. And I have this very detailed image in my head of great locked white gates being opened by a little cross-shaped key with Jesus on it. It must have come from a film strip. I’m sure it was done by the same artist who illustrated my children’s bible and book of saints.
Why did Jesus die on the cross? was the question. To open the gates of Heaven, came the answer. And that served me pretty well back then. It was tidy, bloodless, and put everything nicely in the past. Now I could go to Heaven when I died. Thank you Jesus.
But that story also created an image of Easter that really didn’t have much to do with my every-day life, birth to death. It made Easter about the afterlife. It didn’t suggest that as soon as Easter happened something profound changed on this earth, in this life, and by consequence, my life.
Now around the same time as I was learning those answers in religion class, I discovered an even better theology of Easter – though I didn’t realize it at the time. It was written on a coffee mug that sat near the tooth brushes in my grandma’s bathroom. My grandma lived in a tiny little house on Oregon Street in Lafayette Indiana. For the first 10 years of my life we would make the seven-hour drive twice a year to visit her there. And because it was before the invention of hand-held electronic devices, I had very little to do on those visits. So to keep myself entertained, I explored. And believe me there wasn’t much real-estate at hand. So I peaked in the drawers and hampers, pulled out the few ancient toys that were available, swung on the porch swing on the tiny porch and prowled through the seven rooms that made up her house.
That’s how I found the mug in the bathroom. It was printed with this saying: An Irish Toast. Here’s to you and me and the space between us. Should one of us depart, let it not be you nor I but the space between us.
I think I was about 9 when I figured out what it meant. It made me laugh. And then I forgot about it for about 45 years.
Until a few weeks ago as I was gathering up my thoughts about the cross, like a priest does in Lent, and up came that old Irish toast unbidden: Here’s to You and Me and the Space Between us, should one of us depart let it not be you nor I but the space between us.
And it occurred to me that it was a theology of the cross, or perhaps of the resurrection. Or maybe God actually is Irish, as some of my ancestors suspected I’m sure.
Why did Jesus die on the cross? was the question? To remove the space between us, came the answer. To remove that painful emptiness that can lie between us and God and us and one another. To remove it by filling it with something else -- the presence of God. I think that has been God’s agenda from the beginning, since that first moment when humanity discovered the distancing qualities of the knowledge of good and evil.
This past year the space between us has taken on a very particular quality – it’s at least six feet. It requires a mask. For more than a year the space between us has been cemented between thresholds that can’t be crossed, into hospitals, or nursing homes, or houses where loved ones are and we can’t go. The space between us has been physical and palpable – even for those of us who kind of liked our space, liked some distance. Even for introverts, I’m told.
And we learned again this year that that space between us is also ethical, political, historical – as we struggled again with the impassable spaces we’ve constructed out of race and difference and fear, out of violence, and terror and power. That’s when the space between us is the measure of our sinfulness, that distance that we pace off between us and God, between us and the rest of God’s good creation.
Jesus died to remove the space between us. Which is ironic, since crucifixion separated Jesus from those he loved by the greatest of distances – not the one that God made by locking the gates, but one that humanity made by turning the back. And Jesus hung there looking across the space between us and him, between us and God, and he chose to fill that space, to close that breach, with forgiveness.
His death should have been the final departure, the great cutting of the ties between God and humanity, it should have sent us careening back to the formless void. But instead Jesus’ death and resurrection became a return, a healing of the breach, a re-creation of the world where he could be discovered again and again, recognizable, alive and everywhere.
Each Easter Vigil invites us again to cross that threshold and live into that space, in the belief that what fills the gaps between us and one another and between us and God -- is God. Call it amazing grace. Call it the Kingdom of God. Call it an act of faith that our divisions and distances from one another are healable – in fact might already be healed.
Paul said it this way in his letter to the Romans, people he knew at a distance, whom he never got to meet (Rom. 8: 38-39)
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Paul could have added neither shipwrecks, nor arguments, nor broken relationships, nor jail time, nor stonings, nor beatings, nor temptations, nor slightly oversized egos can separate me from the love of God … for all those things were his to bear. You can insert your own list there.
How might the quality of the wounds, and chasms and distances we might list change if we live in this way – in the promise of Easter, that blessed assurance that God fills the space between us. We know the list itself doesn’t go away, but something about the quality of the space it describes changes. Where there was despair there is hope. Where there was death there is life. Where there was suffering there is beatitude.
To live in this way is a choice – because we always have a choice. It is something we can believe in or not. The very same life can be lived in an Easter way or a non-Easter way. We can live as though at a distance from God. Or we can live in the presence of God.
To live in the presence of God is to begin to see Jesus appearing everywhere. Not shut tight in bibles or theology books or behind church doors. But in faces, and in conversations, in silences and song, in longings and belongings, even written on the side of an old mug, in a bathroom, of a tiny house in a distant memory:
Here’s to you and me and the space between us. Should one of us depart, let it not be you nor I but the space between us. Happy Easter.
Permission to podcast/stream the music in this service obtained from One License with license #A-701187. All rights reserved.
Photographs and graphics by the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Episcopal Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, 8000 St. Martin's Lane, Philadelphia, PA 19118. 215.247.7466
