EASTER 2C 2025

THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

​The Easter season moves us into seven weeks of hearing from the Acts of the
Apostles and many familiar post-resurrection stories from the Gospels. The Second
Sunday of Easter always draws our attention to the upper room appearance of Jesus to
the remaining apostles. It’s two appearances, one week apart. The second is about
Thomas, who was absent at the first one.

The Epistle lessons alternate years. Two of the three-year cycle feature readings
from the Pastoral Epistles, particularly the letters of Peter and of John. The third year
gives us selected verses from the last book of Christian scripture, the Revelation of John
of Patmos. That is this year.

The Revelation to John is perhaps the most well-known and least understood
book of the Bible, especially in fundamentalist circles. It was regularly featured in
Sunday School classes in the church where I was raised. It is so popular among them
that a whole series of shows on what’s called The History Channel portray graphic
interpretations of the book’s apocalyptic visions. That’s why I now refer to that
network as the hysteria channel.

John is in exile on the island of Patmos. He writes letters to seven different
churches, or congregations, in the part of Asia now known as western Turkey. It seems
they follow some of the same paths that caused Paul to write to Corinth, Colossus,
Galatia, and others. They try to be these new people of God called The Church, but like
the first people of God, known as Israel, they have quite a bit of difficulty working out
what that means.

Much of what John writes is interpreted as threatening to the seven churches.
The consequences are dramatic, culminating in a cosmic battle between the forces of
good and evil. John tells us that good will win, mostly because in the resurrection of
Jesus, good has already won. What happens then depends on which side they, and by
extension, we choose for ourselves.

All that we’ll have to leave for another time. Since the impetus for John’s writing
is his vision of the consequences of the way of life of each congregation, I’m led to
wonder what John would write to the church, if there was just one congregation, of
Wilmington.

It’s tempting to list some of the perceived missteps and errors evident in the
present-day church. One of those is the fact that we are so divided, be it by style of
worship, or governance, or the fact that we just don’t get along. But to avoid all that,
and find our way home before Tuesday, let’s look at some of the basics.

1Remember where you came from. The first lesson of the Easter Vigil reminds us
of the story of creation, ending with God forming humankind from dust, and breathing
life into that creation. Indeed, Ash Wednesday does the same thing, reminding us that
we are dust and to dust we shall return. This past week I repeated those words as we
commended one of our members back to God’s safe keeping.

But we treat creation, the earth, as little more than a resource waiting to be mined
for our own benefit and wealth. We neglect what I believe is our purpose—to be
caretakers formed in the image of the Creator and giver of all life—placed here to
continue God’s work of caring for the very thing that supports the life we live. We
ignore our relationship to the earth, as if those words of Genesis were a lie, and we are
not a part of the very ground we plunder.

To change that, we have to remember who we are. We are, simply put, God’s
gardeners, with all life finding its roots and sustaining nourishment from God’s garden.
Between microplastics and forever chemicals, we find it more important, more lucrative,
to ignore the possibility that we fill the food we eat—mass produced to decrease its cost
while increasing its convenience—with substances that very well could inhibit life
rather than sustain and nurture it. We might as well eat the packaging it comes in while
we’re at it, because what still appears to be food probably contains quite a lot of the
ingredients of the package.

All this comes as evidence that we’ve forgotten the end of John’s Revelation. We
don’t remember where we’re going, or at least hope we might go. If you read past the
cosmic battle, the many-eyed beasts, and, yes, the dragons, you find that we’re basically
back where we started. We’re back in the garden, or at least a newer version of it, where
God dwells with God’s people as Genesis tells us, walking in the garden in the cool of
the evening.

A French anthropologist and priest, Teilhard de Chardin, got into trouble with
church authorities by writing and teaching that all life was evolving. He wasn’t
speaking in a Darwinian sense, despite all the evidence of competition for what is called
the Darwin Awards. Those are designated for outstanding acts of no attempt
whatsoever to be the fittest survivor.

Teilhard teaches that all life is evolving back to its Creator, that all our struggles
are with forces that try to deny God’s original blessing. “It is good.” “It is very good.”
That is a competition which John describes, one that has been ongoing since Adam and
Eve found the first recipe for apple pie.

Remember that you are dust. Dust brought to life by the Spirit of God, washed
by the waters of baptism into the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. We
find our heart’s desire in our journey back to our Creator, the source of our very life,
who calls us to nourish all life—plant, animal, and human—without judging it, but
instead acknowledging God’s first blessing.
​
2That is the beginning of finding the grace and peace John uses to greet his
readers. When we continue our own journey in both grace and peace, looking for and
longing for and offering grace and peace, all else comes in a distant second in the
competition for our own lives. It is then that we find our journey is on the right road.