Easter Tuesday - Piercing The Darkness

First reading	Acts 2:36-41 ©

You must repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus

On the day of Pentecost, Peter spoke to the Jews: ‘The whole House of Israel can be certain that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Christ.’

  Hearing this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the apostles, ‘What must we do, brothers?’ ‘You must repent,’ Peter answered ‘and every one of you must be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise that was made is for you and your children, and for all those who are far away, for all those whom the Lord our God will call to himself.’ He spoke to them for a long time using many arguments, and he urged them, ‘Save yourselves from this perverse generation.’ They were convinced by his arguments, and they accepted what he said and were baptized. That very day about three thousand were added to their number.

We have just completed a forty-day journey through the desert as seen through the eyes of a simple man on a pilgrimage.  Our own walk may have been very different than his or perhaps we did not walk at all.  It is of no consequence because now we have a reason to be hopeful.  We have a reason to be joyful.  We have a reason to want to announce the good news that death has lost its sting, that sins have been forgiven.  We should be walking with a spring in our step for Jesus Christ has Risen Today!  Yes, we are two days away from the day which we memorialized the Resurrection with great ceremony and ritualistic celebration.  The Church asked us to reflect, fast, give alms, and repent for forty days. Today she bids us rejoice for fifty days -  From Easter to Pentecost -  and to be ready to tell everyone we meet why we are so happy.  The pagan world welcomes Easter as the time when the cold and gray of winter are banished.  They give a bunny the power to bring candy to children.  They play hide and seek with eggs.  This is all great fun, even politicians in Washington get into the act.  At the White House, there was an Easter Egg rolling contest.  Easter, for pagans, fades into nothingness when the sun rises on Easter Monday.  It was fun while it lasted, but now there is work to be done.  The childish things like bunnies and hard-boiled egg hunts are put back on the shelf and the serious business of business returns.  For a Catholic especially we realize that the festive season has just begun.  In the words of a song that is sung on Holy Saturday at the vigil Mass, "We will sing to my God who has delivered us from death, into life into freedom through the sea."  

Let me exhort you.  The death of Jesus on the cross was for you, personally.  The resurrection on Easter Morning was for you personally as well.  Jesus did not destroy death for the world, He did it for you.  How can you be silent about that?  These next weeks between now and Pentecost, give vent to the joy.  Let everyone you know how happy you are about the gift that Jesus gave you.  Your joyful face should cause people to wonder why you are so happy.  If they ask, tell them, tell them, tell them.  If they don't ask, tell them anyway by the way you live your life, with joy.  Be a little kinder, be more gentle, be helpful, let the love that is bursting through the walls of your soul escape into the wild.  The joy is the Spirit of God in you.  Don't hold it in, dispense it freely.  People will notice and more importantly, you will notice the difference in how people treat you. 

Brothers and sisters, the world is in darkness this day.  The pagans have not a clue that they are loved beyond measure by God who knows them better than their own mother and father. They see the grave and live their life in abundant poverty of spirit.  Give them the gift or at least make them wonder why you are so different than they are.    

CHRIST IS RISEN 

CHRIST IS TRULY RISEN 

Easter - We Are Risen !

When I was in High School, I was fortunate to have as my public speaking teacher a man by the name of Mr. Cassidy. He was the designer of the Ho-Hum Outline.  It was a guaranteed method of creating a speech that would keep your audience's attention.  One of the steps is Ho Hum, thus the clever name!  This step is to engage your listeners so as to get them to buy into the fact that you are worth listening to.  I mention him because I know if you've been to church either for the Easter Vigil last night or at one of the masses today you probably have heard the words, "Easter People." You probably heard how we are the Easter People and how Jesus rose from the dead.  But did you really consider what this means for you, personally? 

We all will die someday.  The thought of death is one we push out of our mind.  As a matter of fact, death is something that happens to someone else, not to me.  We go to a funeral and in America most often we gaze at the body of the guest of honor, we offer our condolences to the bereaved family.  Our next task is, if possible, to get the heck out of there as soon as possible. The body in the casket hits too close to home, we know that someday that we will be the one that is getting a grand send off.  That day is coming all too soon and we do not want to be reminded of it.  Personally, what I do not like about this death thing is the fact that when I am busy taking my last breaths, the world will be continuing without a thought about what is happening to me.  It is this continuance of routine that really offends me.  I can accept the fact that all of my "stuff" will pass either to another person or end up in a landfill somewhere, I have no problem with that.  I just think that while I am dying, should there be a family celebrating a birthday? Should another family be leaving on a Disney Cruise?  Should my neighbor treat the day as just another work day?  I know that this sounds very silly and self-centered, but hey, that is what is inside of me. 

The messy death of Jesus would have meant very little if that is where the story of Jesus ended. We know not only did it not end there but that His story is never ending. He took upon Himself all of our sins.  He turned our disobedience into obedience. He then did something that no other man had done.  He rose from the dead in a body that people could recognize.  The one who was dead was now alive.  Now, while Jesus was on the cross, the temple crew that was standing nearby mocked Him by saying, "He helped others, He cannot help Himself!"  On the third day, He proved them wrong by rising from the dead.  He stayed on earth another forty days.  He ate with the apostles.  He walked to Emmaus.  He forgave Peter.  He removed the doubt from doubting Thomas. Then he physically rose up to heaven and lives there at the right hand of God. 

What He did, we also will do.  On that Easter morning when the angel rolled away the stone he defeated the final enemy of the human race, death.  When we die, we will immediately be judged. We will choose our destiny, heaven, purgatory, or hell depending on how we lived our life here on earth.  Heaven will be a place of complete joy and happiness.  There will be no sorrow, not a bit of discord or hate.  We will recognize our family and our friends.  We will know people we did not know on earth.  We will be with the saints we prayed to and we will know t the complete love of God.  If we juge ourselves to be not ready we will choose to go to purgatory to prepare ourselves to be received by God. There will be intense joy and intense suffering in purgatory.  The suffering in purgatory will be the fact we are separated from God.  The intense joy will be the knowledge that we will soon be joining Him in heaven.  If we choose hell, I am afraid that there would be no turning back.  The fires of hell are forever and there is no hope of seeing God.  But then again, those that go there made their choice here in life when they turned their backs on God and lived according to their own desires.  The pains of hell are enhanced by the knowledge that the darkness of the loss of God is for eternity. 

The Rising of Jesus from the dead means that we too will rise from the grave.  We too will have a glorified body that will be assumed into heaven. On the last day, that which was subject to corruption will be restored.  The sea will give up her dead, graves will open and all of us will be finally judged and in our new, perfected, glorified bodies will be taken to heaven. 

This is what being an Easter People means.  Death, while still inevitable, looses its power over us and together we will join the angels and saints in heaven. Being an Easter People, we no longer fear death as for us, life is not ended, it is just changed.  Now, does that mean we should do everything possible to hasten our death? No of course not.  Each of us, man, woman, boy, or girl, have a mission on earth, a job that no one else in the universe can do and we have to do it.  Our life is a precious gift that was given to us by a loving and caring God.  All God asks of us is that we try, we may not always succeed.  I am in a choir at my church.  I have the devil of a time reading music, but our leader just asks that we try.  Over the years I have gotten better.  God asks us to try, to work to improving.  We will never be perfect and God knows this.  This is why He has provided us with the Sacrament of Reconciliation.  Not so that we can sin with impunity but we can reflect and repent and come back into fellowship with Him when we see the error of our ways and He for His part will always welcome us back.  

Death, oh death, where is thy sting?  

Easter Sunday

They laid him in the tomb. It was getting late, the Sabbath was approaching so they did what they could in the time that they had and the women said they would come back and finish the job. They went back to Jerusalem and crept into their room and each of them seemed to exude the feeling of gloom.  The Master was gone, why had he died? They gave everything up to walk at His side. The Sabbath was over so the women got on the way.  Carrying spices and ointments to anoint the body of Jesus that day, to do to Him the last kindest act, for he lay there dead, they saw Him so they new this was a fact. As they walked to the garden where his body lay, they wondered who would roll the stone away. Finally they were there and thy could not believe what they saw, the stone was away, the body was gone, they were in awe. Two men dressed in dazzling white asked them why they sought the living among the dead the body was gone that is what they saw. The shroud was in a pile at the foot of the crypts cold stone bed and the cloth that covered his face was rolled up in another place. The men in their clothes of brilliant white told them the Jesus was raised late in the night. They told them to tell Peter, James, and John, that Jesus had returned from the great beyond.  To Galilee they must go and go there in haste for Jesus awaits them there and there is no time to waste. So the women left their burdens of spices, and ran to tell the the men of this wonder and they arrived in a trice. The men, they laughed and heaped up scorn, how foolish these women were on this Sunday morn. 

But Peter, James, and John remembered the word that they had received. Could it be as they now perceived that the Lord was risen? They ran to garden and looked in and saw the body was gone and they were in awe. They remembered he said to Galilee they must go so the picked up their cloaks and on the road they went. Their joy was so great that it was very hard to state, The Master had risen on this very date.    

This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad!

Today we celebrate the victory of Christ over sin and death. Had Jesus just died, he would have been no more than another pious preacher. But he tore the veil away and turned death into life. Thank you for letting me tell the story, I know my poetry is bad at best but the story it tells will refresh your soul. You see, because of Jesus and his obedience to the Father, we now can enter heaven.   To all of you, Happy Easter.  Jesus is Risen, He is truly risen.