Easter Rudely Interrupted

May 14, 2017

Acts 7:55-60

Pretty great Easter reading from Acts this morning, right?  Nothing like a stoning to start off the morning!

What happened?  Just last week, everything was going swimmingly for the early church.  It was experiencing explosive growth, people were praying and eating together, sharing everything in common.  And now this!  The bow breaks, the cradle falls, and the persecution of the early church begins in God-awful earnestness.

What happened to “Alleluia, Christ is risen!”  What happened to the joyful celebration?  What happened to Jesus defeating death, the light vanquishing the darkness, and all that?

The shock of finding this reading from Acts in our lectionary this 5th Sunday of Easter reminded me of something that happened a couple months ago at our 8:30 service.  At that service, we have lots of young kids, so we gather everyone together around the altar for the entire Eucharistic prayer and stay up there to pass out musical instruments and sing a final song together.  We started doing that so the kids could be more involved in the service, to see up close the bread and the wine.  They watch as we remember the Last Supper and how Jesus took the bread, and gave thanks for it, and blessed and broke it.  We make the sign of the cross over the bread and wine, say the Lord’s prayer together, and then hold up the bread to break it.

One Sunday during Lent after we’d said the Lord’s Prayer together, I held up the bread and prepared to break it.  And one of the kids shouted out, “No, don’t break it!”  And everyone laughed, because that’s what we do when kids say strange things, but to my ears there was real anguish in her voice.  And her trying to stop the breaking of the bread made perfect sense.  That breaking represents Jesus’ broken body on the cross.  It foreshadows our own brokenness, something we know all too well and wish we didn’t.  And if we’re honest, we’d rather skip over that part.  Jump over Good Friday - all of the too-frequent Good Fridays - and go straight to Easter.  Avoid the pain and the hurting and go straight to the healing.  

But maybe we can’t.  

Jesus certainly couldn’t.  His freely giving himself to all of us, his speaking uncomfortable truths, his loving all people as much as God loves us, was a scandal and an offense to many.  His interceding for the lost and lonely and hurting, his deep empathy for all of humanity, his determination not to avoid the pain and heartbreak and consequences of human life led surely to his death.  That’s the part of Jesus’ story that we’d rather avoid.  And we’d rather avoid those dark, hurting, painful places in our own stories too.

But maybe we can’t.

I wish that part could be explained away, but unfortunately I don’t think it can be.  It doesn’t make sense.  And yet there’s something that has been helping me to think about it differently lately.  I recently heard an interview with Franciscan priest and prolific writer Richard Rohr, where he talked about the progression of the spiritual life as falling into three boxes: Order, Disorder, and Reorder.

Order is where most of us begin.  Order is all about law, tradition, structure, certainty, clarity, and authority.  Order helps us to feel safe, helps us to feel like things make sense.  Order “doesn’t really know the full picture, but it thinks it does.”  Rohr explains that this Order box is a necessary first “containment.”  It isn’t a bad thing in itself.  But this structure is dangerous if we stay there too long. It becomes too small and self-serving.  And it can be a place where we get stuck, until something happens that forces us into the box of Disorder.

Disorder comes when Order starts to fall apart, usually because of the happenstances of our lives.  Maybe an unwanted transition or some crisis or suffering, maybe the loss of a loved one.  Suddenly we find ourselves in darkness.  What we thought we knew and understood to be true is challenged; the things that we relied on fall away.  Our world gets shaken.  Suddenly we are thrust into doubt and confusion; we are forced to face our shadows.  And in the midst of that, as chaotic and uncomfortable as it feels, comes an opportunity.  As we are confronted by beliefs that don’t hold up, by ways of living that now feel hollow, by self-definition that is no longer meaningful, we begin to question.  We start to push back on the expectations that ordered our lives, to dismantle old beliefs, and to make new meaning even in the middle of that darkness. 

And so, through this painful growth, comes the opportunity to enter into Reorder.  In this box, we look at our former reality with a whole new perspective, we become more open to what is and to what might be.  We begin to realize our powerlessness over much of life and start to hold things more loosely.  Reorder doesn’t deny suffering or pain but sees them for what they are – a necessary part of the human experience that often can teach us things we cannot learn any other way.  Reorder is a place where, as Rohr puts it, “darkness and light coexist, paradox is okay… Here death is a part of life, failure is a part of victory, and imperfection is included in perfection. Opposites collide and unite; everything belongs.”  As we reorder, we become more comfortable with mystery, with unknowing, with surprise.

After hearing Rohr talk about these three boxes, I’ve been finding them everywhere.  Not just with Jesus and the early church, not just in the spiritual life, but everywhere.  

I just finished reading Brave New World where the powers ruling society go to outrageous lengths to create a world without any conflict, and quickly dispose of people that threaten Order, so determined are they to stay in that box.  

And I have a friend who just discovered that her kid has been struggling with dyslexia and suddenly her child’s past hurts and frustrations make perfect sense and she is able to begin helping her child into Reorder, as she adapts to seeing and learning differently.  

And I think back to the talk in here a few weeks ago about the spirituality of recovery and I realize that the 12 steps are a way to help someone find their way through Disorder into Reorder.

And I know from my experience and from some of yours, that after we lose someone we love, sometimes the grief surrounds us in a fog for years before we can begin to imagine a new way of living without that person, a new way to reorder our lives.

As painful as it is, as much as we wish it weren’t necessary, sometimes we just have to wade into the muddy waters of Disorder, or even, finding ourselves in the roiling waters, to take a deep breath and try to swim.  Just like in a literal way our community can’t share the bread unless it is first broken, maybe we also can’t get to new life without death, or healing without pain, or grace without struggle.

So maybe the Church was wise to throw this awful story about Stephen’s stoning into the midst of our Easter celebration.  It forces us to pause, shocked and surprised, in our celebration of Jesus’ victory over death.

Alleluia! Christ is risen.  Not to give us a shortcut past darkness and pain and disorder, but instead to go before us, leading us through it and lighting our way.  Amen.