“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure.” 1 John 3:2-3
Dear Redeemer Family:
As we close the Church’s liturgical year, endings are revealed as beginnings, and we find that as the Christian community we live simultaneously in past, present, and future. Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.
What seemed dead lives on, and what seemed purely memory is present, what was longed for is actually at hand. Time and its distinctions stretch and blur at this closing of the year, and the church finds itself living in the future for which it so earnestly petitions. The day of the Lord is at hand. The new age has begun.
Here’s some imagery. The shadows are approaching. The night is lengthened. The grasses fade. Then from the shadows emerges light. From the night comes hope and the memory of saints. From the chaff comes new beginnings and the constant, sure presence of the risen Christ, transforming these days into a new beginning, a new day. The implications are startling! The reign of God is at hand. Newness has already dawned. A new day arises that is gloriously present.
Albert Einstein once set himself this thought experiment: if I were to sit astride a beam of light, traveling at the speed of light, how would time appear? Einstein concluded from his imaginative vigil that past and future would gradually thin, until one existed in an ever-widening, ever-expanding present now. Carl G. Jung said that Holy Communion is the opening of a window into eternity, the fuller reality. For Orthodox Christians, the Holy Communion is nothing less than heaven on earth, the light of God breaking in and making of the past, present, and future one ever-expanding moment. At this transition time in the Church’s year, we are reminded of the breaking in of God’s reign into this earth.
So we remember in these waning days the saints, those whose stories and lives have shaped our lives and the collective life of the Church: human moments of an expanding now who have lived the future of God’s reign; who bore the harvest of the Spirit’s talents as willing and open participants and who are eternally present in memory and expanding time by the pervading light of God through Christ and the Spirit.
The lives of the saints are a part of the Church’s inheritance, and their gifts of hymns, writings, windows, and quiet acts of mercy shape the present in which we live. They are a link of rich memory to the holy story that shapes the Church’s life and our individual lives here, now. They are rays of light, the eternal light breaking into our days. Like the saints, we are cajoled to live as children of light, radiant with God’s presence in an ever-greater melding and blurring of past, present, and future. When we eat of this bread and drink of this cup, we remember the Lord’s death until he comes again.
In Christ,
Pastor Rose
