Christ Has Risen

 

Happy Easter,

LSP

Palm Sunday

Behold beauty from Farrer:

AFTER Jesus had died on the cross, his disciples hoped to keep his body with them as a sacred relic. They shut it in with stone, they came to embalm it. St. Magdalen was disconsolate that she could not find it. But Jesus had given his body to them at the Supper in the form in which he meant them to have it, a form which did not inolve its being stored on earth. He would continually give it them from heaven, where he lives. It is a heavenly being he bestows on us, it is in his heavenly body that he unites us. Lift up your hearts; by this sacrament you are parts of Christ, and Christ is the heart of heaven.

God bless you all,

LSP

The Turin Shroud

 

The Shroud's a curious thing, a faint image of a powerful man with the wounds of Christ's crucifixion and it's been dismissed as a forgery, but not so fast. The image is a photo negative.  What? a negative? Yes. It also doesn't contain dyes or pigments, it's not a painting. So how was it made?

By a "burst of vacuum ultraviolet radiation... emitted from every three-dimensional point of the body in the Shroud." Wow, an insanely atomic burst of energy that somehow seared the image into the cloth. Perhaps, though no one knows who or what might cause such a thing.

You can read about the Shroud here and here and what do we make of it? If it's a forgery or piece of art it's remarkable and miraculous, how many 13/14th C paintings were photo negatives and made without paint or dye. And if real? You behold the face of Christ.

Surrexit,

LSP

Some Good News

 

Good news? That's preposterous, so-called LSP, if that's your real name, which we doubt. But not so fast, punters, there is good news and here it is. The sun shines, the sky is blue, devoid of chemtrails, and the sacrifice of the Mass was offered this morning, not once but twice.

And there were the faithful, and they are, coming together to worship God, hear his Word and receive the Sacrament of the Altar, his Body and Blood, in which we find union with Our Lord's paschal sacrifice on Calvary and with it the forgiveness of sin and a share, even now, in the glorious risen life of the empty tomb.

Therein lies sanctification, freedom, hope and glory, right here in North Central Texas and I say that unreservedly. On topic, if you'd said in the '90s that I'd be  Priest in Charge of two small rural missions in Texas I'd have laughed. Hardly grand enough, where's that stone Altar and polychrome reredos. 

But the joke would've been on me. I'll leave you to do the spiritual math. In the meanwhile, have a beautiful Sunday and as always, God bless you all.

Shoot straight,

LSP

Easter - 8 Days After

 

Birds sing and fight ferociously with squirrels, Blue Terminator rests on the kitchen floor, Mex/Latino big bass pounds from the neighbor's compound and it's the second Sunday of Easter. Or the first if you're old skool lectionary.

Lectionary wars aside, here's some Farrer:

THE death and resurrection of Christ draw near to us in this sacrament.  The bread is broken - there Christ dies; we receive it as Christ alive - there is his resurrection.  It is the typical expression of divine power to make something from nothing.  God has made the world where no world was, and God makes life out of death.  Such is the God with whom we have to do.  We do not come to God for a little help, a little support to our own good intentions.  We come to him for resurrection.  God will not be asked for a little, he will be asked for all.  We reckon ourselves dead, says St. Paul, that we may ask God for a resurrection, not of ourselves, but of Christ in us.

 

Christ in us, crucified and risen. What can we do but with Thomas, fall down and worship at touching so great a mystery, my Lord and my God! Some call that the most magnificent confession of faith in Gospels.

Pax,

LSP

Sunday Reflection

 

After his baptism, Jesus goes out into the wilderness to fast and pray, to gain strength for his journey to Calvary and the Cross. Hating this, Satan attempts to divert him by way of three temptations, three "shortcuts from the Cross." 

We're familiar with them, if you're the Son of God, turn these stones to bread, cast yourself down from the Temple and the angels will bear you up lest you dash your foot against a stone and finally, the offer of all the kingdoms of the world on the condition Christ worshiped Satan.

There they are, the sins of the flesh, of pride, and of greed which if Jesus had succumbed to them would have hijacked his mission of redemption. Stones to bread, why go to the Cross if you can win men's hearts by feeding them? What need for the agony and shame of Golgotha when you can perform a marvel, a sign which converts the people? And why endure the agony of crucifixion when you can establish an earthly kingdom here and now?

Why not indeed. Because in all of Satan's beguilement redemption doesn't occur, the people remain in their sin and subject to death and Hell regardless of how well fed, self-sufficient and well governed they are. No Cross, no Resurrection, no life.

I like Fulton Sheen's observation. The first temptation is economic, the second a marvel and the third political; bread and circuses under the aegis of diabolic power. Perhaps this sounds familiar, as it was in the days of ancient Rome so now. But consider the second or in Luke's case third temptation.

Throw yourself down from the Temple, says Satan to Christ, throw yourself away from the Church. Who will catch you? Angels, yes, but surely fallen ones, demons, and will they hold you up in their claws and talons, elevating you above the ground of reality, of God himself? Maybe for a time, until they don't and the Faustian pact resolves on collision with the rock.

Thus warned, we pray and meditate on God's holy Word, practice fasting, abstinence and self-denial, give alms and tithe, repent and confess our sins. All the disciplines of Lent by which we beat back Satan and find unity with the Cross and from there the risen life of Easter.

God bless,

LSP

I Am The Bread Of Life

 

"I am the bread of life," says Christ in the sixth chapter of John's Gospel. It's a remarkable statement. Jesus claims that he is the spiritual food which came down from heaven, sent by his Father. That he is true manna, "not such as your fathers ate and died, he who eats this bread will live forever." 

He, Jesus, is the very food which endures for everlasting life, the fulfillment and embodiment of the Law represented by the 5 loaves of the miracle performed the day before. 

He is the glory of God which passed by Moses, who was hidden by God in a cleft in the rock, and spoke through the unquenchable fire of the burning bush. He is now unveiled, present, incarnate, "and we beheld His glory, a glory as of an only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth." Glory that's given to us in sacrifice for our atonement on the Cross, "the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh."

Bread which we receive by faith, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” And that's just it. Do we dare to believe, to put our humble, perhaps desperate and fearful faith in the Son of Man who came down from heaven that we might live. To put it another way. Do we labor for earthly food, for bread and power, or for the heavenly food which is the life of God himself? 

Christ faced this temptation in the wilderness and answered Satan, "Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word which proceeds from the mouth of God." He said no to "all the kingdoms of the world and the glories therein," and went to the Cross, which became his throne. He invites us to do the same, "take up your cross," so that we, in him, will have life, divine life.

Of course you might want to choose bread and power instead, thus cunningly marking yourself with the number of the beast. Your call, good luck. But remember, it's all a Big Pharma congressional larf until you wake up and a demon's gnawing on your inner thigh.

God bless,

LSP

A Short Sunday Sermon

 

Then saith he to Thomas, (in the upper room) Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing. Jn. 20:27

Thomas wanted physical proof of the resurrection and got it, the risen Christ was touchable, tangible. He had risen bodily from the tomb and, on reflection, anything less doesn't cut it.

What dies when we die, the spirit? Hardly, it doesn't have any physical parts to decay and return to the dust from which they came. The body, notoriously, does; we don't bounce like we used to, to put it mildly. So what has to be resurrected? The body, rejoined to the spirit, between them both making up the whole person.

Without this, we're left with spirit only or in other words, a shade or ghost, and the rising becomes a haunting. This is not the case in the upper room on the 8th day, the Sunday following the Resurrection. On the contrary, Jesus stands before Thomas, the whole man, body and spirit, risen from the grave.

In an explosion of divine power, Christ had taken humanity to a new dimension of existence, a new mode of imperishable, glorified being. No wonder Thomas fell down and worshiped, he touched the Glory, "My Lord and my God." And note this.

When Christ appeared to the disciples on Easter Sunday, the "doors were shut" for fear of the same people who'd crucified Jesus crucifying them. For fear of death. With the reality of the resurrection upon them, made concrete on the 8th day, the fear was gone. And so they went out and died in the proclamation of the Faith, knowing they would rise in and with their Lord. 

What hope! As opposed to the dismal, wretched, con-trick despair of our disbelieving age. God grant us the faith, hope and love of the disciples in the upper room, and with Thomas the grace to fall down and believe, "My Lord and my God."

Christus Surrexit,

LSP

Jesus Christ is Risen Today

God bless and happy Easter,

LSP

Good Friday

 

The Tabernacles are empty, the Altars are stripped, and Christ lays in the tomb. It seems as though Satan has won, and he must have thought so. You can imagine the infernal ecstasy. Imagine, too, the horror of the Adversary as Christ rises from the dead, demolishing the calculus of the Pit.

Consummatum est. It is finished, the perfect sacrifice is made, man is reconciled to God and the powers of Hell cast down, only to rage in fury as they descend into the Lake of Fire. 

They take their followers with them, the followers of the False Prophet Caiaphas, who on the sixth hour of the sixth day stamp their foreheads with the mark of the Beast crying out, "We have no king but Caesar!"

We follow a different King, the Lord of Life, who reigns victorious on the hard wood of the Cross. Satan and death have no power over us.

Rejoice in that and stand firm.

God bless,

LSP

Thursday Sermon

“You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?”

James and John want a share in Christ's glory, to sit at the right and left hand of His throne at the consummation of all things. But instead of rebuking their "jealousy and selfish ambition" (James 3:16) Jesus invites them into glory by giving them its key, the Passion.

He invites them to share in this, to drink His cup of suffering and to live His baptism of death. Through this comes resurrection and triumphant life. But so easy to say, so hard to do! James and John, doubtless unwittingly, say they're able and they are, in the end. Christ's question becomes prophecy.

He asks the same thing of us. Perhaps this is helpful:

The mind, when purified by Christ’s Chalice is enabled to see spiritual visions. It begins to see the all-embracing Providence of God which is invisible to carnal minds, to see the law of corruption in everything corruptible, to see close to everyone a vast eternity, to see God in His great acts – in the creation and re-creation of the world. Earthly life seems to it a brief pilgrimage; the passing events of earthly life seem like dreams, and its blessings seem to he a fleeting illusion of the, eyes, a short-lived fatal allurement of the mind and heart.

To put it another way, "Whoever does not carry his cross and follow Me cannot be My disciple." (Lk 14:27) And again, "You cannot serve God and Mammon." (Mt. 6:24) By contrast, we should be like the "little child." (Mk 10:15)

May God bless us all in the endeavour. 

LSP

A Conjuring Trick With Bones

A day late and a couple of decades short but rest in peace, apostate  bishop, David Jenkins, onetime prelate of Durham.

Back when you were alive you mocked the resurrection as a "conjuring trick with bones," and York Minster was struck by lightning and gutted by fire.

Undaunted, a sturdy third of CofE clergy are with you on the resurrection and a solid 50% express the same kind of doubt about the Virgin Birth.

Roll those bones and see if you come out ahead.

God bless,

LSP