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Morning Reflection for Eastertide
May 16, 2025
Preface:
For the five years that we’ve distributed meditations, Scripture has been their singular starting point; but I’m aware that there are many issues, concerns, and points of interest specific to our time, that are never explicitly mentioned in Scripture and that, nonetheless, deserve theologically-informed comment. Periodically, then, in place of Meditations, we will offer Reflections that address these matters. Hopefully, they will both broaden and deepen the reach of faith and how it can appropriately be included in the general conversation of life.
Having a Future
Imagine a Gen X teenager. He gets up every day at dawn, his clock radio waking him with the smarmy voices of unhappy, middle-aged DJs playing the same classic rock hits they always play. He goes to a big ugly concrete building that looks like a prison made of life-size gray Lego blocks and tries to stay awake while his teachers lecture about topics that don’t interest him. He moves from one fluorescent lit room to another when directed by the sound of bells. After school, he works a shift at the supermarket deli, trying not to look at his watch every three minutes. He goes home, maybe does his homework or puts it off. Over dinner he deflects questions from his mother about his day. He calls a friend to complain about school, then studies until bedtime. Just before falling asleep, he reads a novel that tells him another life is possible. The next day, he wakes up and does it all again.
Timothy Aubry: “Gateway Books” in The Point journal
We think of Eternal Life, if we think of it at all, as what happens when life ends. We would do better to think of it as what happens when life begins.
Frederick Buechner: Wishful Thinkful - A Theological ABC
Reflection
This week I was very graciously invited by a parishioner to be his guest at the annual Founders Award Dinner at the Historical Society of Philadelphia. The HSP was recognizing the work and legacy of Dr. Ruth J. Simmons, former president of Prairie View A&M University, Smith College, and Brown University—and the first African American president of an Ivy League institution. It was an event that showed the best of Philadelphia and the enduring beauty of the humanities, which the HSP supports.
Dr. Simmons spoke of her own individual journey, extending from her childhood in Texas to the culmination of her career in academia. At the beginning of her remarks - and reiterated at the end - she noted that as a little girl she was informed that she had no future. She was meant to be a mere laborer. But she had a series of teachers that intervened and reshaped her sense of the possible. She had been relegated to being no one; but others found a way, quietly yet determinedly, to open her life so that she could be someone, someone who could provide at a much greater scale the same opening for others. She was given a future. But it wasn’t merely by means of training or years of education. Her future came from the ways that others looked at her and interacted with her. They saw in her things – potentialities – that to many others weren’t immediately apparent. That’s a future worth claiming. And acknowledging this, Dr. Simmons characterized her life as wonderful – the whole of it.
The morning after the dinner, I came across Timothy Aubry’s remembrance of his childhood. I marveled at his recounting all the exercises of advancement – a common list – yet what is absent is any personal investment, either by him or in him. He was given tasks in lieu of a future – a common and deadening mistake.
And it’s the same mistake that often plagues the church. Faith is work. Preaching is cajoling. Reward comes when responsibilities are met. And eternal life is the great payoff for a self-sacrificial life now. Whatever future there may be, it’s a long way off.
How wrong this is. For what we truly claim, week by week, is that God sees us, all the way through, and God engages us and delights in us and gives himself for us. God’s persistent message is that we have a future. This is what is so captivating about Jesus’ interactions with others along the way. He knew how to open for them something that before was closed off. This is the great rejoicing of Eastertide, that what has been opened to us will not be lost. Worship is our joyful recognition that our world is being reshaped – because now and always God is giving us a future. Think of this the next time you step up into the church.
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