Luminous Spiritual Radiance
Resurrection of the Lord: Easter Sunday
By Rev. Dr. Beverly Bingle
April 4, 2021
It wasn’t long after Jesus died that his followers began to experience him alive, still with them.
They knew he had been arrested and crucified, and they had run away to Galilee in fear, but they began to experience his living presence, and to talk about it.
Within a couple of years Paul experienced the risen Christ as a voice and a bright light as he headed to Damascus.
Later he wrote to the Corinthians describing it, along with many other experiences of the risen Christ he had heard about.
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Many of us have experienced that phenomenon.
After my Dad died, I had a dream of him talking with me about a decision I was struggling with.
Last week a friend told me that he saw a buddy who had died, but when he walked closer, he found out it was someone else.
But he had felt his friend’s presence, like that story of the road to Emmaus - where the disciples experienced Jesus’ presence in the breaking of the bread.
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Those appearance stories were the first part of the resurrection tradition to develop.
Much later is the tradition of the empty tomb in today’s gospel. Suggesting that this tradition was a story created to talk about a spiritual, not a historical truth, scholars point out that the Roman practice was to bury executed criminals in a common grave... except in the case of crucifixion, when they left them hanging on their crosses for crows to eat their bodies.
Another fact that scholars point out is that the early Christians showed very little interest in Jesus’ burial site until more than 300 years after the fact.
It’s highly unlikely, they say, that Jesus would have had a tomb.
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Most of us first heard these scriptures when we were very young, and we took them literally, like we believed in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. Gradually we grew up, and the magic fell away.
I remember Fr. Earl Loeffler telling me, as I struggled with that transition to adult faith, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.”
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Where does that leave us in today’s celebration of the resurrection?
Just as quantum physics is giving us a deeper and wider view of physical reality, we are in the process of framing a new view of God among us.
What our ancestors in faith, living in that culture of two millennia ago, described as experiences of physical presence we might describe as a luminous spiritual radiance, a presence that is visible, palpable, in all that is.
We express that in different ways.
Our Christian tradition tells us that God is everywhere: God is in us, works through us, walks among us.
Native Americans live in the presence of the Great Mystery, the Great Spirit in all things.
The Hindu tradition’s Namaste greeting speaks that same understanding: “The God in me bows to the God in you.”
God indeed is everywhere.
The Spirit is with us, in us, and among us.
As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it in his sonnet As Kingfishers Catch Fire, “...the just man justices; Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is - Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his….”
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So we see God in nature as it springs up around us.
We see Christ in the hands of people helping others.
And we see the Spirit radiating love in everything and everyone.
Today we celebrate that reality, the luminous apparition of God in each other, the risen Christ still alive in our midst.
Namaste!