Category: Faith

Is Our Angel Coming?

Rev. Dr. Kate Winters

Years ago someone shared with me an Easter sermon that made a big impression on her. The preacher had been in a deep depression for months and when the day came for the trumpets to sound and joyful expressions of “Alleluia!,” all he could do was stand behind the pulpit and say “I have to be honest. I am still in the deep and dark tomb…but I know my angel is coming!” And he sat down.

This was as powerful an Easter proclamation as I have ever heard, an expression of deep faith born of having lived the resurrection story. From darkness, surely shall spring the light. But I have to admit, I was a bit relieved not to have to preach this Easter Sunday. Not because of any personal depression, but how would I offer a message of hope to a world that seems to be stuck in the dark? Would my “Alleluia! Christ is Risen!” sound authentic when we are circled by death all around?

Mass shootings have become almost a daily occurrence in schools, places of employment, houses of worship, in the city and country streets. Faces of the victims haunt me. The war in Ukraine is a slaughterhouse, as well as the deep famine threatening whole populations in Africa. The global climate crisis is showing up in real time in many ways. Just this week I was in northern Maine. I asked a shop owner about the health of the moose population. She looked grieved as she told me that it is hardly what it used to be. The warmer temperatures have caused numbers of ticks to explode. They suck the blood right out of the young calves killing them in the process. These majestic animals that gave Joel and me so much joy when we first moved here in the not so distant past are now in danger. I am sure that every region has its own canary in the coal mine. Perhaps many.

So on this Easter week, how does one proclaim with conviction that new life springs from death? That the tomb is empty? At least in a way that does not contradict one’s own experience? For me, deep theological truths are based in enfleshed experience. Yes, the daffodils are blooming, and yes the sun is warming, but how is this addressing gun proliferation, growing hatred, white supremacy, anti-semitism, heterosexism, all the isms of our time. Does Christianity and its faith experience have anything to say to our world today? Does religion writ large have any answers for us? Does it offer a path out of the darkness that we are in? Can we still say “our angel is coming?”

I hope to say more, but until then, let us seek signs of hope and life around and within us. We certainly need to share them with one another.

Out of the Rapids, Into the Depths

Rev. Dr. Kate Winters

It is Thursday of Holy Week, in the middle of what I used to call the “rapids” or the “whitewater” of the river of time that is the Christian liturgical year. It has always been a bumpy ride from the ecstatic jubilation of Palm Sunday, to the astounding power of sharing a simple table with one’s community on this day, to the utter desolation and grief on Friday, to gathering to prepare the setting for an open grave on Saturday, to the flowers and trumpets of Easter Sunday. For over thirty years, my job was to guide the craft through the thrilling and dangerous waters.

Here now I sit with my candle, coffee, and journal, a different kind of Holy Week. More reflective than roiling, thinking of Maundy Thursdays past. It was this day’s celebration that called me to be ordained in the church at all. My desire was not really to preach or to lead a congregation, but I longed to have the privilege and the joy of gathering the beloveds around the common table to experience the presence of God – in the bread and the wine, the elements of earth, and in one another. I wanted to be able to look the gathered straight into the eyes and reflect back their goodness as Jesus willed to do in his life. I desired to do my part in weaving together the tender and beautiful body of Christ as we celebrated in true communion. It is this whole body that is the sacrament – the miraculous life of God in the ordinary.

Even in retirement, I retain this calling. This blog, Dwelling in Presence, is my attempt at finding and naming the sacred in all aspects of our lives. In our joys, disapppointments, in our pain, fears, even in our physicality. As at the table on Maundy Thursday, brokenness is blessed. Feet are washed. Wounds are healed. The goodness of God is tasted. Life and death, joy and grief, loom together in one dance. In it all, Christ is present.

And, of course, the mandate (the origin of the word “Maundy”) is received. “Love one another as I have loved you.” What better sign of the sacred in the world, how clear a sacrament, is a community rooted and growing in love. The love that can’t help itself from reaching out, spreading, as it dwells and moves as God’s presence in the world. I may not be taken up by the whitewater today, but I am feeling pulled down into the depths of what this week, this faith, is all about.