Reading
for Easter Vigil
April 15, 2006
The Rev. Robert J. Mayer
St. Jude the Apostle Episcopal Church, Cupertino,
CA
About twenty-six hundred years ago the prophet Ezekiel went into exile with his people. He went from Jerusalem to Babylon, about one hundred forty miles away. Exile is as old as Holy Scripture and as new as a hurricane. No matter why it happens, exile is horrible:
So psalmist rightly laments “By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept, when we remembered you, O Zion.”
Could bring back what you had? Could you reinstate what you remembered? Could you restore what you had lost?
Sometimes we get to begin again. Coming out of exile is hard to do. Sure, we can go back one hundred forty miles from Babylon back to Jerusalem. Sure, we can rebuild where we lived.
It is about a twenty-minute drive fifteen miles north of St. Jude’s to the Stanford Medical Center. Surgeon Norman Shumway performed the first human heart transplant in the United States there in 1981. Some of us know people who received human hearts there.
But, long before surgeons transplanted human hearts my friend and all of us had our heart of stone removed from our bodies. God offers us a new heart as well as a new spirit.
A new heart and a new spirit is more than a do-over.
Again, from the psalmist, “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence and take not your holy Spirit from me.”
| Updated 4/15/06 |
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