Monday, April 21, 2025

In this Easter message, Richard Rohr teaches that Jesus’ resurrection is a universal pattern we can trust:  

Let’s try to get to what I think is something basic, because the basic is beautiful, but to most people, it’s utterly new.  

We got into trouble when we made the person and the message of Jesus into a formal religion, whereby we had an object of worship; then we had to have a priesthood, formal rules and rituals. I’m not saying we should throw those things out, but once we emphasize cult and moral code, we have a religion. When we emphasize experience, unitive experience, we have the world Jesus is moving around in. Once we made Jesus into a form of religion, we projected the whole message onto him alone. He died, he suffered, he rose from the dead, he ascended and returned to God. We thought that by celebrating these wonderful feasts like Easter that this somehow meant that we were members of the club.  

But you know what? I’m quite sure that was not intended as the message! Jesus was not the lone exemplar. Jesus was not the standalone symbol for the pattern of the universe. Resurrection is just the way things work! When we say hallelujah on this Easter morning, we’re also saying hallelujah to our own lives, to where they’re going, to what we believe in, and hope for.  

Reality rolls through cycles of death and resurrection, death and resurrection, death and resurrection. In the raising up of Jesus, we’re assured that this is the pattern for everything—that we, and anybody who is suffering—is also going to be raised up. This is what God does for a suffering reality. What we crucify, what reality crucifies, God transforms. I don’t think it’s naive to say hallelujah. We have every reason, especially now, since biology and science are also saying this seems to be the shape of everything. It just keeps changing form, meaning, focus or direction, but nothing totally goes away.  

Of course, it’s an act of faith on our side. In our experience, our most cherished people, pets, and even places, fade away—but Jesus is the archetype of the shape of the universe. To believe in Jesus is to believe that all of this is going somewhere and that God is going to make it so. All we have to do is stay on the train, stay on the wave, trusting that by our crucifixions, we would be allowed to fail, fumble and die, and be transformed by grace and by God.  

Easter is the great feast of the triumph of universal grace, the triumph of universal salvation, not just the salvation of the body of Jesus. What we’re talking about creates a people of hope, and a culture of hope that doesn’t slip into cynicism and despair. Easter is saying, we don’t need to go there. Love is going to win. Life is going to win. Grace is going to win. Hallelujah! 

Father Richard Rohr, the good news of the resurrection: 

Week Seventeen: Celebrating Resurrection
Sunday, April 20, 2025
Easter Sunday

Easter, 2025

In his homily on Easter Sunday 2019, Father Richard Rohr shared the good news of the resurrection:  

The Brazilian writer and journalist Fernando Sabino wrote, “In the end, everything will be all right. If it’s not all right, it’s not the end.” [1] That’s what today is all about: “Everything will be okay in the end.”  

The message of Easter is not primarily a message about Jesus’ body, although we’ve been taught to limit it to this one-time “miracle.” We’ve been educated to expect a lone, risen Jesus saying, “I rose from the dead; look at me!” I’m afraid that’s why many people, even Christians, don’t really seem to get too excited about Easter. If the message doesn’t somehow include us, humans don’t tend to be that interested in theology. Let me share what I think the real message is: Every message about Jesus is a message about all of us, about humanity. Sadly, the Western church that most of us were raised in emphasized the individual resurrection of Jesus. It was a miracle that we could neither prove nor experience, but that we just dared to boldly believe.  

But there’s a great secret, at least for Western Christians, hidden in the other half of the universal church. In the Eastern Orthodox Church—in places like Syria, Turkey, Greece, and Egypt—Easter is not usually painted with a solitary Jesus rising from the dead. He’s always surrounded by crowds of people—both haloed and unhaloed. In fact, in traditional icons, he’s pulling people out of Hades. Hades isn’t the same as hell, although we put the two words together, and so we grew up reciting in the creed that “Jesus descended into hell.”  

Instead, Hades is simply the place of the dead. There’s no punishment or judgment involved. It’s just where a soul waits for God. But we neglected that interpretation. The Eastern Church was probably much closer to the truth that the resurrection is a message about humanity and all creation. It’s a message about history. It’s a corporate message, and it includes you and me and everyone else. If that isn’t true, it’s no wonder that we basically lost interest.  

Today is the feast of hope, direction, purpose, meaning, and community. We’re all in this together. The cynicism and negativity that our country and many other countries have descended into show a clear example of what happens when people do not have hope. If it’s all hopeless, we individually lose hope too. Easter is an announcement of a common hope. When we sing in the Easter hymn that Christ destroyed death, that means the death of all of us. It’s not just about Jesus; God promises to all, “Life is not ended, it merely changes,” as we say in the funeral liturgy. That’s what happened in Jesus, and that’s what will happen in us. In the end, everything will be all right. History is set on an inherently positive and hopeful tangent.  

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditations

From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Week Eleven: Radical Grace

Already Forgiven

Author and Lutheran minister Nadia Bolz-Weber describes an experience of lapsing into guilt and self-incrimination during a silent retreat:   

What am I doing with this openness? Resting? Sending love and light out into the world? No. In the space left from leaving the city, everyone else and all creature comforts behind, my regrets float in and stay like toy boats in a tide pool….    

I always [mess] things up eventually. Why didn’t I pay more attention to that one person? I could have been more patient, spent more time with my kids, spent less time at work, asked for help when I needed it, been a better friend, been a better mom, been a better pastor. I should have done better. Never-ending accusations…. This is a toy-boat regatta of self-incrimination.   

I’m nervous to say what happened next, because I know how it sounds. Eleven words came to me from … dare I say God? Maybe it was my own mind finding the emergency brake, but it didn’t seem like the words were my own, since what my own mind usually comes up with sound much closer to “Stop being such a crybaby” than the ones I heard that day on the hill. Eleven words: What if you have already been forgiven for all of that?…  

The relief I felt was not a result of hearing that the things I accuse myself of are not true, but that they are not the most true thing. Grace is the most true thing.  

Bolz-Weber recalls how the prophet Jonah had difficulty accepting God’s grace and forgiveness for all, especially his enemies:  

The image that comes to my mind as I am cry-laughing during this “silent retreat” is that of Jonah sitting alone on his own hill, questioning God’s forgiveness…. When Jonah’s enemies repent and are shown mercy by God, Jonah … says: “That’s why I didn’t want this stupid job in the first place—because I knew, God, that you are gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” [see Jonah 4:2]. And it’s hard to manipulate a God like that….   

God’s grace and mercy throws the whole reward and punishment system out the window. So sometimes I want to yell “noooooo” and reach as fast as I can to get it back. Forgiveness can sting when we don’t feel “worthy” of it, when it seems like we are getting away with something…. As if feeling bad for what I have done is the same as being good, when in fact it is not.   

What if we’ve already been forgiven for the ways we’ve hurt the people we love? What if we’ve already been forgiven for not being perfect parents? What if we’ve already been forgiven for the [stuff] we haven’t even done yet?… Maybe forgiving myself isn’t something that happens once on a silent retreat but is a daily option. Give us this day our daily forgiveness, even for ourselves.   

Read this meditation on cac.org.

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation
From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Week Forty-Four: Loving God through Creation

Community of Creation

Theologian and Cherokee descendant Randy Woodley considers how the Bible offers insight into relationship with creation:

In the Genesis accounts of creation, I find a world where each part of creation is related to the other. When God makes the first human and I anticipate what will happen next, I see the requirement for Adam to name all the animals. But to name things in an Indigenous way, you have to get to know them, and to know their special characteristics. In the narrative, God is telling Adam to go out and get to know his relatives. The creation narratives in Genesis, like many Indigenous creation narratives, encourage humans to see the wider created order as part of the same “family tree of the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 2:4). [1]

The importance of the narrative is that it is not just about humans. It is also about the animal kingdom and the plants and the water and the sky and everything else.… My theology begins with the land.…

My understanding is that our responsibility as Indigenous people is to be keepers of the land. That means the whole of all the ecosystems and all the human systems…. That is my job on earth. That is the job I take seriously while I’m here. When the land is used badly, and the community of creation is mistreated, everything becomes out of balance and in disharmony. Anywhere on earth can be a place of harmony when you understand your role.…

When land is lost, a history is ended. It takes land to make history. Humanity is in direct relationship with the land and all creation, a principle found throughout the scriptures and in some of the most poetic places, like Job 12:7–10, where Job says,

Just ask the animals, and they will teach you.
Ask the birds of the sky, and they will tell you.
Speak to the earth, and it will instruct you.
Let the fish in the sea speak to you.
For they all know
that my disaster has come from the hand of the Lord.
For the life of every living thing is in his hand,
and the breath of every human being.

Woodley shares other scriptural examples of God’s love for creation:

God loves everything in creation (John 3:16). In the stories we find God counting the clouds (Job 38:37), releasing the rain (Job 5:10), directing the snow (Job 37:6; 38:22), knowing when a sparrow falls (Matthew 10:29), knowing where a donkey is tied (Matthew 21:2), knowing where the fish will swim (John 21:6), adorning the lilies of the field (Matthew 6:29–30), and comparing the ostrich and the stork (Job 39:13). At the time of Jesus, there were lots of modern mechanisms, lots of inventions [including] chariots and wheels and waterwheels and little torches and all kinds of mechanistic things. But we find Jesus mostly talking about the things that grow out of the earth and the things that fly above the earth….

[1] H. Daniel Zacharias, “The Land Takes Care of Us: Recovering Creator’s Relational Design,” in Theologies of Land: Contested Land, Spatial Justice, and Identity, ed. K. K. Yeo, Gene L. Green (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2021), 79.

Randy S. Woodley, Indigenous Theology and the Western Worldview: A Decolonized Approach to Christian Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2022), 57–58, 66–67.

Image credit: A path from one week to the next—Loïs Mailou Jones, Jeune Fille Français (detail), 1951, oil on canvas, Smithsonian; Textile Design for Cretonne (detail), 1928, watercolor on paper, Smithsonian; Eglise Saint Joseph (detail), 1954, oil on canvas, Smithsonian. Click here to enlarge image.

Creation teaches us to love God in all Her death, decay, fallow times, insemination, growth, blooming and life and death and life.

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation
From the Center for Action and Contemplation

I believe that we rather totally missed Jesus’ major point when we made a religion out of him instead of realizing he was giving us a message of simple humanity, vulnerability, and nonviolence that was necessary for the reform of all religions—and for the survival of humanity. We need to dedicate our lives to building bridges and paying the price in our bodies for this ministry of reconciliation (Ephesians 2:13–18). The price is that we will always, like all bridges, be walked on from both sides. Reconcilers are normally “crucified,” and the “whole world hates them,” because they are neither on one side nor the other. They build the vulnerable bridge in between, which always looks like an abdication of ground to the supposedly “true believer.”

Sunday, February 19, 2023

Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation
From the Center for Action and Contemplation

Week Forty-Two: Love and Justice

God’s Loving Justice

God’s power for justice is precisely God’s power to restore people when they are broken or hurt. God uses their mistakes to liberate them, to soften them, to enlighten them, to transform them, and to heal them. No text in the Hebrew Scriptures equates God’s justice with vengeance on the sinner. It might look like that on the surface, but if we read the whole passage and understand the context, chastisement is always meant to bring us back to love and union. God’s justice is always saving justice, always healing justice. What is experienced as punishment is always for the sake of restoration, not for vengeance. Therefore, justice for the people is to participate in this wholeness and spaciousness of God, to be brought into God’s freedom.

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still: Healing the World from a Place of Prayer (New York: Paulist Press, 2014), 38–40, 87–88.

I’m praying not only for them
But also for those who will believe in me
Because of them and their witness about me.
The goal is for all of them to become one heart and mind—
Just as you, Father, are in me and I in you,
So they might be one heart and mind with us.
Then the world might believe that you, in fact, sent me.
The same glory you gave me, I gave them,
So they’ll be as unified and together as we are—
I in them and you in me.
Then they’ll be mature in this oneness,
And give the godless world evidence
That you’ve sent me and loved them
In the same way, you’ve loved me.

If you see something, say something; don’t let that,”no snitching “ BS ruin your community, ghettos aren’t built, they are formed when we allow criminals to take over and we turn the other way. — Omar Monroe, Conyers, GA

Jesus said to his disciples, “Is a lamp brought in to be placed under a bushel basket or under a bed, and not to be placed on a lampstand?
For there is nothing hidden except to be made visible; nothing is secret except to come to light.
Anyone who has ears to hear ought to hear.”
He also told them, “Take care what you hear. The measure with which you measure will be measured out to you, and still more will be given to you.
To the one who has, more will be given; from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”