St. Mark's News

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April 2017

St. Mark’s News Volume 21/Issue 4

From the Associate Rector: Sci-Fi Easter 2017 This Easter, a Time-Space Portal may or may not open in the pulpits of Christendom. Silently, on Easter morning, or at a Saturday evening vigil, the preachers who step in to those pulpits will be transported to another pulpit in a different city, state, nation, or continent. It will all happen so fast and the Time-Space Portal will disguise the preacher (and translate their languages) so that a Baptist congregation in Cleveland, OH won’t notice their scheduled preacher is preaching on the deck of an Aircraft carrier to a group of sailors, while their preacher has been transported through Space and Time from a small village church in rural Nigeria. Are you still with me? In short, every preacher is swapped, but the congregations who have gathered to hear their Easter sermon--as well as the preachers themselves are oblivious. Everyone thinks that their regularly scheduled preacher is preaching to them. Every preacher looks out and sees the same people they normally see on a Sunday morning. Every preacher preaches the same sermon they prepared. Ok, if you’re still with me, now imagine that these preachers being switched by the Time-Space Portal are not just shuffled through Space and their respective time zones, they’re also shuffled though 2,000 years of Christian history. A German Lutheran congregation from Easter 1678 has a mega-church pastor from Dallas, 1997 preaching to them while an Episcopal parish bordering the Greenbelt in Austin, TX hears a sermon intended for a small congregation huddled in a Roman catacomb during the early 2nd Century. What would you hear in that sermon on Easter Sunday? Aside from some difficult to understand illustrations and some untranslatable jokes (as all jokes are), I would guess we would hear the same sermon in every pulpit in time and space. Surely, there would be some strange exceptions as some Christian preachers have felt they needed to say something totally new and In this Issue original, but I would suspect that most congregations would hear essentially the From the Associate Rector ...... 1 same sermon that Peter preached in Acts 10. Here it is: “God anointed Jesus of A Letter from the Senior Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good Warden .................................... 2 and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are Lenten Thanks! ........................ 3 witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to Take Note! ............................... 4 death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day …. He Outreach .................................. 5 commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained Parish Life ................................ 5 by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him Music Notes ............................. 6 Christian Formation ................. 7 that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his April Celebrations .................... 8 name." Caffeine Ministry .................... 10

That’s it. That’s essentially what every Christian has been hearing every Easter ROTA ..................................... 11 Sunday for 2000 years and every Sunday in between. This is the good news for the world, that through the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ we receive the forgiveness of sins. We say it together in our Eucharistic prayers, “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” So it doesn’t matter if this Time-Space Portal does or doesn’t open this Easter Sunday. You’ll still be hearing the essential message of good news that every follower of Jesus has heard since that first Easter in Jerusalem.

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