I love that hymn. It’s just beautiful, isn’t it? Hear again the words of the last verse:

For the world we raise our voices, for the home that gives us birth;
in our joy we sing returning home to our bluegreen hills of earth.

Do you hear how it puts together the work of caring for this world with the experience of joy?

There’s a refrain that echoes through the Hebrew prophets, calling the people to return, to remember who they are and whose they are. The prophet Malachi quotes God saying, “Return to me, and I will return to you.” You could translate that as, “Come to your senses, come home to your true nature, and your life will be renewed and richly blessed.” What if we, like the hymn we just sang, combine this idea of return with joy? That paying attention to what matters, giving your hands to that good work, will bring goodness and gladness.

In October, Frank talked about grief and loss.   If you recall the fall sermons, we discussed many types of losses:  loss of a loved one, marriage, job, to name a few and Bronnie Ware added to this list with natural disasters in the reading.   As we learned, these losses involve grieving, which everyone must go through in their own way and time.  

As I sat listening to the October services, I thought about filling the voids left by loss.   Just to be specific, I am not thinking that we can fill the void in your heart left by the loss of a loved one.  That void will always be there, the best we can do is learn to move forward with the void.  However, losses leave more voids than many think about.

One of the things I love about parish ministry is getting to hear the stories of people who are new here, or checking us out, looking for a spiritual home. Over the years, I’ve noticed something that a number of us have in common. You’ve said something like, “When I was young, in parochial school, or in church, the teacher or the minister said to me, ‘Why do you ask so many questions? Can’t you just have faith?’” One of the things we have in common, it seems, is that we have questions. We wonder about things.

One day this week, I went out into my back yard, and discovered that there was an invasion underway. The invaders came armed, and they had gained a lot of ground while I wasn’t looking.

You see, last summer I noticed there was a thistle growing in a corner of my yard—one of the big invasive ones that are nearly as tall as I am and are covered, on every inch of leaf and stem, with spikes an inch or two long. Do you know the ones I mean? I know those spikes. They’ll go right through my gloves, even the heavy leather ones for pruning roses. It was going to be a beast to remove, and probably painful, and I wasn’t really suited up for it right then, so I told myself I’d come back out for it in a day or two.

Do you know the name Matthew Fox? He’s a former Roman Catholic priest who was kicked of the church because of his expansive spirituality. Almost fifty years ago he embraced feminist theology, calling God “Mother,” and instead of original sin he talked about original blessing.

Years ago I read an essay about Fox and the creative ways he was practicing his spirituality, and I still remember what he said to an interviewer as he came out of Native American sweat lodge. Asked is there was a lesson that he’d learned there in the heat,  Matthew Fox smiled and said, “More joy.” 

Back when I was a teenager, we got an assistant minister at our church. He was young, free-spirited, kind of radical, at least for us in those days. Everyone loved him. Before preaching, he’d say this prayer: “God grant us the courage to seek the truth, come when it may, cost what it will.”

“Holy mother, life bestowing, bid our was and warfare cease.
Fill us all with grace o’er flowing. Teach us how to live in peace.”

This Easter, and every Easter I suppose, I feel this tug between the churchy, theological Easter with its story of the empty tomb and its promise of resurrection, and the earthy, natural Easter that celebrates the coming of spring, and our earth awakening again. Which is also a resurrection story, isn’t it?

I first came here a little over 11 years ago, in the late winter of  2013.  My wife and I had bought our home nearby in Haverhill a few months prior, and by the time we had fully moved and settled in, I was completely sick of thinking about material things.  

Though I had not regularly attended a church in decades, I was looking to kindle my spiritual life again.

It’s Palm Sunday, the day in the Christian tradition that remembers the symbolic story of Jesus coming into Jerusalem with his followers to celebrate the festival of freedom called Passover. It’s the start of Holy Week, when Christians remember Jesus getting into trouble with the authorities, then betrayed by his friend, being arrested and killed. 

My wife Jessica and I both grew up around here. We knew each other briefly in high school in the mid-90’s, neither was impressed with the other, then moved away and lived our separate lives. Years later in 2004 we met up again, this time we decided the other was actually pretty cool, and got married. And by the time Jess and I moved to Haverhill in 2008 we were ready to have kids. We decided we wanted to give our kids some kind of church experience. We talked about religion and church and what our upbringings were like. Neither of our childhoods were particularly religious. We’d both been through first communion and confirmation, so I guess…Catholic? But it was something that, as prospective parents, we decided was important. Our reasoning went thusly: if we introduce them to religion at a young age, then later on they’ll be less likely to join a cult. Better they learn it from us, than on the streets. She had settled on a belief in a higher spiritual power, and I had recently discovered I was an atheist. So the search began and the bar was low. During that time, about a year later, we learned one of us was pregnant. Then we learned it was twins.