Ephemeroptera
a Reflection given by Rev. Claire Feingold Thoryn
at the Easter Sunrise Service on Sunday, March 23

“Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised.”

The sun is rising and Jesus is risen.  This day holds the entire story of the birth of Christianity: A baby was born.  As a youth he found his voice.  As a man he spoke the truth.  At the end he was killed.  And when all hope seemed lost, he rose.  Again and again, year after year, he rises.

When the two Marys visit the tomb, they encounter an angel so fearsome that the male guards around them faint to the ground.  He tells them that Jesus has been raised from the dead and he has already gone on to Galilee. There is no time to sit still, to take it all in. The angel tells them to go quickly.  They run down the road, full of fear and great joy.  Fear and great joy. All the hope and promise that they thought was memorialized in that tomb is gone.  The tomb is empty now.  The hope and promise they thought lay there is raised up and alive in another place.  It is time to fight through the fear, sing with that joy, it is time to seize the day.

On the way to Galilee the Marys encounter Jesus, and they grab his feet and worship him.  He says “Greetings!”  In Greek the word is more literally translated as “Rejoice!” But their fear takes hold.  They grip his ankles and try to keep him with them, but he is already risen, there is no holding onto him anymore.  He sends them away.  He has risen.  You’ll find, if you read the Gospels carefully, that Mark, Matthew, Luke and John all have different stories of how Jesus rose.  He appears to different people in different places and in different ways, in some he eats and drinks and in others he doesn’t.  There is a similarity—in all of them, he leaves again.  He is not risen to stay.  He doesn’t stick around to give more advice or write a book or choose a successor.  He appears, he says hello, he reminds us to rejoice, he puts his work in our hands, and he’s gone again.

On this day we celebrate the whole crazy cycle of life and death, birth and rebirth.  Jesus, ever rising, ever being born, ever dying, and ever rising yet again, every year, with every retelling of this story.  Each day the sun rises and we decide what story our life will tell.  Meeting.  Mating.  Breeding.  Dying.  Will there be more to our story?

Will we sit sadly by the tombs of our lost dreams, our vanished hopes?  Or will we run down the road to Galilee, on a journey to find new life, new possibility?  “Do not be afraid!” says the angel.  “Rejoice!” says Jesus.  “Carpe diem!” say the mayflies, who only have one day to live. 

The phrase “Carpe diem!” or “Seize the Day!” comes from a poem by the Roman poet Horace, who died a few years before Jesus was born.  Horace wrote in his Odes:

Don’t ask —it’s dangerous to know—what end the gods will give me or you. Don’t play with Babylonian fortune-telling either. Better just deal with whatever comes your way.  Whether you’ll see several more winters or whether the last one Jupiter gives you is the one even now pelting the rocks on the shore with the waves of the Tyrrhenian sea — be smart, drink your wine. Scale back your long hopes to a short period. While we speak, time is envious and is running away from us. Seize the day, trusting little in the future.

Sometimes life brings us moments where we are confronted with our mortality.  Memento mori.  We see how small we are in the vast expanse of the universe; how fragile our bodies; how finite our being.  And as scary as these times are, they often bring with them a heightened sense of the value of each day.  With fear, and great joy, we face the world.

It’s almost 7:30 in the morning.  If we were mayflies, we would be dead by the next dawn.  If this was the last day of your life, how would you want to spend it?

I say who cares if life is a swamp and we’re just a couple of small bugs in a very small pond.  I say live!  I say…darn it…live!

Jesus is gone but his transformation has taken root in our hearts. With fear and great joy, we begin our journey to Galilee.  Happy Easter.

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