Our church is even more impressive then usual right now. Not only because it is well adorned but because much of that festal décor comes from our neighborhoods.  Carefully arranged daffodils on the side altar, fountains of forsythia around the font, and budding cherry blossoms at the altar were in our yards before they joined the lilies in our buildings. It seems like the very rotation of the planet is colluding with the liturgy to present our sacred story.

Pity the poor Australians. (Now THAT seems like an incredible non sequitor unless you keep reading.  Persist, gentle reader!)

Pity the poor Australians.  They are emerging from Lent just in time to transition from autumn to winter. They are singing alleluias as they feel their warmth decreasing and see their plants getting a little grey. I know this because, decades ago, I received a grant to spend a month in Western Australia studying how the Church had adapted the metaphor system it brought from England to coincide with the change of seasons. For example, it would make no sense to sing  “now the green blade riseth,” in Perth!

(I know what you’re thinking and matter how much it sounds like it, this was NOT an attempt to get someone else to pay for a month of surfing.) (An effort that is successful is not an attempt.)

It took me only two or three conversations with clergy to understand how the church had adapted.  It hadn’t.  They persisted in using spring imagery to describe their resurrections even as the Kangaroo Paw was dropping its flowers and the Dryandras was becoming brown.

Two occasions during the tridium made me especially grateful for reality based Redeemer.  The first is an occasion of my personal failure.  During the Good Friday procession, we walked past a man lying on the street.  There was nothing physically that we could have done.  Two MPD officers were appropriately assisting as the ambulance pulled up and several skilled persons jumped out.  My failing was that I persisted with the agenda.  I should have stopped everything and we should have prayed for that person (not one of our usual guests) and for all people asleep on concrete and mud everywhere.  Redeemer people want to deal with the real.

The second was as we gathered around our Easter Vigil campfire to hear stories of our liberation. In relating how Redeemer people kept it real by creating liturgical language that did not ignore the changing seasons around us, Jody described how Redeemer struggled to move from a winter of patriarchal metaphors to a spring which represented all of us and all of our resurrections.

We continue to try to keep it real. Like the flowers on our altar, we have a brown spot here and an unblooming bud there, but we are real and beautiful and we are part of God’s plan of new life.  Alleluia.

Yours in faith,

Dave