Easter Sunday, God's Secret Service, and the Butterfly

Wow, what an Easter.  As a kid I loved the egg hunts.  I still enjoy the candy.  I was always mildly irritated by having to attend an Easter Dinner every year as if it was some important holiday.


Well, surprise, suddenly it is an important holiday to me. Thank you, Federated Church.

I've written previously about the Maundy Thursday Tenebrae service in the dark...amazing.

Good Friday, I attended an interfaith service at the local Catholic Church. I didn't find it very moving, except perhaps for seeing all the priests/ministers/pastors working together to lead worship, but it was another piece of the Easter journey.

Saturday I washed my dogs and my bike, and read some of the Message bible.  I kind of got into it... the story is coming together better for me, how the bible is set up, and how we know what we think we know about Jesus. Then I ran across the 10 Commandments with Charlton Heston on TV.  Believe it or not, I have never seen this film.  Well I still haven't seen the whole thing, but I've seen part of it... Egyptians in shimmering gold lame outfits and hollywood starlets with midwestern accents as famous jewish women from the bible... amazing.  A quick read at Wikipedia about the film showed me where it's accurate biblically and where it's not... and said that in today's dollars, the 10 Commandments would be one of the 10 top grossing films of all time, at just under a billion dollars. Apparently DeMille filled in some details from sources such as Josephus, the Sefer ha-Yashar, and the Chronicle of Moses, as well as the Qur'an (click the links to go to the wikipedia entries). You can read about the movie here .

Sunday I dragged myself out of bed in the dark, showered and shaved, and got out to Nauset Beach for a sunrise service with the Methodist Church.  I don't remember much of the actual service, but the setting and the sunrise was a truly spiritual event.  I've seen plenty of sunsets... I vow to see more sunrises.  Here's an actual Nauset Beach sunrise photo (not from this Easter though):

Then at the 10 am service, Pastor Sally was on fire!  (First she acknowledged the "Christmas and Easter" visitors that filled the sanctuary, with a funny joke about a pastor trying to get an Easter-only worshipper to join the army of god full-time...the visitor replies that he's actually already in the army, it's just that he's in the secret service.) She admitted that even she has those "secret service" moments.

And the Rev. Dr. Phil Mitchell (an awfully nice, humble guy, for such a long title) had a hilarious children's chat moment, as he was leading up to the analogy of Jesus rising from the crucifixion as a butterfly emerges from the cocoon... and one tiny little kid just said right into the microphone something like, "Jesus is just like a butterfly because he was raised up to god" and Phil had the good sense to know when he had been upstaged and end it right there... saying "thanks, you said in a few seconds what the grownups are now going to spend an hour to say."  Another little kid quietly corrected Phil, that moths come from cocoons, and butterflies come from a chrysalis... but that kid wasn't near the microphone so he didn't really get his point across to the whole congregation.

We do laugh a lot at the Federated Church.   And I think we truly celebrated Jesus' resurrection.

Anyway, it also gave me a new way to think about my time in Orleans... while I cast off the remnants of my old life and prepare for a permanent move to Hawaii... as time of reorganization like the caterpillar going into the chrysalis before emerging as the butterfly.  It can be painful and complicated and involves a lot of reorganization, but something great comes out at the end, much lighter and able to fly... so that gave me some good inspiration for slogging away through this period of my life.

Finally, I had just read that the Monarch butterfly that migrates from Southern Canada down to Mexico and back, does so over several generations... the butterfly that starts the trip dies on  the way, but his offspring continue the journey until it is complete.

So, if Jesus is the butterfly, does he die and return many times before his journey is complete, like the Monarch?  I just recently read someone saying that Jesus had already returned-- they believed that Martin Luther King JR was reincarnated Jesus, and he was killed again... another butterfly generation in a long migration?