Dear Friends–

Happy Easter!

There are only a couple of Sundays in the church year when we hear the same Gospel account year in and year out, no matter whether it’s year A, B, or C in our lectionary. One of them is the Sunday after Christmas, when we always hear the great beginning of the Gospel of John (“In the beginning was the Word….”) so that, having heard the story of the Incarnation from the bottom up on Christmas Eve (“she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn”), we can hear it again from the top down (“and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us….”).
Another is the Sunday after Easter Sunday, when we always hear the story of “Doubting” Thomas. It’s a story of forgiveness, new purpose, conversion, and the great patience of Jesus (which of course means hope for us):

http://www.lectionarypage.net/YearC_RCL/Easter/CEaster2_RCL.html#gsp1

I hope you can join us.

After church, our Lent group will meet one more time, one Easter meeting, before the Bishop visits on May 19. The tool in our spiritual toolkit we’ll encounter this week is the Baptismal Covenant, and you are welcome to join us whether you’ve come to any previous sessions or not. We’ll leave a few minutes for Coffee Hour, then meet for way less than an hour.
And after after church, you’re all welcome to make the trek down to Springfield to meet the next bishop of Vermont, the 11th of that line. She’ll be one of the three candidates we’ll meet at the “walkabout” at St. Mark’s, which begins at 5:30 and should be done by 8. Details here:

https://diovermont.org/2019/04/01/details-about-the-walkabout-events-at-which-you-can-meet-the-nominees-for-the-eleventh-bishop-of-vermont/

The Spring garden cleanup will be held next Sunday, May 5th after church (and Coffee Hour). Please bring whatever tools you can, especially rakes. Tick repellent is recommended(!) We will clean up around the parking lot as well as the Memorial Garden.

And there are concerts! Bel Canto’s spring concerts are next weekend (the 4th and the 5th):

https://www.belcantosingers.org/concerts.html

The Thetford Chamber Singers are singing the weekend after that (the 11th and 12th):

http://www.thetfordchambersingers.org/tickets-1

And, finally, here’s a word on conversion, from Frederick Buechner:

There are a number of conversions described in the New Testament. You think of Paul seeing the light on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-19), or the Ethiopian eunuch getting Philip to baptize him on the way from Jerusalem to Gaza (Acts 8:28-40). There is also the apostle Thomas saying, “My Lord and my God!” when he is finally convinced that Jesus is alive and whole again (John 20:26-29), not to mention the Roman centurion who witnessed the crucifixion saying, “Truly this man was the Son of God” (Luke 23:47). All these scenes took place suddenly, dramatically, when they were least expected. They all involved pretty much of an about-face, which is what the word conversion means. We can only imagine that they all were accompanied by a good deal of emotion.

But in this same general connection there are other scenes that we should also remember. There is the young man who, when Jesus told him he should give everything he had to the poor if he really wanted to be perfect as he said he did, walked sorrowfully away because he was a very rich man. There is Nicodemus, who was sufficiently impressed with Jesus to go talk to him under cover of darkness and later to help prepare his body for burial, but who never seems to have actually joined forces with him. There is King Agrippa, who, after hearing Paul’s impassioned defense of his faith, said, “Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian” (Acts 26:28, KJV). There is even Pontius Pilate, who asked, “What is truth?” (John 18:38) under such circumstances as might lead you to suspect that just possibly, half without knowing it, he really hoped Jesus would be able to give him the answer, maybe even become for him the answer.

Like the conversions, there was a certain amount of drama about these other episodes too and perhaps even a certain amount of emotion, though for the most part unexpressed. But of course in the case of none of them was there any about-face. Presumably all these people kept on facing more or less the same way they had been right along. King Agrippa, for instance, kept on being King Agrippa just as he always had. And yet you can’t help wondering if somewhere inside himself, as somewhere also inside the rest of them, the “almost” continued to live on as at least a sidelong glance down a new road, the faintest itching of the feet for a new direction.
We don’t know much about what happened to any of them after their brief appearance in the pages of Scripture, let alone what happened inside them. We can only pray for them, not to mention also for ourselves, that in the absence of a sudden shattering event, there was a slow underground process that got them to the same place in the end.

Peace,
Mark.