Wednesday, April 17, 2024  

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Today's Hymn
“From the Rising of the Sun”

From the rising of the sun
to the going down of the same,
the name of the Lord shall be praised.
So praise ye the Lord.
Praise ye the Lord.
From the rising of the sun
to the going down of the same,
the name of the Lord shall be praised.

Hymn 670, Glory to God
based on Psalm 113

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Reflection

“The rising sun”

“It ain't as bad as you think. It will look better in the morning.” — Colin Powell

As the Easter season fades, we are wont to imagine a beautiful Easter sunrise symbolically after the crucifixion.

I hold an early childhood memory of a trek to Lawton, Oklahoma, in the Wichita Mountains to view Easter sunrise (Easter Pageant, circa 1926–). I only remember the wet hillside and the surprisingly cold weather. And I was missing the Easter egg hunt. Definitely not one of my finer spiritual moments.

But just one year ago I worshiped with Fourth Church at Oak Street Beach, 6:30 a.m., Easter morning. The image of that rising sun so poignantly juxtaposed against our forty reflective and prayerful days of Lent is seared in my consciousness. It unfailingly nudges me closer to God. I remained at the water’s edge long after our service closed. How much history, how many events, how many lives lived and lost in the ceaseless planetary motion of our universe? We live in a metastable churn of chaos while the sun is pure steady state. The perpetuity of the sunrise, eastern sky, almost exactly on a twenty-four-hour cycle — the near perfection of nature; an event that occurs regardless of the prior evening tide. Quasiperfect bliss.

The crucifixion. Alexander’s hymn, #3221. Tenebrae. The themes replicate: betrayal, shame, grief, woundedness, goriness, despair then resignation; all bad stuff. The descriptors could be from the evening news, but instead those are the burdens of Jesus on the cross. Jesus became human, acquiesced to mortal frailties, and endured unimaginable pain and suffering, from us, for us; all because of love. And even after the egregious, heinous, and hate-filled death and dying of Jesus, the sun still rose (akin to the soft lights illuminating angels in the ribbed vault ceiling of Fourth Church at the close of Tenebrae — a moment of ethereal pause).

From the dusk of pain, the night of death, to the rising sun of hope and joy. Stay with that for a minute.

Is this not the everyday message of Easter? If Faith leads you — from pain emerges joy; from tragedy springs hope; and from death sprouts life — not dormant and feeble life, but everlasting life. Every morning sunrise over Lake Michigan, there is another dose of Easter (date inconsequential) — undeserved grace, unimaginable love, and foundational truth. We all have an Easter season in our lives — betrayal, pain, loss — but that darkness always, I repeat, always, yields to the rising sun — God’s countenance. God’s voice. God’s breath. Amen.

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Prayer
In prayer, reflect or meditate on the Morehouse Glee Club (hosted at Fourth Church, March 11, 2024): See this February 2024 performance of “Amazing Grace.”

Amen.

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Written by Clyde Yancy, Member of Fourth Presbyterian Church

Reflection and Prayer © Fourth Presbyterian Church

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