If this morning was a bit warmer, I would be sitting here, watching the sunrise over the water of Wickford harbor with my windows open. And if the wind were just right, I believe I would be able to hear the hymns of Easter praise carried from the sunrise service at Old St. Paul's church. We have been journeying together for the forty days of Lent and the seven days of Holy Week. And today we have arrived at the shore.
In the final chapter of the Book of Acts, Paul too arrives at his final destination. He arrives on the shore of Malta, coming out of the waters of the surf, just as God had promised him. He finds help among the people of that island and eventually makes his way aboard another ship, makes for the coast of Italy and sails north along it. After a few more ports he arrives in Rome. The whole action of the latter part of Acts has found its conclusion in these verses. When Luke abruptly ends the story, Paul has spent two years (which is six months longer than the statue of limitations on his arrest) preaching and teaching about the Way in the City.
The greek language does a much more efficient job of communicating the nature of action than English does. There are more tenses of verbs used in Greek than in modern English and this allows a single word to communicate with more nuance than we are used to reading. Luke does just this sort of thing when he writes in verse 14 "so we came to Rome" and then again in verse 16 essentially the same. This difference is that in the 14th verse Luke uses the imperfect tense, which indicates an action that is ongoing but not completed. In the 16th verse Luke uses the aorist, which signals the full past tense. If you like reading detailed textual studies of manuscripts you can see that the scribes who copied these manuscripts down through history were a little bothered by the strange use of the imperfect in verse 14. Even modern translators aren't quite sure what to do about it. The best scholars think that Luke means to say by the use of that odd tense that he, Paul and the others had arrived in the districts that were under Rome's administrative control. The Forum of Appius and the Three Taverns is still about 34 miles from what we today would call Rome. They arrived in the Roman countryside, but not yet the City itself. And that understanding makes sense to me, at least as we read the text in a historical way.
But I'm rather taken this Easter morning by the two part of arrival at the final destination as a symbol of our own voyage. We too have arrived this morning at Easter, but we do so imperfectly. We are here, but we are not finished with our journey. We are baptized, but we are still wandering in the wilderness. We are proclaiming the Resurrection and the end of the power of death, but we still watch our loved ones die. The Kingdom is breaking in upon us, but it has not yet fully been revealed. Today is Easter Day in the imperfect tense.
We have truly arrived, but we have not completed our journey. There are a few more verses and perhaps, like for Paul, a few more years yet to go for all of us. This yearly pilgrimage through Lent toward Easter is a symbol that we are still travelers on the Way. We have arrived at the outskirts, but there is still more to come.
If you ever have had the chance to read C.S. Lewis' book "The Final Battle", the last of the Narnia books, you might recognize this idea. In Lewis' book, even after the world of Narnia has come to its judgement and end, the people of God are not yet done with their journey to the promised places. They must still go higher up and deeper into the new land they have found.
Those two verses in the final chapter of Acts, with the odd grammatical construction, seem to me the most fitting focus for our thoughts this Easter morn.
I pray God's fullest and richest blessing on you and those you love as you journey onward from this place. Go well!
+Nicholas
Easter Day 2013
Dear Bishop, thank you for leading us on this journey. It has been a privilege to share it with you. Alleluia!
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