Technically speaking–and it is very difficult to gear one’s self up enough to speak technically on Mondays–but, technically speaking, Easter is only eight days old this morning. That is, according to historic Christian teaching, Lent and the great forty-day run-up to Easter was what ended eight days ago on the morning of Sunday, 23 March 2008. And what began that same day at that same moment was Eastertide, otherwise known as the Great Fifty Days.  As a season in the Christian Church’s liturgical calendar, the Great Fifty Days is perhaps the most dramatic of the seven observed seasons. It stretches from the glory of resurrection on Easter morning for fifty days over to the Feast of Pentecost [11 May, this year, should any of us be trying to count that out in our heads this early in the morning.] The whole thing hesitates just briefly on the last Thursday of the Great Fifty [8 May, 2008 this year] to rejoice in the Ascension of Christ. That having been said, the operative truth is that basically the Great Fifty barrel straight ahead down the road to Pentecost, which marks the coming of the Spirit to dwell here among God’s people until such time as the kingdom shall be redeemed on earth and men and women shall be at one with all of the Godhead.  The Great Fifty are, in essence, the predictive history of Christianity, whereas what precedes the Great Fifty is, so to speak, the story of the means and methods by which Christianity was set in motion among us. That is all well and good, except that sometimes there are Lent/Easter Sunday stories that want telling in Eastertide. And this year, I have one. It has chewed at me for over eight days now, and it plainly wants out. I am not sure it has one thing to do with the words of Jesus, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the story. I do fully intend, however, to append a second entry here this morning that speaks more directly to the stated purposes of our gathering here each Monday.                                                    *   *   *   *   * As a Lay Eucharist Minister in the Anglican tradition, I take the Lord’s Supper or the communion or the mass, or the eucharist–the term one uses matters little, the result is the same–to our shut-ins. Over the years, my “shut-ins” have increasingly become Ruthe, whom I join every Wednesday afternoon for prayer, worship, and the mass in her sitting room.  Ruthe and I both live in the country; and though there are some ten or twelve miles between our farms, we might still be called neighbors. We certainly, over the years, have come to call ourselves by the name of close friend and beloved fellow-Christian. Each year at the end of Lent, the two of us also celebrate Easter together in her house. We did that this year, too, albeit with some unanticipated changes in our way of doing things. Because part of Ruthe’s debilitating illness makes her gluten-intolerant, we have to use gluten-free wafers as the bread for all our eucharists. Gluten-free products can be perfectly acceptable to one’s palate only for so long. Then, suddenly and more or less without warning, they all, even consecrated ones, will abruptly go south. This year, the consecrated wafers in my communion kit went suddenly intolerable and unpalatable during the next to the last week of Lent. Accordingly, on Palm Sunday, I set a tube of new wafers upon our altar at Holy Trinity; and Tim, our priest, consecrated them at the same time that he consecrated the bread for our regular eucharist as a congregation. Because no Lay Eucharistic Minister that I know would ever dare to strip his or her communion kit of consecrated elements until there were replacements in hand, I had not disposed of the offensively stale wafers in my kit.  But as soon as Sam and I got home from church on Palm Sunday, I took the new wafers Tim had just consecrated, put them in place in my kit, and removed the ones that had deteriorated. Both the communion bread and the wine, once they have been consecrated, can not be “thrown out” in the usual sense of pitching them like trash into the garbage. One must instead return them to the earth directly. Accordingly, I took the old wafers from my kit, opened the back door of the house, and tossed the wafers out toward the earth beyond.  Sam and I have two dogs, Miss Emma, his basset, and Miss Lucy, my coon hound. I had no more than half-released the ruined wafers from my hand than Miss Emma came tearing up behind me, almost knocking me off the steps in her mad careen down to the wafers. Now one must understand that Miss Emma will eat anything and has, even fur balls. I should, therefore, have foreseen that she would rush for the bread and prevented her, but I hadn’t. She bounded down the steps and made a bee-line for the wafers, ran straight up to them, stopped dead in her tracks, and then veered off, never touching them…never, in fact, ever even investigating them. Just as I turned to Sam to say his dog had just done the most unlikely of things, here came Miss Lucy. Being older and a lady, she moves more slowly than Emma, but her intention was clearly to have at what Emma had left. Down the steps she went, straight to the wafers. Yet Lucy also stopped before them, hesitated a nano-second, and then turned away. Sam made light of my strange story of our dogs’ strange ways, his position being that I was straining to make something of nothing. He noted that Miss Emma really will not eat broccoli, so it is wrong to say she will eat anything, and he even suggested that perhaps the wafers were as unpleasantly stale as Ruthe and I had said. I said nothing after that and, while I did not forget what had happened, I filed it away as something I would try to remember to tell Ruthe on Good Friday; but then on Good Friday, I forgot. On Good Friday afternoon each year, I go to Ruthe’s some time after two o’clock in order to prepare everything for us. Like Christians all over the globe, she and I will celebrate the last eucharist of Lent a few minutes before three o’clock. It was at the ninth hour, or three o’clock, that our Lord cried out, “It is finished,” and breathed His last on the cross. From that moment on until Easter morning there will be no mass, no Last Supper, no Holy Eucharist among us, for our Lord is dead. Ruthe and I make it out to her side porch, locking her chair in place as near to the edge as possible. We have the mass and then, at three o’clock, I go to the spot just in front of Ruthe’s chair where the edge of the porch touches the edge of the lawn. There, Charles, Ruthe’s husband, will always have dug a hole in the dirt and left a trowel sitting beside it for us. I empty my kit of all the sacred bread and wine stored there, wrapping every part of them in foil and waterproof protectors. Then, as Ruthe watches, I place them all in the hole Charles has prepared. I hand Ruthe the trowel and, leaning over as best she can from her chair, she begins to scoop the loose earth over them.  When she is done, I finish the burying and set a cairn of loose stones over the whole, saying only, “Jesus of Nazareth is dead.”  I leave without words and, as I drive away, always I can see her still sitting there, weeping quietly as she looks down at what we have lost. Charles always lets her have a few minutes there before he comes to wheel her back into the house for a long and sad afternoon. On Easter Sunday, before sunrise, I go back to Ruthe’s early enough to be sure that the two of us are once more out on her porch, though usually this time we are both in jackets and she with a lap rug against the morning chill. We do not speak, but rather signal to one another what needs to be done. Then we wait. As the sun begins to lighten the sky, but before it breaks the horizon, I remove the cairn of stones, hand Ruthe the trowel, and watch as she begins to remove the loose dirt. When she is done with what she can reach from her chair, I finish and, putting my hands into the earth, lift up the bread and wine and, as the sun rises, say the ancient words of our faith, “Christ is risen!” “Christ is risen indeed,” Ruthe responds; and together we complete the Easter cry of our kind, “Therefore, let us keep the feast!” And we have our mass there on the porch. Or that’s the plan, and it has worked for almost a decade now. It just didn’t quite work this year. Oh, I got to Ruthe’s in plenty of time, and we got the porch table/make-shift altar set up in the morning twilight, got her chair in place, got my porch chair pulled up beside hers at the edge of the porch, but we did not sit in silence to wait for the rising of the sun. “I have to tell you,” she whispered; and I could tell from the look on her face that she really did. “I have to tell you now about Friday and yesterday morning.” I nodded, and she said, “After you left Friday, I sat here like I always do, and then Charles rolled me back into the house. But Charlotte…” Ruthe and Charles have six cats who are as indulged and impersoned as are Miss Emma and Miss Lucy….”But Charlotte came the minute I got back inside and wanted out, so I let her. Then, Phyllis, then she came right over here where we had been and lay down beside the hole where the things were.” I suspect that in the half-light I looked a little disconcerted, but I knew about the dogs and the wafers and Ruthe didn’t. “I started to call you,” she said, ” but I thought nobody, even you, would believe me over the phone, but it’s God’s own truth. After about an hour, Charlotte got up and came to the sitting room window to be let back in. As she came in, here came Kramer wanting out. And he went straight to the hole and lay down beside it, exactly where she had been. An hour almost to the minute later, he wanted back in and Shelby wanted out. Same thing. It went on all afternoon and all evening and right up through one o’clock when I finally quit letting them in and out and went to bed. The six of them kept vigil…they guarded or whatever you want to call it…the place where the elements were.” Then she said, a bit apologetically, “It really did happen. I know it’s crazy, but Charles can tell you that it happened. And I know cats are curious, but they’ve never done anything like this before, and why would all of them take turns just sitting there, even after dark?” So I told her my wafers and dogs story. “I don’t understand,” she said. I shrugged and said something inane to the effect that it was a singular Easter apparently, for whatever reason, and we would be able to remember it better for having our two stories. Then we fell back into the silence that is customary in our last few minutes of waiting. The sky was light enough at last, and I reached for the trowel. Before I could hand it to Ruthe, however, suddenly the air was filled with the most peculiar of sounds. It was a chorus of owls.  In all my years of living in the country, I have never seen four owls together at one time before. Yet suddenly from nowhere, they were there, and they were hooting in chorus and then in parts so harmoniously and so vocally that the whole farm around us seemed to be filled with their sound. They swooped in and sat in the trees just above us. Then two went across us to take up positions in the trees on the other side of us. They waited there a few seconds in silence….and then began what I have never heard before. One of the owls that had flown over us to the other side of us began a conversation or a declamation or some intoned and sustained rendering that was unlike any sound I have ever heard from a bird, and certainly not from an owl. The other three answered her with what clearly was the hooting sound of their species. She repeated her earlier commentary. They hooted, the sun broke the horizon, and they were gone as dramatically as they had come. I reached quickly into the hole, pulled out the elements, and together with tears choking us, Ruthe and I cried out to the farm, the sky, and the owls in it, “He is risen! Christ is risen indeed!” Ruthe was right, of course, Telling such tales as this is often a fool’s errand. It invites skepticism and persuades almost no one of its actuality. More than that, there clearly is no way to convey the intensity of the experience. Despite all of that, this story really did want to be told. It would not, in fact, let me tell any others until I had told it. So now I have; and because it has been so long in the telling, I will delay until next Monday the things I had planned to say today about the words of Jesus. Suffice it here today simply to say that for all of Easter morning all I could hear in my head were Jesus’ words as He rode into the Holy City in His triumphal entry. The rulers of the people said to Him, Control your followers!’ And He said in retort, “I tell you that even if they were to be silent, the very stones of the city would cry out this day for joy.” .In Holy Week, 2008 the very creatures themselves cried out for joy. I shall never again have such an Easter, but neither shall I ever forget that one day, that one Easter, when even the birds of the air and the creatures of the earth did homage to their Lord and two women in a tiny farming community in western Tennessee were allowed to watch them.  Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed. Therefore, let us keep the feast.