God’s Power, Purpose and Hope for the World
in a Butterfly

I came to me to see God’s power, purpose and message of hope to an ever-changing world in an elementary school science project shared with my son several years ago.  We had purchased two green caterpillars living on a milkweed plant with the promise they would become Monarch butterflies. The instructions directed us to build a screened-in box according to attached plans, and to let nature take its course. We built the enclosure and sat back and watched.

The caterpillars devoured the leaves of the milkweed plant. They doubled in size and almost stripped the plant to its stem.  I prayed the giant caterpillars would not starve in the interim! One day, the unthinkable happened: we discovered the plant stripped of every leaf, and the caterpillars gone. However, my son spotted something new in our “butterfly enclosure.” Attached to its ceiling were two ‘things’ that looked like big fat pea pods. Each caterpillar had made a chrysalis. However, over time the pods turned grayish brown and looked like they had rotted: our experiment had tragically failed. We resolved to give them a proper burial. However, as we prepared for the “funeral,” my son’s eagle eyes found both chrysalises broken open. Attached to each was a beautiful Monarch Butterfly. The big green worms had been transformed into two shiny, sleek, aerodynamic black bodies with wings.  Their wings took shape before our eyes. Beautiful colors emerged, orange, rust, yellow, brown and black. I gently coaxed each butterfly onto my finger and ferried it outside. Instinctively drawn to the flowers, which bloomed in great abundance, each winged wonder landed on a blossom and drank deeply of its nectar. They flew from one blossom to another and then off into the sunset. At that moment, I felt God had spoken to me about Easter in a most profound way.    

God’s message in the butterfly came clear to me some five years later, after I had answered God’s call to ordained ministry. I was serving as a student pastor in Saskatchewan, and was to deliver my first Easter service sermon and ‘Children’s Time’.  I told the children how the Easter sermon God preaches every spring is told through the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly. The caterpillar is a symbol of our human condition. Its insatiable appetite and unrelenting stripping of its milkweed plant are symbols for sin. Desperate to fill our hunger for food and material things, we destroy our environment, hurting others in our mad desire to fill our needs, while others hurt us in turn by their destructive actions. Yet the caterpillar does not remain that way. God made that caterpillar in a special way, so that is utterly changed and transformed. This transformation requires the caterpillar to enter into a chrysalis, to sleep, and to be transformed by the unseen hand of God.  This transformation of the caterpillar into a butterfly is God’s promise to humanity to transform us from caterpillars to butterflies. God fulfilled this promise with His Son, Jesus.     

God touched and entered into our humanity in a profound way in the person of Jesus.  Jesus, the Son of God, miraculously became a human being. He became a caterpillar. Like all of us, He had to eat and sleep in order to stay alive.  He was tempted by all temptations known to humanity; however, unlike every other human being, Jesus retained His divinity, did not sin and did not give in to temptation. When Jesus performed miracles by curing blindness, deafness and paralysis, He promised to cure spiritual illness. Jesus promised all who believed in Him that they would see God in Him and through Him, would hear God through Him, and would be empowered to walk with God. Jesus touched and entered into our humanity in the most profound way through His suffering death on the cross on that first Good Friday. Jesus transformed human death by His own death and His resurrection on that first Easter Sunday. Jesus promised the same transformation from death to eternal life for each of us, with these words: "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?" (John 11:25-26).  We receive faith in God and Jesus, the forgiveness of our sins, participation in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and receive the Holy Spirit when we are baptized in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, when we hear the Gospel of forgiveness, and when we receive Holy Communion.  

God’s sermon in the life of the butterfly touched the heart and mind of a ten year old boy attending church with his grandmother that Easter Sunday morning in Saskatchewan. He was so inspired and excited that he went home and told his two brothers and the rest of his family how the life of a caterpillar and a butterfly testifies to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and His promise of life after death to all who believe in Him. By Friday afternoon, of the same week, that young boy died from complications of an undiagnosed brain tumor. People from the boy’s town and surrounding communities were devastated by the loss of this child. I was given the privilege of consoling the children through talks at their school, and invited the students to come to his funeral. Almost all of the students from that boy’s school came to his funeral.

The funeral gave me the opportunity to tell everyone present the Easter sermon God preached in the transformation of a caterpillar into a butterfly. This transformation is an amazing display of God’s love and power. God loves a destructive little caterpillar enough to change it into something beautiful, like a butterfly. For this to happen, however, the caterpillar must die to being a caterpillar, enter into a tomb, and emerge as a new creation. God showed His great love, power and purpose through the transformation of His own Son; by His Son’s life, suffering, death and resurrection. God took Jesus’ suffering and death and made them into something new: the gateway to eternal life for all those who believe in Jesus.  If that young boy believed in such a loving God, then his casket was not a symbol of suffering, death and an end of life, but rather, it was his chrysalis. I believe God had touched that boy, giving him faith when he was baptized, when he heard the Gospel of forgiveness, and when he received Holy Communion (which he had received that Easter Sunday). If God had touched that boy during his life, then a great transformation occurred after his death. God touched him again, called his name and he became alive to God in heaven. The boy was no longer a caterpillar, but a beautiful butterfly. Many tears dried and even smiles appeared in this sea of faces. Many believed.

We invite you to join us for worship, hear the account of Easter, and believe, on Good Friday March 21st, 7:00 PM; Easter Sunday March 23rd at 8:00 AM at Gellatly Nut Farm, Westbank; and 10:30 AM at Grace Lutheran Church. Wishing you and family a blessed Easter,   
    
In Christ,
Pastor Ed Skutshek