Thoughts and Questions About Today

This week, just finished, a fact, suddenly and forcefully exploded once again into my consciousness.  The fact, I'm thinking on today is that all of Christian history turns on the event I am celebrating today.  The empty tomb!   The abandoned burial wrappings! The startled eyewitnesses, out of breath, heralding the reversal of all that was expected!  A new day had dawned in more than the physical, presenting the reason for my celebration is the impetus for the entire Christian movement. On its significance, I think the apostle Paul was clear in 1 Corinthians 15:13-14: “But if there is no resurrection of the dead, not even Christ has been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is vain, your faith also is vain”. 

Noticing the immense social and religious advertising and promotion, I wonder as Christians emerge from the traditional, contemporary, modern, and postmodern worship services, where I trust they have looked back on the historical significance of the resurrection, are now going to be looking forward to the promise of life after death for an eternal future? I also wonder if there will be a tendency to miss the significance of Easter present?  Will most find the difference the resurrection of Jesus makes in their lives here and now? If the resurrection is only about life after death—going to heaven when I die—or if I am only celebrating something that happened long ago, there is the failure to do the necessary and creative work of what resurrection means for my life today. In addition, if the only significance of Easter is a spiritual metaphor for new life and re-birth, this message is just as easily told through colored eggs finds or rolls advertised on many a church marque this past week.

For we who are called Christians; to affirm the bodily resurrection of Jesus means, at the very least, that God had begun the work of new creation—what began in the bodily resurrection of Jesus—could now, and would now continue into the present time and place. Indeed, Paul writes in Romans 8 that “the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the children of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will, but because of the One who subjected it in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as children, the redemption of our body” God’s new creation has begun with the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Now, my work in this world is the work of resurrection—bringing new life and re-creation as a follower of Jesus. My view is that as a follower of Jesus, I am entrusted with the task of raising dead people to life, helping the lost to find home, and healing those who are wounded and broken. 

My follow-ship at 72 years is the same as when I was 18.  The risen Jesus told his followers, “As the Father has sent me, I also send you” John 20:21. Jesus’s resurrection is not an evacuation strategy from this life nor is it the promise of a life free from trouble. Rather it commissions me as one who would remember his resurrection to be his ‘raising’ agent in the world. Jesus sends me, as His follower, out with the extraordinary news that the dead can be raised to new life for death and evil do not have the last word! And as I begin to live in light of the resurrection, I can gain insight into its significance for the practical realities of everyday life even as I anticipate the world to come, of which the resurrection is a sign. I like very much what  N.T. Wright has concluded in Surprised By Hope: “Jesus is raised, so he is the Messiah, and therefore he is the world’s true Lord; Jesus is raised, so God’s new creation has begun…  Jesus is raised, so we must act as his heralds, announcing his lordship to the entire world, making his kingdom come on earth as in heaven.”

Concluding the matter:  I remember the Risen Lord and hope for a future of resurrected life. But in between the past remembrance and the future reality, everything has changed! 

Let's Have a Little Silence, Please

Two weeks ago, early morning, at Quiet Rest, I sat on the catch-all box, on the porch, while still dark. I listened. Intentionally. Complete silence for fifteen to twenty minutes. It became a little disconcerting, wondering where life was outside my own when an outline of light formed the top of Schoolhouse Mountain to the east. Then a turkey near the fire pit stirred, scratched and began it’s chatter.  A woodpecker, chimed in. So when Gordon Hempton, an audio ecologist, who has traveled, measuring the decibels in hundreds of places throughout the world, says he can count on one hand the  places in the United States where you can sit for twenty minutes without hearing a generator, a plane, or some other mechanized sound, he must have been saying Quiet Rest is one of them. Just kidding! His reason for all his interesting work is to demonstrate by recording the sharp decline of sounds of nature. “I don't want the absence of sound," he told Diane Daniel, in her Ode Magazine article Listening is worship, "I want the absence of noise."  Adding, "Listening is worship."

I seem to think a little differently than most of the crowd I hang around with but I'm coming to think that maybe, just maybe, that Holy Week ought to begin a time of silence, a week of sitting in the dark with the jarring events from the triumphal entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem to the march of Christ to the grave. Holy Week moves the world through the shouts of Palm Sunday to the empty space of Holy Saturday. In preparation for this week I'm seeing more clearly and loudly the Biblical record indicates it will end on the note of triumph and resurrection.  On the other hand, I recognize, more than ever, there is a great silence in between now and then. A great darkness I believe is necessary for me to sit with.  It’s reminds me of sitting with an actively dying person, alone, in silence.

 
I agree with Alen Lewis when writing in Between Cross and Resurrection, "Ironically, the center of the drama itself is an empty space. All the action and emotion, it seems, belong to two days only: despair and joy, dark and light, defeat and victory, the end and the beginning, evenly distributed in vivid contrast between what humanity did to Jesus on the first day and what God did for him on the third... [Yet] between the crucifying and the raising there is interposed a brief, inert void: a nonevent surely—only a time of waiting in which nothing of significance occurs and of which there is little to be said. It is rare to hear a sermon about Easter Saturday; for much of Christian history the day has found no place in liturgy and worship it could call its own."

I ask myself the question; Is this perhaps behind the reason I’m generally uncomfortable with silence, uncomforted by waiting. Have I not understood fully that a messiah who stands at the crossroads of an identity as a deliverer, a political hero who could fight with force for my salvation and that of a servant, a messiah who chooses intentional suffering, who chooses to walk me through darkness on the way to redemption? If Holy Week is filled with events that silence me in disbelief, Holy Saturday levels me with the silence and emptiness that is the end of God.

Yet, I am viewing Holy Week as a preparation of me precisely for this silence. For certainly, here, after the end of God on Easter Saturday, I’m not only going to find the absence of sound, the absence of noise, but the end of the world—confirming my despair and doubt, the fear that history is meaningless, that evil is in control, and my future perilous. Such silence is one in which I can only manage a redirected cry for "Hosanna," a reiterating of the lighthearted cheers of Palm Sunday, a desperate prayer for a Messiah to save me now, to deliver me from evil and emptiness.

I’ve confirmed this cry in the case of Willa.  She was a young adult who  was hospitalized and classified as schizophrenic of an undifferentiated type. She was born into a home where she was unwanted and abused. She was a bright child, but everyone took advantage of her such that she grew up with no sense of boundary or healthy relationships. Tragically, the very individuals who pledged to help her also became stories of abuse in her life. She was in the second year of graduate school when she finally broke down and could not finish her examinations.

In the hospital, she sat for hours rocking her doll and staring into space. The head nurse on the floor told Dr. Loder, that they expected Willa would never leave the hospital. One day, however, while she was sitting in her chair, someone came up behind her, put arms around her and said, "The silence is not empty; there is purpose for your life." She turned around, but there was no one there. The power of that experience began to build sanity, and to distinguish illusion from reality. While no one thought she would ever leave the hospital, she was released after three weeks. She was eventually baptized and returned to the profession for which she was training. Commenting on this encounter with God in the silence when all else seems lost, Loder in The Logic of the Spirit  writes: "The intimacy of the Spirit runs deeper than family violence and neglect, and has immense restorative power."

Father, God thank You for revealing to me that Your intimacy, truly, runs deeper than silence.  There is going to be much to listen for between today, Palm Sunday and especially after the crucifying and the raising.  Father, I am not ignoring the fact that after Easter Sunday there will also be much silence and darkness to sit with as well but it is and never will be fully empty.  Amen.