Kicking Up Dust

Walking toward the events of Easter, the suffering of the cross and the shock of the resurrection, has a way of dredging up the dust of existential questions with some of the GenX and Millennial  crowd  that otherwise sit quietly along the way.  This seems to be the case for the past number of decades.

Jurgen Moltmann, in his “Prisoner of Hope,” in Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter asks concerning the events leading up to the cross: “Who can stay awake in this night of God?” “Who will not be as if paralyzed by it?… Is there any answer to the question why God forsook him? Is there any answer to the agonizing questionings of disappointment and death?… Is this the end of all human and religious hope? Or is it the beginning of the true hope, which has been born again and can no longer be shaken?”

It’s been a few years, now, that beside the lacerated body of Christ, death is not a figure I have been able to turn away from as if to say it is simply unwelcomed. And life, as it appears unhindered and uncontainable by the tomb and even the grave clothes, unexpectedly becomes a word I do not really fully know, despite my regular use of the term.

I’ve come around over the years to understand that many of the parables Jesus told worked to counter the unchallenged cultural interpretations that buried words in contemporary holes. In fact, His stories habitually seemed to unpigeon-hole (I can’t think of another word)   concepts that had become so familiar they were no longer seen, words so often used in a particular way that their greater meaning had long been forsaken. Again, just lately, I’m recognizing that the goings into crowds, He seems to work to remove the coded obstacles that blocked folks from seeing words and truths in true kingdom-proportion.

In it I’m convicted to see the same in me these days of Lent. Especially today, as I sit, facilitating a discussion toward the subject of compassion and asking: “What do I do when a question about eternal life is answered with a story about robbers causing harm and neighbors who don’t care? I cannot find a story Jesus told, or sermon He preached with and without words that does not move me to rediscover the words I use and the confessions I make. These weeks leading up to the cross remind me just how often I limit and even misuse words and notions pertaining to “life” itself.

Insistence of the “sanctity of life” is one such confession oft on the lips of most believers my age.  Created in the image of God, the church confesses that life is sacred, loved, and valued. With good reason, this confession is often voiced in arenas fighting for the unborn or ethical practices of medicine. Even the phrase “sanctity of life” likely brings to many an elder's mind one of these often charged and public areas of concern.

Now, I ask myself, if “life” is a word at the heart of the very kingdom Christ proclaimed, should not my confession of life bring to mind all of this and even more? Should my life not be one that offers a representation and confession of life’s sanctity on all fronts—on the streets, in forgotten prisons, in anonymous online banter? In other words, beyond my voice crying out for the protection of the unborn and the dying, how else is my for-life stance being communicated to and within the world less predictably? In the words of Jesus, “For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” What might Christ’s kingdom-sized use of the word “life” include that I am still overlooking?

I recently read an account of a pastor in Bellevue, Washington, in Treasure in Clay Jars: Patterns in Missional Faithfulness, who reminded me of one such thing. Wanting his congregation both to represent and to identify itself with its missional calling, he called them to see life in its broadest context. He asked them “to recognize…that their missional calling involves the witness of their quality of life together as much as it involves service to real human needs and verbal witness to Jesus Christ." I am so accustomed to the phrase “quality of life” referring to ethics and medicine that the idea actually took a few minutes to really settle in me. But once it did, I realized in fact how short-sided I had allowed that phrase to become.

If the greatest message of Christians is that God, says Lois Y. Barrett, “sent his one and only Son into the world that we might truly live by being united with him,” it follows that our life together is a very representation of the life Jesus offers and the love God showed in sending his Son. Here, quality of life is far more than a medical term, although it would certainly include ethics in medical care and the means with which the sick are treated. Similarly, the sanctity of life is always more than a three-point argument or a voting record, but something Christ gives everyone to embody in every sense of the word and every manner of living together in this world.

Father, God, as I move into the second half of this Lenten journey toward the events of Holy Week, the multivalent (new word) words of Your Son are still mercifully confronting my own, unearthing long-buried dimensions, revealing the unsearchable depths of the truly super-sized King and the kingdom my life represents: “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.” I believe and confess this! Amen