He is Risen, He is Risen Indeed!

There is something incredible about waking up as the sun rises on Easter morning.  If you know me (even a little bit), you know I am not a morning person… at all…  There is, quite literally, nothing I like about the rising of the sun.  I love the sunset.  I love the darkness.  My family and friends just roll their eyes, shake their heads, and smile when it starts to rain, and the sun goes behind the clouds, and I breathe a huge sigh of relief that it is damp and cold and dreary.  If I’m honest, it’s not that hard for me to sit with the sadness of Holy Week, which is probably one of the reasons I do it so well and preach it so nauseatingly.  Yet, as the sun just barely peeked over the horizon, this morning… this morning… this Easter morning… I instinctively, joyfully woke up.  I arose, because Jesus arose!  This is the best morning for waking up! 

Matthew 28:6-7, “He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly…” (NIV).

Interestingly, this is not a morning for sitting with… anything…

When Mary and Mary arrived at the tomb, they probably needed a minute.  I mean, how confusing must it have been?  Even if they remembered Jesus’ words, none of it would have made sense.  Grief is a horrible, wonderful, terrible process.  What is essentially just hours after the brutal death of Jesus, which they observed, grief must still be clouding everything!  They must be numb.  Incredibly, they are going through all the right motions, adhering to all the right customs.  The vast majority of us rally and do these things when tragedy strikes.  But there is an order to things.  A protocol.  A modus operandi. 

What do you do when the body is missing?

Oh, I just realized I could go more ways than I want to with that one… (note to self, follow up).

As I read the resurrection account again, this morning, I stopped to think about how very familiar it is.  To be candid, we need some things in our life like this… some truths we can recall by rote, in the midst of our most heartrending moments, when we can’t make sense of anything.  And we need the angel, too.

As a force of habit, I woke up with the words, “He is not here; he has risen, just as he said…” niggling at the back of my mind.  I’m not sure my eyes had even opened yet.  I surely hadn’t had my morning coffee (still haven’t as of this writing, so forgive me if it isn’t as coherent as I think it is).  It was that foggy instant between being fully asleep and fully awake.  Honestly, I might have still been dreaming.  And even though it’s a passage I have memorized and quoted, I couldn’t for the life of me remember who spoke the words.

Ah… the angel.

Thank goodness the angel was there, speaking truth into the lives of two women who were probably more prepared for another day of death than one of joy.  They had come to rub spices and oils on a rotting corpse.  Thank goodness the angel was able to catch their attention long enough to jog their memories.  And thank goodness the angel had a plan for what happens next!

“Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly…”

And you know… they do it!

The resurrection narrative hangs on these women with red, swollen eyes.  I think they’re able to accomplish the telling, precisely because they know what it is to sit through the pain.  They know we can’t have one without the other.  They’ve lived it (and lived it well). 

Colossians 3:1-3, “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.  For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God” (NIV).

And so their lives are inextricably tied to Jesus’ life, once again.  To… his… life!  Because he is alive!

May our lives be tied together, as well.

Psalm 118:24, “The Lord has done it this very day; let us rejoice today and be glad” (NIV).

 
L.

A Guest Post From Q

In the midst of an incredibly busy week at Q,

here's a guest post from Grace Michaels.

This is the essay she submitted for the discipleship scholarship,

which she was awarded during the Wednesday night plenary session.

I am proud of her for many reasons,

but mostly because she loves so well.

*****

“Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.  Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone.  Forgive as the Lord forgave you.  And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.” –Colossians 3:12-14

Loving, forgiving, putting on compassion and kindness and humility and gentleness and patience, has at times been a struggle for me—perhaps especially so during Bible quizzing.  Maybe that sounds awful, but even in such a widespread community of quizzers and fellow Jesus disciples, there are going to be people who aren’t your best of friends…people with whom you don’t get along well…people who hurt you in a lot of ways.  Basically, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.  And it never will be.

I quizzed on a new district this year, and it was one of the best things that has happened to me during the course of my Bible quizzing career.  I get along with everyone on my district.  We’re all friends.  None of us are perfect, but we still love each other.  Loving, at the least loving the people on my district, has been pretty easy for me this quiz season.  But that makes me stop and wonder: Am I only striving to love when it’s easy?  In that case I’m not obliged to strive that much at all.  There are still people who aren’t easy to love—and maybe I’m not really loving them yet.  Maybe I’ve pushed them off to the side now that they aren’t as close as they used to be, and maybe I’m forgetting about them.  Maybe I’m dismissing them because they hurt me.  Maybe I’ve made a choice in the back of my mind not to love them and not to forgive them.

If as “God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved,” we are to clothe ourselves with “compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience,” that means compassion for everyone, kindness towards everyone, humility in every situation and no matter who we are facing; gentleness towards everyone, patience with everyone.  Everyone is a lot of people.  Studying these three verses from Colossians has reminded me that sometimes I don’t follow these instructions.  I ignore the people I just don’t want to love or spend my time on.  I say they’re not worth it.  But the truth is…I’m not worth it, either.  Nobody is.  But Jesus loves us anyway.  Who am I to not love everyone in the same way?

Sometimes it’s easy to say I’ll show compassion, I’ll be kind and gentle, and I’ll even forgive and have patience and humility,  but I don’t want to actually say that I will love—especially not my enemies.  The thing is, though, that love binds all these virtues together in perfect unity.  The rest of this doesn’t really matter without love, because love holds it all together.  And saying I have all these other virtues but not love is a false statement—because I can’t truly have anything else if love is not present within me and I am not pouring it out, to anyone and everyone.  So I have chosen to “put off my old self,” the self that wants to dismiss as unimportant the act of loving those who hurt me.  I want to do the most loving thing in any and every situation.  I want my whole life to be love, for love, and lived in love.  If I don’t love, I can’t forgive. I can’t clothe myself with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. I can’t bear with and forgive others if I have a grievance against someone.  I have to have love and live love—or I have nothing, and I literally am nothing at all.  Colossians 3:12-14 has been my reminder of this throughout the quiz year, and I find that the more I put love into practice, the easier it becomes; not because it is easy to love everyone, but because love grows within me to the point where it is all that is flowing from me.

Painfully Excellent

Today I received a graded paper that included the most interesting comment I have ever seen, "Painfully excellent paper..." 

I paused...

It is here that I will admit that I have struggled with this class.  I don't tend to struggle a whole lot in the academic world.  I might push back... and debate... and say things just to get a reaction (sometimes).  But I'm a good student.  In all of my post-grad work, there has only been one course that caused me serious, legitimate distress.  I mean, by the time I reach the final week of any term, I am holding my eyes open with toothpicks and begging for the last few words to write themselves before I collapse in a pile of 2:00am exhaustion, but that's not actually distress.  I secretly love that part.  Mostly, school is awesome.

But I found myself bordering on, "Oh my goodness, I cannot have a second class that brings me to tears every night," with this one...  Preaching and Worship... just about enough to make me question my call and whether or not I really need to finish the last five classes...

It took me awhile to figure out exactly what the problem was, and this is it: this class underscores what I do not have...

Even though I love what I do... and even though I don't really want to live in suburbia and pastor a church that offers every program under the sun and nearly runs itself... and even though I'm sort of anti-establishment and I can't sing in a choir to save my life... There are moments when I do feel this enormous void well up.  Anyone enrolled in an M.Div. ought to be able to record a sermon they're preaching, relatively easily, right?  Anyone enrolled in an M.Div. ought to be licensed and pretty close to ordination, right?  Anyone enrolled in an M.Div. ought to be able to find someone to serve as their director for supervised ministry, right? 

Crap!  Nothing I do is supervised!  Do you want to know the single most exciting thing, for me, about the recent trailer that was released for "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story?"  It was this line, "This is a rebellion, isn't it?  I rebel..." Except, it's not even that I really rebel... or at least, not that much.  It's more like I see things that other people don't see, and then I want to do something about them even when other people don't care.  I didn't mean to break the mold.  It just... broke...

I really like to do things that are excellent. 

Sometimes I would like to stop doing things that are painfully excellent.

Sometimes I would just like to stop living a painful narrative, altogether, but the alternative isn't always what you might think, so I keep living it, because at least it's real.    

I read this, from Common Prayer, today:

"Even in the darkness, we will trust: that our lives are still in your hands."

And you know what?  It helped.

Colossians 4:2-6, "Devote yourselves to prayer, being watchful and thankful. And pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ, for which I am in chains. Pray that I may proclaim it clearly, as I should. Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders; make the most of every opportunity. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone" (NIV).

At least we've already established that I have the salty part down...

 
L.