What happens after the resurrection?

I heard about a town in Southwest Oklahoma that had a community-wide Easter pageant. It so happened that the character chosen to play Jesus had obviously been miscast; he was more suited for the part of a Roman soldier.

This man, a roughneck, a seasoned oil field worker, was known for an occasional barroom brawl.  With his burly physical presence and no-nonsense personality, he could have easily moonlighted as a bouncer, had he wanted the job.

After weeks of rehearsal, the day of the Pageant finally arrived. It was a moving scene when Jesus was carrying the cross to Calvary. A host of characters shouted, “Crucify him! Crucify him!”

At that point, one little man who was only filling in as a second, got caught up in the emotion. Forgetting himself, he truly played the part, shouting “Crucify him!” with energetic gusto. This small man, who could have posed as the skinny guy in the “before” pictures for the old Charles Atlas commercials, was so into the moment that he shouted insult upon insult at Jesus.

And then he did the unthinkable:  He spit in the face of Jesus.

What did the big, brawny, tough guy do? He stopped, wiped the spit  from his face, glared at the puny man, took one step toward him, and whispered through clenched teeth, “I’ll be back to take care of you after the resurrection!”

It’s been my observation that too many Christians recast Jesus’ post-resurrection image into a character that crushes, dominates, and subdues his enemies by force.

And too often it seems his followers play the part of the character they have created in their own image, using the Bible as a holy club to intimidate the world’s résistance, pursing opponents with a full court gospel press.

These Christians make the mistake of confusing what they say about Jesus with what he actually said.

What he did say after the resurrections was “Peace be with you.” Those are some of the first words he spoke to his frightened little band of followers.  “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you,” (John 20:19; 21), he told them.

The same Jesus who said, “Love your enemies,” is the same Jesus who appeared to the disciples after the resurrection. He didn't come back as a Greco-Roman style, conquering Caesar, intent on retaliating against those who had opposed or failed him and his cause. You don’t find the resurrected Jesus hounding Pilate, putting him in a headlock, and taunting, “You asked ‘What is truth?’ Well, how does it feel now, you little punk?”

Going in peace is rooted in something deeper than international politics, although it most certainly involves that. It has everything to do with how Christians treat those unlike them, those who do not hold the Christians’ particular perspective on the truth and consequently live a different lifestyle, those who dare oppose that for which Christians stand and hold sacred.

The gospel of peace affects the way Christians treat the vulnerable, the unfortunate, the outcast, the resident aliens, and yes, the earth and its creatures. It is shown in how they use or abuse the power they have been temporarily given. It is reflected in their actions more than their words, in whether they exult in the power of love or the love of power.

I read about an international student who came to the United States to study at a Christian school. She was a bright and brilliant young student but not a believer in Christ.

“How can we ever convince her to become a follower?” some Christian students asked.

Eventually the student did make a commitment to become a Christian. Someone asked her what argument convinced her to make that decision. “It wasn't any argument,” she said. “It was another student.”

Then she spoke of a student, one not particularly popular or well known, who had accepted the international student for who she was.  “No, she did not use any arguments,” she emphasized. “She just built a bridge of love from her heart to mine, and Christ walked over it.”

That would be the Christ of peace who walked over the bridge of love into the young lady’s heart.

And that would be the same One who sends Christians on their way.

Into the world.

With peace. 

He's Alive!

Years ago when our son, Dave, Jr., was about 7 or 8 years old, he awoke early one Easter morning before anyone but I was awake, and he immediately began singing the chorus of the Don Francisco song, “He’s Alive.”

“He's alive yes He's alive/Yes He's alive and I'm forgiven,” Dave sang as he hopped out of bed.

At first, before I could understand what he was singing, I thought something was wrong with him: Maybe he was having a bad dream or was sick and crying for help.

But no, nothing was wrong; in fact, everything was right, for the little guy was excited that Easter had arrived: He was ready to celebrate, exulting in the fact that Jesus is alive and because of that, our sins are forgiven.

Sometime later that day, as I was at church, I thought how sad it is that so often as we grow older, we think we have outgrown the excitement Easter should bring. It’s an old story, after all. We've heard it over and over; we know what happens.

And yet, as we contemplate the living Christ, the One who is alive from the dead, as we try to unpack the implications of that, our hearts will hopefully come alive with the God who is always the Lord of the eternal Now, and well as the everlasting Tomorrow.

As Bible scholar, N.T. Wright said, “Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.” 

The depth of that truth is certainly something worth shouting about, if not vocally, at least in your heart.

I’m reminded of a story I read years ago in Leadership Journal by Vernon Grounds. It was a vignette from the life of the British preacher, W.E. Sangster.

Sangster was known for his effectiveness in the pulpit. In the mid-1950s, while lecturing in Texas, Sangster noticed that he had difficulty swallowing and walking. He was subsequently diagnosed with a type of progressive muscular atrophy. Gradually, the physicians told him, his muscles would waste away, and he would no longer be able to swallow.

Sangster threw himself into his work. He wrote; he spoke; he did all he could to proclaim the Good News of the gospel. When people pitied him, he would say, “I’m only in the kindergarten of suffering.”

Finally, he was completely immobilized and could barely speak. Shakily holding a pen in his hand he wrote a letter on Easter Sunday to his daughter, Margaret Phippin. In that letter, Sangster said, “It is terrible to wake up on Easter morning and have no voice with which to shout, ‘He is risen!’---but it would be still more terrible to have a voice and not want to shout.”

Sangster would live only a few more weeks. But in reality, he had become truly alive.

Whether you shout, “He’s alive,” or “He is risen,” I hope you at least have it in your heart to shout. And even if no one hears the cry of your heart as you praise the Lord, God will.

And he will be rejoicing with you.

How long till Easter?

He was sitting on the front pew, crumpled over in a heap, like one of those college basketball players writhing on the court because his team has just lost a game in the Final Four.

Only this young man had not just lost a game. He had lost his mother. She had been killed in a car accident that morning as she drove to church---the church I pastor.

I knew her well: a good, godly woman.

I had just concluded the service with prayer when a parishioner whispered, “I think you might be needed over there.” That’s when I saw him, the son of the lady who had just died. I didn’t know of her death until he spewed the words in between gasps, “My…mother…just…died.”

He had come into the worship service as I was completing my sermon about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.

“I heard a little of what you said,” he told me as I tried to console him.

How do you listen to even a teensy bit of a sermon when your mother has suddenly died?

You do when your insides feel like they are about to cave in and you can’t catch your breath, when you are desperate to hear something, anything that might offer a glimmer of hope (even if you have no clue what that hope is), when you are grasping for a word that might begin to answer The Question---you know The Question, the one bubbling up deep within you, passing uncontrollably from your lungs to your throat, erupting in a voice that has no voice, a voice you don’t recognize as your own because it’s silent and can only be felt, not heard---The Question you fear has no answer but you know you must ask anyway, for you somehow know that if you don’t ask there is no possibility of receiving even a morsel of bread, a tangible word that will wrap itself around your soul like a warm blanket on a cold, lonely night, giving you a reason to carry on in the absence, the emptiness, the darkness, even if that word is nothing more than a glint, an inkling, a spark--- a mere flickering menorah lighting your way out of the shadows to the Eternal Present that seems in that moment to be the Eternal Absent.

And so you ask.

Why?

And in asking you shake and bow your head for you know the answer is the mystery of the universe and the whirlwind therein.

Encapsulated in the Why? is the How? (You must face it, after all.) How do you go on in this in- between time, the four days Lazarus lay in the tomb, the time before Jesus, tardy by choice, showed up---and is late, too late---at least from our view of the matter?

We are stuck in these four days, for we too wait for Jesus to arrive. Wringing our hands, pacing back and forth, peering into the horizon, we ask, Where is he? Why doesn’t he show? If only he had been there to direct the car away from that tree, the crunch of the metal would have been averted and life preserved.

With my arm around the young man, I pull him in and feel his body weep uncontrollably, convulsing under the weight of his loss.

After he arrived four days too late to save Lazarus from death, the Scripture says Jesus was “deeply moved.” One Bible scholar notes that those two English words describing Jesus are one word in Greek and used to describe a horse snorting.  Jesus felt it; he entered into our pain, taking it upon himself.  

We live between the now of incompleteness and the then of redemption.

Holy Week is about waiting, anticipating.  And it’s not easy.

“How long till Easter?” we cry.

But we are not alone. The German theologian Jürgen Moltmann in one sentence summarized this four day period where we, like Martha and Mary, wait on Jesus. It’s the time between the crucifixion on Friday and the resurrection on Sunday; it’s the span of our lives, of human history. “"God weeps with us so that we may someday laugh with him," Moltmann said.

We may weep now, but make no doubt about it, Easter is not far away.

Even now the Dawn is breaking, the Son is rising, the Day is approaching.

It’s almost time to laugh.

Sing a song that brings happiness

“The sun is finally out, the weather is warming up, I’m definitely heading home and putting on my Beach Boy records,” a friend once told me one bright, sun-shiny spring day, back when people still played records.

I now know why she was thinking about those good vibrations: We tend to invoke music that parallels the circumstances of our lives.

“When I’m feeling blue, all I have to do/Is take a look at you, then I’m not so blue,” Phil Collins crooned in one of my favorite “I’m in a blue funk,” songs. I suppose taking a look at his lover lifted his spirit, but the somber tune and melancholic words of that song reinforce the angst of separated love.

If you’re sitting alone in a hotel room, miles apart from your love, tormented by the possibility that she or he could always walk away, leaving you alone like a stranger in a bus station, or if that love is a distant memory for which you still yearn but know has evaporated like water in the desert, then “Groovy Kind of Love,” might just be the song to soothe your jaded heart.

Now, when I’m feeling atop the world, Pharrell Williams’ “Happy Song,” American Authors’ “Best Day of My Life,” or U2’s “Beautiful Day,” are perfect companions, and guess what happens when I listen? “I feel happy inside/It’s such a feeling that my love/I can’t hide, I can’t hide, I can’t hide.”

For years we have known that music affects our mood. After all, it’s been over 300 years since the playwright William Congreve penned the words, “Music has charms to soothe a savage beast.” And long before him, the servants of a depressed King Saul called on the young David to play his harp, hoping the music would lift the king from his doldrums.

We now know why music carries charms that can dispel the despondent soul, replenishing it with hope, much like a hearty meal does to a starving beggar.

It does it by getting inside your head, or more specifically, your brain.

Studies have shown that listening to music that moves you releases dopamine, the feel good chemical in the brain that is involved in both motivation and addiction. That helps explain why music has been around cross culturally for, well, as long as humans could sing. We feel it; we like it; we want more of it.

Shouldn't we then make the most of our music, becoming our own music therapists, spinning tunes that set us on a course that moves us in the direction of our true selves?

That shouldn't mean we limit ourselves to only one genre of music. I’m a believer in the occasional sad song, not only because it can be a healing salve for blistered love, but because it’s also a painful reminiscence that we are not there yet: We can sing about heaven on earth but we are still all too human. “No matter what we breed/We’re still made of greed,” the Imagine Dragons mournfully sing.

And yet, music has the power to lift us from the pit, even if the steps leading out are laced with dopamine. Ultimately, we are in charge of our emotions. We choose the music for our life song. It can be beautiful, prompting the good, or at least the better in us.

William James, in his Principles of Psychology, wrote that it is not so much sadness that makes us cry as crying that makes us feel sad. The body, or our physical actions, can determine how we feel. It was James who penned that quotable phrase: “I don’t sing because I’m happy; I’m happy because I sing.”

Didn't we learn something like that in a childhood song? “Be careful little ears what you hear…Be careful little mouth what you say…” for “There's a Father up above/And He's looking down in love…”

Looking down in love?

If that much is true, then why not sing a joyful song?

And be happy.