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.

Here comes the sun: Spring is near

“I’ll go ahead and take that 50 pound bag of fertilizer,” I told the proprietor at the feed store, after briefly debating the matter in my mind.

The fertilizer was my deposit for the promise of spring.

It happens every year: From the warmth of my house, I look out my window to the fallow mound of earth I call my garden and ask myself, Should I prepare to plant, or should I let her go?

The toil, the time, the trouble she brings: Why not just stay cocooned in winter’s somnambulant embrace?

For a gardener wavering between a commitment to the task and a relinquishment of duty, the past few months have proven tempting. Winter has stayed around until he has become an annoying, but nonetheless accommodating sleeping partner, a convenient excuse to stay in bed: “Spring is a distant memory,” he entices, “so slumber a little longer; why trouble thyself with cultivating?”

One day when the weather was once again being its fickle self---this time hovering between winter and early spring---having tended to my compost piles, I knelt on bended knee near the heart of my garden and felt for a pulse. Ol’ man winter kicked me in the seat of my pants, pushing me down on all fours, roaring by with a frosty laugh before settling beside me in a frigid pose, grinning in triumph.

“He still has us in his grip,” I told my garden, “But hang in there. He can’t last forever.”

Or can he?

Will spring ever arrive? Will winter’s tendrils forever keep his hold on the dirt, making it cower beneath the blast of his arctic breath?

In C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, four kids crawl through a wardrobe and stumble into the land of Narnia, a land of splendor that is unfortunately dominated by an evil White Witch. Under her control, it is “always winter,” in Narnia.

Listening to the morning forecast, I wondered, Am I in Narnia?

I had to do something.

Late one evening, with the sun bowing to the horizon, I took my 18 month old grandson in my arms, and with a little help from my friends, began singing “Here Comes the Sun,” to him. (Eli doesn’t care that I’m off key.) And as we danced about the room, he stretched his arm straight out, like someone performing the Tango, and with his brow furrowed, pointed his index finger in the direction of the back door.

I knew exactly where he was determined to go: the garden.

It was time---time to break the spell.

Babies have that sixth sense, you know.

Locking eyes, we danced to the door, while I mouthed George Harrison’s words, “Little darling/It’s been a long, cold lonely winter,” swaying Eli in my arms, until we reached the garden, where I kicked up some dirt with my Red Wings, hoping to wake the frozen ground from the  chill of winter’s spell.

I paused, and clutching Eli ever so tightly, I breathed deeply, slowly taking in a full measure of the cold, evening air.

Then I pointed to the fading ball of fire in the west.

“Sun.”

 Eli nodded his head firmly one time in acknowledgment.

Swirling around full circle with him snuggled to my chest, I sang again, “Sun, sun, sun, here it comes.”

He nodded once, twice, then thrice--- as if he were instinctively responding to my incantation.

“It’s coming to Kentucky, to the garden, and to you, my little Kentucky Boy.”

His smile stretched across his pacifier till it dropped from his lips. His baby fingers pulled my neck to his.

We felt it together, the two of us. It was faint, but it was there: the promise of spring.

The fertilizer is still in the bag, but not for long.

The snow is melting; the sun is shining; the spell is broken: Spring is near.

The Bible’s message is not just in its words

If you were to insist that what makes the Bible a special book is not its outward appearance—whether it’s bound in leather or cloth, colored bright pink or plain brown---but what’s inside it---its message, meaning, and purpose, I would heartily agree.

But then again, the very presence of the Good Book can not only speak to the soul, it even save a life.

Just ask Dayton, Ohio bus driver, Rickey Waggoner. Recently, while making a mechanical repair outside his bus, three young men, presumably in a gang, approached Waggoner and shot him twice in the chest.  Luckily, or more accurately, providentially, Waggoner had a Bible in his pocket. The two bullets, which otherwise would have killed Waggoner, were found lodged inside his Bible.

Waggoner was then able to fend off the assailants who fled. (I always heard the Devil runs from the Word of God.)

“There was obviously some kind of intervention involved in this incident because (Waggoner) should probably not be here,” Dayton Police Sgt. Michael Pauley said.

Don’t you think Waggoner will display that Bible in a prominent place? Picking it up and pointing to the holes left by the bullets, he might say, “Let me tell you about the time this Bible saved my life.”

Waggoner’s story is dramatic and rare. It is more often in less sensational ways that the Bible’s appearance---that is, its cover, the texture of its pages, the feel of the book in the hands--- evokes memories of God’s directive hand in life.

As a child, I saw Dad carry his red leather bound New Testament to church Sunday after Sunday. I had forgotten about that particular Bible until I was helping Dad after his knee surgery last October, and there it was, unobtrusively resting on a shelf in his bedroom. Years of use had worn away the luster on the leather; it was now cracked and faded, and the gilded pages tattered. But that didn't stop me from gingerly opening it, and in so doing, stepping into the past , into the church sanctuary I grew up in, breathing in the smell of the oak pews, listening to the choir sing the old hymns and the preacher exhort from the King James Bible.

“You take it,” Dad told me when I showed it to him at the hospital.

It wasn't until I got back home that I noticed, when thumbing through it ,the quote he must have scribbled during a sermon: “Sin will take you farther than you want to go, keep you longer than you want stay, and cost you more than you want to pay.”

Inside the cover was Dad’s name and a date, 1961.

Dates in a Bible can act almost like journal entries, signifying spiritual markers in life’s journey.

The first Bible I actually carried to church is dated December 25, 1963. It’s a children’s Bible with a sketch of Jesus and the little children on the cover. I was getting to know the Bible as a book of God- stories, mainly about a man named Jesus who loved little guys like me.

That Bible was replaced exactly three years later with a red imitation leather Bible, given to me by my grandparents. Now I was growing up: my new Bible resembled Dad’s.

When I graduated from high school, Mom and Dad gave me a Thompson’s Chain Concordance Bible, my first study Bible, bound in “Deluxe Leather.” A couple of years later, I held that Bible with sweaty palms as I preached my first sermon while doing mission work with my parents in Bangalore, India.

Dates also lined the margins of Mom‘s Bible. Lord help the preacher who warmed up an old sermon from the back burner. Mom had him dead to rights with date and notes of when he last delivered it.

On occasion I come across a Bible whose owner has passed from the scene.  Our church custodian found a Bible tucked in an obscure corner of the building. “Look at that,” Charles pointed out: “December 12, 1913.” I wondered how it managed to go unnoticed for all these years. Did anyone miss it?

And it’s not just the dates that tell a story. You can tell a lot from what’s inside of a person’s Bible. A friend brought me an old Bible. It was filled with sermon notes, clippings, and gospel tracts. How did it end up in a used book store rather than with a family descendant? Was the owner the only one who carried it?

Some Bibles are given an early retirement, no longer available for daily use.

And sometimes that’s not the owner’s choice.

I cherish the little, blue leather New Testament Mom and Dad gave my brother, Dougie. His short life ended abruptly in a head on collision.  Inside the cover, under “Name,” is his, “Dug.” And under “Nearest Relative” are the initials “DW,” referring to me--- his little brother and constant companion.

I wish that little Book could have redirected an errant automobile like Rickey Waggoner’s Bible stopped a speeding bullet.

But my longing plunges us deep into the mystery of tragedy and hope that’s found in “the strange new world within the Bible.”

And for that story, we have to turn its pages and read it.

I want to fist bump your hand

John Lennon and Paul McCartney couldn't have known the danger in the words they wrote with the Beatles first major hit, “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

“And please say to me/
You’ll let me hold your hand.”

In case you haven’t heard, holding and shaking hands can be hazardous to your health.

According to the Center for Disease Control, up to 80% of infection can be spread through our hands. If you have a virus, and I shake your hand, you will likely transmit your bacteria to me. If I then then rub my eye or scratch my nose, guess what? You've just shared your virus with me.

This is the kind of news I love and hate: I relish information that helps me avoid illness; but it’s also one more anti-bacterial defense mechanism I must manage. It’s the kind of information that is likely to push borderline germaphobes like me over the edge into OCD Land.

Why not just wash hands? That will certainly help reduce the risk, but it’s not always possible to wash after shaking hands. And besides, according to Dr. Tom McClellan at West Virginia University Medical School, “as many as 80 percent of individuals retain some disease-causing bacteria after washing.” Part of the problem is that few of us wash our hands properly. (You’re supposed to use soap and scrub for about the amount of time it takes to repeat the alphabet twice.)

What then is the alternative to hand shaking---that ancient ritual that can be traced at least to the 5^th century BC--- a custom that apparently developed as an expression of peace, showing that the hand held no weapon?

May I suggest the fist bump?

You know the fist bump. You clench your fist tightly, tuck your thumb inside your palm and extend your arm to someone who responds to you in like fashion.

President Barak Obama popularized the fist bump during the 2008 presidential campaign. Just before accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination as presidential candidate, he greeted Michelle with a fist bump rather than a hug.  The fist bump gained popularity.

Even the Dali Lama joined in, or at least he did in 2009, when he met the mayor of Memphis, TN., during a flu pandemic. There is good reason why the threat of flu prompted that fist bump.

Scientific evidence seems to support the claim that fist bumping over hand shaking can reduce the spread of infection. What Dr. Tom McClellan’s research at the University of West Virginia concluded was that the hand shake, in comparison to the fist bump, led to a 400% increase in bacterial transfer. It makes sense: With the fist bump, you have less physical contact for a shorter period of time.

But, I have to admit, transitioning to the fist bump is not easy. What do you do when someone extends a hand for you to shake? Returning a fist bump instead of a hand shake might appear offensive if not downright bizarre.

Yet, I was determined to be a change agent, so I decided to test the fist bump, incognito, of course.

Visiting another church seemed an acceptable setting for my venture. Sitting to me to me was a lady whom I guessed to be in her eighty’s, maybe nineties, reposing in a cloak of serenity-- the perfect recipient for my first fist bump. When the time came for fellowship, I thought, “Now’s the time, be brave, do the fist bump.” Closing my fist and tucking my thumb, I began to raise my hand in her direction.

Greeting me with a smile as innocent as a new born baby's, she offered her open hand to me.

I held my ground, lifting my fist.

Stiffening her neck, she looked gimlet-eyed at me.

Then as if to wave away the confusion caused by my fist, she grinned again—a silent signal that she was overlooking my unusual behavior.  Then she extended her hand once more, this time more aggressively with an added air of confidence. She straightened her back and edged toward me, like a soldier poised for an attack.

It was over, beyond my control: My fist bump morphed into a hand shake, disarmed by her sign of peace.

Her face beamed as she embraced my hand, enveloping my left as well, as if to say, “There now, sonny, don’t you feel better now that you've put away that silly notion of fist bumping?”

And indeed I did---all the way to my car, where I opened the door and reached for the hand sanitizer.

Practicing the prayer of Ruby Bridges

It’s too bad we don’t know the person’s name who said it, for there is much truth in the statement: “What man does not understand, he fears; and what he fears, he tends to destroy.”

Michael Dunn claimed fear was the reason he shot to death the young black man, Jordan Davis at a Jacksonville, Fla., gas station in an argument over loud music. Did Davis point a gun at Dunn, as he alleged? 

No gun was ever found.

Columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., quipped that Dunn’s impulsive decision to shoot at the young men in the SUV may have been made in a kind of fear, a fear that is “the unspoken but clear recognition that black boys and men are our national boogeymen---they threaten by existing…”

While Pitts’ assessment is on target, fear extends beyond some whites’ apprehension of black boys and men. Our society is riveted with misunderstanding and distrust with the result that whether red or yellow, black or white, gay or straight, we fear each other.

We would do well to remember how little Ruby Bridges dealt with her fear back in 1960, when she was just six years old.

Because of her high test scores, Bridges was selected to attend an all-white school in New Orleans, LA..

When local authorities refused to provide protection for Ruby, President Eisenhower sent Federal Deputy Marshalls to escort her to school.

Years later in an interview with Charlayne Hunter-Gault on PBS NewsHour, Ruby described the first day she arrived at the school: "Driving up I could see the crowd, but living in New Orleans, I actually thought it was Mardi Gras. There was a large crowd of people outside of the school. They were throwing things and shouting, and that sort of goes on in New Orleans at Mardi Gras."

Only one person, Barbara Henry, agreed to teach Ruby. White parents boycotted and wouldn’t send their children to the school. So for an entire year, it was just Ms. Henry and Ruby, alone in the classroom.

And every day the Federal Marshalls would escort Ruby through the gauntlet of jeering people as she arrived at school. One parent repeatedly threatened to poison Ruby, so the Marshalls insisted that Ruby only eat food she brought from her home. Another lady would hold a small wooden casket with a black baby doll in it as Ruby passed by.

Dr. Robert Coles, a child psychiatrist who volunteered to provide weekly counseling for Bridges, was mystified as to how Ruby could apparently remain so well-adjusted throughout the harrowing ordeal.

Ruby’s equanimity was likely the result of something her mother taught her.

Her mother told Ruby that whenever she was afraid, she should pray: “If I’m not with you and you’re afraid, then always say your prayers.”

So each day on the way to school, Ruby would pray.

One day Ms. Henry watched from her class window as the Federal Marshalls escorted Ruby through the taunting crowd. Then something out of the ordinary happened.

Ruby turned and appeared to be talking back to the people. When Ms. Henry asked Ruby what she had said, Ruby insisted she hadn't said anything to them.

“But I saw you speaking,” Ms. Henry countered.

“I wasn't talking to them,” Ruby explained. “I was praying for them.”

Ruby had following her mother’s instructions, but that that day she had forgotten to pray. So, on the steps of the school, Ruby turned to the people and prayed.

And what did she pray?

According to Dr. Robert Coles, Ruby’s pray went like this:

Please God, try to forgive these people. 
Because even if they say those bad things, 
They don't know what they're doing. 
So You could forgive them, 
Just like You did those folks a long time ago 
When they said terrible things about You.

Had Mr. Michael Dunn been half as brave as Ruby Bridges, he would not be facing the prospects of spending his remaining years behind bars, and Jordan Davis would still be alive.

Wouldn't our world be a better place if we would all take heed and practice the simple yet profound  pray of Ruby Bridges?

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