The Lord Is Risen In Deed.

Easter

Exodus 14:10-31; 15:20-21 [Israel's deliverance at the Red Sea]
Ezekiel 37:1-14 [The valley of dry bones]

At The Eucharist
Romans 6:3-11
Psalm 114
Luke 24:1-12

Today I'm going to write about my father's resurrection. I expect that everyone who's been reading this blog over these last several weeks (all four of you) knows that my dad died about a year and a half ago. He did not want to die. At one point in his life, he really believed humans would find a way to cheat death so that we could live virtually forever. He once told me that he was jealous of me because he knew that for him it was too late, but that I would probably live to see those days. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I wasn't sure I'd want to take advantage of eternal mortal life.

Our was a cordial but rather distant relationship in adulthood. I had come to learn and accept that the type of relationship I wanted to have with him was not a relationship he was capable of having with me. I think he had to come to similar acceptances about me. There were many times that I kept in contact or initiated a visit specifically because I didn't want to regret my behavior after he died.

Yet when he died, I was devastated and full of regret. I questioned every interaction I had with him. I examined our time together like a dumped teenager--what did he mean when he said this? If I had done that, would things have been different? Was I fair to him? Was I faithful? Was I good?

So I know--I think most of us know--why Peter took off and ran to the tomb as soon as the women said that Jesus had been raised from the dead. Because if Jesus was, like Miracle Max says in The Princess Bride, "only mostly dead," Peter wanted his chance to say all those things he should have said, and he didn't care who laughed at him for believing what his friends called an idle tale.

But I was going to talk about my father's resurrection. My father was an atheist, so by most understandings of Christianity, Heaven was not really a comfort to me when I considered Dad's death. Thank God nobody told me in the funeral that he was in a better place, because I'm sure I would have burst into tears. I'm not even sure Dad would be happy in Heaven, being expected to serve a God he never knew, or at least, never recognized as a friend. So, clearly, heaven and eternal life are not the resurrection I'm thinking about when I write that Dad has been resurrected from the dead.

His resurrection has happened inside of me. Not at first, because at first I was too ripped apart by grief and confusion for him to be anything but dead. His death was a presence in my life.

But a few months ago, things began to change. One morning I realized that Dad had begun to occupy a different place in my brain. A place where things didn't really hurt--they just were. Somehow Dad became a different kind of alive in my imagination and memory. Things that he had said to me or done with me took on new and different meanings as they percolated through all of my memories. And as I continued to live, my life experiences informed my memories, and helped me to understand things in new ways. I ran with my fifth-grader in a 5K, just like Dad had done with me, and I found myself handing down some of the same advice he's given me. My Dad continues to influence me and advise me because he lives again, resurrected and re-resurrected in my mind, and in my stories that I tell my own children about him. In some ways, I grow closer to him as I live into the fullness of his life--as my children grow older and I go through what he went through with me, I know him better as I walk in a version of his shoes.

I don't want to water down the great hope we have in Easter by saying that my father's resurrection is Jesus' resurrection--that we make Jesus live again by telling his story and letting his words enlighten and inform us, and by letting the example of his life be a shining beacon to us when the darkness of the world seems like all there is.

But certainly, we, the Body of Christ, are part of what keeps his heart thumping. When we participate in the eucharist, or allow Jesus' teachings to inform our behavior and open our hearts, we are participants in Jesus' resurrection. When we give hope to the hopeless, homes to the homeless, food to the hungry, and a compassionate ear to those who are troubled, we are re-resurrecting Christ. Every time we choose to live, as much as we can, the way Jesus lovingly, desperately wanted us to live, that is when we are, as Paul said, baptized into his resurrection.

As Christ's body, we are all, always, being asked to do and believe in the impossible. Moses lead his people away, safely, from his oppressors. Ezekiel turned corpses into an army with a few commands. We are able to hold our hearts open to the people who need us and the people we need, even after those hearts have been damaged by the very people we're opening them to. And we are asked to live hopefully even when hope is so thin and spare that it seems like it would just be safer to close ourselves off to the possibility of hope--to dismiss rumors of the miraculous cynically as idle tales.

So, lent is over now. Easter is here. Jesus is alive. He was only ever mostly dead, and now there is a great deal to do. Let's go do it. Because the Lord is risen. He is risen in deed.