Weeping at the Tomb

I awakened this Easter hours before daybreak. It’s not because I am preparing to attend a “sunrise service.” I’m not. The church I serve will meet today at 10, our normal time for gathering on Sundays.

This is our third Easter since our community went into pandemic mode. On the first Easter, we met on Zoom and there were many tears shed. Last year, we met outdoors in person. We simply hosted a party for the neighborhood. It was a blast but some of the members of our congregation wondered “when church was going to start” and apparently we disappointed them.

This morning, I am ready for another in-person gathering that will look a little more like normal. We’ll gather outdoors for a little while at the beginning but then we’ll head into the sanctuary to sing, hear the story together, reflect upon it, and pray.

As I think about the way our ministry has changed over the past two years, it is heartbreaking to me to acknowledge that we have let so many people down. That’s not the sort of thing you want to hear from a pastor on Easter Sunday, but it’s the truth.

Our church decided to approach the pandemic as an opportunity to experiment with different ways of being. I suppose every church has had to do that to some extent, but the sad news about our little congregation is that, despite our efforts to innovate…the church seems to be dying.

We’re all tired. So tired. Grieving the loss of what we once knew. Confused, frustrated, and sometimes angry. All the feelings you would expect to feel…in grief.

This Easter, I feel like a failure. That’s the God-honest truth.

In Scripture, we are told that some women made their way to the tomb “at dawn on the first day of the week,” not long after they had laid Jesus to rest just before sunset the previous Friday.

In the apostle John’s account, Mary Magdalene remains at the tomb weeping when she sees that the stone has been rolled away from the entrance of the tomb and Jesus’ body has gone missing.

That is what I feel like this Easter.

But as I am wakeful this morning, and the sun has yet to rise, I am cherishing the collective memory of Jesus’ appearance to her in the garden by the tomb. She thinks he’s the gardener at first. Until he asks her why she is weeping and speaks her name.

So, this morning, I am speaking with my Lord in my own inner garden. Asking him to tend the ground of my entire being with care. Asking him to see my tears and open the ears of my heart so I can hear him speak my name.

And I’m asking him to heal this world. And I’m asking him to help me be even a small part of that healing work, to share his resurrected life and his renewing love with others. I’m asking him for faith. I’m asking him for fresh hope. I’m asking him for rest not only for myself on this day after the Sabbath but the rest of his peace for our entire society and for creation herself. Start with me, Lord, but let the rest of your resurrection usher in a new dawn, a new day, the reign of grace and joy and all things bright and beautiful.

Lord, make it so. Deliver us from the clutches of death, even if it means something needs to die for your love to rise.

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Weeping at the Tomb

reflections by troy cady

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*Photo by Orkhan Farmanli via Unsplash. Creative Commons License.

 

 

Crucifixion and Resurrection: Beyond Reason and Science

Crucifixion and Resurrection: Beyond Reason and Science

reflections on Easter by Troy Cady

What grips me about the Easter weekend is that it proclaims a message that still speaks today, nearly two thousand years later. It reminds me that natural human moral reasoning and science are sufficient only to a point. The story, the history, we remember and re-enact this weekend goes far beyond what common sense and nature dictate. Indeed, the story of Easter confounds reason and science.

Moral reason breaks down by the challenge of Jesus who loved his enemies so much that he gave up his life for them. He loved his ENEMIES. What rational paradigm would ever support such an act? None that I can think of. None that I or anyone else could ever imagine.

And the dictates of science break down in this story, too. Who has ever found a way to bring someone back from the dead? Someone might say, “Hey, that just happened with pigs last week!” But the Easter story is not talking about a resurrection that’s merely temporary. Jesus claims to give ETERNAL life to those who place their faith in him.

Many people today feel that “religion” is irrelevant. They observe that we really don’t need it anymore to make sense of reality and we don’t even need it to serve as a moral compass. Who doesn’t know that murder and theft are bad? We don’t need religion to tell us what it means to be a good person. We also don’t need the healing miracles of religion anymore because modern medicine does a pretty good job of healing on its own. In the past, humanity might have needed the idea of a God who intervenes to account for certain things we couldn’t explain but we really don’t need such an idea anymore.

To be sure, there is some truth in this: human reason, including moral reasoning, can tell us a lot about right and wrong. Immanuel Kant did a pretty good job demonstrating the rationality of categorical imperatives outside the bounds of religion. What’s more, science has told us a lot about the world and through science we are now able to help people in ways we had never imagined before.

But reason and science still cannot explain how Jesus models and gives to us the moral strength it takes to love an enemy. Science cannot adequately account for categories like joy, love, and hope. It can try, but at the end of the day such an accounting would still require faith. And science certainly has yet to find a permanent cure…for death.

Christianity isn’t about the laws of the universe. It’s about the Source from which all the laws spring. It’s an acknowledgment of humility before such a Source, an acknowledgment we will never know it all, never be the masters we imagine ourselves to be. It’s about our contingency, meek dependence on Someone greater.

And Christianity isn’t ultimately about “being a good person.” Anyone can do that. Christianity is about becoming more than just “a good person.” It’s about God doing in us what we could never do on our own. It’s about a God who is eager to do that in us—so eager, all he’s looking for is a tiny seed of childlike faith. Christianity confounds reason and nature—and it still does so today. Because of Easter, I continue to gladly give my heart to the mystery and wonder of Jesus, whom I still can’t quite figure out—but whom I will always place all my trust.   

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*Photo: “Cross Cutout Décor” by James L W via Unsplash. Creative Commons.

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Ashes to Ashes?

Photo by Ahna Ziegler on Unsplash

Ashes to Ashes?

reflections on Ash Wednesday, Lent and Easter

by Troy Cady

Many people observed Ash Wednesday two days ago. In the annual custom, the worshipper is marked with the pattern of the cross by the imposition of ashes on their forehead or hand. The ritual is often accompanied with a saying that briefly reminds the worshipper of its significance: “Remember that you are but dust and to dust you shall return.”

It’s a potent expression because it conveys so much in such a dense form.

Dust and Remembrance

First, “Remember.” The expression begins by grounding us in our beginning. It reminds the worshipper of that great origin story in Scripture that has survived the test of time where it is written that God formed human beings from the dust of the earth. In Hebrew, the word for “earth” or “ground” is adamah, so the first human being is named Adam, which means “from the ground” or “of the earth.”

It is a name of contingency: human life is dependent not only on God, but we depend quite literally on the earth itself. We live off the land. As much as we would like to think we are the lords of creation, the earth laughs at such a notion and just carries on with her work of sustaining us, anyway.

And even this life which has been given to us by the earth is limited, like all natural phenomena. Life renews, but it is not immortal. All life dies, even as we hope that, somehow, the finality of death can be cheated, skirted or extended indefinitely.

The hope of immortality runs across the board in our collective human consciousness. No matter what religious background you have, everyone holds some type of idea about how each life even after death will factor into the ongoing cycle of all life.

Even those with no particular religious affiliation exhibit a measure of hope in immortality. After all, I have never met anyone who did not want to “live on” in the memories of loved ones. And many take comfort in the fact that, when we die, we simply become part of the soil, nourishing the very ground of all being.

In any case, the story of our origin in the Bible runs so deeply in us it even suggests to us the very hopes of our destiny. Thus, the custom of receiving ashes every year is more than a remembrance of our past.

The Dust That is Present

The custom is also an acknowledgement of our present condition:

“Remember that you are but dust…”

Truly, there is no time like the present to remember your frailty, no matter how old you are. Ash Wednesday thus kicks off a season of noticing the tremendous gap that exists between our primordial longing for abundant life and the reality that death is a disease which has penetrated humanity to the very core of our being. So, remembering that we are dust in the present is an act of confession. When we remember that death is a present reality, we admit that our hearts provide harbor for the suicide of self-hatred and the homicide of condemnation towards our own neighbors, our own fellow humans.

It is the astounding depth of this reality that causes the person who observes Lent to spend an entire 40-day period in the practice of lament. It is truly a practice of being present to and honoring the innumerable causes of our deep mourning.

Lament is not a popular practice; we prefer to be happy. In a culture where we are quick to tell others to “get over it already” when they have physically lost a loved one, it feels practically impossible to spend an entire forty days (every year!) lamenting the many ways we are killing ourselves and one another. We feel that, if we are going to lament, let’s not wallow in it; let’s get on with the work of fixing it, already. At least, that’s how most of us feel about it. And I freely admit: I’m in that company.

Lent slows us down to really notice the depth of our need. When we are too quick to move beyond noticing the need, we tend to propose solutions that don’t really meet the need. Haste does not provide adequate conditions for meaningful reflection. We have to go slow.

In a world where trending stories turn on a pinhead, we have been trained that if we do not act quickly and decisively, we will be left in the dust. But the fact is: it is our acts of haste that are leaving us in the dust.

I confess that even as I write this morning, I felt prompted to just share with you what I am lamenting of late—but then I hesitated because I didn’t want to come across as a doom and gloom kind of person.

But there is a gift we can give to ourselves and others when we can just face our own frailty without feeling the need to fix it right away. The first step to all personal and interpersonal recovery is to just admit you need help and to conduct a fearless moral inventory. Putting it right can come later (and should come later) but if we do not rightly understand the problem, any solution we devise will miss the mark—and, perhaps, create even bigger problems.

So, before I move on to writing about “dust and the future”, I want to pause to simply share with you my “laments of the present” that I notice from both within and without.

I lament the polarization that’s tearing us apart.

I lament my own lack of faith.

I lament the many ways we devalue life, any life. I lament my part in this.

I lament the way we’ve wounded and exploited the earth. I lament my part in this.

I lament hurry.

I lament pride and greed.

I lament deception.

I lament our inability to be able to trust what we read in the news.

I lament the confusion that seems to grip us.

I lament that there are so many lonely people in this world.

I lament that many people go hungry more often than they are filled and satisfied.

I lament that there are too many people who do not have a safe place to live.

I lament violence and war.

I lament the manufacture of instruments for the sole purpose of destruction.

I lament how we have laid claim to things that do not belong to us.

I lament that we need locks and keys and codes to protect what is dear to us.

I lament that many women and children have been gravely mistreated.

I lament defensiveness.

I lament insularity.

I lament hypocrisy.

I lament arrogance.

I lament manipulation.

I lament stubbornness and harshness.

I lament envy.

I lament profanity and verbal epithets that corrupt the beauty of language.

I lament delighting in the misfortune of my enemies.

I lament the harboring of stereotypes.

I lament unforgiveness and interpersonal division.

I lament shame.

I lament my own feelings of inadequacy.

I lament that I worry more than I trust and pray.

I lament the anger that too often has its way in me.

I lament my own thoughtlessness and selfishness.

I lament infidelity.

I lament injustice.

I lament the way self-protection keeps us from living in freedom.

I lament that children today are being made to work more and play less.

I lament the helpless feelings that cripple us when contemplating a better world.

God, hear my cry.

Receive this lament as my prayer and

Lord, have mercy.

Amen.

The Future of Dust

Just as the Ash Wednesday ritual reminds us of our past and our present, so it points us to our future:

“…to dust you shall return.”

It doesn’t give us much comfort, does it? Nevertheless, it is a reminder of our destiny. And, as such, the saying conceals a deeper hope, I feel. Here’s a story about why I suggest that.

Last Sunday, I had the privilege of teaching a small group of teenagers and the topic was the notion of “resurrection.” So, I took them to a cemetery. Creepy, right? :-)  (It is ever so fun to mess with young minds, isn’t it?! Just kidding…)

Though it was a little strange for some of them, I took them to the cemetery because I wanted them to be able to put the topic of resurrection in a larger context. Before resurrection comes death. It sounds tautological, but it’s true: only that which dies can come back to life.

It’s an important principle partly because it helps us pay proper respect to the inescapable reality of death. So, as we arrived at the cemetery, I formed the group into two teams and gave them tasks to complete. The hope was that, by going about these tasks, they would reflect on life, death and the after-life without being too weirded out about it all.

One of the tasks involved noting the youngest and oldest people they could find. As we went, the youngest person we found was just one year old and the oldest person was ninety-eight. Of course, along the way, we noticed a large variety of ages.

Some people lost their lives in a tragic accident in 1915 known as the Eastman Disaster, where a large ship capsized at port in Lake Michigan. One gravestone memorialized a mother and her three daughters (who were only teenagers when they died).

Another gravestone indicated someone who had died when they were only twenty-six. Others had various ages such as fifty-six, seventy-one, and forty-two.

It was fascinating talking with the students afterwards about this experience because they started thinking about their own lives. I asked one of the students: “How old are you right now?”

They said, “Seventeen.”

We talked about the people who died in the Eastman Disaster and someone noted that one of the three daughters was only eighteen when she died.

So, I asked the group: “If you knew you only had one year left to live, how would you live it?” We discussed that for a while, and then turned to the topic at-hand: resurrection.

Now, by this point in their lives, all of these students were familiar with the story of Jesus dying and rising from the dead because they have been raised as regular church-goers.

But as we came to the topic at-hand I asked them, “Do you think that really happened? I mean…come on: it seems more likely that it was just a myth, right?”

I asked them, “What would you have done if, while we were looking around the cemetery earlier, one of those mausoleum doors opened up and the dead person walked out of it, alive?”

That question elicited some rather…imaginative responses, ahem.

As we talked about the Bible’s claim that the resurrection really happened, I asked what they thought it was like. I asked, “Do you think that what the disciples saw was a ghost, like a spirit…or did he really have a body?”

And we read parts of the text that indicated Jesus did, indeed, have a body. I asked, “I wonder what kind of body it was? Was it the same body as he had before?”

That was a hard one to answer with any degree of confidence because in one part of the story Jesus showed Thomas his wounds but in another part of the story two disciples walk all the way to another town with Jesus and they don’t recognize him until they are sitting down to have a meal together at the end of their journey. He must have somehow been the same, but different, the students concluded.

So, we looked at a text in I Corinthians where the apostle Paul explains that we will have bodies in the future resurrection. But, he notes, our resurrection bodies will be different than the bodies we have now. In any case, they found it fascinating that, in heaven, we won’t just be bodiless entities floating around like ghosts.

"What sort of world could that be?" we wondered.

The Hope of Ashes: What Sort of World Could This Be?

This is why the cycle of Lent and Easter has endured for centuries now. Ultimately, it is a cycle of hope, for whenever we are reminded that we will return to dust, we are also reminded that God has a way of turning our ashes into something beautiful and enduring. It is a testament solely to the goodness of God, ultimately, for there is nothing we can do to make it happen. It is a surprising gift that comes out of the deepest darkness.

            The ashes of Lent, thus, conceal a secret hope. Even as we confess our frailty, we confess the ultimacy of new life. And we remember this life we live now could end at any moment. We don’t know. All we know is “to dust you shall return.” So, in the spirit of hope, we look to the future and make it present for today. It is this future that gives us hope to carry on.

            Admittedly, hope sometimes feels strange to me. It is awareness of this future hope that makes our lament in the present that much deeper. But it is also this future hope that enables us to bear our present lament. Without this hope, the lament I shared earlier would be downright unbearable to me. Without this hope, it would only be a matter of time when I would just want to die.

            That is why I believe the unbelievable story of Jesus dying and rising again, springing from dust, returning to it…but, ultimately, rising above it. It is the one thing that gives me hope to carry on.

So, my prayer for you this season is that you will know the secret hope that comes with knowing we are imperfect and finite. This is a secret hope because whenever we confess as much, our gracious ever-living God is working to renew us daily for an eternity that is so expansive we can already taste it, see it, hear it and touch it…right here and right now.

            Amen.

firstfruits

After the Exodus, God instructed the people of Israel to observe three festivals each year. The first was the Passover. This observance marked the beginning of an annual cycle. The nation had a new “first month.” Everything they did from that point on was intended to emanate from the narrative of deliverance.

The second festival took place when fields produced their first fruits. Though it was not time for the big harvest yet, this was cause for celebration because the emergence of firstfruits served as a sign pointing to something greater. Of course, there was no guarantee that disaster would not strike between the festival of firstfruits and the third festival of ingathering. So, observing this second festival was purely an act of faith—or, better yet, let’s call it anticipation, hope, expectation.

It is no coincidence that the pivotal events of the Christian faith coincide with those of Judaism. Christians celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus on or close to Passover week. Jesus’ last supper was a Jewish Seder. The death and resurrection of Jesus correspond to the Exodus deliverance. Like our Jewish brothers and sisters, the Christian experiences the beginning of their story as an act of liberation.

Once deliverance is claimed, the Christian may well ask, “What next?” This, too, corresponds to the experience of Israel in the Old Testament.

It should not surprise us, then, to consider the answer to that question lies in the promise of firstfruits, like it did for the nation of Israel.

The New Testament calls those who believe in Jesus “the firstfruits” (cf. 2 Thess. 2:13 & James 1:18). Jesus himself is described as the firstborn of these firstfruits. (cf. Col. 1:18 and 1 Cor. 15:20).

This serves as a reminder to us. Since we live on the other side of Easter, we are to live in this “now and not-yet” tension. On the one hand, we have been granted an experience of the harvest to come. On the other hand, we are still waiting. As we wait, we should have faith—faith that, as surely as God is good and faithful, so the full ingathering will come. We should believe to the point of expectancy. We should anticipate the fullness of joy as a Bride and Groom anticipate the consummation of their marriage on their wedding night.

This is a message for Easter Monday. Yes, deliverance came on Sunday, but Monday is just as important because it is on Monday that we believe to the point of sharing out of the abundance of promise that is surely ours. Let us celebrate as the firstfruits of one who is firstborn from among the dead. As firstfruits, let us be a sign of something greater that is surely coming. Let us be a people of hope.

there are no more lost causes

My grandfather was a man who knew how to hold a wrench but not his temper. His entire life he dismissed religion as useless. I suppose he thought if it couldn’t put motor oil under your nails, what good was it?

His wife remained faithful, however. Every Sunday she took her five kids to church. And she prayed. She prayed every day for about forty years. Do the math. That’s more than twelve thousand prayers. Think of it as calling more than ten thousand angels for help.

She prayed every day that one day (will today be the day?) her husband would see his need for a Savior.

One day, one day, he did. And his life changed. He became gentle. Yes, my hard-faced grandfather—who smoked cigarettes outside in the Minnesota winter in naught but his tshirt—softened.

Just months after that: he died.

There is no such thing as a lost cause.

My grandmother lived on for many more years after that, but one day she was diagnosed with cancer. In the latter stages of her disease, she had the privilege of homecare.

In her final days, she made arrangements for her funeral. She asked if I would sing a cherished song of hers that spoke of heaven. I was honored.

One night she lay in her bed in the dining room. The table had been moved out so there was room for her to rest there. Her breathing became labored and irregular until finally she breathed in but not out.

She had passed to the other side of eternity, quietly.

Today I cling to the truth that if a man who lived 2,000 years ago can come back to life after death-by-torture, there are no more lost causes. Death used to be the last cause but no more. And, if death has been defeated, what may we say about hard hearts? Life finds a way. If rain is needed to soften the ground, let it rain. If a plough is required, I pray he cuts deep and wide.

I write this today because the prayers of my grandmother were answered concerning my grandfather. And the change in my grandfather wrought a change in me. I figured, if God can change his life, he can change mine. One day in the summer of 1984, he did just that. And he’s still doing it today. He does it for me, he does it for you. And he can do it for anyone.

Keep praying, keep hoping, do not give up. There are no lost causes.

"...we will reap a harvest if we do not give up." -Galatians 6:9b