The Christianity Today Weblog had it exactly right: “Few weeks are as heavy on religion news, or death news, as this one.” Terri Schiavo dies, Karol Wojtyla dies, investigations continue into mass shootings at a church and school, executions (both legal and extra-) work their way through the courts. As CT puts it, “See a theme?”
It’s a good time to be reminded of the promise of the resurrection. Again, this is no “pie in the sky” affair: in the gospel accounts, it is emphatically, almost embarrassingly, physical. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands,” says Thomas, “and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
A week later, Jesus appears to invite him to do just that.
This is an earthy resurrection, a bodily one. The gospels are vague on the issue, but Jesus seems to reappear to the disciples, wounds and all. This is the same body that was laid in the grave—and yet it is restored, somehow. It is in the process of some further transformation: as Jesus tells Mary Magdalene when he appears to her, “Do not hold onto me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.” Is this transformation promised to us as well? The gospels are silent on the point.
Skeptics—some friendly, some not—occasionally ask how I can hold a boatload of counter-intuitve beliefs. You seem like a reasonable person, they say, yet you believe things that aren’t rational.
I tell them I believe because I have seen the power of the resurrection with my own eyes.
In my time as a pastor, I’ve been called upon to do a lot of visiting with the sick and dying. One of my favorites was literally a singing cowboy; he’d had his own band back in the 30s and 40s, though for most of his life, he made his living selling insurance.
He was quite possibly the kindest, friendliest man I’d ever met. He claimed to have made a few enemies along the way, but I didn’t believe him for a moment. He died in great pain from lymphoma.
For many months, as he struggled against the cancer, he was cheerful to a fault, telling everyone he met that he was going to beat it and get back to life. His wife would tell me privately that she didn’t think he would, but she didn’t want to say so because she thought it wouldn’t be supportive. When I talked to him, he’d say the same thing about her.
This went on for weeks, even when it became obvious to everyone that he was not going to beat it. I finally spoke to him in private and asked him again how he was feeling about the situation. “Fine, pastor,” he said. “I’m going to beat this and get back to church.”
“See, here’s the thing,” I told him, as gently as I could. “I don’t think you are. And you and your wife need to start talking about it, so you can enjoy the rest of your time together.”
He put up a little more resistance, but eventually fell silent. I pressed him on the issue, and he said, “I’ll take care of it.” He did, and from there, they began the long process of reconciling themselves to his death.
Another woman in the same congregation had been bed-ridden for years with multiple sclerosis. Then she, too, was diagnosed with cancer, an aggressive kind that by all rights should have killed her. (Three years later, she’s still making it.) I asked her if she believed in the resurrection, if she believed her body would be restored someday.
“You bet,” she said. “It’s what keeps me going.”
And there’s the power and the promise of the resurrection: that whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.
“Peace be with you,” Christ says to his disciples. Not, “you have nothing to fear.” Not, “nothing’s going to happen to you,” but “Peace be with you.” Awful, painful, humiliating, even killing things happen to our bodies. Yet through all those things, God is present with us, working to reassure us that strife and pain and death are not ultimate realities.
I don’t know about you, but that’s reassuring for me in this week filled with far too much news of division and death. We cannot avoid these things, but by God, they don’t have to have the last word.
I too am a Thomas, a twin, a doubter.
However, last I checked, I am not a tank engine.
Are there really good flamewars on the Christianity Today Weblog?
Well, it isn’t really a blog, in that it doesn’t allow comments…so no. No, there are not.
Had any good ones around here lately?
I don’t think so. We seem to be a peaceful bunch.
What do you think of the new ratings at dKos?
Meh. My policy is almost always to give a 4 or nothing. Very very seldom, I will give a 1 or a 2, and then explain why.
Ratings and grace are at some odds, as you might imagine.
the wrath of Dan cometh on heavy wings…
The only ‘3’s I’ve even given out are to people who I felt were being unjustly flamed, but whose comments did not warrant an ‘excellent’.
The 2’s are useful as a warning.
Other than that, the 1’s and 0’s are for troll maintenence and/or hiding flamewars.
But everyone enjoys the validation of a ‘4’.
what’s the benefit of hiding a flamewar?
although I confess to having some prurient interest in reading one from time to time. It’s good to be a TU.
It is good to be a trusted user… especially as a conservative on a liberal site. 😀
Thanks for the clear, concise response.
I think I was thinking of a flamewar as not necessarily being off-topic, but it appears I had that definition wrong.
if you find that you must flame someone but are short on time, there is a standardized form out there:
http://www.ou.edu/research/electron/internet/flame.shtml
It’s kind of funny.
gives the correct answer.
Flamewars are rarely conducted between a reader and the author. Usually they are between two readers who take over the conversation and cause the thread to be taken off-topic.
If the flamewar involves offensive material, it can be hidden by trusted users, and the thread returned to topic…it also makes it easier to load a bloated thread.
I’ll not enter the discussion of the Resurrection as we had this ten years ago in the UK and even the Church of England seems to have achieved some accommodation with the different interpretations of this powerful concept.
I am interested, however, on your take about an uncontested comment made in one 600 plus comment flame war going on elsewhere for the last two days. The comment was “Since when was the right of the individual to freedom of speech removed by the need to be sensitive to the feelings of another?”
I ask because, like Alice, I am getting curiouser and curiouser about what “The right to individual freedom” means in modern day America.
plain and simple. I like to think these things in terms of “freedom from” and “freedome for”. In this case, free speech=freedom from censorship.
But you have to ask yourself, what is that freedom for? To be a disrespectful nuisance? To force your views on someone else, whether or not they’re ready to hear it?
Better that it should be freedom for building one another up.
where your nose begins. It is ironic (and, perhaps, fascistic) that some on the right would like to curtail free speech, e.g. in the presence of the president at his so-called conversations, while simultaneously imposing ideas on the population in the form of legislated morality.
..the debate was about the shortcomings of the Papacy and the Catholic Church. A reader of the diary suggested that many of the accusations against both, whether they had any foundation or not, were inappropriate and hurtful by being made immediately after the death of the Pope.
Hence the “Right to freedom of speech” comment.
Behind my question is a very much bigger about the difference between European and US thinking on issues. Involved in this is my growing interest in the way that the absolute and right to individual freedom is seen as the fundamental basis of Constitution in the US which seems to over-rule all other rights. Meanwhile in Europe there is a greater sense and acceptance of communitarian law – just call it greater sense of the needs of the community – as the over-riding principle.
Welshman-
We are a country of refugees from state power. All our western states were (virtually lawless) territories before they became states. And those states have a disproportinate influence through our ‘2’ senators per state and electoral college rules.
The basic issue is this: what right does the state have to do anything? And the default presumption is that they have no right to do anything that isn’t spelled out in the constitution.
We are very protective of our individual liberties, which is why even a graduated income tax is a source of irritation to many Americans.
In spite of this, we have an over 70 year history of making large fincancial redistributions to take care of our elderly and poor, and to provide upward mobility through things like college loans, grants, etc.
In working our way through the civil rights struggle, we vastly increased the reach of the federal government…utilizing expanded civil rights laws linked to dubious interpretations of the commerce clause of the constitution.
And then there was the Cold War, which involved a bipartisan agreement on maintaining a gigantic military and using it aggressively to secure energy sources and fight off any foothold of communism (which was opposed as much for its statism as for its official atheism).
All of these factor, and more, have combined to create a very uneasy tension between those of us that want a bigger role for the state in helping the least of us, but a smaller, less aggressive military, and the other half of the country that would have the reverse.
I would add that the seeming obsession with individualism/individual freedom, often at the expense of the community, may in part be a long-lasting consequence of anti-communist propaganda. Plus the fact that lots of people really hate taxes, and casting tax cuts in the language of individual freedom has definitely been effective.
The argument I get with some family members when saying that Republicans want to be restrictive (in the area of ‘morality’) is that Democrats are restrictive in terms of what you can do with your money, and this is more important to some people (mostly those whose views of morality coincide with the Rs and those who really love their money–hence the economic and social conservative alliance).
..for your answers.
I have in mind doing a diary on this to explore the whole issue further. It is a raging debate in Europe right now as well in the USA but on both continents it doesn’t seem to emerge from the shadows. The symptoms of this difficult-to-reconcile-conflict between individual freedom and community good are discussed but not the underlying source of where the conflict lies.
Since you are the pastor in residence here at Boomanland, I would like to have your take on a discussion Hausfrau and I are having on her diary Evolution is just a theory. I would appreciate your perspective on the comment I made in regard to this near the bottom of hte page.
Thanks