Ed is dying from AIDS related wasting. If you picture in your mind those grisly photographs of people who have starved to death in other parts of the world, you get the idea. There isn’t much left of his body. Ed is bedridden, but he likes to be wheeled out on to the porch at Omega Hospice when the sun is shining. That’s where I first got to visit with him. Ed loves the warmth of the sun, and as we talked I watched as all sorts of sunlight and shadows played across his skeletal face.
His daughter comes to visit Ed. She is corageous and honest and loving and all of those things that I wish all of our hospice relatives were. She had taken a picture of Ed as he sat in the sun outside, his face turned up toward the sun. She showed me the picture and said, “Look how the light shines on his face. It seems like he is looking right up at God. Doesn’t he look beautiful?”
Yes, he looks beautiful.
“Dad and I have already agreed that this is the picture that we are going to use for the obituary, right Dad?” Ed smiled and managed a weak nod in agreement. She held his hand and said, “Dad, this is your going home picture.”
We are an Easter People. We live the resurrection, with all of its love and hope, over and over again.
Other faith traditions have prophets or heroes that die as a revered religious figure – with all of the appropriate ceremony and hoopala. The One who began our tradition died a painful and humiliating death without fanfare or honor. If that sort of death was the final word, Jesus should have completely dissapeared in collective memory. But something completely different happened. Paul does a valient job of attempting to explain this extraordinary collective experience and how his life had been changed by the incarnation, life, and resurrection of Christ. It is a change that defies reason, a change that has created and continues to create a new life for Paul.
There is a lot of wonderful variation in the resurrection narratives in the Gospels. I love that about this story; the many ways that Christ appears to all sorts of people. Jesus lives, and hope is rediscovered. This is the glorious message of Easter, one that has defied our attempts to standardize and make it rational and reasonable. I once had a professor at Perkins who said that if the dead bones of Jesus were ever found here on earth, he would no longer be a Christian, as either the resurrection or the ascension would have been proven false. I had another professor who said that the idea of Jesus coming back from the dead was absurd, because “dead bodies don’t become alive again.” Sadly, we often seem to be people of dogma instead of people of faith, failing to trust that with God anything and everything is possible.
A few years ago I lost a very dear friend to breast cancer. As the end drew closer, she expressed over and over again that she was going home. She knew that the lousy stuff of this life never has the last word, and that she had experienced the Truth of the Resurrection. She returned to the One who gave her life, the One who loves her the very most.
We live with the mystery of life overcoming death. We live and breathe and rest in hope. We know that the resurrection is never limited to one moment in time, one life changing event, but that it occurs over and over again in a myriad of forms and times and places. God comes to us and makes all things new. We are an Easter People who know that the story continues, because “neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities nor things present nor things to come, nor powers nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation shall separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Read Matthew 28
Mark 16
Luke 24
John 20 and 21
Might the diversity of the canon be the cannonization of diversity?
How do you live the resurrection?
Cool post., brother
thats for sure, brother