Risen Indeed

We made a quick trip (for us) to Target on Monday to pick up a few essentials for the week and noticed a large portion of the store was empty. Just a couple of days earlier, shoppers could fill their baskets with bags of plastic eggs, pastel shirts for the whole family, and holiday cards galore. It looked like a swarm of locusts descended on the big box store and devoured everything. Store employees now stocked the racks for Mother’s Day. Easter was so yesterday, and it is on to what’s next.

We have 50 days to celebrate Easter and a lifetime to contemplate what Jesus’ resurrection means for the world. A Religious Studies professor introduced me to John Updike’s writings in college. His words still speak to my heart, and I encourage you to sit with his poem, “Seven Stanzas at Easter.”

Make no mistake: if he rose at all It was as His body; If the cell’s dissolution did not reverse, the molecule reknit, The amino acids rekindle, The Church will fall. 

It was not as the flowers, Each soft spring recurrent; It was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the Eleven apostles; It was as His flesh; ours. 

The same hinged thumbs and toes The same valved heart That—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then regathered Out of enduring Might New strength to enclose. 

Let us not mock God with metaphor, Analogy, sidestepping, transcendence, Making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded Credulity of earlier ages: Let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache, Not a stone in a story, But the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of Time will eclipse for each of us The wide light of day.

And if we have an angel at the tomb, Make it a real angel, Weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in The dawn light, robed in real linen Spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, For our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, Lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed By the miracle, And crushed by remonstrance.

Easter Sunday has passed, but the season continues until early June. Don’t miss the miracle – He is risen; He is risen indeed!

In Hope and Confidence,

Pastor Dave