He’s alive

Writing about Jesus the other day, I said Christians need to stand their ground on the truth of who Jesus is. And I hope you were paying attention when I added, “Part of that truth, of course, is referring to Jesus Christ in the present tense.”

As we approach the annual observance of Christ’s execution and resurrection, there’s an important distinction to be made.

The death and resurrection of Jesus is not a nice story or a myth. The death and resurrection of Jesus is historic fact, witnessed by rather large numbers of people.

In his first recorded letter to believers in Corinth, the apostle Paul wrote, “What I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than 500 of the brothers and sisters at the same time …”

Those hundreds of witnesses never recanted. Paul went on to say, “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead.”

And so in this coming week we commemorate the historic events at the foundation of the Christian faith. The events were so momentous that they set a movement in motion that has survived more than 2,000 years now.

That first generation of Christians were adamant that they witnessed the risen Christ. Who am I to say they did not see what they testified to, including those who were martyred for refusing to recant their testimony?

We celebrate this holy day every year because He’s alive.

Miracles in our lifetime

How did records happen? The leaps of faith and logic required seem miraculous. What made someone think they could reproduce sound by attaching a needle to a megaphone and applying it to a rotating bit of wax — and then the evolution that replaced the megaphone with an electronic device called a microphone and developed the means to amplify the needle’s vibrations to fill rooms and auditoriums?

I look at the squiggles etched into the vinyl surface and can scarcely imagine how they will be translated into glorious sound. And don’t get me started on how over the years they have miniaturized the process so the sound from hundreds of these 12-inch records can be condensed into a flash drive, also known as a thumb drive because it is about the size of a human’s thumb.

I am in awe of the technology that brought music into my living room 60 years ago. I am only beginning to wrap my head around the technology that has evolved in the ensuing six decades.

The camera I used to take the photo of a record being played can also shoot video, record sound, take dictation, connect me with countless sources of news, information and entertainment, read me a book, play me any recorded music I want to hear, and oh yes, I can make a phone call with it.

And it weighs about six ounces.

My father was born three years after the first commercial radio station went on the air. I often marveled at the scientific achievements he witnessed in his lifetime, and lately I’ve been pondering what I’ve been experiencing in my own lifetime. Outside of the realm of politics and government — where the goal seems to be to wreak as much death and destruction as humans can muster — a lot of people have been busy making this a much better world than our forebears could imagine.

Obscure references and mixed metaphors

So what’s it all about, Ralphie? Is it just for the moment we live? Surely there is a greater purpose than planting one foot in front of the other and breathing the air that we breathe? Yes, sometimes that’s all we need — and to love you — but we’re certainly not here merely to take up space and eat bags and bags of potato chips. And I apologize, I won’t call you Shirley again.

On this morning, when the sun is shining and the snow is melting, I pause and reach for words, and there they are, shiny and new, but not so new that I haven’t heard them before or even written them before in some fashion. Here we are, under the sun, and in point of fact there is indeed nothing new.

That does not, and should not, preclude us from reminding ourselves and our neighbors of the oft-repeated truths about this world. We are here to love our neighbors with patience and kindness and all of the joy we can muster — and in the face of being alive, we ought to muster all kinds of joy, wouldn’t you think? We are fragile and short-lived creatures, little more than a morning mist that is here but gone by noon, and yet we are also hardy creatures who are hard to put down if we’re willing to stand up to the bullies.

I feel like I’m making sense here, but I’m not sure I’m getting through — does that make sense? All I really know in this moment is that life is worth living even when the sunshine feels like an illusion, because it’s proven every morning that light shines again even after the very darkest night.

And so rejoice, and again I say rejoice, because darkness never lasts, and if evil seems to triumph, it is a meaningless triumph because evil cannot prevail for long. It’s part of its nature to be defeated in the end, although the end can seem a long way off sometimes.

Am I naive? Am I foolish to hold out hope? Some days it may seem so, but sure as spring follows winter and day follows night, the good triumphs over evil at the end of every road.

What’s that you say? “But eventually we cycle back to winter, and night always follows day”? “Darkness and light are brothers who need each other”? “Good needs evil and evil needs good”?

I can’t argue with those first two points — but good “needs” evil? I think not. Evil may hone the good as resistance sharpens a knife, but there is no “need” for the fruits of evil. Surely goodness and mercy are elements of a well-lived life. A life can be well-lived without ever encountering evil, but the opposite is not true.

Light and dark, winter and spring, make good metaphors for good and evil, but they are inexact metaphors. A person does not need a dark side to balance the light. The more good there is in the world, the healthier we are. While dark is inevitable, in the sense of sunset balancing sunrise, goodness need not be balanced by evil to thrive.

W.B.’s Book Report: addendum

I mentioned the other day that I had not marked anything on Page 72 of Don’t Waste Your Life, the John Piper book I am reading that I don’t remember reading except that I made a dog ear on that page.

It turns out that I did indeed take a pen to that book a couple of pages later. In fact, I underlined one sentence in red. I very rarely reach for a red pen.

“Any thing but a denial of the truth.” It’s part of a John Bunyan quote about whether it’s ever appropriate for Christians to retreat rather than take a stand for their faith. Bunyan’s point was that it’s OK to choose not to risk life or limb for a variety of reasons — “Any thing but a denial of the truth.”

And then about 10 pages later, I brought out the red pen again: “It is the will of God that we be uncertain about how life on this earth will turn out for us. And therefore it is the will of the Lord that we take risks for the cause of God.”

So we stand our ground on the truth of who Christ is, as we approach the annual observance of how he paid the price for refusing to deny the truth of who he is.

Part of that truth, of course, is referring to Jesus Christ in the present tense.

The dog ear and the underlined sentences are messages from my past self, left for a time when their full meaning would resonate for my present-day self.

The redemption of March 22

Today marks the beginning of my 74th trip around the sun. This past year has been as eventful as ever. This will be my second birthday shared with Mary, who herself is embarking on her (mumble, mumble)th season.

I have had a mixed relationship with March 22 in recent years. I have always been tickled to share my birthday with William “James T. Kirk” Shatner, sportscaster Bob Costas, and Werner “Colonel Klink” Klemperer, not to mention (looks it up) Reese Witherspoon, J.J. Watt, Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, James Patterson, M. Emmet Walsh, Marcel Marceau and Chico Marx.

But then five years ago the date was ruined, forever I thought, by the death of Willow The Best Dog There Is™ on my 68th birthday. I knew my birthday would never be the same, now that it was a marker of my best canine friend’s departure more than my own arrival.

Sure enough, the next three March 22s were somber days, especially after the even deeper loss of my beloved Red, who had been my partner for close to 26 years. Nothing, it seemed, would restore any sense of happiness to my natal anniversary.

Then a sweet woman offered me a hug one fateful Sunday morning. A week or so later, during coffee after church, I happened to mention to a friend that my birthday is March 22. A voice popped up behind me, “Why, my birthday is March 22!” It was the sweet woman who had hugged me. We talked about what a fun coincidence that was, and it was another thing that led to other things that soon caused our fellow parishioners to start calling us “you two lovebirds.”

And so the reputation of March 22 is redeemed in my eyes. That one year is sealed as my worst birthday ever — God forbid there ever be a worse one — but I’ve discovered it is still possible to have a happy birthday after all, especially since now it’s a celebration of the woman who hugged me back to life.

W.B.’s Book Report: Don’t Waste Your Life

I think I bought Don’t Waste Your Life by John Piper in part because of the bonus DVD, which is still tucked in an unopened sleeve in the back of the book. I have been tracking all of the books I’ve read since 1994, and although this book has been on my shelf since shortly after it was published in 2003, it does not show up in my “Books Read” file. (I only record books I have finished.)

The dog ear on Page 72 is evidence that I started to read it somewhere along the way and made it nearly halfway through, and something on that page resonated with me. I didn’t write anything on the page, so it could have been something under the heading on top of the page — “Pain and Pleasure As Ways to Make Much of Christ” — or further down — “How We Handle Loss Shows Us Who Our Treasure Is” — or even that section over on Page 73 — “Wasting Life by Running From Pain.”

Piper is a Minneapolis-based preacher and one of a handful of authors who find their way into my pastor friend’s sermons from time to time. The first time he mentioned Piper, I may have thought, “Hey, I think I have a book by that guy,” and after much rinsing and repeating, I finally reached up and pulled it down. Of course it has been worth the effort.

The dog ear is two-thirds of the way through Chapter 4 of 10, “Magnifying Christ Through Pain and Death,” which reaches into Paul’s letters to make the point that how we die defines us as much as how we live.

“The way we die reveals the worth of Christ in our hearts,” Piper writes. “Christ is magnified in my death when I am satisfied with him in my dying — when I experience death as gain because I gain him.”

I’ll always remember a story from the funeral of a friend’s 13-year-old son who was dying of cancer. They sat down with their pastor to break the news that there was nothing more the doctors could do; he would be gone in a few days. The young man flashed a huge grin and teased the clergyman, “I’m going to meet Jesus before you do!”

I am in no hurry to die by any means, but when the time comes I hope I will face it by pointing people to Christ. Of course, every big change carries a little fear of the unknown, and death is the biggest change since we emerged from the womb, but I also trust God. As the plaque on my kitchen wall says, “I trust the next chapter because I know the author.”

Equinox blessings

The forecast is for spring. With last weekend’s snowfall measured in feet, the weather people are predicting high temps in the mid 30s to upper 40s for the foreseeable future. The storm of April 2018 haunts us with the guarantee that it still could snow, but not before this snowfall does quite a bit of melting over the next 10 days.

And so it seems a grand time to throw a spring equinox. We hereby declare that the sun must stay above the horizon longer each day than below for the next six months.

May chlorophyll-green invade and conquer the land. May the sun yield sunflowers and coneflowers and wildflowers beyond our ability to count. May birds nest and fledglings fly and children run and dirty their knees. May the land burst with bounty enough to keep our bellies full through the next season of winter, months from now.

Let bandshells in town parks everywhere sprout music of all shapes and sizes. The music of spring and summer is joy joy joy to the world — let heaven and nature sing!

I look across the yard and into the woods and see gray and white. The only color is from the lawn chairs, and even there you could not sit without brushing away a cushion of cold, wet white. But last Saturday, before the storm, a fresh green glow was starting to emerge from the ground, and no doubt it waits beneath the snow and will be even greener after it quenches its thirst on the spring melt.

“Yeah, right, it sure looks like the first day of spring,” leers the cynic. But he can’t deny the truth: It is, indeed, the first day of spring. We survived another winter, and the season of light is upon us.