Sunday, April 5, 2015

Easter's Truth!

The Seven Stanzas of Easter
by:  John Updike



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.

Saturday, April 4, 2015

Holy Saturday Blessing

Even while you lie in the tomb--you are God.
Even as death embraces your body--your Father upholds your life,
and make no mistake. You will not get up on your own. Love itself 
as that of a Father for his Son will raise you up...;.
and everyone who follows after you.  AMEN+

Friday, April 3, 2015

The Dream of the Cross

Was it just a dream...

Jesus with his cross, falling under its weight...and I am standing there feel drawn to lift it, to help, one more shoulder for a dying man...

Yet as I stooped to lift the cross, I felt his hand on my shoulder --and the words are spoken in my heart---

"Not my cross, but yours....

What?  I am stooping to help you and now you want me to add my cross to your cross--my burden to your burden?

All I heard was...let me carry it to the top of the hill and plant it, and when I die, your burden will die as well--and you shall be free of it forever, and you shall find rest for your soul.

Could it have been a dream?  The message of Good News of what God does for us in Jesus--not what we do for him?

Take it to the top of the hill, and plant it, and when I die--your burden dies as well and you shall be set free.

Just a dream.....

The Friday that is So Good!

The Friday that is Good!


"He is the still point of the turning world."
T.S. Eliot 

I am haunted by Dali's Christ on the Cross.  I look down from this point to the Galilean Sea, into all ages, and can see God planting that cross in heart of life--giving Life away to all who would come to him.  Is there a greater good? 

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Letting Jesus Carry Your Cross

Row by row of grave markers line Arlington Cemetery, but few at all, see it as the way of the cross....that Jesus himself walks by and asks us to place our grief on his cross and find rest for our souls.

"Surely he has borne our grief," says Isaiah--that is--only if we let him.

We just never think of Jesus carrying our cross--it is always the other way around--"pick up your cross and follow me."  But what if our cross is really his cross--if he carries our lives with him?"  Jesus was clear "to come to me all that are heavy laden and I will give you rest."  What if we took him at his word by laying our grief on his cross--letting it die with him, so that we can live a life like his?  It would take a Savior to do that.