More Holy Saturday

Now the Word had fallen silent, and the water had run dry,
The bread had all been broken, and the light had left the sky;
The flock had lost its shepherd, and the seed was sadly sown,
The courtiers had betrayed their king, and nailed him to his throne.
O sabbath rest by Calvary, O calm of tomb below,
Where the grave-clothes and the spices cradle him we did not know!
Rest you well, beloved Jesus: Caesar's Lord and Israel's King,
In the brooding of the Spirit, in the darkness of the spring
(Extract from the Easter Oratorio, Lichfield Cathedral, words by Tom Wright )

Holy Saturday

We are faced on Holy Saturday with the most puzzling thing. God died and is resting in a tomb. How indeed can this be?

I know the early church fathers shied away from language like "God died." Many had a Greek notion of God that included impassibility. God could not experience something like pain and death.

But we believe that Jesus was in fact God. And Jesus died. Somehow God is able to even experience death!

The first disciples were not thinking like this. They were hiding. They were devastated. They had absolutely no hope. John (the only disciple to be a eyewitness) would have reported to them that he had seen Jesus die. Blood and water came out of the wound in his side.

No hope.

We move too quickly to Easter. We need to stop and ponder this deep mystery of Jesus/God in the tomb. We know how the story ends, but we will only fully appreciate the wonder and glory if we first dive deep into the sorrow and grief of that first Saturday.

In many ways we live in Holy Saturday all the time. We live between our own death and our resurrection. Yes, Jesus' resurrection power is at work in us now, but Paul said he didn't think the present suffering worth comparing with the glory to come. We still hurt, friends and loved ones die. There is no justice, the guilty go free, the innocent are condemned.

Too many in our world are like those first disciples. They have no hope. But by living our Holy Saturday lives grasping the full measure of sorrow and remembering Jesus' words that he must rise again, we can bring real hope to our world. We walk with others through their pain, but knowing that Sunday morning with it's completely unexpected joy is close at hand.

Always tragic

I said before that death is bad. It is.

A friend of mine is dying. He is roughly my age. His death will be tragic.

A five year old girl here in Minnesota died from complications of the flu. Her death was tragic.

My dad was 86 years old when he died last September. His death was tragic.

We have a visceral reaction when a young person dies. As a parent it does not bear contemplation to consider one's children dying. It is an unbearable pain to even think about, let alone experience.

When my dad died, many people said, when they learned he was 86 that "well he lived a long life." I thank them for their concern, but the assumption that because he was old, his death is not so bad, I reject.

Death is always tragic.

God did not intend for us to experience death. Death is the result of our sin. It is NEVER good.

And God is going to fix it all. In the Resurrection, death will be done with. Death will not get to keep any of it's prey. God's victory will NOT BE PARTIAL. It will be complete.

So I pray for William and his family. And I place all my hope in the Resurrection.

Music to my ears

Luther said, "He who sings, prays twice." He was on to something - music has a special quality to it. People have thought so for a long time. The expression "The music of the spheres" comes for the idea that the stars in the sky were attached to a giant sphere and that the music of the "Prime mover" is what made the sphere move.

During the Reformation, when almost all other arts were denigrated, music remained in a place of acceptance. It was believed that music was "more spiritual" than other art forms.

We really do only see what we want to - because music is a very physical thing. Whether it is produced by violins and cellos, or by a larynx, it takes some physical item to produce it. It takes a physical substance like air to take music (sound) from on place to another. And it takes the physical ear to translate sound waves into something we can hear. (Mozart seems to have been an exception - music for him seemed to be something that "lived in his head." It would be interesting to know more about how he related to the physicality of music)

Turns out that the part of the brain that helps us hear and the part that helps us move are connected. Tapping your foot when you hear music is not just natural, it is the way you were made (so I wonder how we can stand still as we sing many of the hymns at church).

I propose that music is not the most spiritual of the arts, but rather is a place where spirit and matter come together in a sacramental way. We are "embodied souls" and music speaks to us at the very joint between that reality.

Free like a kite

We worship freedom. We want as many choices as possible (just go to the supermarket if you don't believe me). Anything that threaten our freedom is resisted and attacked.

But there is no such thing as unlimited freedom. All our civic freedoms have responsibilities attached. We have free speech, but we cannot yell "fire" in a crowded theater. Likewise, in our whole lives, freedom is constrained.

We are like kites. A kite is designed to soar high in the sky. But if you remove the string, it can not longer fly, but will flutter away, and eventually hit the ground. The sting seems to hold it back, but in fact is essential to the kites ability to fly.

Our bodies seem to hold us back. We can't fly, even like kites with out technological help. We can only be in one place at a time, and to be in a different location takes effort, and great effort if we want to travel around the world.

We can only know so much. Some can know quite a lot! But still a limited amount.

We are finite.

And we rebel at that finitude. We tell stories of a humanity that transcends limits (I just watched the first two seasons of Heros. It is a show about people that have extraordinary abilities - like flying, or invisibility.).

And of course we fight against death, the ultimate reminder of our limits.

But God made us as limited beings (though he never meant death to be one of those limits). We try to be free, but we cut the strings that allow us to fly. We need to embrace our limits as a good thing, and then enjoy the view as we soar in the sky of our God given freedom.

Death Bad

Our culture has gone out of its way to hide death. One still hears stories of wakes at home with the body present, where the family and friends prepared the body themselves. Now we have a vast industry to take care of our dead.

Did you know that the city of San Francisco has no cemeteries within the city limits? The city fathers thought this would help the city grow, so they moved all the dead to the suburbs!

We don't use the words "dead" or "died." We say the deceased "passed away." They've gone "to a better place."

We say that "death is just a part of life."

Ironically, we glorify death in our portrayal of it in the media, especially movies. Scenes of death give us an immediate rush, but we don't have to suffer the long term consequences. Long term exposure to scenes of violent death harden us further to deaths presence.

But as Christians, we must not let the culture carry us along. We must return to a basic fact about death - it is bad. It was not God's intention for us to die. It is the result of sin.

And nothing will be ok until death is finally done away with. Jesus' resurrection is the foretaste of death final absolute defeat, but it will only be finally gone when Jesus returns and the whole Creation is renewed.