While Biking I Found a Fern Stately Standing

Field Notes From a Religion-Less Christian

August 26, 2022

A Word About Resurrection. A Word Of Resurrection.

Yesterday at my Book Club, a bunch of us guys who enjoy reading and gathering monthly at selected breweries in our Orlando area (we call our club “Half Finished” but actually we do finish the books the majority of the time…..it just gives us some breathing room!), one of our group shared a story of a recent visit to Oberammergau and it’s Passion Play. Though an atheist or a deist, which I am not sure, and of course could be something else, he told us he thoroughly enjoyed the production. He told us the production has little about the resurrection of Jesus, that the majority of the attention was on the life and death of Jesus. I told our group that I conjectured the production’s little display or attention to the resurrection is such because the four Gospel book texts (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) actually have no description of the event of Jesus getting up and leaving the tomb. Appearances yes, after the event, but actual rising, no. 

Then, the next day in my daily Scriptural reading was Matthew 28:1-10, the resurrection! And the reflection reading for the day was Adam Soderblum who wrote this about the “effects,” of the resurrection event, by which he meant what actually happened historically and how it might match our science and experience: “But it would do us little good to study these effects in the hope that they might throw additional light on the manner in which the disciples, through a divine intervention, a miracle of God, arose out of the grave of disappointment and despair to a new and transfigured existence.”

How does that happen, this rising “from the grave of disappointment and despair”? Not just then, but now.  

My contention about what happened then is that something, some event, some experience of the presence of Jesus, conversation with Jesus, encounter with Jesus, happened to any number of people that catapulted them into a new way of seeing the world and living in the world. We cannot question the results of the experience even while we might question the experience itself. And this ‘new way’ was defined as the way of unconditional love, for others, at all costs. It was the way of Jesus himself. 

About what happens now – it’s all about the hearing, not the seeing. It’s Romans 10: faith comes by hearing.  We cannot and do not come to a resurrection from “disappointment and despair” because we see tangible changes in conditions or lives, as inspiring as such may be (and so readily told, even “NBC Nightly News” closes its broadcast with an “Inspiring America” piece meant lift our spirits out the mayhem). We come, rather, by hearing a Promise that is too good not to be true. We come by way of hearing, being told, that We Do Enough, We Have Enough, We Are Enough. This word of liberation from the tyranny of carving out our own identity, community, meaning and destiny brings the opportunity then to share all things, materially and emotionally, with all others. 

So, would someone please tell me and the rest of us again today, that I Do Enough, I Have Enough and I am Enough? Oh, ok, somebody is telling me. That’s right! The local church down the street is charged with such a Word, if they would but speak it. Alas, too many do not.