Choice

“Grandmother, how do you know there is a God?”

“Oh Honey!  You hear the birds sing and see the flowers grow and you know there’s God!”

“But Grandmother…I hear the birds and see the flowers…and I don’t.”

Grandmother Page was a—perhaps the—pivotal person in my life.  She lived out the example of unconditional love.

When I was a child I suffered from severe attacks of asthma.  My lungs would close off to the degree that I was sure, even when I was quite small, that panic would kill me and I had to remain still, both physically and emotionally.  Nights were worse; lying down brought me a level of distress similar to a sailor in a sinking submarine.

Grandmother would sit with me and hold me upright all night long.  She’d sing to me, and tell me stories from her childhood and from the Bible, and most of all she’d keep her light blue eyes focused on mine so that I was drawn into her spirit and her heart.  To this day I don’t see blue eyes without thinking of her.

Her faith burned like a star; through losing my grandfather, the love of her life, in her early 40’s, through ensuing decades of poverty and constant physical pain, she loved.  Her love, and her faith, seemed effortless.

The exchange of words I share with you now occurred in the kitchen of my parent’s home when I was sixteen.  When I told her honestly of my emptiness I ran out of the room and sat in a car and cried.  She didn’t follow me; she didn’t have to.  I’m certain she prayed for me, and we never spoke like that again.  Somewhere along the line, faith came to me.

I suppose we might call that a kind of resurrection.  And though it’s not as monumental, nor as preposterous, as Jesus leaving his tomb in Jerusalem 2000 years ago, I’d argue that it’s a related miracle.

A miracle is something we can’t explain, can’t get our minds around, an experience that brings us to awe and wonder.  It may be that we’re never supposed to grow fully comfortable with a miracle, that we always need to stand—or kneel, or fall on our faces—in front of it, and later process the whole experience with questioning and even with tears.

The Resurrection is not dogma, it’s not religion—it’s revelation.  It’s there.  It happened; we can and should wrestle with how, what and why it all happened, but that it happened strikes me as undeniable.  Mary Magdalen said it happened.  Peter and John experienced it too.  Did they see the same thing?  They each saw through their own eyes, but they saw something that transformed them from terrified, lost sheep to lions willing to die rather than deny what they’d seen.

I haven’t seen—yet—the physical form of Jesus risen from the dead.  But I have had a revelation, and it involved my Grandmother, long after she’d taken her last breath on earth.

I was praying.  I was about to ask God for help as I faced a situation involving career and ego and emotional turmoil and a large amount of money.  I knelt by my bedside and suddenly none of that seemed pressing.  A different prayer—not a prayer of petition but simply the desire to be open and honest—came to me.

Then came a revelation, and sharply along with it surged something both spiritual and physical—so physical my lungs expanded like the breath of God blown into them.  The revelation was an insight, and more—it was a purpose.

What struck me was that I’d had it easy; I’d been blessed, surrounded, bathed in love.  Believing in God was a gift I’d been given.  I’d always seen myself as struggling for faith.  But I had experienced God’s love from my earliest moments; both spiritually and physically I’d felt and seen it.

And I saw at that moment that other people have a different road, and some a viciously different one.  Some children are abused by parents or grandparents; some people, when they are smothering as I was as a child, have their teeth knocked out.

My duty—my opportunity, my calling, as God let me know on my knees that night—is not to convince anyone of the supreme miracle of God’s endless, eternal love.  I am simply to love them, to contribute in any way I can to the possibility that they can experience enough love to believe that Resurrection—Jesus’s, and their own—might just be possible.

And that they, and you, and I all might say together, “He is Risen!  He is Risen indeed!”

-Randall

John

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”    —  The Gospel of John

That sentence, the opening of the account of Jesus written by John, who has the unique place in Christian history as the disciple whom Jesus loved, is a leap of vision and daring beyond all description.  The writers of the other three Gospels framed their stories as accounts of Jesus and his work on earth; Mark jumps into the story three years before Jesus’ crucifixion, while both Matthew and Luke begin with genealogies—Matthew back to Abraham, the patriarch of the Jewish people, and Luke draws a line from Jesus back to the first human beings.

But John points to something in a realm beyond all this; John tells us that Jesus’ life has no beginning and no end.  Not only is Jesus beyond time, he is synonymous with God:  “All things were made through him, and without him was not made anything that was made.”  Even time itself is his creation.

I don’t know about you, but this strikes me as a rather bold statement.  Now, as Easter approaches, I ask myself what could compel a person to write such a thing…and to believe it.

The answer is:  the Resurrection.

John’s eloquence as a writer is stupendous; while Mark’s Gospel reflects Peter’s personality (scholars believe Peter was Mark’s main source) and is straightforward and immediate, John’s sings with flights of lyricism and vision:  “For God so loved the world that He gave his only son, that whosoever believes him him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

Hanging on the cross, Jesus looked down and saw his mother beside John and told them they were now to treat each other as mother and son.

So if Jesus loved John, and trusted him with his own mother, and inspired him to write such things, John must have been someone we’d all love and admire, right?

Wrong.  Jesus loved John, but the other disciples did not—or at least they sometimes found him intolerable.  John and his brother James, when they saw that massive crowds were following Jesus and they felt Jesus would be setting up a powerful kingdom—here on earth—they went behind the backs of the other disciples and asked to be designated as Jesus’ main men when he came to power.  That didn’t sit well with Jesus, or the rest of the disciples.

Still John had a special place.  And he wasn’t perfect.

I have two friends right now who struggle with perfection—or rather their lack of it.  One is Catholic, the other Protestant, and yet their problem is the same:  because of their on-going inability—or unwillingness; it’s beyond me to judge which—to purge sin from their lives, they can’t allow themselves to participate fully in worship.

As I say, I can’t judge.  What I can say is that all of Jesus’ followers were flawed; none of them expected Jesus to rise from death.

And he did.

-Randall

Peter

“Get behind me, Satan!”

Jesus said those words to Peter.  Think about that:  Jesus.  Said those words.  To Peter, the man he’d identified as the one to lead the gathering of believers after the Resurrection.  Imagine hearing those words spoken to you, from Jesus himself.  

I mean this:  stop and imagine it.

Albert Einstein’s best work great out of what he called thought experiments; he would sit and think of situations that came alive in his own imagination—a spaceship moving through space at the speed of light, for example.  We may not have Einstein’s brains but we can use his technique:  sit back in your chair, close your eyes and imagine being among the disciples, with Jesus.

He looks at them…at us…at you…and says that he’s going to Jerusalem and there he will be killed.  And after that he’s going to rise from the dead.

When we read this, it’s easy to skip over the part about being killed, about becoming dead.  But to be there, to live it, even as a thought experiment, is unsettling.  We are terrified by death.

If you really do this as a thought experiment, watch Peter.  I suggest reading the passage in the Gospel of Mark first; it will bring detail to your imagination.  Peter has just done what he so often does, stepping forward to say what the other disciples wouldn’t or couldn’t—he’s just declared his faith that Jesus is the Christ.  Then immediately after, Jesus tells his followers about his impending death and resurrection.  Peter draws Jesus aside and begins to rebuke him…

Imagine this!  Peter…rebukes Jesus!  Why, how, could Peter do this?  Peter had been with Jesus from the beginning; Jesus walked alone into a crowd of people who had come to hear John the Baptist preach; Peter, his brother Andrew and several other future disciples were there.  Now Jesus had vast crowds following him, and Peter was disturbed by the future Jesus had just laid out.  What did Peter think?  “This won’t sell?”  How could Peter presume to tell the man he’d just identified as the Christ—the Messiah, the Savior of Israel—that he was out of line?

It seems he didn’t really hear the part about rising from the dead.

No one knew.   No one except Jesus.

-Randall

Quantum Physics

I understand little about quantum physics, and understanding a very little may be worse than understanding nothing; what I think I know could be absolutely wrong.  But at least I understand that I don’t understand.

What I read of quantum mechanics and black holes and the stupendous nature of the fraction of the universe we have been able to peek into puts me into a state of awe and wonder.  I don’t even need a Hubble telescope to reach reverence like this; I can find it gazing at a full moon, or a hummingbird.

What I read about quantum mechanics tells me that at the extremes of the physical world, such as they observe with black holes, the normal rules of physics cease to apply.  As if that weren’t enough to boggle the mind, scientists also say they now calculate that everything in the universe—everything:  all matter, energy, and even gravity and time itself—came into existence in a single moment 13 billion years ago.  (If that sounds to you like a reflection of Genesis, you’re not alone.)

I’m sorry for the gobbledygook; what I’m trying to say here is that our knowledge is finite, while our ignorance is unbounded.  We have limits.  And we don’t like limits.  That is certainly a confirmation of Genesis.

Mixed in with the awe I feel, and the sense of my own ignorance, is fear.  I experience the overwhelming magnitude of creation and the insignificance of my own place within it.  This fear too is holy.  (King David spoke of this in the Psalms: “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him?”)

The point to me is that this fear, this humility, is not there to freeze us; it forces us to move forward in faith.

When I first encountered the story of William Wallace, I felt both awe and fear.  When the time came (a time driven by desperation) to write it, I knew I was ignorant of many historical details.  Many of these details were not only unknown but unknowable because first-hand accounts of his life didn’t exist.  I plunged into the story, led not by scholarly research but by the belief that what inspired me about William Wallace’s life must be similar to what inspired those who followed him in his own time.

I wasn’t writing to tell what I’d discovered; I was writing in order to discover.

I recently heard an interview with Paul McCartney, who said something similar.  McCartney is the Mozart of our time, and he’s still writing music and lyrics.  What keeps him doing it, he said, is the discovery; he never knows where a song  will lead, and he writes to find out.

Accepting our own ignorance and standing before a mystery is the first step toward creation and growth in anything—all art and all science, and in all great human adventures like love and family.

What does all this have to do with why I believe in the Resurrection?  It’s a matter of openness.  If I believed I knew everything, I could say that such a thing was truly impossible.

But when I look at the heavens, the work of God’s fingers, the moon and the stars which God has set in place, I have the sense He can do anything.

-Randall

Vision

“If we were standing at Jesus’ tomb on that first Easter, at the time when the tomb went from occupied to empty, what would we see?” I asked.

“We might see different things,” Dr. Langford said.

Thomas A. Langford was a Religion professor at Duke University, and later he was Dean of Duke Divinity School.  Like so many others who had the privilege of learning from him, I held him in awe.  And because I saw him as a titan of theology, I dared to ask him the hardest question I wrestled with.

His answer baffled and frustrated me, as honest answers from brilliant people often do.

How could two different people, standing at the same place at the same time and watching the same event, see two different things?  

The answer, of course, is that they are two different people—and our vision is determined not so much by what we observe but by who (and what) we are.

The evidence of this is all around us:  a political candidate appears to one voter as a champion of truth and to another as a scheming liar.  This divergence in observation occurs not only in judging things we can’t touch, like character, but in noticing actual physical events; it’s almost impossible to see what we believe is not possible.

Almost.  

Peter and John, two men who held unique positions among Jesus’ disciples and had followed him constantly for three years, ran to the tomb when Mary Magdalen told them she had discovered his body was gone.  John outran Peter and go there first; reluctant or afraid to go in, John peeked inside and saw the tomb was empty.  Peter arrived and entered; he found no one there.  When Peter stepped out John looked in again and saw an angel.

He saw an angel.  The story becomes even more extraordinary.  John saw a heavenly being, but he didn’t see a physically resurrected Jesus—not yet; that would come later.

But Mary Magdalen, when both men had left, encountered and even spoke with a man she found so real and tangible that at first she assumed he was a gardener.

So the question I have this morning—the question Dr. Langford steered me toward so many years ago—is:  Would I have seen him?

Would you?

What is there about my own pride, fear, cynicism, that would keep me from encountering Jesus as Mary Magdalen did?

Would I have come to the tomb as John and Peter did, leaving baffled and disturbed?  Or would I not have come there at all?

So here is another profound paradox of the Resurrection:  Jesus reveals God to us—and reveals us to us.

-Randall

Mary Magdalen

In Palestine 2000 years ago, women did not testify before judges in legal actions because their word was deemed untrustworthy.  

I’ve already said that we in modern times find the Resurrection preposterous—and in those times people were the same way.  Even the disciples themselves, the men Jesus hand picked to learn directly from him, stumbled over the idea though Jesus told them multiple times it would happen, and then when it did happen they themselves didn’t believe it.  Even when Peter and John, the two disciples closest to Jesus, heard the tomb was empty and ran to it and saw for themselves that Jesus’ body was gone, they had no thought whatsoever that Jesus had come back to life.

So why, when the earliest followers of Jesus began to declare this preposterous story, did they identify the first witness of the event as a woman?  And not just any woman, but one who was fallen?

Fallen, not just because all of us are fallen, but fallen in the fuller sense because the narratives and traditions suggest a complex woman with a difficult past.  The Bible says Jesus had cast demons out of her; she was the one who broke a jar of expensive ointment to anoint Jesus’ feet as she washed them with her tears and dried them with her hair—and what an image of emotion and devotion that is!  She may have been the woman who was dragged before Jesus by a mob intent on fulfilling their tradition of stoning to death any woman caught in the act of adultery.  (Yes, men got away free.)

Mary Magdalen…her name itself strikes me as beautiful, and I have always thought of her as physically attractive.  But was she, if in fact she was a demon-possessed sex worker in Roman-occupied Palestine?

When I was a boy my father sometimes took me along to work on Saturday mornings (my father worked 6 1/2 days a week).  As a salesman he called on wholesalers who worked out of warehouses in areas known as rough.  Most of the time he’d take me in with him; sometimes he’d tell me to stay in the car with the doors locked.

One Saturday morning when I was sitting in his car alone I noticed a commotion on the sidewalk behind me; two young police officers were arresting woman for prostitution.  I understood this, even at age 12, because she was trying to seduce her way out of the situation by throwing her arms around the waist of the younger of the cops and saying, “Please, honey, let me go!  Even a dog will lie in the bed for greenbacks!”

That was enough to brand my brain with the memory, but what really burned was how she looked.  Her teeth were gone—either rotted or punched out, so that her mouth had the caved-in look of a crone, though now I’d guess she was no more than 40.  Her hair was stringy, her body had the collapsed look of abuse.

She was a woman at the Bottom—mentally, emotionally, physically, she was in living hell.  Even the policeman were trying distance themselves, one of them trying to squirm from her embrace while his partner stood back and smirked.  To say she was a prostitute is too polite; she was a whore, possessed with everything even we moderns would call demonic.

What if Mary Magdalen was like her?

Mary Magdalen met Jesus.  And Mary Magdalen became new.  Mary Magdalen knew with absolutely clarity that Jesus could—and already had, in every dimension of  her own life—accomplish something everyone else found impossible, even unthinkable.

Even she found it unthinkable!  When she discovered the tomb empty on the morning we now celebrate as Easter, she thought someone had taken his body; it didn’t occur to her that he might have returned to physical life and walked out.

The she saw him.  Saw—not felt, but saw him.  She didn’t recognize him until he spoke.  Then she had no doubt.

So here is one reason for believing the preposterous story of the Resurrection:  Mary Magdalen believed it.  She saw it first.  Even the disciples couldn’t deny that.  She told them.  At first they couldn’t get their minds around the truth of it.  Later, they believed her.

So do I.

-Randall

The Resurrection Is Coming

“If you don’t think the Resurrection is preposterous, you’ve missed the point.”  

N.T. Wright, the brilliant English scholar, wrote that, and when I first read the words they shot through my brain like a bullet of angel light.

Even those among us who hold the harshest of hostility toward the Christian faith find it easy to accept that a man named Jesus of Nazareth walked the earth two thousand years ago.  They may even concede that his execution occurred.  But the idea that after crucifixion and burial, he rose again…that’s a thought they push into the box of fantasy.  

And to be honest, there are more than a few professors of religion and even pastors who dodge the sharp edges of Easter with rational-sounding ideas about a spiritual rebirth of intangible, emotional love—but not one flesh, blood and bone.

So I will tell you plainly:  I believe Jesus rose from his grave and stood and walked, that his disciples could feel him with their hands as well as with their hearts.

(Let me pause here and say that this morning, as I began my day with devotions, the first passage I saw was Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount:  “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them,” and this stopped me cold, as I was about to sit down and write.  I’m not trying to tell you I’m a better believer than anyone else.  I want to be honest with you and with myself—that’s what all real writing is and always has been for me.)

The Resurrection challenges me just as it does everyone else.  It is the Mount Everest of faith, and we all climb it…or we don’t.

As we move toward Easter, I’m going write about that preposterous, mind-blowing, universe re-ordering event—and why I believe it.

Randall