The Newness - A Word (or Two) About Resurrection

The Treehouse: Conversations About God

Along a city path I found a smashed pumpkin. I scavenged some seeds, dried them, later soaked them, planted them in some potting soil, and lo and behold they sprouted.

I’ve purposely waited until after Easter to dip a toe in these waters, in part because the secular imprint of bunnies and chocolate and spring flowers and fancy hats is so deep it can get in the way of what for me is the core emotional impact of the story of Resurrection. But also, in truth I’ve been struggling with how to articulate what I believe about this basic and most essential raison d’être of the Christian church.

I’m not sure where to begin, so I’ll just jump in. What happens below might get a little circular.

As we’ve gone along this past year in these conversations about God, I’ve found myself more and more impatient with my own academic and scholarly approach to my theological reconstruction. I’ve felt a certain obligation to at least show why I believe what I believe, and scripture (what we have of it, which please remember is copies of copies) at least can give us a good look at what early beliefs and practices were, before Empire co-opted the polity, if not the message. (We’ll dig into this another time.)

I still believe that the academic approach is good and responsible practice. But it’s not the only approach with validity. I came through seminary at a time when the “authority of experience” was beginning to be considered alongside the authority of scripture. (When I speak of scriptural authority, please remember I absolutely don’t hold to a literal reading or inerrancy of the Bible.) Feminist Theology, Black Theology, and Liberation Theology put people’s experiences and life stories in dialogue with scripture, leading to new insights, interpretations, and perspectives.

That’s the vantage point I’m writing from today…my personal experience. I want to reframe Resurrection through the lenses of my own deep hunger, my own profound longing. And it may come about that I end up saying I believe in the possibility because I want to believe in it. Because I want to believe more things are possible than the small purview mortality affords me.

The “how” and “why” and “what” of some kind of life beyond death is not a topic that I spend much time with anymore, because there are no answers. Those who try to give them to me are wasting their precious breath. I know nothing more than at the end of my life will be the door that swings only one way, an exit beyond which…

Yeah. So. Knowing is head stuff. Answers have to do with reason and logic and what is quantifiable and measurable.

Now. Let me tell you what happens to my heart when I read the gospel accounts which all tell a version of the same story, that grief-stricken women came to the tomb early in the morning after the Sabbath observation had concluded, anguished over the hasty placement of their beloved friend’s body in a borrowed tomb. Both to honor the life of their friend and to preserve his body from rapid decay, they came before the sun was fully up with aromatic oils and spices to place inside the shroud in this final gesture of love. Sometimes I weep to read of it.

***

The night my father died, our angel of a hospice nurse asked if we wanted to bathe his body. I remember my mother and I looking at each other in wonder and surprise, and recognizing in one another’s eyes a deep, sad joy in the chance to tend to him in this last loving act.

The hospice nurse had shaved my father’s face, so that it gleamed in the half-light, and I could not believe he did not move, so naturally did his naked body rest there on the bed. She brought us a bowl with warm, fragrant, soapy water, and we took terry cloths and slowly washed his long legs and big, bony feet and his strong arms, washed his torso that bore pale surgical scars. We patted him dry with soft towels, and the hospice nurse helped us dress him in the sky blue trousers and sky blue short-sleeved shirt that was one of his favorite outfits and that matched the color of his eyes.

What followed was the arrival of the funeral director and his assistants. They transferred my father’s body into a black body bag and onto a gurney, and let us all take one last look before zipping the bag closed, then wheeled my father’s body through the apartment door and down the hallway and outside, into the back of the hearse, which took him to the funeral home where, per his wishes, he would be reduced to ash.

“Behold, I am making all things new,” the risen and enthroned Jesus says in the much-misunderstood and often misused book of the Revelation of John, chapter 21, verse 5.

I’ve had several dreams about my father since the night he died in the spring of 2009, but in only one has he ever spoken. In the dream, I opened a door to a room I did not know existed, and there stood my father in his summer shortie pajamas, folding up something that he laid on the bed, a shirt, maybe. He turned and looked at me with a surprised joy, and said, “Well, hi, Bec! Where have you been?” In my dream, I went to him and he gathered me in a warm embrace, and I wept and said, “I’ve missed you so much.” Then he leaned down and put his mouth next to my ear and began to speak, saying things I could not decipher. When I woke, I still felt his arms around me, wishing I’d been able to understand what he was trying to tell me.

I will never not believe that somehow my father came to me. Alive. Whole. I don’t need to know how. I don’t need an explanation. I’m okay with simply accepting the wonder of it and holding it, as he held me, as treasure, and perhaps as promise.

***

The real truth for me is as simple as this: My heart desperately longs for, yearns toward hope, for what leads to not just any future but a certain kind of future where Love has the first and last words and holds everything in between in Its healing, expansive embrace. I crave stories of continuing newness, which is what I believe God in essence is. The One who said to Moses, “I am who I am” or “I will be who I will be” is Beingness, Becomingness Itself, which is an ongoing dynamic, which is the ongoing dynamic. The infinite universe and everything in it has renewal woven into the very fabric, all the way down to the subatomic level and beyond.

In this process of becoming something altogether new, I rely on the authority of my experience — of times when I was at my lowest, when thoughts of surrender, of self-harm, of utter darkness were closing in, when I contemplated, even relished the thought of Not Being, and then there came some small lifeline of Love that pulled me forward and into the surprise of a future I could not have imagined for myself. A transformed life. A resurrected life. Again and again over these seventy-plus years I’ve been on Planet Earth. Love did that. Keeps doing that. Whatever you want to call it is fine with me. Right now, today I’m calling it Jesus, seeing him as the icon, the image, the logos that embodies and delivers this eternal, surprising newness.

There is lots more to say, and I’m sidestepping what is, as far as the Christian church is concerned, the inescapable other part of the meaning of the Resurrection, which is the meaning of the Crucifixion. (My mentor Walt Bouman¹ used to speak of the Crucifixion/Resurrection as one event.) More on that later.

These are not full and conclusive thoughts about Jesus and Resurrection. But for today, they are enough. I’m not sure I’m making much sense, but at least it feels authentic to me. With this different road I’ve taken to talking about my theology, what could have been confined to academic parsing instead expands, soaked through with deep emotion and longing and wonder, into a beautiful uncertainty that draws me ever onward.

And the sprouts took root, and I planted them in the yard. Life is persistent everywhere.

1. If you want some really meaty theology, here is a link to a sermon Walt preached after receiving his diagnosis of terminal cancer. He delivered these words at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in May of 2005. By August he was dead. Dr. Bouman was my Systematics professor, my friend, and my mentor.