(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Living”, originally shared on April 12, 2021. It was the 106th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
What does Christmas have to do with Easter?
Well, there’s the candy. And, you do have to be born before you can die and
rise again. And maybe birth, death and resurrection are really all one thing.
Today, we’re going to talk about what it means to be living.
It’s Spring, and life is a little more
obvious. We’ve been working around our yard, planting and preparing the
landscape. It’s God’s creation. We just tend it.
The Bible’s first book is called, appropriately, “Genesis”. The
beginning. And the beginning of the beginning tells us that God created
everything out of nothing, including the plants and the animals and every living
thing.
At the end of creation God creates human beings. Here’s how it’s
described in Genesis 1, starting with verse 26:
*Genesis 1:26-27
I think I’ve described before the story of how I witnessed an autopsy in
a summer program for seminary students. We were student chaplains at Lutheran
General Hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois, and afterward the pathologist’s
assistant, who I had nicknamed in my mind “Igor”, asked us to stay a few
minutes more after the autopsy was finished.
He said, “Here is a man who yesterday was living and today is not.
Yesterday, he was laughing or crying, he was loving his friends and his family,
working, breathing, taking in the world. He was living. And now he’s lying on a
table. Dead.”
“What’s the difference between yesterday and today? What did he have
yesterday that he does not have today?”
What is the difference between life and death?
We can describe a clinical difference: respiration, pulse, brain waves.
But those are how we describe the mechanics of life. What is life itself?
In T.S. Elliot’s poem “The Journey of the Magi” he describes the
reflections of one of the wise men after their journey to find the baby Jesus,
something that centers on Christmas. He says:
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth,
certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had
seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different;
this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like
Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these
Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old
dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their
gods.
I should be glad of another death.
What does it mean, “I should be glad of another death”?
St. Paul writes in his letter to the Church at Rome, the 6th
chapter starting at the 3rd verse:
As I mentioned last time, death is a past-tense experience for
Christians. We are united with Christ in Baptism in a death like Christ’s.
Therefore, we will rise with Jesus. Baptism is dying and rising.
Eternal life isn’t “a pie in the sky by and by”, as they used to say. It
starts right now in our faith and Baptism. Death is just a change by God’s
grace to a more perfect relationship with the one true living God, who adopted
us at our Baptisms. “Eternal” is an expression of the quality of life, not just
the quantity.
Whatever else among the many things that “So God created humankind in
his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created
them.” (Genesis 1:27) means, one of them is that we were created for a
relationship with God.
That is not always obvious to us. In fact, we messed it up by wanting to
be God ourselves in the original garden. It took God to come and die for us to
make a pathway for us back to that relationship for which human beings were
created.
I think that one of the greatest science fiction stories of all time was
Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, and it was first published in 1818! We get a
little clearer picture of its meaning in the book than in the movie. Dr.
Frankenstein wants to be God, to create human life. Instead, he creates a
monster who murders everyone whom he loves and even Dr. Frankenstein dies as a
result. We think of Frankenstein as the monster, but that is actually
Frankenstein’s monster, his creation. Or, as Keith Morrison would ask, “Or is
it?” Dr. Frankenstein’s efforts to
create life, to be God, results in death. The book leaves it to us to decide
which one is the monster.
What is the remedy? The cross bridges the gap that we have dug between
ourselves and God. It is the cure for that sin that separates us from God, the
sin that brought and continues to bring evil into the world, including death.
God takes our Sin with a capital “S” on himself and pays the price to
restore that relationship for all who believe and are baptized. We are a new
creation. We are born again.
We have been given the gift of faith, the living relationship with the
one true living God.
We are not part of a tradition. We are not a part of the Lutheran
tradition, or of the Roman Catholic tradition, or of the Evangelical tradition,
or of the Pentecostal tradition, or even of the Christian tradition. We are a
part of a living faith, a living relationship with the one true living God.
We are not congregants, we are members of the living Body of Christ, the
Church, alive and made new and renewed in new life every day by the Holy Spirit.
We are not a faith-based organization, we are people filled with the
Holy Spirit, streams of living water, that forms us into the Church.
We all have to make a living. Jesus came to make us a life.
When Jesus was driven by the Spirit into the wilderness, fasting for 40
days and nights before his public ministry, “The tempter came and said to him,
“’If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.’
But he answered, ‘It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by
every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” (Matthew
4:3-4)
Living is a gift from God. Truly living, is also a gift from God.
Vaccine distribution is moving very quickly now. The Dodgers held their
home game season opener last night, and people were there. Health experts are
warning about another surge, and it’s starting to happen all over the country,
though here in California, we seem to be doing really well. People are almost
giddy about getting back to normal, though that’s truly months away, and then
it will be the New Normal.
Do you remember that at the beginning of the pandemic it was predicted
that in 9 months there would be a huge baby boom? People were isolated, and
bored and, well, nature would take its course. It hasn’t happened. What
happened to life finding a way? Maybe we are looking for life in the wrong
places?
On the first Easter, early in the morning, women approached the place
where Jesus had been laid in a tomb, to prepare the body for a dignified decay.
We read in Luke, chapter 24 starting at the 1st verse:
“Why do you look for the living among the dead?” Good question.
We tend to pursue the things that are killing us rather than turning
toward God and receiving the gift of truly living. We prefer to ignore
restrictions even when the consequences are literally killing us. That’s why
one of the very first words of Jesus at the beginning of his public ministry
was, “repent.” That is not a call to say we’re sorry. That’s a turning away
from death and toward life.
Paul wrote in his letter to the Philippians,
1:21: “For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain.”
Christ is life, not the most important part, or my highest priority, but
everything. The cross bridged the gap we had dug between us and God so that we
could receive a life that is about truly living.
And to the Romans in chapter 15, vs. 8,
Paul wrote: “If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die,
we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the
Lord’s.”
The life that truly is life is a living relationship with the one true
living God. The new life is a gift from God, it wells up from within us. It is
made known to us by the Holy Spirit, the streams of living water, God’s ongoing
personal presence for good in the world. It flows freely and is abundant life
in both quality and quantity.
Birth, death, and resurrection are all the same if we are the Lord’s.
They are all what it means to be truly living.
Open your heart to receive the living God, or be renewed in that life,
today. That’s living.
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