(Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “First-generation
Christians”, originally shared on April 3, 2026. It was the 407th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams
of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my
wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)
What possible meaning can life have in the face of the inevitability of
death? Today, we’re going to find out.
I don’t even know where to
start with that, except to say that everything about it is wrong, and it would
be even more wrong this year with our rising gas prices! 😊
Maybe it’s just my age.
When I was a younger man, I
wondered why the Bible’s book of Ecclesiastes was even in the Bible. It just
seemed to be the rantings of a bitter, old man.
But, the older I get, the more
it makes sense to me. 😊
I’ve had the same experience
watching the TV show, “Lost”.
It ran on ABC from 2004-2010.
It was a sort of science
fiction drama about the survivors of a plane crash somewhere in the Pacific
Ocean (or was it?), who may or may not be alive in our dimension, on an island
that may have supernatural or spiritual powers, or not.
It raised deeply important
questions about time and space, reality and illusion, God and human beings, and
I found something that I used in my sermon pretty much every week. I put a
“Lost” promo side in our audio/visual system whenever I was about to quote from
it, and after a while, whenever it appeared, I could hear a low groan from the
congregation.
It was funny.
But then the show ended,
suddenly, with most of the characters, major and minor, meeting in a church,
getting on a plane and taking off, or maybe it was a metaphor for an afterlife.
And that was it. It was over.
It felt like the writers had
just got tired of working on it and, instead of giving answers to the show’s
mysteries, instead of tying up all the loose ends and explaining them, it just
ended.
I concluded that it was the
best TV show in the history of television with the worst ending ever.
And then I got a little older,
and I changed my mind. I realized that it was the best TV show with the best
ending ever, because it was real.
We die, at least for this life,
without getting all the answers. The loose ends don’t get tied up, goals go
unmet, and mysteries go unexplained. By all appearances, we just end. We’re
over. Cancelled.
So, a new question is raised.
What possible meaning can life have in the face of the inevitability of death?
Today, we’re going to find out.
Today is Good Friday.
Good Friday is
the day we mark as the day that Jesus was crucified. What’s so good
about that?
I have a T-shirt that says, “Body Piercing Saved my Soul”.
It’s a reference to Isaiah 53:5, in Isaiah’s prophecy of the
Messiah,
5 But he was wounded for our
transgressions,
crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
and by his bruises we are healed.
(Many translations replace “wounded” with “pierced”, i.e. “he was
pierced for our transgressions”)
Body piercing saved my soul.
It refers to Jesus giving his life on the cross. There’s no
mystery about who took Jesus’ life.
No one took it from him. Jesus gave his life.
Jesus said in John 10:14-18,
14 I am the good shepherd. I know my own
and my own know me, 15 just as the Father knows me
and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. 16 I
have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and
they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. 17 For
this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it
up again. 18 No one takes it from me, but I
lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to
take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.”
Good Friday is the main event. Over half of the entire gospel of John is
about the last week of Jesus’ life. The resurrection validates that
Jesus was who he said he was, that his death on the cross could reconcile God
and humanity. There’s no Christianity without the resurrection of Jesus.
But
that in no way detracts from the fact that it is the crucifixion of Jesus that
is the central event of all human history. His death is what brings life for
all humankind.
Here it is, near the end of the Gospel reading, John 18:1-19:42,
that will be read in the vast majority of churches in the world on Good Friday,
in John 19:28-30,
28 After this, when Jesus knew that all
was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), “I am
thirsty.” 29 A jar full of sour wine was standing
there. So they put a sponge full of the wine on a branch of hyssop and held it
to his mouth. 30 When Jesus had received the wine,
he said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
I spent a summer when I was in seminary doing a quarter of Clinical
Pastoral Education. CPE is a program training prospective pastors to do
hospital visits and patient counseling. It’s very intense, is partially intended
to desensitize seminarians to the things they will see in hospitals, and it exposes them to a lot of different kinds of
life experiences.
The program I was part of was held at Lutheran General Hospital in Park
Ridge, Illinois.
One night, there was a humongous thunderstorm, and a lightning bolt hit
a transformer that knocked out power to the hospital. The emergency generators
kicked in and all essential services like the operating carols, the Natal
Intensive Care Units, respirators, and so on, received power.
Almost immediately, the
switchboard was lit up with calls from very agitated air traffic controllers
from the nearby O’Hare International Airport asking what had happened to the
fluorescent cross on the top of the hospital.
Pilots coming in for landings had used that cross as a visual reference
point as they descended and, seeing no cross, had been thinking that they were
coming in from the wrong side of the airport. They were pulling up and flying
in stacks over O’Hare.
From that night onward, the cross was included in the emergency power
network.
The cross is our reference point. We see the love of God on it,
what God did to restore the living relationship with God for which we were
created. We see where we stand in limitless eternity.
The Artemis II rocket lifted
off last Wednesday on a 10-day manned trip around the moon, taking human beings
to the deepest spot in space that we have ever been.
It was even more exciting than
normal as the pilot of the mission, Victor Glover, was born right here in
Pomona and graduated from high school right here in Ontario.
The launch reminded me of a
quote, possibly apocryphal, from one of the early astronauts, Walter Shirra in
1962 who, when he was asked what he thought about while he sat in what he
called the couch just before lift-off said, “Every time I climb up on the couch
I say to myself—just think, Wally, everything that makes this thing go was
supplied by the lowest bidder.” 😊
When the get into space, they will see the great void that has humbled
dozens of space explorers before them. The limitless space in which our planet
was created, and to which Jesus came to die. How can we respond to that?
Did you know that there is a local connection to the crucifixion? If you know the whole story, you know that
Jesus was crucified between two thieves. One taunted Jesus, and the other asked
Jesus for mercy and received Jesus’ promise of salvation right there. The
traditional name for the repentant thief on the cross is San Dimas. It’s
never too late to turn to Jesus and repent and be forgiven. Jesus gave up his
life to give you life.
I remember reading a story about a congregation that asked people to
donate easter lilies for its annual spectacular display to decorate the altar
area and back wall for Easter Sunday. The flowers remained for weeks and drew
visitors. One year, a woman decided that she wanted the lily that she had
donated money for to take to a shut-in. She didn’t think that anybody would
miss one lily.
After the church had cleared out, she crept up to the altar and
discovered that almost all the lilies were fake! She confronted the pastor who
said that years earlier, the leadership had decided that it was not good
stewardship to buy flowers and throw them away, that they could keep artificial
flowers, use the donated money for good causes, and that artificial flowers
were a better symbol of the resurrection anyway, because they never died.
The thing is, though, is that they never died because they were never
alive. Jesus lived among us, gave up his life for us, and then
took it back again, but gave it up to bridge the gap of separation, to
reconcile human beings with God.
The night that Sally and I had learned that she was expecting our son
was a happy night. We went to bed filled with joy. But then the next morning we
found that the young man who lived across the street from us when we lived in
another town had gone up the street and around the corner to buy cigarettes for
his mom around midnight. On his way back, he encountered another young man
whose car had a flat tire and stopped to help him.
Meanwhile, a gang was out looking for the young man with the flat, angry
over some offense and when they saw him, gunshots rang out. They missed the guy
with the flat but hit the young man from across the street instead. He managed
to stumble back to his front lawn and died there. Sally later said that she had
felt that someone had died that night.
In the midst of life, we were in death. But the message of the cross is
that Jesus took the bullet for us, so that in the midst of death, we
might be in life, eternal life in a living relationship with the one true
living God.
A pastor who
served not far from us when I served in San Dimas told the story of having gone
in to start his church’s Good Friday service, expecting the regular 30-40
people, but finding the place packed, wall to wall, standing room only.
He said to an
usher, “Wow! This is unbelievable!” The usher said, “What do you mean?” The
pastor said, “Well, everybody’s here!”
The usher
said, “But you told us that we had to be here.” “What?” the pastor replied.
“You said that
we couldn’t come to church on Easter Sunday if we didn’t come to church on Good
Friday.”, the usher said. “What?”, the pastor said.
The pastor
tried to think of what he could have said that the people interpreted in this
way.
And then he
remembered that the theme of part of his sermon the previous Sunday was that
you can’t know Easter without first knowing Good Friday! 😊
The message of
the cross is that God redeemed the world because God so loved the world.
What’s good
about Good Friday? It was terrible for Jesus, but it was really good for us.
I’m not saying
that you have to go to Good Friday worship before you can go to church on
Easter Sunday, but Easter doesn’t make much sense without it.
I encourage
you to go to a Good Friday service to experience the depth of the riches of the
love of God for you on the cross, because body piercing saved your soul.
And invite someone to go with
you.
We are now about 2,000 years,
or about 100 generations from the first Good Friday. It’s said that the Church
is always one generation away from extinction. One. If you are a Christian,
it’s because somebody, probably a friend or a relative, brought you to a
church.
I once heard a
story about the development of the Christian Church in Indonesia. The seeds of
the Church were planted by missionaries, but it had grown into an independent
church, with its own schools and seminaries. It was financially independent and
had developed its own cultural identity.
During the
pre-Christian era, Indonesians were pre-supposed to have the religion of their
parents by birth, not by faith. God stood above the parents and the children stood
below the parents.
But when the
Indonesian church composed its statement of faith, they included the words, “We
believe that God has no grandchildren.” That is, that we are not Christians
because our parents are Christians. We are Christians because we have received
the gift of reconciliation through faith.
We have been
reconciled to God through Jesus’ death on the cross. Each of us. Each of us has
had the relationship with God for which we were Created, restored. All we “do”
is to receive that gift in faith. Our attitudes and actions are the fruit
produced from that relationship with the one true living God. God has only
children.
Who will make them, if not us?
My grandmother on my father’s
side came from Norway with her parents when she was a small child. They settled
in Wisconsin among other Norwegians and did what they knew: farming. She said
that they came speaking Norwegian, but when she was in 8th grade,
they switched to English, the language of their new country.
But she said that her mother
always prayed in Norwegian. Because she wasn’t sure that God understood the new
language as well as he knew Norwegian! 😊
Norwegian was her heart
language. But what becomes of the heart when we are no longer in a familiar
culture?
It’s a common pattern among
immigrants to the United States that the third generation tries to remember
what the second generation tries to forget.
That can be true of Christian
families as well.
Worship can become
performative. Faith can become whatever serves our needs.
Sometimes, we inherit not the
content but the language and the mannerisms, even the social values of our own
tribe and clan. We become a social service agency using religious language, or
a social justice organization with a Christian tradition,
We are imitative in language,
behavior, customs, and culture, having the form of the Gospel but not the
substance of it.
Make these few remaining hours
of Lent mean something. Remake your heart language.
What’s the meaning of life in
the face of the inevitability of death? Sharing the good news of what Jesus
Christ did on the cross.
Be a first-generation Christian
again. Imitate no one but Christ. Be a child of God, because God has no
grandchildren.
And teach all who come after you to do the same.
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