Practice Resurrection!
In his poem “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” Wendell Berry advises the reader to do things that don’t necessarily make sense, such as “love God and the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it.” He recommends we ask difficult questions and plan for a future we ourselves will never see. And when those with power can predict our thoughts and behavior, Berry tells us, that’s when we should change. He sums up all the advice in the poem with two words: Practice resurrection.
Last Sunday, the Christian world celebrated Easter, telling the story of Jesus’ resurrection as a way of proclaiming that love is stronger than hate and even death. It will not be defeated by petty tyrants who live fearfully by violence, hoarding wealth and power. But resurrection isn’t just a one time event that happened to Jesus 2000 years ago. Resurrection is a principle and a way of life. Those who choose to walk God’s Way of Love are asked, as Wendell Berry asks us, to practice resurrection. To become a resurrection people who, when struck down, rise again from the ashes.
Resurrection people reject the hate and selfishness that leads to death, putting their trust in the belief that love will overcome. They nurture life, building loving and supporting relationships, valuing compassion and justice – and not just for themselves, but for their grandchildren and great-grandchildren and all the people who will come after them who they will never know. Resurrection people are resilient and generous, loving and forgiving. They put their faith and hope in God as they seek to live justly in peace, believing there is always a light to guide them out of darkenss.
The story of Easter morning shows us how we can become such a people.1 When the women were going to Jesus’ tomb to anoint his body, they must have wondered how they were ever going to get in as the tomb was closed off by a huge stone. They could have just stayed home, accepting defeat without trying, but they went anyway and discovered new life where they expected to find death. What obstacles threaten to block us from encountering new life? For many of us, it will be our perceived need to protect ourselves and not worry about anyone else, which leads to apathy, fear, and selfishness. These are barriers reinforced by the world around us. Those who seek to exploit others don’t want themcoming together in loving community. They want them to feel scared, separated, hateful, and weak. Being a resurrection people means looking at the barriers in front of us and challenging them like those women did on Easter morning. People of life cannot be held in tombs of fear.
We also need to make sure we look for life in the right places. The women encounter strangers at the tomb who ask them why they are looking for the living in a graveyard. But we do this all of the time. We want to live full and joyful lives, but we look in the wrong places. We delude ourselves that life can be found in addictions or wealth or more power, but when we look in places of death, we will only find more death, more stones threatening to block our way. If we want the fullness of life, then let’s look where life is nurtured. Instead of roadblocks that stop us from acting, we can choose to see challenges to be tackled. Instead of focusing on scarcity and what we don’t have, we can focus on the abundance of what we do have. We can put our trust in God that we’ll either be able to move the stones or find another way. Instead of driving wedges between ourselves thinking it will protect us, we can reach out and build relationship, nurturing life for everyone, other people as well as rivers, lakes, and oceans, forests and fields, wild animals and birds.
Finally, to be a resurrection people we need to accept that not everything is going to make sense. When the women went back to the other disciples and reported what they had found (or didn’t find), they weren’t believed. Their story made no sense. How could Jesus be alive? Peter went to the tomb himself to investigate and we’re told he was amazed that the tomb was empty. But there’s no indication that he understood what had happened, at least not yet. It still didn’t make sense and Peter and the others were left asking what had just happened, what did it mean, and what happens next? Life won’t always make sense to us and we’re often left asking how and why. Resurrection invites us to trust God and lean into the unknown. Resurrection turns everything upside down. God sees life where we see death. Because of that, sometimes we don’t understand what’s going on or we don’t recognize the new life happening right in front of us.
God’s love can’t be killed. It is stronger than death. It is life-giving. And if we are to walk the path of this death-defying, life-giving love, then we are asked to become a resurrection people, a death-defying and life-giving people. Let’s set aside our fear and selfishness, meet our challenges with hope and a thirst for peace and justice, and seek life not in graveyards but gardens. Instead of demanding life happen our way, let’s live with an amazement for the possibilities of the unexpected. Practice resurrection! Easter blessings to everyone!
1. Luke 24:1-12; Thanks also to Cameron Trimble @
for inspiring some of this reflection.