A World of Graves

Death puts on all kinds of clothes

For a hungry child, an empty stomach, a tomb
A no-job father finds Death in idle hopelessness
A mother fears Death's darkness, blackened in by her baby's tears
The homeless veteran cannot escape his plot defined by fear and hard, hard memory
Dying folk face Death in the eye, trying to stare it down, but no
Rejected, marginalized people move in and out of Death's shadows
Hated immigrants feel a Death separating them from home, while serving their captors right well
A poor beggar, standing at a busy urban intersection, wrestles Death a car at a time
The lonely know Death's solitude, resigned
Prisoners endure a life behind Death's locked door
The naked experience Death as humiliating uncovering
All sorts of blind people live in a darkness no one understands but Death
Abused, violated women live in a hellish sector of Death
Oppressed people know Death's weight
Homeless strugglers know Death in the great ourdoors
Crippled, broken bodies linger around souls chasing Death away
The world can be understood as a tomb
Death's home

What we need is a way out, through, beyond, up--liberation
The Liberator overcomes
The Warrior drives out fear
The Rescuer kills death
Leaving only an
Empty Tomb!

Our faith, in a world of graves

Easter faith

Easter 2014.

The streamers will fly!

The music will rise to amazing crescendos!

The litany will inspire to tears.

The faith will be confessed again.

The children will laugh!

The pews will swell!

The preachers will preach an ancient message of surprising hope.

The Christian year ascends to its highest point before a time of more waiting.

Easter 2014.

How did we get here again, and so quickly?

Today should be a time to remember and reflect.  The cross, the place of death, signaled the results of an extremely radical message, a word from heaven directed to earth. 

Easter teaches us:

Defend widows. . .

Receive without exception children who are poor. . .

Challenge unjust, oppressive authority. . .

Resist injustice. . .

Shine a spotlight on wealth and its dangers. . .

Question religion. . .

Eat with the poor as buds. . .

Embrace sinners. . .

Accept "Samaritans". . .

Touch the "unclean". . .

Champion the homeless as fellow residents of the streets. . .

Welcome women as leaders/contributors. . .

Call for a new Kingdom emerging from within everyone. . .

Dare to announce forgiveness to thieves. . .

Befriend enemies. . .

Welcome the world to your party. . .

Prefer the poor and the weak. . .

Indeed, these are the sure, certain steps to a cross, yet giving birth to individual acts of resurrection upon which to build a life that blesses all.

An empty tomb must lead to emptied lives.

Easter 2014!

Now what?

Women

Who Baked the Bread? 

 Who baked the bread

That Jesus blessed
And broke, and shared
That Passover supper, when he said,
"This is my body
Broken for you"?

Who made the wine,
When he passed the cup,
Saying, "This is my blood,
The blood of the covenant,
Shed for you and for many.
The fruit of the vine
I shall not taste again
Until I taste it new
In the Kingdom of God"?
Who made the wine?

Was it a woman who tended the vine,
Pressed the grapes, and made the wine;
Who planted the field, threshed the wheat,
And baked the bread for others to eat?

And afterwards, did a woman come
To clear the cup; to mop,
Perhaps, a single careless drop
Of wine, of God's blood shed;
To gather every scattered crumb
Of broken body, broken bread?

Did a woman, coming to clean the room,
Find grace in the fragments left behind,
As women, later, would come to find
An angel and an empty tomb?

Katherine Dale Makus

Source: Daughters of Sarah (Mar-Apr 1988)

Add your thoughts at inward/outward

Where love lives. . .

When I reflect on "how I got where I am" today, I quickly think of the very special church of my childhood and my last parish ministry. The Richardson East Church of Christ is that congregation.

As I say, I grew up there.

In something of an unusual development, I also returned to serve as senior minister at the church for 14 years from 1980 until 1994 when I move to Central Dallas Ministries.

I've always had an unusual relationship with "church" in general--more on that later, maybe. But, this church has seemed to always major on acceptance and love, inclusion and high-touch ministry to people in trouble. No, not every member, but certainly the vast majority and almost always the leadership.

On Easter Sunday this year the church experienced what must have been an incredibly inspirational celebration of "lives resurrected." We witness a lot of the same sort of reality in the lives of the people we touch here at CDM. The two settings are very different. The renewed hope and determination to move forward, very much the same.

Take a look at what's been captured on YouTube. As always, reactions are welcomed.

Minding the Soul

Did you see Bono's Op-Ed essay in The New York Times on Saturday (April 18, 2009)? Worth reading.

Here's the start of it:

It’s 2009. Do You Know Where Your Soul Is?

By BONO
Published: April 18, 2009

I AM in Midtown Manhattan, where drivers still play their car horns as if they were musical instruments and shouting in restaurants is sport.

I am a long way from the warm breeze of voices I heard a week ago on Easter Sunday.

“Glorify your name,” the island women sang, as they swayed in a cut sandstone church. I was overwhelmed by a riot of color, an emotional swell that carried me to sea.

Christianity it turns out, has a rhythm — and it crescendos this time of year. The rumba of Carnival gives way to the slow march of Lent, then to the staccato hymnals of the Easter parade. From revelry to reverie. After 40 days in the desert, sort of ... Carnival — rock stars are good at that.

“Carne” is flesh; “Carne-val,” its goodbye party. I’ve been to many. Brazilians say they’ve done it longest; they certainly do it best. You can’t help but contract the fever. You’ve got no choice but to join the ravers as they swell up the streets bursting like the banks of a river in a flood of fun set to rhythm. This is a Joy that cannot be conjured. This is life force. This is the heart full and spilling over with gratitude. The choice is yours ...

It’s Lent I’ve always had issues with. I gave it up ... self-denial is where I come a cropper. My idea of discipline is simple — hard work — but of course that’s another indulgence.

Then comes the dying and the living that is Easter.

It’s a transcendent moment for me — a rebirth I always seem to need. Never more so than a few years ago, when my father died. I recall the embarrassment and relief of hot tears as I knelt in a chapel in a village in France and repented my prodigal nature — repented for fighting my father for so many years and wasting so many opportunities to know him better. I remember the feeling of “a peace that passes understanding” as a load lifted. Of all the Christian festivals, it is the Easter parade that demands the most faith — pushing you past reverence for creation, through bewilderment at the idea of a virgin birth, and into the far-fetched and far-reaching idea that death is not the end. The cross as crossroads. Whatever your religious or nonreligious views, the chance to begin again is a compelling idea.

Last Sunday, the choirmaster was jumping out of his skin ... stormy then still, playful then tender, on the most upright of pianos and melodies. He sang his invocations in a beautiful oaken tenor with a freckle-faced boy at his side playing conga and tambourine as if it was a full drum kit. The parish sang to the rafters songs of praise to a God that apparently surrendered His voice to ours.

I come to lowly church halls and lofty cathedrals for what purpose? I search the Scriptures to what end? To check my head? My heart? No, my soul. For me these meditations are like a plumb line dropped by a master builder — to see if the walls are straight or crooked. I check my emotional life with music, my intellectual life with writing, but religion is where I soul-search.

Read the entire essay here.

Faith Sung and Worked Out

Hymn sung in church, Easter 2009. . .

Christ Is Alive

In ev'ry insult, rift and war,

Where color, scorn or wealth divide,

Christ suffers still, yet loves the more,

And lives, where even hope has died.

Christ is alive, and comes to bring

Good news to this and ev'ry age,

Till earth and sky and ocean ring

With joy, with justice, love and praise.

.

Easter Meditation: "This is my church. . ."

Lots of us these days are wondering about how "church" ought to be redefined more in line with the spirit, values and life of its founder.

Where are we to stand and what are we to do when it comes to the marginalized, the oppressed and those who are routinely taken advantage of? What has this to do with being church in our world today?

As an Easter Meditation, I offer the following clip from the classic 1954 film, On the Waterfront.

Anxious to know your ideas after you watch it.

Hope

Easter is about hope.

Life presses on us circumstances, pain, defeat, fear and doubt at such a depth and pace that without hope we find no reason whatsoever for going on.

But, hope lives among us. Or, if it doesn't at this moment, it can be reborn.

Years ago it became very clear to me that if a child has hope, she will learn to read at grade level, no matter what other factors in her world may be out of whack. Everything may not be perfect. A world full of fear and challenge may surround the child, but with hope, great things are not only just possible, they are within reach.

I've observed much the same thing in the eyes of my homeless friends. A basic hope in what is ahead keeps the most challenged life moving on with a sense that better things are ahead or could be.

Life hard wires us for hope.

Hope feels genetic.

Hope fuels communities.

Hope rallies families.

Hope fires the poorest church in the inner city.

Hope knocks the single parent out of bed every morning and sends her into another day of hard work, as she thinks of the better life her kids will enjoy.

Hope moves people all over the world to find and to carve out a better life, a better world.

Hope makes acts of great risk and courage feel routine.

Life teaches us all about the power of darkness, doubt and despair.

Easter calls us back to hope.

Darkness does not have, cannot have the last word.

Death surely will not win out. Life prevails.

And, even here, no matter what, hope lives!

If I were preaching on Easter. . .

I've been wrestling with Jesus for almost 50 years.

I mean, the guy has this way of getting all over you, under your skin, moving inside your head and never letting go!

The longer I have studied, listened to and observed him in the biblical record, in terms of his historical impact and in regard to the effect he has had on my own life and world, the more convinced I am that most people don't really understand him, what he said or who he was.

Jesus didn't talk much at all about church things.

He didn't provide much instruction on worship services or music styles.

He wasn't into institutional matters. In fact, he chaffed against the institutional leaders and voices of his own day. In my experience he continues that same tact today.

Jesus didn't talk about ordination or education or anything related to status in positive terms.

He talked about life. He talked about this world, its pain and how he wanted to open folks up to a new way of navigating their way through this life.

He connected the here-and-now of my life to the there and then of the next life.

So, if I were preaching this Easter Sunday (and, to the relief of so many, including myself, I am not!), my sermon would be a bit different than it was 15 or 20 years ago.

I would be pointing beyond the particulars of the resurrection narrative to the significance of the story, the claim and the man, as each relates to the real world in which I live today.

What, after all, is the power of the resurrection story for my world?

The resurrection story declares that death will not have the last word and that life beyond this life is certain. But, remember, this is a story about a person who dies, passes over and then returns. This movement toward this world is very important, or so it seems to me.

If my afterlife is squared away, I am free to concentrate on this world--its beauty, its ugliness, its pain, its joy, its need and its assets.

If I truly believe in the truth back of Easter, I am not carried farther away from this world. To the contrary, Jesus shows me that I am pressed deeper into it and its messiness.

So, my one-point message would be simple beyond belief.

To celebrate the resurrection, to signal your belief in its power and its truth, be a resurrection in your world! Live your life as an agent of resurrection, life, renewal and hope.

That's what I'd just have to say.