Practice Resurrection: Act as signposts of hope

see all Practice Resurrection 2016 posts here

Mural created by Syrian refugees and local Jordanian youth to promote harmony, Jordan
source

Signposts of hope

With Easter, God's new creation is launched upon a surprised world, pointing ahead to the renewal, the redemption, the rebirth of the entire creation.... every act of love, every deed done in Christ and by the Spirit, every work of true creativity -- doing justice, making peace, healing families, resisting temptation, seeking and winning true freedom -- is an earthly event in a long history of things that implement Jesus's own resurrection and anticipate the final new creation and act as signposts of hope.

N.T. Wright
Surprised by Hope

via Topology magazine

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Today's Readings:  

Acts 9:36-43  • 

 

Psalm 23  • 

 

Revelation 7:9-17  • 

 

John 10:22-30

Practice Resurrection: Wage peace

Sea of Galilee
Sister Mary Corita Kent
source

Wage peace

Wage peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble,
breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists
and breathe out sleeping children and freshly mown fields.

Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.

Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.
Play music, memorize the words for thank you in three languages.
Learn to knit, and make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,
imagine grief
as the outbreath of beauty
or the gesture of fish.

Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.
Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious:
Have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.

Celebrate today.

Judyth Hill
"Wage Peace," written on September 11, 2001

via Topology magazine

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Today's Readings: 

Acts 9:1-6, (7-20) •

 

Psalm 30 • 

Revelation 5:11-14 • 

John 21:1-19

Practice Resurrection: Be believing!

Caravaggio

Be believing*

(John 20:19-30)

Later on
that day / the dark room
was enough
to concoct buttoned down,
in our minds.

While we lingered bolted-in,
shut-up / You
breezed past barricade as One
hole-pocked / exhaled
absolution, a hot gust
peace be with you;
materialized new --
as Yourself / awake & alive
after the woman's claim
you spoke her name.

afraid / our fingers
traced your split side
'til we inhaled
Your closer breathing,
our truer air.

*I wrote this poem a few years ago, inspired by the form Luci Shaw used in her poem Ascending.

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What do you need help believing to be true about the resurrected Christ?  What fears are hindering you from receiving his offer of peace?

Practice Resurrection: send me your photos and captions!

For the next six weeks (from now until Pentecost), will you join me in feasting on Resurrection goodness in our everyday lives?

During Lent, the phrase retrieve lament captures me through the words of Rilke. During the Great Fifty Days of Easter, it's the lovable contrarian Wendell Berry exhorting my imagination with two words (plus many more): Practice Resurrection.

I also remember each year the passage I've fallen in love with from N.T. Wright:

"... we should be taking steps to celebrate Easter in creative new ways: in art, literature, children's games, poetry, music, dance, festivals, bells, special concerts, anything that comes to mind. this is our greatest festival....This is our greatest day. We should put the flags out. 

...if Lent is a time to give things up, Easter ought to be a time to take things up. Champagne for breakfast again -- well, of course....The forty days of the Easter season, until the ascension, ought to be a time to balance out Lent by taking something up, some new task or venture, something wholesome and fruitful and outgoing and self-giving. You may be able to do it only for six weeks, just as you may be able to go without beer or tobacco only for the six weeks of Lent. But if you really make a start on it, it might give you a sniff of new possibilities, new hopes, new ventures you never dreamed of. It might bring something of Easter into your innermost life..."

After attending Good Friday service together this year, my daughters and I talked honestly about how sometimes Easter feels like a let-down. It seems to be easier to understand fasting better that feasting. We thought that might be, in part, because our world is generally obsessed with feasting, and whatever we try to do to mark Eastertide feels like the stuff we're normally trying to do every day anyway. 

Maybe so. 

I wonder, too, if sometimes feasting shows more plainly how far away from God we still live. When I can be satisfied in just the right amount of wine or chocolate, that is feasting. When I can't stop either one, that turns into gluttony - which is no longer true feasting. In some ways, fasting is easier, see?

Put another way: feasting is a discipline, too. We take in the good with gratitude and contentment without making an idol of the gifts. This requires us to depend on the Creator as much (maybe more so) as any other spiritual exercise.

So that's what I've been pondering.

The last couple of years, we've celebrated Eastertide on this blog with photos and captions you send me each week. It's one of my favorite series all year, and I'm excited it's time to start again!

For the next six weeks (from now until Pentecost), will you join me in feasting on Resurrection goodness in our everyday lives? It can be as simple as a special candle you use for your meals during Eastertide or as elaborate as travelling across the world to meet new people. 

Whatever it is, will you show us a picture and tell us a few words? Plant spring flowers (maybe a new variety this year)? Show us! Get up to see the sun rise on a Sunday morning? Tell us about it! Take a new route to work (maybe taking more time than necessary in honor of the mad farmer)? Share it!

Three steps to play along:

1. Add something to your day that helps you practice resurrection. (one day or fifty days doesn't matter)  

2. Take a picture and write a description in 1-50 words.  

3. Share it with me via an email, Facebook. I'll share some of your photo-stories with everyone here each week.

Who's in?

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Thank you to these friends who are helping me kick off this weekly series: 

"I journeyed and prayed through the prayer labyrinth this morning out at the Shrine of St. Therese. There I laid my sorrows down. There I thanked Him for His suffering and enduring the cross. There I laid the 25 years of my marriage down. There I begged Him to be kind and gracious and to forgive my failures. He is full of grace and freedom. Thank you Jesus for all you are to me." (Wendy Wall, Juneau, AK)

.....

(I love an artist willing to share a photo of his work in progress!) "Day one of my next parable painting : Mark 4:26-29 26 He also said, ‘The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, 27 and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. 28 The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. 29 But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.’ " (Jim Janknegt, Austin)

.....

"We haven't traveled locally nearly as much here in Texas.... I think we have to be really intentional or else it doesn't happen, what with city life and unbelievable traffic in our day-to-day. Today? We decided to let the kids take a day off school and take their learning on the road - just like we used to. Feels good to find a familiar rhythm today." (Tsh Oxenreider, Austin. By the way, you can read about this excursion at Tsh's blog, The Art of Simple)

..... 

"Easter welcomes outdoor running on Lake Michigan." (Sarah Lewis, Chicago)

.....

"A few little vignettes from today's Easter feast with darling friends. I'm so happy to have had a house full of laughing and toasting and food." / "Phaedra printed a collection of posters for Easter and placed them throughout the house. It was like a scavenger hunt for words that dearly need to be true and images that made our spaces beautiful. God knows I need his resurrection life, and thank Jesus for it." (Phaedra & David Taylor, Richmond, TX)

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"Just because!" (Kim & Gracie Akel, Austin)

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"I was overwhelmed today that God would send me to Japan at such a gloriously beautiful time as cherry blossom blooming. I'm so glad he knows our hearts and gives us these good gifts." (Tammy Burger, Binghamton, NY)

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Prelude to Vespers, Easter Sunday at Orcas Island Community Church  (Brian Moss, Eastsound, WA)

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Now it's your turn. Who wants to join us?

The best place to start is with another reading of the poem that inspires our Eastertide blog series....

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

 by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.

Practice resurrection. 

Practice Resurrection: Reintroduce yourself

The Resurrection: Reunion of Families
Stanley Spencer
source

Reintroduced

The resurrection is a moment in which human beings are reintroduced to each other across the gulf of mutual resentment and blame; a new human community becomes possible.

Rowan Williams
The Dwelling of the Light

via Topology magazine

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What relationships in your life are separated now by "mutual resentment and blame"? Where could the reality of resurrection bridge the gap and allow you to reintroduce yourself?

Practice Resurrection: Make visible

Famous Artists In Their Studios  / Ron Mueck
source

Make visible

Culture making is needed in every company, every school and every church.  In every place there are impossibilities that leave even the powerful feeling constrained and drained, and that rob the powerless of the ability to imagine something different and better.  At root, every human cultural enterprise is haunted by the ultimate impossibility, death, which threatens to slam shut the door of human hope.  But God is at work precisely in these places where the impossible seems absolute.  Our calling is to join him in what he is already doing -- to make visible what, in exodus and resurrection, he has already done.

Andy Crouch
Culture Making

via Topology magazine

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Where this Eastertide is God calling you to join him in what he is already doing to make resurrection life visible?

Practice Resurrection: Embrace life!

Planting Out
Joy Williams
source

Embrace of life

The practice of resurrection is not an attack on the world of death; it is a nonviolent embrace of life in the county of death.  It is an open invitation to live eternity in time.

Eugene Peterson
Practice Resurrection
via Topology magazine

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What is in front of you this week welcoming you to embrace life?

Practice Resurrection: Look forward to a resurrected body!

Photographer Takes A Boy With Muscular Dystrophy On An Imaginary Adventure
Matej Peljhan
source

The body, glorified

To see Christ as God and man is probably no more difficult today than it has always been, even if today there seem to be more reasons to doubt. For you it may be a matter of not being able to accept what you call a suspension of the laws of the flesh and the physical, but for my part I think that when I know what the laws of the flesh and the physical really are, then I will know what God is. We know them as we see them, not as God sees them. For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified. I have always thought that purity was the most mysterious of the virtues, but it occurs to me that it would never have entered the human consciousness to conceive of purity if we were not to look forward to a resurrection of the body, which will be flesh and spirit united in peace, in the way they were in Christ. The resurrection of Christ seems the high point in the law of nature.

Flannery O’Connor"Letter to 'A' (Sep. 6, 1955)" in The Habit of Being

via Topology magazine

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What are YOU looking forward to when you think of a resurrected body (for you or for someone else)?

Practice Resurrection: Take heart!

Za'atari Syrican Refugee Camp, swimming hole
source

We take heart

And yet, and yet, the times are inexhaustibly good, solaced by the courage and hope of many. The truth rules, Christ is not forsaken. In a time of death, some men and women--the resisters, those who work hardily for social change, those who preach and embrace the unpalatable truth--such men and women overcome death, their lives are bathed in the light of the resurrection, the truth has set them free. In the jaws of death, of contumely, of good and ill report, they proclaim their love of the people. We think of such men and women in the world, in our nation, in the churches, and the stone in our breast is dissolved. We take heart once more.

Daniel Berrigan

"Our Apologies, Good Friends" in Essential Writings 

via Topology magazine

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What people do you think of when you read Berrigan's description of men and women "bathed in light of resurrection"? What stories from their lives cause you to take heart?

your Practice Resurrection photo stories [2015, vol. 4]

via: Lent & Beyond

This is our last week of photo stories as we near Pentecost.  I am so grateful to rehearse the reality of Christ's gift of "life that trumps death" with some beautiful contributions this week. Thank you to everyone who shared photos and stories this year. You made Eastertide a brighter, more joyful season for us!  

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"Loved."  (Paul & Lisa Van Allen, Austin, TX)

Read this post Henri's dad shared during the waiting and mourning of Holy Week.  We're so glad to welcome this beautiful boy during the celebration of life in Eastertide.

....

This photo looks past our little front porch and the cultivated flower beds to the sea of wildflowers (Indian blanket) that adamantly take over each spring nearly obscuring our front path. Knowing that it will all likely be toasty brown in a few months under the Texas sun makes me want to soak in the spring fervor just like our soil is gulping this blessed rain." 

"While looking for some fencing in a neglected pile this week, I discovered that the brambly dewberries growing wild around our property were finally having a productive year due to the rains we've been receiving. So it just seemed worthwhile to celebrate that abundance and wander around the edges of the wild areas of our land to see what I could find. What a delight to easily pick a decent amount of fruit (for two of us)! So I also had to pick a child's handful of meadow pinks, those charming pink wildflowers which have an indescribable sweet fragrance and last surprisingly well in a vase." (Jan Horn, Bastrop County, TX)

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"To be honest, there have been moments when I've felt a little overwhelmed by it all. I have even wished that I had more time for remembering and celebrating Easter with the boys, but when I think of what we are gaining as we plant and tend and I am reminded that the celebration of new life is part of Eastertide, I'm very grateful for this land and these hens we've been given to care for.  Alleluia!" (Emily Watkins, blogging from Richmond, VA at Wondering Through the Year)

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"The rain trickled, and soon poured over us in sheets.  Then thunderous giggles ensued."  (Kim Akel, Austin, TX)

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"A quick coffee run at the local deli turned into forty minutes of Evy singing with these guys. It was such and unexpected surprise. Evidently every Friday morning, whoever can make it gets together for a jam session. Including this lady shaking her maraca with all her heart.  I love NY." (Cheryl Mango, New York, NY) 

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"Here we are, over a year after the stroke. I continue to be both incredibly sad for Renee's losses and at the same time filled with admiration for her ability to keep going forward despite them.  She hasn't given up. Her desire is to be able to run again; which by the way, she has started doing in therapy -- and through our kitchen.  It's almost unbelievable to watch." (Les & Renee Aylesworth, Owego, NY)

Read this mourning story Les shared in Holy Week.  We're so glad to welcome this beautiful boy during the celebration of life in Eastertide.

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"Despite the seizures, we were excited to announce the pregnancy! A week later we'd be making a much darker announcement -- the seizures were caused by a malignant brain tumor. The anticipation of our son was overshadowed by doctors, hospitals and multiple surgeries. We kept pushing forward. In the end, the tumor was downgraded and our son was born healthy.  It was a miracle." (Earl, Florrie and Alastair Barnett, LaGrange, GA)

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I took my first class in Seminary in 2006. It was a mission’s class called Perspectives that I took with two colleagues. We stayed at a Christian retreat for ten days, learned about each other, learned about Jesus' love for all peoples.  I received 3 hours of seminary credit toward a master’s degree for the effort. 

That was nine years ago.

Yesterday, I graduated from Redeemer Seminary in Austin. Seminary was hard for me. I am 15 years older than the 11 of the 12 other guys I graduated with. I was the only Anglican, and I am not a scholar in the classic sense of the word. 

Seminary was so hard for me that I considered not walking in my graduation ceremony. Following the advice of my wife and friends, I walked and received my diploma in front of my wife, children, pastor, and my fellow graduates. And my perspective changed.

Rather than remembering the hard times over the past nine years, I remembered all of the people who helped me achieve this goal. I remember how my wife routinely showed me the graciousness and strength of Jesus. I remembered how the fine people of Christ Church supported me with resources and words of encouragement.

Rather than recalling the frustration that I often felt, I rehearsed the joy from the great friendships that I forged these past nine years; the confidence I gained from sitting under Godly professors; and the honor I feel from being invited to serve the Redeemer and Restorer of all creation.

There is an old joke that calls “seminary” “cemetery”. I used to use the lingo in my most frustrated times. But after walking into the graduation ceremony last evening singing “All Hail the Power of Jesus Name”, I think that I will call my experience “resurrection life” instead.   (Brian Murphy, Austin, TX )

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