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“Witnesses to the Resurrection” Church scandals and the faithful who stay

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My friend Tony Robinson, author, speaker, preacher, and peripatetic traveler for the good of the church, is an acute observer of what is going on in our world.

I heartily recommend his website Anthony B. Robinson, and especially the page called “What’s Tony Thinking?”  A few days ago he posted some good thoughts from Peggy Noonan on the Roman Catholic clergy sex abuse story.  He wrote:

“I am becoming a fan of Peggy Noonan’s Saturday columns in the Wall Street Journal. This week she wrote on the Catholic clergy sex abuse troubles concluding by saying, “There are three great groups of victims in this story. The first and most obvious, the children who were abused, who trusted, were preyed upon and bear the burden through life. The second group is the good priests and good nuns, the great leaders of the church in the day to day, who save the poor, teach the immigrant, and literally, save lives. They have been stigmatized when they deserve to be lionized. And the third group is the Catholics in the pews–the heroic Catholics of America and now Europe, the hardy souls who in spite of what has been done to their church are still there, still making parish life possible, who hold high the flag, their faith unshaken. No one thanks those Catholics, sees their heroism, respects their patience and fidelity. The world thinks they are stupid. They are not stupid, and with their prayers they keep the world going, and the old church too.

One might say the same of many “heroic laypeople” in all sorts of congregations and communities of faith amid failures of leadership and scandals and disarray among higher ups. So many good people keep on keeping on in the face of disappointment, deceit and challenge. They are the witnesses to the resurrection.”

 

That last observation is a particularly wise one, I think.  I can remember sometimes looking out at the congregations I have served after a particularly nasty fight over something ephemeral and wondering, “Why do they even bother to come back every Sunday?  There must be more here than meets the eye.”  And, of course, the answer is that there is!

As somebody once said about Noah’s ark: “If it wasn’t for the storm outside,  one couldn’t stand the stench inside.”   Still, Tony is just right.  These faithful are living witnesses to the resurrection.

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Spring busts out in the Berkshires, but “Nothing Gold Can Stay”

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T. S. Eliot wrote that “April is the cruelest month,” but it was another poet that better described our Berkshires today.

After recent rains the season’s first really hot day brought out the early buds, as well as lawn rakers and walkers out taking the air after a long winter indoors.

The Forsythia bloomed since yesterday, and the branches are full of the delicate gold that a week from now will be the green leaves of spring.

Our great New England poet Robert Frost described such days in his poem:

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leafs a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost
(October 1923, The Yale Review)

(Photo:  R. L. Floyd)

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Eastertide Ruminations on Committal Practices around Cremation

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My mother died young at age 53 in 1967, and by her request was cremated. There was a moving memorial service for her at our little church, but the “cremains” remained in a box inside a cardboard box on my father’s dresser for years, since my bereft and broken-hearted Dad either didn’t know what to do with them, or just couldn’t part with them.   Some good pastoral care would have been helpful.  For years I felt no sense of place to pay my respects to my mother or grieve or do whatever one needs to do at a graveside.

Many years later my Dad remarried a wonderful woman named Virginia, and my Mom’s ashes went along with him to his new household.  He was blessed with ten very happy years with his second wife, and then in 1983 he himself died at the age of 69.  My wife and I were privileged to be with him for a couple weeks at the time of his death, although I had left for a few minutes to have a swim in the ocean when he actually died.  When I saw my wife standing quietly on the shore I knew he was gone.

Later that week I received a phone call that from anybody else but a gracious soul like Virginia might have been extremely awkward.  We were preparing for my Dad’s graveside committal (unlike my mother, he had chosen to be buried), and Virginia asked me and my sister and brother, “What should I do with your Mom’s ashes?”  He had held onto them all those years.

So we all huddled and decided they should go into the ground alongside my Dad’s body and that’s what we did. So my sister, brother, my Dad’s wife, and I saw both my parents committed to the ground in “The sure and certain hope of eternal life,“ despite the fact that they had died 17 years apart.   And it probably wasn’t with those words since it was a Quaker cemetery (Virginia was a Quaker and my Dad had become one), and Quakers are short on liturgy.  Nonetheless, now we have a place, even if it is far from where we live.

We know their remains are just that, but rituals and sacred sites have their place in our lives.  Once in answer to a question about multiple spouses in heaven, Jesus said that “when the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven,” so I anticipate in faith that God will sort it all out on the Great Day of Resurrection.

Cremations were rare back in 1967, and my mother was a practical Christian woman with a proto-Green streak.  Today cremations are much more common, but our committal practices have not caught up with that reality.

A friend of mine sent me a link to today’s Christian Century blog. There is a moving and instructive article by Thomas Lynch called The holy fire, Cremation: A practice in need of ritual.  Lynch is a writer (a good one) and a funeral director, and I recommend that every pastor should read this piece, which can be found here.

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The Resurrection is not a metaphor: “Seven Stanzas at Easter by John Updike”

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A few years ago, a friend of mine, a college professor, was driving by a local Lutheran Church and saw in big letters on their sign, THE RESURRECTION IS NOT A METAPHOR!

Those who read this blog know my love for the work of John Updike, one of our best Twentieth Century Christian novelists. His poetry is pretty good, too.  Here’s his take on the wise Lutherans’ signboard.


Seven Stanzas at Easter
by John Updike

 

Make no mistake: if He rose at all

it was as His body.

If the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the

amino acids rekindle,

the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,

each soft spring recurrent;

it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the

eleven apostles;

it was as his flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,

the same valved heart

that – pierced – died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of

enduring Might

new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,

analogy, sidestepping transcendence;

making of the event a parable, a thing painted in the faded credulity

of earlier ages:

let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier mache,

not stone in a story,

but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will

eclipse for each of us

the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,

make it a real angel,

weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the

dawn light, robed in real linen

spun on a definite loom.

Let us not make it less monstrous,

for in our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,

lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour,

we are embarrassed by the miracle,

and crushed by remonstrance.

– John Updike, “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” in Telephone Poles and Other Poems (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964), 72–3.
(Photo by David Macy:  Easter, yesterday, North Haven, Maine)

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On Easter Day, on Easter Day

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On Easter Day, on Easter Day
The angel rolled the stone away.
Let all good Christians sing and pray
On Easter Day.

On Easter Day, on Easter Day
A new creation came to stay
To take the sting of death away
On Easter Day.

On Easter Day, on Easter Day
Christ came among them, so they say,
And shared his story on the Way
On Easter Day.

On Easter Day, this Easter Day,
We come to worship, sing and pray,
And share his presence, come what may
On Easter Day.

©Richard L. Floyd, 2004

(Picture: Resurrection by Matthias Grunewald, Colmar, France)

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“He descended into Hell.” Ruminations on the Work of Christ between Good Friday and Easter

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One of the most problematic phrases in the Apostles’ Creed for many people today is the assertion that Jesus “descended into Hell” (descenit ad inferos in the original Latin.)

Some congregations just omit it, others alter it. Some say he descended “to the dead, ”which seems to me to be redundant after we have just said, “He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.” The United Methodist Church omits it altogether. It doesn’t appear at all in the Nicene Creed, although there is a long tradition of iconography in the Eastern Church of the “Descent into Hell.” The Athanasian Creed contains it.

For this post I am going to skirt the complex question of what the term “hell” even means.  For many believers today the phrase means nothing more that the agony of Jesus’ death on the Cross, a metaphorical Hell. It was certainly at least that. I think it is means more.

It must be admitted that the Scriptural evidence is slender. Among the texts used are: Ephesians 4:7-10., 1 Peter 3:18-20, and 1 Peter 4:6. None of them are without ambiguity.

But the belief that Jesus descended into Hell is an early one in the church. A creed from Syria in the Third Century says that Jesus was “crucified under Pontius Pilate and departed in peace, in order to preach to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all the saints concerning the end of the world and the resurrection of the dead.”

The early doctrine based on this phrase is “The Harrowing of Hell,” attested to by several of the early important Church Fathers, including Tertullian, Origen, and Hippolytus. Later Ambrose of Milan (who may have been the principle author of the Apostles Creed) refers to it.

The thrust of the doctrine can perhaps best be stated by the current catechism of the Roman Catholic Church which asserts: “In his human soul united to his divine person, the dead Christ went down to the realm of the dead. He opened Heaven’s gates for the just who had gone before him.”

Since I generally operate out of what I call “a hermeneutic of trust” for both Scripture and the ancient traditions of the church, the first questions I ask are why is it there? And what does it mean?

The obvious answer is that there are three days between the death of Jesus on Good Friday and his Resurrection on Easter. So where was he and what was he doing?

My answer to both those questions is a simple one.  It seems to me the descent into Hell functions theologically to show the scope of God’s saving work in Jesus Christ. Eastern icons often show the Resurrected Christ rising out of Hell dragging Adam and Eve with him, one with each hand.

Whether it is symbolized by this deliverance of our original forebears, the preaching to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, or to all who died before the first Good Friday, his descent affirms that there is no place, even Hell, where Jesus’ saving work cannot go, no corner of the cosmos untouched by his atoning Cross. This reminds me of the words in Psalm 139, where the Psalmist asks God, “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there? If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. (Vs. 7, 8.)

This is the love that will not let us go.  This is what Jesus died for.

To end this meditation I share an irreverent contemporary prose-poem sent to me from a friend of mine, which imagines Jesus waking up in Hell:

Goodtime Jesus
by James Tate

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn’t afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How ’bout some coffee? Don’t mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

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Good Friday: “Sometimes it causes me to tremble!”

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“Sometimes it causes me to tremble” is a line from the refrain of the well-known spiritual, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” The trembling comes upon the witness to Jesus’ crucifixion, and like many hymns and spirituals puts the singer or hearer in the role of a witness to the event.

This is a particularly modern approach, an existential one we might say, where the “religious affections,” to use Jonathan Edwards’ term, are profoundly moved by contemplating Jesus on the cross.

But there is another parallel tradition as ancient as the New Testament that sees in the death of Jesus not merely a profoundly agonizing event which moves the witnesses, then and now, but also as an event that changes the whole world, even the natural world.

In theology talk we would call the Cross of Jesus a “cosmic and eschatological” event, meaning that its implications were both universal in scope and ultimate in time.

We see some of this imagery already in, for example, the Gospel of Mark, our earliest Gospel, where he describes the earth darkening at the hour of the crucifixion, and the veil of the temple being torn in two. (Mark 15:33 and 38)

Matthew’s account says even more of this kind of thing: “The earth shook and the rocks were split.” (Matt. 57: 21b)  Luke adds that “the sun’s light failed.” (Luke 23:45)

P. T. Forsyth once got at the cosmic implications of the Cross by saying that the very atomic structure of the universe was changed by this event. Whether he meant this as science or as a metaphor, either way it points to the vast repercussions of the moment when “They crucified my Lord.”

Earlier generations were more able to see in such an event, not the merely personal and individual, where our time seems to want to safely relegate all religious phenomena, but the cosmic.

Here’s an example of such a cosmic view from Frances Quarles, a Seventeenth Century poet, which refers to a trembling that shook not just the believer, but the earth itself.  He doesn’t ignore the personal. On the contrary, he asks, if these senseless things can tremble so, “Shall I not melt one poor drop to see my Saviour die?”

The Earth Did Tremble
“The earth did tremble: and heaven’s closed eye was loathe to see the Lord of Glory die.
The skies were clad in mourning, and the spheres forgot their harmony;
The clouds dropped tears.
The ambitious dead arose to give him room; and ev’ry grave did gape to be his tomb.
The affrighted heav’n sent down elegious thunder;
The world’s foundation loosed, to lose their founder;
The impatient temple rent her veil in two,
To teach our hearts what our sad hearts should do:
Shall senseless things do this, and shall I not melt one poor drop to see my Savior die?
Drill forth my tears and trickle one by one till you have pierced this heart of mine, this stone.”
Frances Quarles, 1592-1644
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Maundy Thursday Ruminations about Jesus’ vocation and ours with help from Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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The Passion narrative is “thick,” and no day in the church year has more going on in it than today.

First of all we have the Lord’s Supper, which I believe, along with many scholars, contains authentic words of Jesus, in which he tries to give his disciples an interpretive framework for understanding the meaning of his upcoming death.

Luke describes that immediately after the Supper “a dispute also arose among them about who would be the greatest,” which suggests that Jesus’ interpretive framework had gone right over their heads. (Luke 22:24)  This is neither the first nor the last time that the church didn’t get it.

Then, Luke tells us, they all left the Supper and took a postprandial stroll to the Mount of Olives, where Jesus goes off by himself, a “stone’s throw away” and prays to the Father, “If you are willing, remove this cup from me, yet not my will, but yours be done.” (Luke  22:42)

When the church later came to assert the doctrine of the two natures of Christ, that he was “truly human and truly divine,” few episodes in the Gospels show his human nature better than this small episode.

We have seen throughout this Gospel (Luke) how Jesus has been steadfastly intent on his vocation to go to Jerusalem and die.  At one point in the story (Luke 9: 51) we are told that, “he set his face toward Jerusalem,” a quote loosely based on Isaiah 50:7, where the Psalmist says he has set his face “like a flint.”  That’s a pretty strong image of determination.

Yet here, in this prayer, he ponders in prayer to the Father if there might be some way to get out of his calling.  It is not a long moment, for immediately he says, “yet not my will, but yours be done.”

It may not be a long moment, but it is a significant one, because it seems to me that no Christian vocation, and I don’t mean merely that of the ordained, is without the temptation to find a shortcut, an easier way, certainly a way that avoids a cross, either, as in this case, literally, or in most of our cases, metaphorically.

Dietrich Bonhoefffer, one of our modern saints and martyrs, wrestled mightily with his conscience about his decision to participate in a plot to kill Adolph Hitler.  The plot failed, and he was executed by the Nazis for his part in it just days before the war ended.  Whether you support his decision (many Christian pacifists, for example, do not) you must admit the integrity and courage of his act.  It was, as well, an obedient act, as was Jesus’ decision for the cross.  This is at the heart of Christian vocation, where Jesus calls each and every Christian to, “Take up your cross and follow me.”

But how do we know how to do that?  Where are we called to be, and what are we called to do? After all, the word vocation means calling.  And where are we to find our particular cross to take up?

Bonhoeffer himself provides a template.  He once wrote, “Either I determine the place in which I will find God, or I allow God to determine the place where he will be found.  If it is I who say where God will be, I will always find there a God who in some way corresponds to me, is agreeable to me, fits in with my nature.  But if it is God who says where He will be, then that will truly be a place which at first is not agreeable at all, which does not fit so well with me.  That place is the cross of Christ.” (Meditating on the Word,  p 44–45).

There is much more still to take place in the story on this Holy Thursday, but in this small anguished moment of hesitation,  we get a glimpse of the human struggle to be faithful to the hard road of Christian vocation, what Bonhoeffer called the “The Cost of Discipleship.” The alternative to vocation, I think, is self-deception.

(Picture: The Agony in the Gardenby El Greco)

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Can Judas be saved? Ruminations on his role in the drama of Redemption.

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Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve Apostles, and the one who betrayed Jesus with a kiss, has become a byword in English for a betrayer.

None of us is a stranger to betrayal.  It is a particularly painful experience because it comes at the hand of someone we trusted; someone we thought would look out for us;  someone we loved, and believed loved us.  We must consider that one of the sufferings that constitute Jesus’ passion must have been that he was betrayed by one of his close friends, a member of his inner circle.

For my Holy Week devotions this year I have been reading At The Cross:  Meditations on People Who Were There by Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart (IVP, 1999), two fine scholars from the University of St Andrews.  I highly recommend it.

Their meditation on Judas is particularly insightful.  Although they admit that Judas’ deed was a dark one (“there is no getting Judas off the hook”), they assert the paradox that his betrayal was a necessary act:  “The structure of the Gospel plot demands it.”

And it is quite true that Jesus speaks repeatedly, not only that he will experience death, but that he will “be given up” to death.  So Judas is the instrument of that happening, and therefore an important player in the narrative of the passion, what I like to call “the drama of redemption.”

But though Judas plays his part in the drama, the Christian tradition has pretty consistently painted him to be an utterly despicable character. I have been ruminating on this, since it raises many questions, some of which I will leave to others to address.

But with the help of Bauckham and Hart, I have two thoughts to share about his role.

The first is Judas’ solidarity with all of humanity.   We are all, to some degree or another, betrayers.  There are the big betrayals, of course, like marital infidelity or financial shenanigans like the recent ones by Bernie Madoff.  But there are also the little daily betrayals where we break trust with those we love and care for, and in this case Judas is not so different from all of us.  His sin is different in degree and not in kind.

My second thought follows from the first, and that is whether Judas can be saved?  The Christian tradition has generally said no.  Perhaps I have fallen under the spell of Karl Barth’s alleged universalism, but I believe in a God whose mercy is so vast that there might be a place for Judas in it.

I don’t make the move to dogmatic universalism, because the separating of the “sheep from the goats” is God’s job and not mine. I think I have also been influenced by a fine dissertation I read this summer by Jason Goroncy, in which he asserts convincingly that the trajectory of P. T. Forsyth’s theology should (but doesn’t) lead him toward dogmatic universalism, a belief that all will ultimately be saved.  I still don’t know whether I am there yet, but I have been ruminating about the “love that will not let me go.”  As a theologian of the cross and the atonement I would be the last to limit its power and scope.  Who can say where the saving work of Jesus Christ ends?

Is this another scandal of the cross?  It just might be.  Have you noticed that in many of our theological discussions about who is in and who is out with God, we naturally gravitate toward the extreme cases: Hitler, Stalin, and, of course, Judas.  This lets us off the hook.  But it shouldn’t.  “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”

One of the most powerful and poignant moments for me every Holy Week is when I come to the line in the passion hymn Herzliebster Jesu where the congregation sings, “I it was denied thee, I crucified thee.”  That pretty much settles for me the ever vexing question of who killed Jesus.  Yes, the Romans, but they were stand-ins for all of humanity.  Still, from the cross Jesus forgives his murderers, and by extension, us.

So if I can be saved, can Judas be saved?  I am not the one to say, but I am intrigued by what Bauckham and Hart do in their meditation. They end with a poem that speaks to this very point, an “imaginative construal between Judas and Jesus in death, which ironically brought Judas much closer to his master than any of the other disciples, as they hung on their respective trees.”  I am reassured that I am not the only one who sometimes has to turn to a poet when the language of theology reaches its outer limit:

The  Ballad of the Judas Tree

In Hell there grew a Judas Tree
Where Judas hanged and died
Because he could not bear to see
His master crucified
Our Lord descended into Hell
And found his Judas there
For ever hanging on the tree
Grown from his own despair
So Jesus cut his Judas down
And took him in his arms
“It was for this I came” he said
“And not to do you harm
My Father gave me twelve good men
And all of them I kept
Though one betrayed and one denied
Some fled and others slept
In three days’ time
I must return
To make the others glad
But first I had to come to Hell
And share the death you had
My tree will grow in place of yours
Its roots lie here as well
There is no final victory
Without this soul from Hell”
So when we all condemn him
As of every traitor worst
Remember that of all his men
Our Lord forgave him first

by D. RUTH ETCHELLS

These mediations are particularly significant to me since they were developed for a Good Friday service at St. Andrew’s, St. Andrews, Scotland, very near to where we lived, and where we sometimes worshipped, during our sojourn there in the Spring and Summer of 1995.  Alas, we left a year too early to hear them there, as they were done in 1996 and 1997.

(At The Cross:  Meditations on People Who Were Thereby Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart, InterVarsity Press, 1999)

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Why was Jesus’ cross different? Ruminations for Holy Week

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When I was a young boy in Sunday School, I somehow got the idea that Jesus’ crucifixion was a unique event. I knew about the two brigands that were with him on Golgotha, because I had seen a particularly gruesome picture of the three men on crosses in a Bible picture book. But I thought this was the only event of its kind, and I didn’t learn until sometime much later that crucifixions were a common occurrence in the Roman Empire during that time.

Crucifixion was the dark side of the Pax Romana, that period of political stability that for over a century kept the peace from Rome out to the edges of the known world. During that time there were tens of thousands of crucifixions by order of Roman authorities. Crucifixion was so common that poles were permanently set up in many public places so as to be ready when needed. When Jesus carried his cross on Good Friday, and later, when Jesus was too beat up to continue, when Simon of Cyrene carried it for him, it probably wasn’t the whole cross they carried, but just the top cross bar. The upright poles were most likely there all the time, kept in readiness. In that world at that time crucifixion was a daily fact of life.

And yet, curiously, the accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus that we have in the Gospels, as brief as they are, are the most extensive accounts of crucifixion we have in ancient literature. If you stop to think about it, it makes a certain sense. Crucifixion isn’t something one wants to talk about or write about. It just wasn’t a topic for polite society. No, the upper classes of Roman society didn’t want to think about crucifixion.

Nonetheless, they tolerated the practice as an expedient way to keep the masses in line, as you and I, to some degree, tolerate capital punishment in our country. Such punishments are always for others, not for us. And educated, literate Roman citizens need not fear crucifixion. Nobody they knew needed to fear crucifixion. Crucifixion was reserved for nobodies: slaves, bandits, rebels, and conquered enemies.

And so it was that, when Jesus was crucified on that hill in Jerusalem, he died the death of a nobody, the death of a slave. We can well imagine how this must have been profoundly disappointing to his followers. You get a hint of this almost wistful disappointment in Luke’s story of the walk to Emmaus. The risen Jesus, unrecognized, is walking with two disciples and Cleopas starts telling Jesus about Jesus, “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.” (Luke 24:21)

Those high hopes about Jesus were what the triumphal entry of Palm Sunday was all about. When Jesus came into Jerusalem the people put down their garments in his path and waved palms. It was a royal entrance. Every Jew knew that certain things had to happen before God came among them in his fullness. The Romans had to be driven out, the temple purified, and a descendant of David take the throne of Israel once again.

So on Palm Sunday Jesus comes into Jerusalem and gets a king’s reception. The crowds shout “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highes theaven.” This is messiah talk. And messiah talk isn’t just religious, it is political. The Romans must have been justifiably nervous. There were big crowds there for the Passover festival. A messianic pretender could only mean turmoil and unrest.

And to exacerbate things, the very first thing Jesus does after coming into Jerusalem is to cleanse the temple. This is more than just messiah talk now. This is a highly symbolic messianic gesture. I am sure there were many that day who sadly shook their heads, and saw a cross in Jesus’ immediate future.  They knew, as Tom Wright once said, “people who said and did the kind of things Jesus said and did usually ended up on crosses.” The Romans were not patient with insurrectionists and revolutionaries, even if their claims were wrapped up in religious talk.

So there seemed to be only two possibilities. Either Jesus was who he said he was, and he would drive out the Romans and take the throne as the anointed one of God, or he would end up on a cross. But what nobody anticipated is what actually happened. Jesus failed to conquer the Romans, and he was crucified, and that should have been the end of it.

But, as we know, it wasn’t. If it had been we would never heard of Jesus. At best, he would have been a minor footnote in the history of ancient Palestine during the years of Jewish unrest under the Romans.  Another messianic pretender who got himself crucified by the Romans and that was that.

But that isn’t what happened. Something else happened. The claim then and now is that God raised Jesus from the dead, and not just temporarily like Lazarus was raised from the dead to die eventually, but that Jesus was raised to never die again. Indeed, the claim then and now is that Jesus shares in the divine life, that to know Jesus is in some very real sense to know God.

And, as Philippians 2:5-11 proclaims, it was his death itself that makes him worthy of the name “Lord,” a name previously reserved for God.  As one of our hymns on that passage says, “T’is the Father’s pleasure, we should call him Lord, who from the beginning was the mighty Word.”(Photo;  R. L. Floyd: Celtic cross at First Church, Pittsfield)