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Our Triumphant Holy Week

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Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia!
Our triumphant holy day, Alleluia!
Who did once upon the cross, Alleluia!
Suffer to redeem our loss. Alleluia!

Hymns of praise then let us sing, Alleluia!
Unto Christ, our heavenly King, Alleluia!
Who endured the cross and grave, Alleluia!
Sinners to redeem and save. Alleluia!

But the pains which he endured, Alleluia!
Our salvation have procured, Alleluia!
Now above the sky he’s King, Alleluia!
Where the angels ever sing. Alleluia!

Many of our children don’t know this hymn and that breaks my heart. Growing up in the Lutheran Church, we sang “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today” almost every Easter. Peter Paul Rubens - The Resurrection of ChristI used to love the ascending melody in the third line of each stanza. Our organist would pull out all the stops and my heart would thrill.

Leonard Ravenhill once said that the sign of the Church wasn’t the cross, but the empty tomb. Though he readily acknowledged the difficulty of rendering an empty tomb in jewelry.

Maybe that’s for the better, for as much as the symbol of the cross has been co-opted by pot-smoking, women-abusing, hip-hop artists; bed-hopping, clueless, Hollywood celebrities; Christians in name only who never got to the real cross; and the the inane, shallow world-at-large, no one’s done a good job transforming an empty tomb into bling.

And that’s good for us, because an empty tomb that defies secularization can still say, “He’s not there.” In fact, about the only place we can say the Lord is not is in that chamber of death. He’s risen. He’s risen indeed.

More so than Christmas, we Christians should find a way to turn the celebration of Christ’s resurrection into the party of all parties. We are people most pitied, Paul wrote, if Christ did not rise from the grave. But because He did, we’ve been granted an immeasurable gift. How can we not pull out all the stops on the organ? How can we not join up with friends and family and laugh, play, run, jump, and dance till we can barely catch our next breath? This is our day, the precursor of that final day. Our earthly celebration should resemble the one that is to come.

We somehow manage to take a week off for Christmas if we can, why not do the same for celebrating resurrection? They celebrated a wedding for seven days as we know from Jesus’ first miracle. Christ’s resurrection made us His Bride. So why not live up Easter for a week afterwards?

Instead, we’ll dress up nice for Sunday 9 AM and by 9 PM we’ll be dreading another week of work. We talk and talk about countercultural living, but when it comes to our high holy day, it’s twelve hours then back to the grind.

How I wish we would learn how to live! How awesome would it be to not let the world dictate how we celebrate our faith. I think the greatest impediment to revival in this country is our slavish devotion to systems rather than to Christ. The Holy Spirit could bust out and do miracles and we wouldn’t be able to tarry even a day because some system tells us we have such and such we MUST do. We’re important people. The world would stop if we did.

Bah, humbug!

Don’t you want to see our triumphant Holy Day go on and on?

{Image: Peter Paul Rubens – The Resurrection of Christ, 1612}

When the World Was New

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Christ blessing childrenWhen I left my son at 9:30 PM, he had his Bible folded over his chest, waiting for me to leave so he could wander over to his reading corner (complete with a beanbag chair and a funky five-headed lamp) and finish reading about the Passover. He couldn’t wait.

I let him read at night. As a precocious reader, he eats up just about any reading material we give him. I could no sooner punish him for staying up to read than I could punish myself for staying up to blog. Sometimes, you have to pick your battles.

This afternoon, he asked why serpents are evil. I told him God made all things good and that the snakes we see around outside our house keep mice in check. I mentioned that the devil took the form of a serpent when he deceived Adam and Eve, but the word serpent could be broader than snake. Then he asked to define the difference between a serpent and a snake. When I asked where he was getting this from, he mentioned the story of Aaron throwing down his staff and it turning into a serpent. Wasn’t Aaron a good guy? What was he doing messing around with serpents?

After his obviously faux attempt to go to bed this evening, he hopped into his beanbag chair and read through the Egyptian plagues, eventually answering his own question about the Passover. When I mentioned earlier that Passover started two days ago, you could see the excitement in his eyes. He thought it was “cool” that the narrative he now read just so happened to coincide with the actual events of thousands of years ago.

When the world was new to us, wonder filled every moment. Who knew what astonishing revelation might unfold before our wide innocent eyes. Magic filled each breath. Possibilities hid behind every corner, ready to unleash the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

What a pity then that I read so many Christian sites on the Web and note all the child-like wonder sucked right out of them. How sad for us that we traded in our amazement at the mysteries of God for some cut-and-dried “faith” that’s overly diced and ludicrously dessicated.

I won’t hold myself up as the pinnacle of Christian practice by any means, but the older I get, the more I see God restoring the wonder in my life. Something about maturity in Christ recaptures our childlikeness, that winsome inner spectacle that never ceases to amaze us who are His dwelling place. Anything is possible! What can He not do? If we’re not tracking with that kind of “inverted maturity,” we instead turn into grizzled and bitter veterans of the spiritual war. I see far too many people on the path to that cold, hard anti-faith. God help them!

For the Christian, every day becomes that day when the world was new. If we’re living consecrated, abandoned lives. If we died at the cross.

Big ifs, but not too big for a magnificent God to make real in the hearts of His children.

{Image: detail from stained glass window from Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Wyandotte, MI}

Testimony Tuesday at Cerulean Sanctum

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On a hill far away...The Godblogosphere’s Powers That Be elected today “Testimony Tuesday,” so I thought I better fall in line lest I be numbered among the transgressors. As someone of whom it was once said, “He’s got the worst testimony I’ve ever heard,” don’t expect a whole lot. For the curious, that notorious testimony can be found here.

I think knowing another’s testimony binds us together. One day, I hope to hear the testimony of every member of my church. I’d be blessed if you posted your own testimony in the comments here.†  We preach the Gospel to others by telling our own stories of coming to Christ. Those stories build our faith.

The best testimony I think any Christian can give is to go to the grave in such a way that others say, “That one finished the race sprinting.” Over the last few years, I’ve come to believe that how we act out the faith is the best testimony we can give. May it be that every person we encounter in our daily journey can point to us and say, “Because of the way they live, we can see Jesus.”

Talk is good. Actions are better.

Live out the Gospel today in a way that radiates Jesus to everyone you meet.

Have a blessed day!

†  If you don’t know how to write a testimony, someone’s actually gone to the great length to post an outline for doing so. By their standard, I guess mine once again doesn’t measure up!