Easter People

Easter Sunday
Text: Luke 24:1-12

As I have previously posted, the first funeral I ever attended was one I officiated, and never having been at one I wasn’t sure how it was done.  One of the realities about a funeral that surprised me then, and still affects me now, is the business of it.  Caskets need to be purchased, plots prepared, the body of the deceased embalmed or made ready for the viewing.  Call the Florist. Meet with the pastor.  Write the obituary.  In the fervor of all the arrangements that need to be made (it's like planning a wedding in three days!) it’s easy to get lost.  It’s easy to forget that what we’re about is an entire life, so enmeshed are we in the routines of death.

It should have been a funeral preparation like any other.  The women approach the tomb in the darkness before dawn, with their spices and oils, following the custom of preparing the body.  There was no hope in their eyes.  They had seen this before – one of the Mary’s had once buried her brother, Lazarus; and I suppose now the fact that the deceased had been violently ripped from life, slain at the hands of men in a mockery of justice made their pain all the worse.  They knew as we do:  the human house is built on Death, Violence, and Injustice, and the house always wins.

Or so they thought.  It’s no coincidence that the first word in Luke 24 is “BUT”.  “But” just when we've pronounced hope dead and prepared the spices for burial, that’s when the unthinkable, unimaginable, certainly unanticipated happens, and two visitors approach in star-filled jackets and say:  why are you looking for the living among the dead?  And then Luke says something amazing about the women:  “they turned away from the grave, and reported what happened.”  They turned away from the “memorial” (as it’s called in the Greek), a sign and token of the way death and despair so easily take hold of our lives, and they proclaimed good news.  They became Easter people.  And for Easter people hope reigns. 

Several weeks after he had first been arrested for preaching against apartheid, then Archbishop Desmond Tutu was scheduled to preach at a large ecumenical worship service. As Tutu was beginning his sermon, South African Security Police stormed the building and surrounded the worshipers in the congregation. Needless to say, the presence of armed policemen at a worship service was unsettling.  Their message from Johannesburg was clear. Speak out against the Apartheid regime and we will take you down.

After pausing for a moment, Tutu fixed his glare on the policeman and said to them, sternly: “You are powerful, but I serve a God who cannot be mocked.” Then Tutu’s face turned warm and compassionate as he said to the police, “Since you have already lost, I invite you today to join the winning side.” No one expected what they just heard, including the officers. The crowd became energized. First, a few “Amens” erupted. Then someone stood and shouted “Hallelujah!” The next thing everyone knew the crowd was rushing out of the building and parading down the streets of the city singing hymns of praise. The police were caught totally unprepared, and could do nothing but watch it happen. Eventually, they grew confused about what they should do and so they disbanded for the evening and went home while the crowd of Easter people continued to praise God in the streets. 

Move ahead a couple decades and across the Atlantic to Saranac Lake, NY.   In a story from StoryCorps Andrea St. John relates how she and her fiancé were in the faculty room when he received news from his doctor.  All he said to her was “I think you should get your jacket, maybe we’ll go for a walk.”  And he told her what the doctors had told him;  that the cancer was back, he said, “There’s a spot in my thigh, in my ribs, and in my pelvis,” and he paused and said humorously, “the scans lit up like a Christmas tree.”  One morning Andrea who had now become his caregiver, prepared his tea and breakfast for him and said, “Hey, I need your opinion on something.  I want to wear this dress to your wake.”  So she put it on and she stood on the bed and asked “How do I look?”  He started to cry, and she immediately stepped down and said “I’m so sorry -- I’ll take it off, I didn’t mean to upset you at all.”  And he replied “No, it’s just that you look so beautiful.  I’m so glad I got to see you in that dress.”  But he kept crying.  She held his hand and sat down on the bed next to him and asked “What’s going on?”  He replied, “It’s just that I woke up this morning more ready.”  Andrea asked him what that felt like.  He paused and looked at her and said, “Well, I guess it’s the same thing you felt when you put the dress on this morning.”

For Easter people death is real; but not final.  For Easter people violence and injustice are sickness are powerful in this world, but not more powerful than God’s victory over death and cruelty and brokenness.  Easter people are those who live in God’s great “nevertheless, still, but”.  If I can quote from Practicing Resurrection, by Nora Gallagher: “When I think about resurrection now, I don't only think about what happened to Jesus.  I think about what happened to his disciples.  Something happened to them, too.  They went into hiding after the crucifixion but after the resurrection appearances, they walked back into the world.  They became braver and stronger; they visited strangers, and healed the sick.  It was not only what they saw when they saw Jesus, or how they saw it, but what was set free in them. . ."

Something has been set free, and the world will never be the same.  Easter people, you know the task ahead of you.  The wind is at your back, the victory is yours, and nothing is wasted.  Come and eat the meal before you, refresh yourself for the work ahead of you.  Practice Resurrection!

+++ Sources and Influences

Thank you, Pastor Steve Klemz, for the Desmond Tutu illustration.

He Pushed Our Buttons

Good Friday

Text: John 18.1-19.42

Delivered at a combined Presbyterian-Lutheran service

This last Sunday I did something a little different for Palm and Passion Sunday. I decided to tell the story of Jesus’ passion in pictures, not using overtly religious icons, but by a judicious selection of images that came up in Google image searches. Preparing the montage was emotionally overwhelming for me. The problem with Google, even when you use filters, is that you cannot control what comes up when you type in “lynch mob”. You cannot “unsee” those images of unspeakable violence, depictions that make me sick. Obviously I’m not going to show those on Sunday morning. But it did impress upon me in a very visible way how in his sufferings Christ encompasses all the suffering of the world, right there in a Google search.

None of this is to pre-empt a question we rightly ask today: why did Christ suffer? Maybe to the more dark Lutherans and Presbyterians among us that seems like an easy question to answer, evocative of that scene in Hannah and Her Sisters when Max Von Sydow, playing Frederick, a cynical New York artist, tells his girlfriend Barbara Hershey as she arrives home late: “You missed a very dull TV show on Auschwitz. More gruesome film clips, and more puzzled intellectuals declaring their mystification over the systematic murder of millions. The reason they can never answer the question "How could it possibly happen?" is that it's the wrong question. Given what people are, the question is "Why doesn't it happen more often?"  That is dark! But don’t deny it. There’s a part of you that is asking that same question!

Why did Jesus suffer? For some 2000 years the church has tried to avoid the pain behind this question. We’ve come up with various atonement theories – Jesus died to pay Satan off, or to pay God off, to give us a model (which we can never really live up to) some of these theories work, some do not.

So why did Jesus die? Are you ready? He pushed our buttons. And he pushed just the right ones. I think Jesus was a genius! I consider myself a reasonable person, but I’m also a Dad. When just the right button is pushed, watch out! My poor kids know this well, because they know which buttons to push to transform a mild-mannered Lutheran pastor into a raging maniac. Jesus is that child pushing humanity’s buttons. And when he does, watch out!

So what are the buttons?

Smarter people than I have grappled with that question, but if I were to take a stab at it I would say that one button he pushed was our need for purity. Jesus was amazingly cavalier about whom he ate with, whom he touched, and whom he spoke with. Allowing a woman wash your feet with tears and dry them with her hair? That was poor form in his day. Touching a leper? Healing on the Sabbath? Those may be the purity codes he broke then…but ask yourself: who is unclean to you? And now imagine Jesus breaking bread with that person. Unsettling.

Another button may be about our need for certainty. There’s a prescribed way that God works…right? But Jesus just doesn’t seem to care what the theology books…or even scriptures for that matter, say. “You have heard it said…but I say to you”; that takes some hutzpah! Forgiving people without a priest, without a sacrifice, and criticizing the temple to boot? “Don’t mess with my God!” people clamor. Don’t believe me? Just change the liturgy, and see what happens!

The last button I can think of: the need to keep God at a distance. And Jesus brought God painfully near. And as he said earlier in the gospel of John: everyone who practices uselessness hates the light and avoids it (John 3.20). In Jesus we saw too much of ourselves. Peter caught in his denials. Judas in his betrayals. We didn’t like what we saw. And we let that get in the way of the bigger picture, that in him we also see the grace of God inviting us into the very life of God. Those who love the light come to it, so that their deeds –good and bad – are seen to have been done in God (John 3.21).

Jesus pushed our buttons, but it was for a good reason and a healing cause. Brene Brown, researcher and storyteller on shame and vulnerability said that one day the rector at her Episcopal Church clarified 10 years of confusion for her when he said, "In order for forgiveness to happen, something has to die." It may be an expectation of a person, a unfulfilled dream, a grudge, whatever, something has to die. And all these churches that are so cavalier about forgiveness simply do not have enough blood on the floor. 

Today, as Jesus pushes our buttons and we strike back with a vengeance, there is blood on the floor. But it’s God’s blood. To break through to us, and our need for blood, God is giving us what we wanted. And saying to us – this is what forgiveness looks like. This blood is spilt to reach you, that you may see the extent to which I am willing to go to reach out to you, and to heal you, and to claim you as my very own.

And if that pushes our buttons…so be it.

+++ Sources and Influences

Hannah and Her Sisters,Orion Pictures, 1986.

David Lose. Making Sense of the Cross (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress) 2011.

Marcus Borg. Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (New York: HarperCollins, 1994) 46-68, on purity codes and how Jesus engaged them.

Brene Brown's video clip on theworkofthepeople.com, "Grace Is Not Attractive" 

Nothing Bad Can Happen Here

Lent 5, Year A
Text: John 11.1-45
The police really ought to be following me, because its seems that lately when I show up, people die. I suppose it’s a work-related hazard of mine to be exposed to death on a regular basis. Strangely, though, in the 16 years in which I have been a pastor, I’ve only been present at a death once. Usually I leave too soon or arrive too late. But the one death for which I was present was a profoundly holy experience. So if jobs are given out in the life beyond this one, I want to be an other-worldly “Doctor Sleep” (from the Stephen King novel of that title) who is present as a comfort to people as they pass to the other side.

Indeed, in this line of work I hear many stories of people having conversations with “others” in the room at the time of their passing. My grandmother was almost 102 when she passed away, and reported visits from long-deceased loved ones before she finally departed this life. At the time I passed it off as dementia, although she showed no other symptoms of it. Our own Arnold Nelson is another example of someone who had conversations with “visitors” during his final hours. Those of you who knew Arnold know he was not prone to flights of fancy! Additionally, during a hospital visit a patient shared his story of a heavenly companion who stayed with him while he was pinned under his truck until the paramedics arrived. Then he vanished.

I used to shrug off these stories, but I’ve heard too many to consider them all fantasies or dreams. All of this is to say that life is more than just the biology we define as such. There is more to this creation than we are comfortable with. And it takes someone like Jesus to come in to our world of small expectations and small thinking to blow the lid off our small lives.

Which is exactly what happened with Lazarus and his sisters. In Java & Jesus this week I was a little hard on Jesus for waiting two days before coming to visit Lazarus. I still don’t like that fact, but as I explore the gospel there seems to be a pattern of Jesus saying no but then yes. For example in Cana, Mary says: “Jesus, do something about the wine situation!” Jesus: “No.” But then yes – delicious falernium whereas before it was mere tapwater! His brothers say to him, “Jesus, are you going to the festival in Jerusalem?” Jesus: “No.” And then yes, he goes on his own. The disciples ask today, “Jesus, are you going to help Lazarus?” Jesus: “No.” But then yes! The reason? Obedience. From the Latin ob-audire; to listen. Jesus listens to God’s will and acts not a moment before or after. Even his love of his dear friends does not get in the way of doing God’s work. 

And that’s where the scandal, the stumbling comes. Our timetables and God’s so rarely coincide. Can you think of the times when you really wanted something to happen – and it did, but in a way you could not have anticipated and in at time that was better than the one you wanted?

But when Jesus finally shows up things happen! As the last in the book of “signs” Jesus enacts the final revelation: resurrection and the life. The point about raising Lazarus is not a trick, or even to save the day for his friends. It’s about reorienting our understanding of God, so as to say: God is not stingy when it comes to giving out life. God is not the withholder. Jesus reveals a God who is lavish in giving life and  more life, and the raising of Lazarus is proof. Lazarus will die again, but this sign points to who Jesus says he is and what he promises for us now. We no longer are constrained to be “beings toward death”, as Heidegger would say, but beings toward life and more life.

Many who have had NDE’s are completely oriented toward life, and it’s a wonder to see. About a year ago I mentioned Eben Alexander III, a neurosurgeon who went there and back. In his book Proof of Heaven he shares how supremely clumsy and inept he feels with the brain of his current biology, in comparison with the mental and spiritual alacrity he enjoyed while in his 8-day coma. I would be happy to have the “inept” brain of a neurosurgeon! He says that during his experience of life beyond this familiar life he encountered what can only be called “hyper-real”. He does not fear leaving this life to experience that one again.

But you don’t need an NDE to get a whiff of resurrection. Barbara was an amazingly radiant woman I knew from my first call. She was always smiling, and made you feel good just to be in her presence. She lived in the country in Eastern Washington, with her husband, Jack, a truly brilliant man. I hardly ever saw him in church. It was devastating for all of us when Barbara was diagnosed with cancer. Over the course of her treatments, and her many ups and downs, the aggregate direction of which was down, Jack began to write. My inbox would receive a Barbara update a few times every week, and it was clear this was therapy for a husband who was already mourning the loss of his wife. In typical form I was not present when Barbara died, but the lead pastor was. Later that day I read his last entry: “I was with her to the last moment, and when she breathed her final breath a palpable presence of peace filled the room. I said to the attendant and the pastor: ‘It’s OK. Nothing bad can happen here.’” Something happened to Jack at that time, something in the likeness of resurrection. I began to see him more often at our Saturday services. His anxiety and dread had left him. “Unbind him. Let him go.”

The resurrection and the life is for us now, not just when someone stands over our casket or urn to console those who mourn for us. As Augustine said (in paraphrase): Let us sing Alleluia (even in Lent!) here on earth, while we still live in anxiety, so that we may sing it one day in heaven in full security; here it is sung in hope, there in hope’s fulfillment; here as wayfarers, there, as citizens. So then, let us sing, not to enjoy a life of leisure, but to lighten our labors. Sing, wayfarers, but continue your journey. So let’s sing! (Hymn of the Day follows.)

+++Sources and Influences

Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary as almost every week. Pastor Paul Nuechterlein's material on 5 Lent , year A is here.

James Alison's passion for the God "for whom death is not".

Richard Rohr's homily, "What is Resurrection?", delivered 9 November 2013.

Alexander, Eben. Proof of Heaven. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012.

Norris, Kathleen. Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. New York: Riverhead Books, 1998. (p. 368)

Letting Light in the Window

Lent 4, Year A

Text: John 9.1-41

Life has a way of serving us eye-opening experiences when our guard is down. For me a turning point happened while I was a counselor for “Campformaion”, a confirmation/summer camp experience in Phoenix. While the campers were busy gifted pastors worked with counselors, and among the relational exercises was the so-called Johari window.

It’s a simple yet powerful relational tool, in which every participant chooses from a list of adjectives 5 or 6 that describe you, and just as many for the other participants. The you chart the responses on the window: Box 1 contains the adjectives agreed upon by you and your peers. Box 2 indicates what others know about you but are unknown to you. Box 3 holds what is known only to you, and Box 4 is the dark area known to nobody. While I can’t say I recall what was said about any particular person, I remember it was a very affirming exercise. But what really got me thinking were Boxes 2 and 4: Do I really want to know what others know about me, what I am blind to? And the dark area, what is lurking in there?

Our blind sides are often fear-ridden places of either denial or avoidance. And I wonder if our allergy to the blind side also fuels blindness of others; those unsettled feelings we project onto other people because we fear the same things for ourselves. We become blind to them: the homeless man ahead of us at Casey's, the AIDS patient in the hospital. No surprise, then, in our story of the “man born blind” that people who supposedly “knew” him, and “saw” him every day did not recognize him when his sight was miraculously restored. As he returns home you can hear the equivocation of his neighbors: “He sort of looks like him….but I’m not sure if it’s really him..” When he was a beggar they didn’t really see him, for the same reason we do not really see the injustices and the forces at play that keep people from living into the fullness of who they are as children of God. But Jesus does.

One of my favorite descriptions of Jesus in John’s gospel is in chapter 2 when Jesus does not entrust himself to anyone but he “knew what was in everyone”. Ponder that one for a moment. If Jesus was taking the Johari Window test there would be no blind side! Everything would be in the light. Your own potential, also your own shadow.

And when all is revealed of course there will be resistance. When the man is restored to sight, certain Pharisees, blinded by their false belief that there must be residual sin in his history or genealogy, do not care to see him restored and whole. Even his parents distance themselves from him. His neighbors likewise. No one wants to see him, except Jesus. For most of the story the man never saw Jesus, but Jesus sees him and seeks him and entrusts himself to him. And in so doing the healing is complete. As he acknowledges Jesus he also becomes a sheep in Jesus’ new fold.

Amazing things happen when we brave the blind side. It’s almost too easy, but of course I was reminded of the 2009 movie of that title (The Blind Side), in which Sandra Bullock plays  Leigh Anne Tuohy, a mother of 2 who takes Michael Oher, a homeless high-school student, into her house. 

Somehow she saw something in him that others were blind to. While the football coach had almost written him off as being too passive a player, she saw he had a protective instinct that could be used on the field. All he needed to do was to protect that ball the way he wants to protect the Tuohy family. And it worked! The rest is history: Oher played left tackle at Ole Miss, drafted into the Baltimore Ravens to play right and left tackle, and is now with the Tennessee Titans. Windows were opened because someone saw him. And acted on what she saw. 

I wonder how many other Michael Ohers there are out there. I don’t mean potential football stars, but how many kids, teens, adults, even older folks are written off because no one sees them? And I wonder if it's not the hard work of the church to see as Jesus sees. It’s appropriate that we have a baptism today for little Hayden, because this very reading is an ancient baptismal text: in the watery depths of baptism we die to the blindness of ourselves and of others and rise again to the insight of God’s love for every human being, seen or unseen by us. You are seen by God, precious, beloved, and Jesus seeks you!

And perhaps now with eyes opened, as we look on others with God's gaze they can begin to see themselves just as Jesus sees them.

After the Thrill is Gone...Laughter!

Lent 5, Year A

Text: John 11.1-45

Although I was not a card-carrying fan of John Cougar in the 80's, as I get older I have to appreciate the wisdom of his “ditty” about Jack and Diane. How can you fault a chorus that goes “Oh yeah, life goes on, long after the thrill of living is gone”? In my teen years I did not get what it meant nor did I care. 

Now, in my forties, it’s a different story, especially as I ponder my vacation reading of Angle of Repose by Wallace Steger, a novel is all about life going on, long after the thrill of living is gone. It’s about how a conflicted pioneer couple were able to find that angle of repose, that way of being together, long after the thrill of courtship and romantic hopes for the future had been buried deep in the mines of the West, long after failures and hurts, betrayals and tragedies, had eroded their lives together. In their later years they reached a point of surrender, a hidden grace to keep them together. Still, the reader wants more for them. Is the best we can hope for repose, a kind of malaise, life without the thrill?

Maybe it's a good thing that life goes on without endless thrill, and yet there are times when something pierces the daily routine and calls our attention to something greater. An unpredictable moment of truth and decision. That something happens in our readings today, as dry bones- a myriad of them – are re-knit together with flesh and muscle to become living, human beings with breath again. It happens amid the funeral routines of a small family as their loved one is laid in a tomb; and as all the trappings of death play the shrill tune we are all too well attuned to: death is final, and death is our destiny.  It’s the latent despair behind the saying on my Professor William Spong’s wall: “Life is what happens while you’re waiting to die.”

The despairing signs are there: Mary and Martha, pleading, “If you had only come earlier, he wouldn’t have died!”; the professional mourners, “If he can open the eyes of the blind can he not also prevent death?”; Martha, “Are you kidding me? Open the tomb? He’s been in there 4 days, he’s got to stink!” These are the words, our words, of those for whom the thrill has been gone, and the finality of death as seeped in, now our defining metaphor. One so defining we fail to see how confining it is.

I don’t know if it would make very good theater, but playwright Eugene O’Neil calls us on the confines we create in his play “Lazarus Laughed”, as he shows a returning Lazarus, having enjoyed 4 days of heaven’s delight, shouting “Yes!” in fits of laughter. In fact, Lazarus’s unstoppable laughter gets him in trouble – Judean leaders think he’s blaspheming God, followers of Jesus think he’s betraying their Lord.  Greeks try to idolize him as an avatar of Dionysus. Romans try to snuff him out, because if there is no fear of death then there is no imperial power. Yet despite all their attempts to silence Lazarus, he cannot help but laugh at the games we play in our attempts to tame life, to sap it of its wonder, and to drown out the din of God’s laughter with the droning hum of routine whose author is Death.

Lazarus knows firsthand the fulsome life God intends. But for us, it takes a raising of someone like Lazarus – and more profoundly still, of Jesus, to shake us out of complacency. Can we stumble on the thrill of living? We celebrate Easter every year not to place resurrection on a predictable timetable, but only to show that resurrection happens, in different ways, at different times in our lives. Paul Martinson of Luther Seminary once wrote that Christianity is a faith not of discovery, but surprise. We go to our tombs – those places where we are bound and tied up, the places of darkness and disappointment, failure and fear, places of hurt and betrayal and tragedy --places we hazard only by compulsion –as if sleuths or archeologists, asking “What happened here?” But as we dig we are surprised that someone has already been there before us, bringing life to dry bones, and calling us by name, shouting: “Be unbound, Be set free!”  We peer in. The tomb is empty, trappings of death are left behind.

If a reading like today’s causes our eyes to glaze over from familiarity (or length!) it’s only because we are so captive to the deathly repetition that we fail to see the resurrection before us. Even when the thrill of living is gone, Surprise! Resurrection happens! God’s laughing matter in the midst of our dead seriousness.

2 Advent 2013A

Change. Just earlier today I mentioned a staffing change going on here at St. Paul. We have some changes in our town happening very soon. I’m sure you have some changes in your life or in the lives of those you love. Some of these changes are welcome, others not so much. The Buddha said that all is change, all is in flux; not even from one moment to the next is anything, even the most stable mountain, the same. And the lion’s share of the suffering we inflict on ourselves and others stems from our desire to resist change. The Buddha did not say what the change was leading up to, only that it is. And is constant.

John the Baptizer comes on the scene to say change is coming. And it’s not a comfortable message! He talks about wrath, and the ax lying at the tree, ready to chop. It’s a call to repentance, as you know in Greek metanoia: a change of mind and perspective about their lives and world. The surprising thing is that people are actually coming out to him, in droves even, and in him find a kind of renewal in this ritual called baptism, offering a hopeful view of the future.

A couple weeks ago I shared a view of the future which you might call dismal. After all, the readings were apocalyptic, a healthy perspective to consider now and then. Because unlike the Buddha the Biblical Prophets, including John the Baptist and Jesus, say the change is headed somewhere. It’s not just change for change’s sake. Sometimes that somewhere is frightening: like the Titanic sinking, and there’s a warning call, like John the Baptist today, who says the ax is ready to swing. Where there was once a majestic poplar, soon there will be but a stump. But we’d be remiss if we stopped there. In the Old Testament reading of Isaiah there’s an axed stump, but look closely! There are shoots coming out! And all of those shoots are brimming and bursting with potential life and hope.

We simply do not know when either is going to happen – the ax or the shoot. We just know both are inevitable.

Who says this better than Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” a movie a watch almost every year about this time?  Jimmy Stewart, as George Bailey, is regular Joe, small town businessman, a good man. His whole life is all about making sacrifices for others, and as director of a Building and Loan he makes risky loans to people and trusts in their innate goodness. When an honest money error lands him on the edge of bankruptcy, and worse, possible scandal and criminal charges, he ponders ending it all. That’s when some divine intervention comes in, and he’s given a chance to see what life would be like if he hadn’t ever been born. What if he hadn’t helped all those people in mundane yet significant ways, with loans to build their businesses and homes; if he hadn’t made interventions which at the time he thought nothing of; if he hadn’t made certain self-sacrificing decisions? That world is now before him. And he does not like what he sees. Suddenly in comparison the world of his real life blooms with significance – AND when he returns from his parallel universe help comes from unexpected places.  He comes back to his own with new eyes. That’s repentance!

While John the Baptizer proclaimed disaster – which did happen, by the way: Jerusalem would be a smoldering pile of ashes within 40 years -- he also saw beyond the stump to the shoot. And that takes repentance. And for us too. Jesus, it turns out, is less of an axe-swinger and more of a “shoot-bearer”! Jesus himself was cut down, but the ax, or the cross, did not have the last word. The tomb miraculously empty did. Just as in the case of George Bailey, we can see God at work to bring about change, but the change that gives a fresh start and a healing space. Just as we look forward to the great day when God restores everything to the immortal hope that is stirring in God’s breast, which Isaiah foresaw: lions and lambs together; the cow and the bear, grazing. Cosmic restoration.

We may not see the grand vision yet. But you have already seen it in miniature in your own life. Maybe just in little shoots. Or if not, you know it’s coming. It’s not just a vain hope, it’s a proven reality. So for any George Baileys out there, repent, change your mind, to see the wonderful life before you.

In Christ. Amen.