Some heavy duty theology

¹⁹If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.

 ²⁰But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.

 ²¹For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.

 ²²For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

 ²³But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are Christ's at his coming.

 ²⁴Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power.

 ²⁵For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet.

 ²⁶The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

- 1 Corinthians 15:19-26 (KJV)

It begins (v.19) with what's very obvious, in looking around the world we live in.  Of course we're fools if judging by the world's standards.  Each person for themself, follow your bliss, the pursuit of happiness, whatever. . . maybe that system works really well for some people, in some places and fortuitous time.  For others, it's a rabbit trail.

Then a pretty straight-forward, on the surface, description of the order of resurrection (v. 20-23), but that's pretty weird too.  I mean, who can really imagine what that is like? That world, redeemed, those eternal bodies, who can really inhabit that belief?  We've had some talk at church lately about the inadequacy of English to express the fullest translation of what we often call "belief."  The word we translate, in other languages, could more accurately be called "trust."  So, it doesn't matter nearly enough that I say I "believe" in resurrection, if I don't trust it as well.  As an aging, broken, this side of 40-years-old person, it's easy enough to recognize that the bodies we live in now are painfully inadequate.  But how on Earth does one imagine resurrection of ourselves? It seems almost sacreligious even to try.  .  . I can imagine Jesus resurrected easily enough, but He was/is already perfect.  It feels comical, almost pathetic, to try to imagine that for little old me, with this ridiculous flesh housing an even more limited and obsolete consciousness.  Where to even begin?

So let's just move along in our reading, but now it gets even stranger.  In v. 24-25, I like that Paul mostly side-steps the trippy eschatological imagery, fire and brimstone, dragons and cosmic ladies, and deals instead with the earthly powers of men.  Except, he isn't really.  We know there are also the "powers and principalities" as the real enemies, not just theological abstractions but manifested in bones and stones.  Here I get really  irritated, because my conscious imagery has been influenced by too many Hollywood epic battle scenes (I blame Peter Jackson for making LOTR so dang "evocative").  I really don't want to focus on the gore. the rallying cries, but to understand in whatever paltry level what it would feel like to welcome that king, to be part of that following, to step into eternity.

Then again, maybe I don't want to tax my little brain that much.  It's late, and things are bizarre enough.  We see through the glass sooooooo very darkly, or not at all.  And when our eyes are too tired to see, when we can't even bear the over-stimulation of what clutters our retina for this second, we may be allowed to smell it.  Maybe a wordless, subconscious hum we almost heard.  We can't quite understand, we can't entirely say we "believe" because we're so smart and modern and have to explain, define, compartmentalize it before we can trust.

I don't understand.  Except when I do.  Sometimes when it's way too late and I can see the full moon, taste the insomnia, it's almost within reach.  I miss those midnights with my feral nurslings. the raw physicality juxtaposed with acute clarity. Often times now it's so much more mundane; I act like I 'trust" in a resurrected life far too often for it to have been just some good idea I invented.  This journey has far outlasted any good idea I ever had; it started with someone else.  Lately I'm walking more in shadows and clouds (not doubts, clouds) than I have in decades.  Frustrated and irritated all the time, and yet I know it's the only path open.  I"m not aligning with the enemy.  I'm not strong enough to challenge the creator of the Universe, or young enough to play the nihilist/existentialist pose any longer.

So where were we? Oh yeah, we come to the last baffling line (v.26), which is either supposed to be reassuring or just make you scratch your head, I'm not sure.  I'd like to just accept it and go on, except it changes the entire physical/temporal nature of the universe and existence as we know it.  How can consciousness go on after death is defeated, if by "go on" we mean "to go forward in time," when time no longer exists?  And anyway, thank goodness it isn't "us" that goes on anyway, us petty, silly (I'm being charitable) half-blind ghosts (okay maybe I'm being a bit misanthropic . . . ).  I'd want it to be someone far more perfect than us, someone that bears only the faintest whiff of resemblance, and that only as a merciful nod to recognition.  I'd want it to be someone awake enough, clear enough, alive enough to really belong there.  See how even the usual adjectives don't work here?  "Good" and "wise" are so earth-bound and arrogant.  We just can't pretend, right now in this world, to understand or even describe, let alone be those creatures that would inhabit Eternity with Him (a far better writer than me might attempt it, but even C.S. Lewis only dared to be specific in his allegories, not as a literal projection of heaven).

Of course, the other option is to take it at face value, accept that we can't understand it yet at any deeper level, and return to the work of this temporary world we live in.  Serve somebody, knowing it's not nearly enough to make this hurting, F'ed up place as good as it was meant to be.  But it's what we do, it's the only thing we can do, while we wait for the one who will defeat the last enemy.  And when we're really honest, we tremble at the bit of enemy still inside us, that must die.

Have a great week, kids!      : )

I did it ~ sort of . . .

Well, the 5K is over, and I'm trying to reframe this as a successful learning experience, if not an outright Success.  I didn't make my goal of running the whole way without stopping to walk, but I learned a lot.

Lesson 1: know your route.  Had I known the topography in advance I would've paced myself much better and possibly not had to stop and walk.  The route was pretty much straight up hill for the first 2.5K and mostly downhill on the way back.

Lesson 2:  Go sloooowwww . . . like, WAY slower than you think you should be. I thought I had learned this one during training, that the only way to go the distance is to pace really slowly, but in practice I guess my default pace is always starting out way too fast and burning out.  I had to stop once to walk about 1 Km into it, and again briefly at 2K and 2.5K (top of hill for a water break).  Still, I ran almost the entire way back down, and my final time was under 37 minutes.  That's about 2 minutes better than my personal best, and 4 minutes ahead of my goal time.  Which tells me I was going way too fast.

Lesson 3:  Meta-lesson.  I don't "learn" nearly as fast as I think I do, because I'll think I've learned something when I understand it intellectually, but it doesn't do me any good till I've learned it experientially.  Until I knew what it felt like to apply lessons 1 & 2, above, I couldn't really apply them in the crunch.

But anyhow, I did it!!!! I finished the 5K in less than 37 minutes, and it was a glorious Family Event (both Nelson family and church family) for a good cause.  Yaaayyy team!   : )

Here's something you don't see every day

I'm training for a 5K.  Big whoop, you say, but this is me.  

Running.  

Voluntarily.

Really.

So, now that you've picked yourself off the floor, be reassured that I will approach even this most  seemingly physical of endeavors with as ruminative and navel-gazing a perspective as ever.  Already I'm convinced of at least 3 great "life lessons" learned from my 2 weeks (so far) of haphazard training.  But the most wonderful part is that I haven't quit yet.  And it hasn't been nearly as impossible as I would've thought.  Or at least, the really hard parts are completely different/opposite from what I thought they would be.  But more on that in later posts.

Already I'm up to running 2.5 miles without stopping to walk.  Yes.  For me that's the best cardio-vascular performance I've ever had in my life, except perhaps in the fog of some netherworld dance-clubbing days.  And those certainly weren't exactly healthy days . . . 

But off I go to bed now, since this "training" things works a whole lot better if I get something resembling sleep at least 5 nights a week.

Aaaahhhh . . . finally it's spring!

70's and sunny, that's what I needed.  Actually went running OUTSIDE today and didn't hate it.  The birds are twittering non-stop, the pea plants haven't been devoured by foraging animals (yet), and I'm looking through my Breck's catalog for next year's tulips.  Because the one and only thing I miss about our old house is the awesome tulips.

April? What the . . ?

Last week it snowed.  This week, out with the kids, I saw what I thought was another snow and inwardly groaned.  I was wrong.  It was a cascade of pear tree blossoms caught in a gust of wind.

Beautiful!

Perhaps because it's been the LONGEST winter anyone can remember, I'm really noticing the spring signs proliferating this year.  Every single day, there are changes from just a day before, buds that hadn't quite opened, leaves growing right before my eyes, (pre)teenagers sprouting another inch overnight . . . and suddenly our dead brown neglected lawn is green again.  When did that happen?

Now if it would just warm up a little.

"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians.  Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."

- Mahatma Gandhi

Yow!

On this day before Good Friday, I want to reflect on how little we resemble Christ, NOT as a way to beat up Christians (after all, will the person in the room who isn't a hypocrite please stand up?  There, you just found your hypocrite), but as a reminder how much we/I need a Savior.  The Good Friday cross brings to mind so many things, but the latest visions are particularly brutal to me this year, having just watched a PBS special where an anthropologist did various high-tech scans of an antiquated specimen, a human heel-bone pierced by a Roman nail.  The computer simulations illustrated graphically what would have happened inside a body after that nail was inserted, and the chain of indescribable suffering that would follow.

Gasp.

Can anything but horror and incredulity be an adequate response that treatment of one human being by another? 

Call me slow, but I just got something really central to the faith.  All these years I've been critical and dismissive of my own level of spiritual surrender (or more appropriately, lack thereof) because even though I am to metaphorically "die to self" everyday as a follower of Christ, it's usually pretty symbolic.  Sure, I'll surrender my rights/wants/needs here and there, even if I don't really love the recipient of whatever limited "grace" I have to offer.  And of course I would lay down my life for my children, and maybe even for someone else if that's what was required.  But that's a tremendous MAYBE ~ God's grace would definitely have to be acting for me to be that surrendered at that moment.  But even then I'm thinking a quick bullet to the brain, or something equally instantaneous and relatively suffering-free.  And I'm not really thinking about it at all, in terms of the full trauma of expectation and knowing what's going to happen.

But to choose a death like He endured?

Never.  Not in my wildest dreams.  That is a level of Willingness and Acceptance that I truly cannot fathom.  And somehow, in my warped (works rather than faith-based) walking out of salvation, I've held that as a minus against ME and my spiritual immaturity.  But it's not about me.  It's about Him. What he was willing to do, "while we were yet in our sin."  While we continue (even years after being saved, see above mentioned hypocrite) in our rebellion and hard-heartedness.  He still would do that for us; He still loves us that much.

So this Good Friday the kids and I are taking some food to the Healing Center (pantry), delivering some chocolate bunnies to some kids who probably won't get much from the Easter Bunny, and thinking about how much we've been given.

Happy Easter!   : )

Lenten thoughts

Although I expect it to be predictable (isn't that kinda the point of rituals?) every Lenten season is different.  This year, after deciding I don't have enough legitimate "vices" leftover to give up, and I'm DANG sure not giving up teevee during March Madness (grrrrr . . .Pitino!!), I gave up radio instead.  This means no NPR, no classical tunes, no sports scores, nada.  It's been a good thing, one less angry voice screaming through the day, if you know what I mean.

I think I'm used to the surreal never-endingness of this cursed winter.  It's gone on, what, like 9 years now since we had sweater weather?  But today I put in the seeds for early starting with the little kids, so we have a pan of dirt on top of the fridge now, teasing us with dreams of future basil and beefsteak tomatoes. Oh me of little faith, I honestly can't fathom that we will ever see gardening weather again. . .

So into the midst of this gloom and pessimism comes the promise of Messiah, the ancient wish for renewal and salvation.  God we still need saving, 2000 years later, so Somebody please come quick.  

I'm glad we're doing this corporately, 50+ churches in greater Cincy are using the "Reset" curriculum to recharge, explore, explode our concept of who that Jewish carpenter was and what he really came for.  It's a pretty heavy-lifting curriculum that requires real study and commitment, not just sitting in a pew once a week.  Every week we have a small group meeting, suggested readings, and several assigned writing prompts to help us dig deeper.  Plus we're going into large chunks of the gospel of Luke from various angles. The point of this, for me anyway, is to kick me out of the malaise and inertia of thinking  I "know" what Christianity is supposed to be about and remind me once again of who Messiah is.

That guy isn't just the hippie Jesus, the nice guy, the baby in the manger, the American Protestant.  He's world-changing, enigmatic, unpredictable, dangerous, life-giving, life-saving, friend of the poor, enemy of tyrants, Lion, lamb, a brother, a mother, the beginning and the end and (most unsettling of all) the right now.

Where do I even begin?