Before the Rising (A Meditation for April)

"Elegy" ©Jules Olitski (2002)

---

It is Lent 2017. I am the office administrator at Redeemer Lutheran Church in north Minneapolis where I am a decidedly agnostic Lutheran still very much in the process of composting old beliefs, unsure if any type of faith might ever grow again. After two years in the congregation and one on staff, Pastors Kelly and Babette Chatman still faithfully welcome my unanswerable questions and deep doubts. They ask nothing of me but myself. Wounds are beginning to heal, scab over, and even scar. But I am fallow ground.

We are at our mid-week check-in and I am lamenting to P.K. how distant I still feel from Easter or any kind of resurrection hope. Everyone around me is marching triumphantly toward Sunday morning; I seem to be marching toward a sure and un-raisable End. I tell him I’ve long-since surrendered to the disintegration of my faith and am committed to letting it run its course, but I am scared. What happens when faith dies? I have had so many of these conversations with P.K., but I am still taken aback when he simply asks, “Why?”

“What do you mean?”
“Why do you lament feeling distant from resurrection? Why are you afraid of a dead faith?”

The Apostle Paul’s words from I Corinthians 15:14 ring in my ears as I stumble over my own: “Well…? Because…? You know…isn’t that the whole point of all this?”

He shrugs. “Amy, you can’t rush resurrection.” 

 I did not know I was expecting, never mind rushing resurrection.
And now for the first time I notice: For three days before the rising, Lazaraus was dead. The community wailed, and Christ, along with his disciples, wept.

For the first time I realize: On Holy Saturday when God is Dead, the tomb is sealed and nothing – not the blackened sky, nor the quaking earth, nor any part of the rent and broken creation – can move against the all-and-onlyness of Death. The Keeper of Creation dies and everything buckles under the weight.

Still, I will rush resurrection. 

--

It is May 6, 2019, my son’s eighth birthday. We celebrated Easter 2 ½ weeks ago, but just two days ago, author and theologian Rachel Held Evans died, and lots of us post-Evangelical millennial types are reeling from her sudden loss.

I am still camped out in the tomb of Holy Saturday where I’ve been since two Lents ago, when Rev. Emmy Kegler’s words on the Resurrection Hope into which all the beloved are baptized cut through stone:

“On my best days, I believe it.
  On my worst days, I am desperate for it.”

It has been my worst day for many years.

But…I know that Voice; it vibrates within me.
I can identify two sorts of hope and it is Death who taught me the difference:
One sort sparkles like a plastic jewel on cheaply polished aluminum – it will cut your skin and turn your finger green. The other strains and stretches itself well beyond faith’s reach to sustain the desperate in its lack. I know what sort this is.

I am three-days-dead-and-smelling-like-it-Lazarus, stumbling toward the sound of Gospel.

Today, I am desperate.
Today, I believe. 

--

It is April 2025. 
Beloved, you cannot -- so do not -- rush resurrection.
But wait! And he will call you by name.