1 Corinthians 15: 1-11 (links validated 3/13/24)

Mickey Haller is one of the central characters in Michael Connelly’s mystery, Resurrection Walk. He’s a highly successful, if sometimes controversial Los Angeles-area criminal defense attorney. Haller reflects on the pleasure he experiences in hearing not-guilty verdicts, offering good cross examinations and receiving juries’ attentiveness. But Haller insists that none of it approaches the joy of witnessing what he calls an acquitted person’s “resurrection.” He says, “nothing could beat the resurrection walk — when the manacles come off and the last metal doors slide open like the gates of heaven, and a man or woman declared innocent walks into the waiting arms of family, resurrected in life and the law. There is no better feeling in the world than being with that family.”

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(" I like Nick Cave's song because of its audacious first line: 'I don't believe in an interventionist God'. What an unlikely way to begin a love song! He once explained that he wrote the song while sitting at the back of an Anglican church where he had gone with his wife Susie, who presumably does believe in an interventionist God - at least that's what the song says. Cave's father died in a car accident when he was only 19...")

Trevor Beeson stood at the high altar of Westminster Abbey to celebrate the marriage of his daughter, Catharine, to Anthony, aged twenty-three. Nine months later he stood before the same altar for Anthony's funeral, who was killed when his car ran into a wall in East London. Four months later, Trevor returned to the altar beside the coffin of his friend and hero Earl Mountbatten, who died when his fishing boat was blown to pieces by Irish terrorists. Reflecting on the experience, he said he could not blame God for these senseless tragedies. He wrote: "I should find it impossible to believe in, and worship, a God who arranged for the great servants of the community to be blown up on their holidays and who deliberately turned a young man's car into a brick wall. This is not the God of love whose ways are revealed in the Bible and supremely in the life of Jesus Christ. "There are two insights that helped me to cope with this tragedy and to look beyond it. The first is that, although God is not responsible for causing tragedy, he is not a detached observer of our suffering. On the contrary, he is immersed in it with us, sharing to the full our particular grief and pain. This is the fundamental significance of the cross...

Iona McLaughlin’s book, Triumph Over Tragedy, tells of her struggle to find purpose and meaning in life following the death of her daughter Jane and husband Pete and son Jack in an accident which also left her near death. The sequence of tragedy, as you can imagine, was overwhelming for her. Lying in her hospital room she wondered for what purpose she continued to live. She often wished for and prayed for death. But there were people in her life who would not let her give in. Though she was some 1500 miles from home, they flew to her side.The day came when she was able to leave the hospital. But what could she do? For 20 years she had been a wife and mother. Now her husband, her 14-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son were gone. How do you so radically change from being wife and mother to being neither. She went back to school to retrain. But there, among the cynicism of college students and professors, her faith in God began to falter. Maybe they were right. The universe was without reason or plan. Her despair led to thoughts of suicide. There would be no need to struggle any longer. The anniversary of the deaths for first Jane and then Pete and Jack were difficult milestones. It was the sudden unexpected memories which would shatter her the most. A note left in a forgotten book. A person walking down the street with the same gate as Peter. The struggle with “Why?” was the most difficult struggle in her life...

In her shocking short story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor describes the Misfit, a murderer with a conscience who’s about to kill an elderly woman. Before he does so, however, he talks about Jesus’ resurrection. It changes everything, he insists. It, in fact, seems to haunt him. “’Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead’,” The Misfit … [said], “and He shouldn’t have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,’ he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.“

In her shocking short story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor describes the Misfit, a murderer with a conscience who’s about to kill an elderly woman. Before he does so, however, he talks about Jesus’ resurrection. It changes everything, he insists. It, in fact, seems to haunt him. “’Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead’,” The Misfit … [said], “and He shouldn’t have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,’ he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.“...

("George Herbert was born to wealth and political power, and after graduation from Cambridge distinguished himself as the university's Public Orator and a member of Parliament. At the age of thirty-six, and despite the objections of friends that he was wasting his life, Herbert renounced his life of privilege and became the pastor at Bemerton, a rural village near Salisbury...")

("Three months ago I stood alone in front of my mother's casket at the Thomas Funeral Home in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina, a small town near Raleigh where our family moved in 1966. I twisted my neck so that my face would parallel hers. Hot tears streaked down my cheeks, my nose ran, my vision blurred...")

From Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC: “Those who believe in the immortality of the soul believe that life after death is a natural function of man as digestion after a meal. The Bible instead speaks of resurrection. It is entirely unnatural. Man does not go on living beyond the grave because that’s how he’s made. Rather, he goes to his grave as dead as a doornail and is given his life back again by God just as he was given it by God in the first place, because that is the way God is made. All of the major creeds affirm belief in resurrection of the body...

("Paul's words about grace reminded me of Leif Enger's wonderful novel, Peace Like a River. In it, Davy Land guns down two school bullies who have broken into his home. After he is arrested, jailed and convicted, Davey breaks out of jail and heads for the Badlands of North Dakota. He is pursued by a federal agent and by his own father, the one representing law, the other love...")

("The story is told of St Augustine of Hippo, a great philosopher and theologian who really wanted to understand the doctrine of the Trinity and to be able to explain it logically. One day as he was walking along the sea shore and reflecting on this, he suddenly saw a little child all alone on the shore. The child made a hole in the sand, ran to the sea with a little cup, filled her cup, came and poured it into the hole she had made in the sand...")

("The devil came to me the other day, as he often does, and he said, 'Preacher, how about joining me for a little walk. It never hurts to walk and talk a little bit, now does it?' I had to admit that I couldn’t see any harm in walking and talking, and so I agreed to walk with him for a little while. He led me out the door of the church and up the street to one of our neighbourhood convenience stores...")

Few people were simultaneously more rhetorically eloquent and morally flawed than John Updike. That eloquence extended to his Seven Stanzas at Easter (here excerpted): “Make no mistake: if [Christ] 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 … Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance.” But the magnitude of Updike’s eloquence surpassed the magnitude of his character...

My four and a half year old daughter and I were on our way to the grocery store and she was asking me questions about one of her favorite subjects. "Are we going to see Granny in heaven?" (Her only grandmother had died when she was just two, but with videotape and pictures, she knows what her granny looked like and says she remembers her.) "Yes, honey, when we die we will see Granny in heaven." "And then," she continued, "Will we come back to our own house?" "No honey," I replied, "We will stay with Jesus and Granny forever." She sat up straight and said in her most shocked voice, "You mean we're gona' stay dead?"...

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Fritz Kreisler was a world-famous violinist. He had earned a fortune with his concerts and compositions, but he generously gave most of it away. So, when he discovered an exquisite violin on one of his trips, he wasn’t able to buy it. But he remembered the instrument, and later on, having raised enough money to meet the asking price, he returned to the seller, hoping to purchase that beautiful instrument. But to his great dismay he discovered it had been sold to a collector. This man did not play violins, he only collected them. Kreisler made his way to the new owner’s home and offered to buy the violin. The collector said it had become his prized possession and he would not sell it. Kreisler was about to leave when he asked the owner, “Could I play the instrument once more before it is consigned to silence?” Permission was granted, and the great virtuoso filled the room with such heart-moving music that the collector’s emotions were deeply stirred. “I have no right to keep that to myself,” he exclaimed. “It’s yours, Mr. Kreisler. Take it into the world, and let people hear it.”...

Management guru Stephen Covey became known for his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey stated that effective people have a knack of “Putting First Things First.” For Covey this stretched well beyond the ability to set up a simple nuts and bolts To Be Done List. He has a very effective illustration that uses small pebbles and large rocks. Covey takes a container and fills it about 3/4 full of small pebbles. He then challenges someone who is attending his conference to try to put the set of large rocks into the container. The person will try to jam the larger rocks into the pebbles. He or she will only succeed in putting one of two of the rocks into the container. The person usually tries to rearrange the pebbles, again with only limited success. Once the person acknowledges that they cannot do it, Covey will successfully use a paradigm shift by beginning with the larger rocks then pouring the smaller rocks around them. Covey claims that most people first fill their lives with a lot of little tasks or activities. People then try to jam the more important tasks around all these less important tasks. However, the less important tasks prevent us from accomplishing the more important ones...