The Resurrection
Stone
Delivered at Madison
Chapel, Madison, MS
The Thirteenth Sunday
of Pentecost
I
had the opportunity to travel to Greece in 2007 for a course on Paul and his
Grecian churches. Much of the religious culture that we encountered there was
Greek Orthodox, a branch of Christianity that seems to be a throwback to
ancient times with its Greek liturgy and fascinating architecture.
What
has stuck with me from the tours we took of various churches in Athens,
Corinth, and Thessaloniki, is the sense of historical participation that is
build into the Eastern Orthodox liturgy and worship. In many of the churches we
toured the sanctuary is painted from five feet off of the floor to the very
ceiling with images of people praising Jesus Christ. At the highest point in
the room, usually a domed ceiling in the center of the space, Jesus Christ sits
surrounded by angels. Surrounding this image are circles of worshippers: the
Old Testament heroes, the Apostles, the Fathers, then the saints of the Orthodox
faith whose feet are painted just below eye level on the walls of the room. The
effect of all this painting is that as you stand anywhere in that room you are
drawn into a sense of participation in the eternal worship of Jesus Christ. You
are the next generation, the next circle of the faithful looking upward and
singing “Holy, Holy, Holy” along with all of those who have gone on before. One
gets a sense of the immense scope of tradition and history that is celebrated
in the liturgy of Greek Orthodoxy just by standing in the room where worship
happens. My voice, my eyes, my spirit was added to those of the great cloud of
witnesses painted on the walls. Standing in those cathedrals you can hear the
voices of long-dead saints hanging both in the air and before the Throne.
We don’t do saints
well in Baptist life. We have heroes, it is true, but our heroes generally
represent our own pet causes more than our devotion to godly faithfulness. We
unofficially canonize preachers who preach our brand of theology or those who
champion the social causes that we support. We are wary of saints as we are of
creeds - in our denial of either we belie our de facto devotion to both.
I
have been so moved by the painting of the Greek churches because I crave
membership in a great tradition, one that has icons and saints, smells and
bells, demands and devotion that is deeper than the individualistic,
consumer-based model of spirituality that I have come to embody. Baptists have
such a poor sense of history that we often ignore or even mock those we call
“traditionalists” for their dusty and inflexible devotion to irrelevant forms
of Christianity. We are a people who rely on the conversion experience as a
moment more important that any moment which has come before. We set the date of
our baptism as a watershed event and measure everything as being before or
after we “met Jesus.”
But
I want tradition. I want spirituality. I want, no, I thirst for something
deeper and bigger and dustier than the flashy, polished, needs-meeting ministry
of my culture. I want to be able to look and saints and heroes of the faith in
the way that the author of Hebrews does - as imperfect examples of how to live
a godly life in the world that is being redeemed by the Spirit of God.
Perhaps
we can learn something from our Catholic and Orthodox cousins. Be appropriating
a Baptist version of sainthood we can avoid our Baptist navel-gazing and re-conceptualize
spirituality by providing ourselves with a stronger sense of spiritual lineage,
that is, a sense of purposeful connectedness with the past and the future. Our
commitment to scripture as the primary authority for Christian faith and
practice will enable us to avoid treating these spiritual heroes as icons in
stained glass; rather, we will tend to conceptualize the lives of such saints
as windows through which to gain a fresh perspective on scripture and on the
life and teaching of Jesus himself. So long as we see the Saints and spiritual
heroes as examples, as windows to the true Godly life made real in Jesus we
will avoid the perils of misguided honor and worship.
We
would do well to examine the lives of the saints and those spiritual heroes who
have journeyed this way before us. Through such reading and prayerful
examination we may learn what being a member of this Baptist priesthood is all
about. We will surely find a connectedness across the broken years of history
to the people and traditions of our Faith from which we have been separated
because of our peculiar Baptist experiences here. We will find that the
examination of the lives of the faithful is useful, beneficial, and even
desirable. More than this, though, is the sense of participation that will fill
us.
We
should not engage the writings of and about Christian saints and heroes out of
historical curiosity; rather we should examine them to help us understand our
own lives as examples to those who come after us. Morgan comments that, “The
long Christian tradition of sanctity views exemplary Christians as bridges
between earlier lives of righteousness, even the life of Jesus Christ himself,
and future righteousness.”[1] We
Baptists are much more familiar and comfortable with this idea. We speak of
“witness” and “testimony.” We are to be living examples of the transforming and
redeeming power of Jesus Christ for others to see. Surely it is not so strange
to think of ourselves as participating in someone else’s “great cloud” one day,
though I confess it seems arrogant to do so. Perhaps by examining the lives of
those spiritual heroes we will see ourselves, at least in part, as real
participants in what God is and has been doing in the world.
Being a real
participant in the real work that God is doing in our world can be a little
intimidating. My tradition of Baptist life has formed me to think of the Gospel
as evangelization with little afterward. The idea, then, of being ushered into
a Kingdom where people do real work that does real good for a very real God
seems more than I can bear. It is in those moments when the work of God lands
me in the middle of very real and very powerful situations with families and
communities that I need the cloud of witnesses to be real.
The
people mentioned in the Hebrews list are far from perfect. They are not holy;
they are not canonized. They are real. They are prostitutes, adulterers,
doubters, deserters, murderers, and thieves. They are like that rowdy lot in
Tiger Stadium or Cameron Indoor, pressing in on both home and away players,
cheering and chanting and pleading in their imperfection for us to taste and see
that the Lord is good. They are pleading for one more foot to land in front of
the other. They are cheering us on and worshipping the Lord in the same breath.
They cry, “Holy, Holy, Holy!” as though it was an invitation hymn.
In the final book
of the Harry Potter series the main characters are introduced to a magical
object called the resurrection stone. This curious little rock has been imbued
with the power to call forth the dead at the pleasure of the living.
When
Harry comes to the end of his own journey, in a moment when he faces the
embodiment of evil, he uses the resurrection stone to call forth courage. What
the stone reveals to him are the spirits of his long-dead parents and his
recently killed friends. He does not call them forth from the beyond to deny
them peace or rest; he calls on them in his moment of need.
“He
closed his eyes and turned the stone over in his hand three times.
He
knew it had happened, because he heard slight movements around him that
suggested frail bodies shifting their footing on the earth, twig-strewn ground
that marked the outer edge of the forest. He opened his eyes and looked around.
They
were neither ghostly nor truly flesh, he could see that. Less substantial than
living bodies, but much more than ghosts, they moved toward him, and on each
face there was the same loving smile…
Lily’s
smile was widest of all. She pushed her long hair back as she drew close to
him, and her green eyes, so like his, searched his face hungrily, as though she
would never be able to look at him enough.
“You’ve
been so brave.”
He
could not speak. His eyes feasted on her, and he thought that he would like to
stand and look at her forever, and that would be enough.
“You’re
nearly there,” said his father. “Very close. We are…so proud of you.”
“Does
it hurt?” The childish question had fallen from Harry’s lips before he could
stop it.
“Dying?
Not at all,” said Sirius. “Quicker and easier than falling asleep.”
“I
didn’t want you to die, “ Harry said. These words came without his volition.
“Any of you. I’m sorry…”
A
chilly breeze that seemed to emanate from the heart of the forest lifted the
fair at Harry’s brow. He knew that they would not tell him to go, that it would
have to be his decision.
“You’ll
stay with me?”
“Until
the very end,” said his father.
Harry
looked at his mother.
“Stay
close to me,” he said quietly. And he set off.”[2]
This tender scene is how the “great
cloud of witnesses” functions for me. It is easy to think of Abraham and David
and Joshua and Paul and Matthew as holy characters who seem too different from
me to be a part of my own spirituality. I need people a little closer to home.
I need some holy heroes that point the way along this Way because they have
been that way themselves. I need heroes, witnesses, saints not made in my own
image but in the image of those seeking the image of Jesus Christ.
That
is the essence of our Christian discipleship - the imitation of Christ. Such
imitation is in the practices of Jesus himself, but it can also be found in observing
the lives of those saints who were closer to that image than I am. It is in
mentoring the believers who follow behind us on the journey of faith. It is in
showing the way even as we stumble along and look ahead for guidance. It is to
stand at the base of that great basilica and see ourselves as the next
generation of believers in a very real God who does very real things and sing
our part in that Holy, Holy, Holy that never stops.
In
our troubles and in our struggles we are not alone. In our successes and
failures we are not the only ones. We belong to a community that extends from
God’s first words to Abram through the call we each have heard to run that good
race. This extended community includes those whose faithfulness has actually
ended in success.[3] It
includes those saints who have found the solid footholds and who have, through
their writings, come back to guide us along the way.
We
are not alone. The journey is too much for any of us to do alone, but it is
enough to have a cloud of witnesses to guide and to cheer us on. Together,
standing with one another and in the midst of this host, we will walk the Way
and do the work of God in this place. Is not God a God who is nearby? Is not
this great cloud of witnesses with us?
Take heart, then, my
dear friends. Let us do that holy work of moving forward in our faith and help
others find their way. Keeping our eyes on Jesus, our feet on the path, and our
ears tuned to the sounds of that great crowd saying, “you’re almost there.”
Dear God, “stay close” to us. Amen.
[1] From
Morgan, Ron, “The Great Cloud of Witnesses: Evangelical Christians and the
Lives of the Saints.” Fides et Historia,
35 no 2, 19-27.
[2]
Adapted from Rowling, J.K., Harry Potter
and the Deathly Hallows. New York: Scholastic, 2007, p. 698-700.
[3]
Renwick, David A., “Hebrews 11:29-12:2.” Interpretation,
57 no. 3, 300-302.
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