A few days ago, my wife and I reminded ourselves that April 11 marked what would have been her mother's 94th birthday.  A lovely and deeply caring woman, Helen was a beautiful picture of a human being.  Though her immediate world was small (she lived most her life in a little farming town in southwest Arkansas), and her purview blissfully absent of the political and social machinations which seem to trouble so many of us, Helen did her best to love everyone whom she came across, regardless of who or what they were.
     Many decades ago, when my wife and I were getting to know each other, I hitchhiked from rural Texas into her parents' little town to visit.  Although I doubt the town had ever seen a hitchhiker before (!), that didn't stop Helen from extending her most gracious hospitality to me in the course of my time there.  I'll not forget that week.
     As I view the larger world today, I see that we can all learn from being hospitable, in every way.  So many of us try so hard to look after ourselves, expending every effort to carve out our little niche of happiness in this existence, always seeking to maximize ourselves above all.  It's rather Darwinian, really, and I sometimes wonder why, as social science wants to think, humanity ever decided that cooperation was to be preferred over antagonism.  We all want "our" own.
     This is why Jesus' life is so startling.  As he said, "I did not come to be served, but to serve, and give my life as a ransom for many."  Jesus' words present the precise opposite of how most humans frame their lives.  Not that we should not be concerned for ourselves and our loved ones, but that we should remember that because in Jesus, God's love has truly been loosed in this universe, we should be entirely comfortable sharing love and life without worrying unduly about whether we will enjoy them, too.  God's love is endless.
     Thanks, Helen.

     While traveling last week, I found time to read George Elliot's Middlemarch.  It reminded me of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, as well as the currently popular PBS series, Downton Abbey.  All three of these works portray worlds that at first glance seem very far removed from our own, but if we examine them more closely, we see that they are in fact not significantly different.  They present people who, like all of us, are simply trying to make sense of and deal with the realities they face each day.  They give us telling and realistic pictures of the human condition.
     So much of life is indeed rather ordinary and bland, a series of routines and commitments, seemingly endless rivers of challenge and responsibility.  We often search long and hard for a higher plane of experience, a break from the normal, an inroad into the distinctive and unique.  The people of Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, and Downtoon Abbey were doing the same.  We all look for a greater meaning.
     Extraordinary meaning, meaning that rocks our world, however, rarely emerges from ordinary circumstances.  Extraordinary meaning demands extraordinary origins, origins that are not dependent on ordinary circumstances.  It bursts boundaries, shatters categories.  It takes life apart.
     This is a crucial point.  As the characters of Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, and Downton Abbey learned, however much life takes itself apart, it still remains life.  Only when life is taken apart will it genuinely change.
     So did Jesus say to Nicodemus when the inquisitive Pharisee asked Jesus how he could experience God more fully:  "You must be born again."
     Put another way, you must believe in the one who can see everything if you wish to see--really see--anything.
     

     What's your place?  I ask because I recently reread German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's soliloquy on the death of God.  Writing, in his The Gay Science, and adopting the guise of a "madman," Nietzsche asks, "Whither is God?  I will tell you.  We have killed him--you and I" [italics Nietzsche].  And, he adds, "Whither are we moving? . . . Are we not plunging continually? . . . Is there still any up or down?  Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?  Do we not feel the breath of empty space?  As it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?"
     Any death creates a space, a gap, however large or small, in the fabric of existence.  A death is a tear in the tapestry of reality.  It shrinks the world; it makes it less complete. Given how most of us define God, that is, as an extraordinarily large and powerful being, the death of God would therefore produce an enormous hole in the universe.  We would feel colder, we would feel emptier, we would feel as if "night" were "continually closing in on us."  We would be alone in a way that we probably cannot presently imagine.
     Put another way, we would no longer have a place.  Sure, we would continue to exist, and sure, we would continue to do what we enjoy doing, and sure, we would continue to die.  Why would we not?  But we would do all these things in a world, and cosmos, that are no more than space, excruciatingly dead and empty space, no rhyme, no reason, no point as to why they, or we, should be here.
     Succinctly and cogently, Nietzsche stumbled onto a painful and difficult truth:  space will never be place.
     What's your place?

     Yesterday, we talked about the Romantics and the resurrection.  Today, as I continue to contemplate how the idea of resurrection, whether we believe Jesus' resurrection happened or not, nonetheless ripples through our lives, I wonder, as I always do, why.  Why does the notion of resurrection so capture our senses, our hopes, our dreams?  Why do we so much long for a new beginning, a beginning that seems to rise, like a miracle, out of the old?  Why are we creatures who wish for another day?
     Of all the animals, we are the only ones who grasp the presence of mortality.  Of all the animals, we are the only ones who understand that life is more than life, that to live means also to die.  We understand the notion of nothingness.
     And nothingness is, as many existentialists have observed, a path to somethingness, a somethingness that bequeaths a powerful newness, a newnesss of deeper life and richer meaning.
     In the absolute nothingness of Jesus' death, the Son of God abandoned by his Father, the greatest of all somethingnesses arose, a somethingness that eclipses all others, a somethingness that changed history, bent space, and permanently altered all our notions of meaning and time:  the resurrection.
     The resurrection is nonsensical, radical, unbelievable, and unfathomable, but it solves humanity's greatest puzzle:  why does life have meaning?

     As I was traveling last week, I didn't get opportunity to take note of April 1 which, in addition to being, in many parts of the world, April Fools Day, is the birthday of one of the greatest of the Romantic pianists:  Sergei Rachmaninoff.  Born in Russia, eventually emigrating to America and, shortly before his death in 1943, becoming an American citizen, Rachmaninoff composed some of the richest music ever written for the piano. His work expresses a blending of intense and mournful melody with powerful and intricate chords and keyboard movements, aptly capturing and expressing the deepest spirit of the Romantics.  His playing took his audiences into the fullness of their emotional imaginations; they left amazed.
     Romanticism speaks of emotion, sense, and imagination, the heights, and the depths of the full gamut of humanness.  It takes us to the peaks of ecstasy, and drags us through the darkest nadirs of tragedy.  It is life.  Rachmaninoff gave us a glimpse of a human being struggling with what it is to be alive on this planet, what it is to experience, what it is to know, what it is to be as real as anything can possibly be.
     One of Rachmaninoff's closest associates was another Russian pianist, the incomparable Vladimir Horowitz.  In 1987, at the age of 82, Horowitz returned to Soviet Russia to perform, the first time he had been back since he had emigrated many years before.  He, too, made his audience swoon with the force and potency of his piano, demonstrating to us once more that however intellectual we may suppose ourselves to be, we are, in the end, creatures of heart and imagination.  We live as sensual beings.
     So it is as we, romantic and emotional creatures that we are, we who delight in the poignant melodies of the Romantics, we who today bask in the light of Easter, we realize that although reason is an essential part of who we are, we ultimately make our biggest decisions with our heart.  As Paul says in Romans 10, we believe, as a matter of intellectual assent, that Jesus died and rose, but we trust it with our heart.
     Long live the Romantics.

     As we reflect on Easter today, some of us may be asking whether the resurrection is, as some of my atheist friends have told me, parochial.  Is it really so small and insignificant that it affects only a very small corner of an infinitely large universe?  Is one itinerant Jewish preacher's return from death really that important?
     If the resurrection happened, it's vastly important.  Why?  It tells us that this vast universe is the creation, in some way, of a personal being.  Only a personal being can cause another personal being to rise from the dead; impersonal things have no power over anything.  A personal creator being ensures that the fabric of the cosmos is more than its parts.  It is a work of eternity.
     In this light, the resurrection becomes anything but parochial.  The resurrection means that life is more than itself, that life as we know and love it is not all there is to experience.  There is more to life than meets the eye.  Or the ear.  Or the heart.  The resurrection means that this present is only the work of a far greater present still, a present that will never end.
     As Jesus told Martha in John 11, "He who believes in me will live even if he dies.  And he who believes in me will never die."
     Death is not the end.

     Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends."  So said Jesus, Jewish Messiah and, as he constantly made clear, the son of God, on the eve of his crucifixion.  Most of us know how Jesus would, in a few short hours, demonstrate his words in tangible form by dying on a Roman cross for, as he had long proclaimed he would do, all humanity, billions and billions of people, people who had already lived and died, people who were living, people who had not yet even been born.  Most of us know that this man Jesus, God in the flesh, gave himself so that we could find forgiveness of our sins and eternal life, an abundant life in the present moment and, when our days draw to a close, life forevermore.  Most of us know that because Jesus died, life is more than living, dying, and no more.
      Not as many of us, however, know about Maximilian Kolbe who, in his own way, did exactly the same thing.
     Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest who was imprisoned at one of the most notorious of the German concentration camps, Auschwitz.  In an act of selfless sacrifice that will be remembered for many ages to come, Kolbe willingly came forward to serve the death sentence of another prisoner, one Franciszek Gajowniczek, whom he had not even met.  After two weeks of slow dehydration and starvation, Kolbe finally died when the guards injected him with carbolic acid.  Gajowniczek, who died in 1995, devoted the rest of his life to telling the world about Kolbe's incredible sacrifice.
     Kolbe surely exemplified Jesus' words.  He willingly and happily died for another human being. As did Jesus for us.  As the Christian world remembers Good Friday, that darkest yet most sacred of days, the day on which Jesus, the son of God and God in the flesh, sacrificed himself, giving everything he was for the world that he had made, all of us should therefore ask, with joy, gratitude, and astonishment:  what kind of a God would do such a thing?
     The answer is very simple:  a God who loves us.