Sunday Musings

Practice Resurrection

Many people think Easter is a day — and that day is now passed, the family gatherings over, the candy eaten.

By ancient Christian tradition, however, Easter is a season — fifty days to celebrate resurrection, new life, joy, and hope. Easter is Christianity’s greatest feast following Lent’s great fast. The fifty days of Easter include seven Sundays, the final Sunday of Easter (this year) being May 21.

In many ways, Easter is particularly counter-cultural these days. Gloominess, fear, anxiety, attack, distrust, and stress are the emotional coin of the realm. Where I live outside of Washington, D.C., it is almost as if you aren’t allowed to be joyful: Don’t you know about gun violence? What about the attack on voting rights? Did you hear what just happened in Florida (fill in the state-of-the-week-outrage)? How can you make jokes when the worst climate report ever was just released? OMG, did you read that story in the Post?

Informed people — serious people — are on top of it all — and aren’t going to feast for fifty days. We don’t have time for that. We’ve got to get to work.

On these seven Sundays of Easter, I’m going to go to an unacceptable place: to joy, celebration, wonder, and awe. During the week, we can take time for those other things — the headlines, the things that take us to despair. But here, on the first day of these weeks, we’re going to feast on the promises of new life.

You can expect this season’s Sunday Musings to be a little different. The focus will be “Practicing Resurrection,” a phrase drawn from Wendell Berry’s 1973 poem, “Manifesto” (below). Through May, the Musings will feature a poem that highlights some aspect of this counter-cultural celebration rather than staying with the lectionary gospel readings. (The lectionary readings will be posted at the end of each Musing, rather than the beginning.)

The question for these weeks IS NOT: What is the resurrection?

Rather, the questions WILL BE: Where does resurrection show up in our lives? How do we practice resurrection?

Today is the Second Sunday of Easter and the poem is Wendell Berry’s well-known “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.” The lectionary reading is the story of Doubting Thomas.

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Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
by Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

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I remember the day I walked away.

For months, the religious studies department at the college where I worked had been in turmoil. Behind the scenes, of course. I doubt the students knew. I’d gone to this college after losing my job at an evangelical school. It was the first job of my post-evangelical life. When I arrived three years earlier, I was thrilled to be free of doctrinal constraints — and liberated from the tedious bickering of conservative Christians.

My naïveté did not last long. I discovered that in-fighting is not unique to evangelicals. This other place, a loosely church-related “prestige” liberal arts college, was roiled by conflict as well. The religious studies faculty was divided between those who were still “church-y” (liberal Protestants and Catholics) and those who wanted to undo their students’ faith. The anti-religion religious studies professors led a crusade against the Presbyterian minister department chair. Eventually, he lost his leadership position — and those of us who had supported him were to be punished.

In three short years, I’d gone from being the liberal feminist heretic at an evangelical college to being a traditionalist church-going believer at a prestige one. It was head-spinning. All I ever wanted to do was to teach — and write — and make a difference. I didn’t sign up for institutional drama with its pettiness, competition, and conflict.

I’d had enough. I wanted a new life.

The winner, a woman I never really trusted, called me to her office. She told me that I’d been re-assigned a teaching load of the most boring, intellectually deadening courses you can imagine — and she did so while smiling maliciously.

After she finished reading my sentence, I replied, “I’m not going to teach those courses.”

She said, “Yes, you will. Or you won’t have a a job.”

I said, “Oh, really? I’m not going to teach those classes. I quit.”

“You can’t quit,” she nearly shouted at me. “If you quit, you’ll never work in academia again. You’ll never get another teaching job. No tenure, no professorship, nothing.”

“That is a chance I’m willing to take. I quit.”

I turned and walked out of her office into the warm spring sunshine. Free at last.

When I read Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto,” the first lines jump out at me:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay . . .
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

Of course, none of us wants to be foolish. We want to be secure, care for our families, have decent health insurance, and a sense that the future will unfold in some vaguely predictable way.

But the sad truth is that we live in a world that often demands we sacrifice vocation, humanity, and the hope for a good life in favor of success and security in the Empire of Commoditized Everything. It is our empire of death, one that kills us and yet has itself been dying for a long time.

Resurrection involves death. For the new thing to come, old things have to go — the structures of domination, evils that pose as grace, and whatever undermines loving the earth and our neighbors. Resurrection can’t happen without endings. New life is impossible without the finality of no-going-back grief-at-the-tomb death.

And so, on one spring day, I knifed my own academic career — a sort of vocational twist on Abraham and his son of promise — only I completed the act.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world.

Resurrection is like that. “You’ll never work in academia again. . .” still rings in my ears. She was right. I haven’t. Not, at least, as I once thought I would. Not in a way marked by traditional milestones, recognized titles, and social respectability. Nope. I was reborn as a kind of “mad academic” who made — or followed — a different path. Faith is a kind of liberating madness, the courage to say no, and a leap into what you don’t entirely understand before it unfolds.

There’s a wildness to resurrection. You can’t predict it. Life after death doesn’t behave in any sort of normal way. Like Jesus who shows up to tearful Mary and says “don’t touch me” and a week later invites skeptical Thomas to stick a finger in his open wounds. Like a God who sends women out to the world to preach to men who won’t listen. Like the breath of peace showing up in a room of those terrified by the possibility of their own arrest and death.

Resurrection is the work of a feral spirit, as untamed and undomesticated a possibility as we humans can barely imagine. It breaks the rules, bursts through expectations, and follows only freedom and love.

Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.

Often, I’ve heard today’s Thomas passage preached with surety — that this story witnesses to a literal bodily resurrection. The resurrection happens in this one particular way and, if you believe in this certain fact, you will be saved. This evidence demands a verdict: believe it or go to hell.

That’s made me hate the Thomas story, a biblical text I’ve gladly ignored. For a time, I dismissed all such “evidence” of resurrection as a kind of rebellion against evangelicalism. But doubting Thomas isn’t about scientific or historical fact — and it doesn’t offer what we consider evidence at all.

Instead, the story of Thomas invites us to see the unpredictable Jesus, who shows up at dinner tables, during long walks, and on a fishing trip. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of it, except that whenever he appears, his friends know joy and surprise and wonder anew. They are changed forever.

Signs (not “evidence”) of this resurrection abounds — I see those signs everywhere now. Whenever we turn away from that which causes death to our own souls, to the souls of others, and to the world — and walk out into the spring sun, unsure of the next steps, but liberated at last to bring freedom to all. When we embrace the wild God wherever and however that God shows up. And when we hear the voice that invites us to abandon tenure and plant sequoias instead.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Jesus said, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” That’s resurrection. Its best evidence is poetry — and protest — and our persistence to confound the empires of death.

Re-read the “Manifesto.” Imagine that world — the world of switchbacks and surprises to the fullness of life.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

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What do you think it means to “practice resurrection”? Have you ever purposefully walked away from something that deadened your soul? Where have you seen resurrection?

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You may want to watch this extended interview with Wendell Berry by Bill Moyers, from a program recorded nine years ago. In many ways, it expands on the vision of the “Mad Farmer” and what it means to practice resurrection. It is relevant as we move toward Earth Day (and, in addition to Berry and Moyers, you get some wise comments from Bill McKibben as well).

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Maybe the story is less about a doubtful Thomas needing evidence for the resurrection and more about the risen Jesus having the courage to let his friends touch his deepest wounds.

Who among us so willingly lets others touch our wounds?

— Diana Butler Bass

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LECTIONARY READING

John 20:19-31

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the authorities, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you." When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."

But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord." But he said to them, "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe."

A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you." Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe." Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God!" Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe."

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

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PAID SUBSCRIBERS — LIVE ZOOM on THURSDAY, APRIL 20 at 4PM Eastern/1PM Pacific

Mark your calendars! Don’t worry if you can’t make it. A recording will be sent out to the entire paid list after the live event.

Our guest is James D. Richardson, author of The Abolitionist’s Journal: Memories of an American Antislavery Family. Finding his a family journal lead him to trace the life of his ancestor, George Richardson, a white clergyman, along the Underground Railroad, as the chaplain to a Black unit in the Civil War, to being the founder of a Black college. The book tells a history of what some white families did to stand for justice and equality — as well as how the past has a continuing life into the present.

Jim was formerly a journalist and editor — and then an Episcopal priest. Most recently, he was Dean of the Cathedral in Sacramento, California.

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