alive

There's only one of these every year, a Resurrection Sunday. Just one chance to really let our joy ring out unabashed. All around the planet there are Christians meeting. Some in magnificent cathedrals, some in tiny wooden churches, some in school halls or sitting rooms. Some meet with candles and incense, following ancient patterns; others raise their hands to loud anthems. Where ever they meet, and however they do it, their focus is the same; Jesus.

Our congregation always manages to find a nice groove somewhere between ancient and loud, and this morning we sang the classic hymn "Thine be the Glory";

Thine be the glory, risen conquering son,
Endless is the victory, thou o'er death, has won.
Angels in bright raiment, rolled the stone away,
Kept the folded grave clothes, where thy body lay.


Lo, Jesus meets us, risen from the tomb,
Lovingly he greets us, scatters fear and doom.
Let the church with gladness, hymns of triumph sing,
For her Lord now liveth, death hath lost it's sting.


Thine be the glory, risen conquering son,
Endless is the victory, thou o'er death, has won.


There really aren't any other words better than those for today. It puzzles me that some would say you can have Christian faith without the resurrection. I can't agree. The resurrection, that other-worldly, incomprehensible battle against death is the crux, literally, of everything we believe. If it didn't happen, then we Christians, wanna-be's that we are half of the time, should just pack up and go home.

My good friend Heidi shared her story today in church. She's had her own other-worldly battle against death. A few years ago she became very sick. Mis-diagnosed pneumonia turned into multiple organ failure with frightening speed, and within hours she was in a coma. The coma lasted three weeks, and during that time she died nine times.

She stood in front of us today, her face bright and her smile wide. Heidi walks, talks, works, sings, loves her husband, gardens, cooks, eats and dances. She dresses with spunk and has a great sense of humour. She is infectiously alive.

There was a period of time where Heidi's husband and family were being repeatedly told to expect her to die. They were told this by doctors in such a resigned way that her husband, a normally reticent man, couldn't take it any more. "Stop talking about Heidi as if she's already dead!" he said to them as his frustration exploded. "You are robbing us of the dignity of hope."

The dignity of hope.


We can't live without hope. It's a tangible thing. We feel it, like a light or a flame inside of us. It comforts us and feeds us. It enables us to endure.

Heidi breathed through a tracheotomy while she was in a coma, and even when she woke up, that tube kept her alive. She said today that it's really lonely having a "trachy", because you can't speak, you effectively have no voice.

I think I know how that feels. When it comes to putting words to this faith of mine I've felt silenced. Like I've had no voice. There have been plenty of voices around me and in the public sphere, but I haven't always liked the words they used. They haven't spoken my language. And I didn't realise I needed to find a language of my own.

My faith is nothing more, and nothing less than persistent hope. It's a persistent hope that has never really gone away since the moment I prayed as a four year old asking God to be with me "for all the days of my life." That hope stuck around through a less than perfect childhood and through angst-ridden teenage years. It never left when depression lurked in the shadows of exhaustion, and it wrote itself over my heart while I took an eternity to figure myself out. It never left me through those shocking first years of motherhood, nor through the highs and lows of marriage. My hope remains.

Today, Resurrection Sunday, is my hope. The easily misunderstood, often mocked and barely explainable death and resurrection of Christ is the source of my hope. He lives, and so do I.