Throughout Easter week, Terri Schiavo has been in the news.  (The Florida woman diagnosed as being in a vegetative state.)  And the legal debate whether to keep her alive or reinstate the feeding tube.  One side accuses the other of "judicial homicide."

They line up with rhetoric like "right to life" and "the sanctity of life."  The other side accuses the first of not respecting the wishes of a dying person.  Their clichés are the "right of choice" and "respecting one’s wishes."

Twenty-four hour news coverage interviews professional after professional.  My online ministerial discussion group has lined up on both sides of the issue.  All over the country, on coffee breaks, and by water coolers, people share their views.  The intensity of conflict and depth of feelings suggest much about our culture.

It points out how divided we continue to be as a nation.  The political divisions over so-called "moral values" that shaped our last election seem to be along the same lines in this debate.  It suggests that we need to learn more about advanced directives.  This is something no one wants to think about, and yet it remains an issue relevant to all of us.

Most significantly, I think the debate over Terri Schiavo illustrates how confused we are as a people over the issue of death.  It’s something we never talk about, directly.  Instead, as a nation, we argue about feeding tubes and legal rights.  The problem I have with this so-called "sanctity of life" argument is that it seems to leave out the "dignity of death."

Death is treated as the opposite of life, rather than a complimentary dialectic of life – giving life value and meaning.  To hang on to any thread of "life" at all costs seems to me not only to compromise a quality of life, but is a denial of death itself.

Yet the meaning in the precariousness of life and death and what happens beyond death, in one way or another, is at the heart of what religion is all about.  While admittedly speculative, this is what all religions seek to address.  While the language and culture differs, they all speak to three things.

•  How to live.

•  How to die.                                                                                                

•  What it means to be reborn or live beyond death.                                [TOP]

Egyptian mythology tells of the phoenix, a bird that lives in the desert for 500 years. Then it explodes into flames.   The ashes rain down to the earth.  Then, suddenly, out of this dead pile of ashes, the bird bursts forth and rises up afresh, renewed in excellence and beauty.  Variations on this bird are found throughout the world. 

In the delightful Sufi allegory entitled, "The Conference of the Birds," it is called the "Simurgh."  One fallen feather from this bird inspires in the heart of all other birds a sense of the transcendent and the urge to seek it.  The truth does not depend on whether there really is such a bird.  The truth lies in the deep and gnawing sense to which the story points.   

Eastern religions talk about reincarnation.  "Reincarnation" and "karma" are catchwords in our culture.  We like to speculate on the possibilities.  Asian religions explore how our debt of karma determines our next life.  Somewhat like our metaphors of judgment day, how lives are evaluated.  I like to think of this as being recycled until we get it right.

Jewish tradition has a concept of reincarnation called Gilgulim, or sometimes called "transmigration of the soul." More choice, here, than with karma.  As delightful stories about this go the soul negotiates with the angels as to what we need to learn.  It’s like consulting with a panel and determining the best situation within which we can learn these new lessons.  And so we are reborn in our particular time and place and circumstance.

Just before we are born, the angel reaches out and touches us so we forget our past experiences and can learn afresh.  That’s why we have this little dimple, just above our upper lip. That’s where the angel touched us.  Some sources say that Christians, too, had a concept of reincarnation up until about the fifth century. It was called the "pre-existence of the soul."  It was based on such passages as when Jesus asked the disciples, "Who do people say that I am?"  The disciples reported rumors of Elijah, or Jeremiah, or one of the prophets. 

The church was split over this issue between Rome and Constantinople.  When one voting block refused to show up, the doctrine shifted more toward the sense of heaven and hell.  In many, and perhaps most, quarters of Christianity, that notion prevails to this day.  In the early centuries of Christianity, there was much speculation and little consensus.                                                                                                        [TOP]

Informative, if not challenging, to present day Christianity is to know that         "resurrection" is not a new concept with Christianity.  It was well established in the Jewish tradition, long before Jesus.  Except for the Sadducees, most Jews believed in resurrection.  Ezekiel 37:12 says, "Behold, I will open your graves, and cause you to come out of them, O my people."  Ezekiel talks about the valley of dry bones. Wind swept and sun bleached.

The foot bone connects to the anklebone, and the anklebone to the leg bone, and the leg bone to the knee bone, and the song goes on.  Soon, this dead valley of bleached bones is alive and dancing.  Ezekiel invoked this image of bodily resurrection for a people lost in exile.  Jerusalem, the people and the land, is dead like a valley of dry bones but the land will come alive again!

This is a clear metaphor for the return from exile.  It gave desperate people some hope, something to believe in.  Bodily resurrection was well understood as a metaphor.  Daniel 12:2 says "Those who sleep in the dust shall awaken."  Again, a prophecy for exiles. We get a sense of a promise.  A new life. A new Jerusalem. A new heaven and a new earth.  Bodily resurrection is the image of this hope.   Isaiah 26:19 … "The dead shall live, the bodies shall arise. Awake and sing, ye who dwell in the dust."  This image was so entrenched in the minds of Jews that by the time of the first century, it was widespread.

Paul attempted to explain resurrection in the 15^th chapter of 1^st Corinthians.  In the first century, the milieu in which the Bible was written, two divergent worldviews merged - the Hebrew and the Greek.  Like two rivers of different constituencies merging, it takes awhile for them to mix. It was so with these two, radically different ways of thinking.

The Hebrew language is based on verbs, processes, ongoing happenings.  The Greek language is based on nouns, concepts, static terms.  When the Hebrews wanted to express an idea, they used images, metaphors, stories.  This is how they thought about resurrection.  Stories, metaphors, allegories are the best way to talk about a process.  The Greeks preferred to think about it in terms of concepts - body and soul.  The Greeks wanted it explained in concrete terms.  What does it mean? How does it work?

In 1^st Corinthians 15, Paul tries to make sense of this Hebrew witness for the Greeks. If we can feel both sides of this struggle to understand, it’s an amazing chapter.

Walter Brueggemann, a well know professor of the Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, and well respected for his writing, views the Hebrew scriptures as a story of inversions, a story of the reversal of fortunes.

•  Noah, oppressed, was rescued by God.                                                   [TOP]

•  Abraham, in an unworkable world, left Ur to find a homeland.

•  Moses, enslaved, led the children of Israel out of Egypt.

•  The story of the judges repeats this cycle twelve times.

•  Hannah was childless, and prayed to God, and God lifted her up.

•  The people lived in Exile … the prophets spoke … and sure enough, true to   pattern, Ezra and Nehemiah and the prophet Malachi walking not far behind, led the people back to their homeland.

The concept of "resurrection" emerged as a metaphor for this reversal of fortune.  What dies or falls apart, by the grace of God, has come back together again.  In the context of Jesus time, Jews understood resurrection imagery as the renewing power of God in people’s lives.  And they understood it, even unto and through death itself.  There is no such thing as an ending. All endings are new beginnings.  And hence, there is no need to fear death, or fight death, or hang onto tiny threads of life with feeding tubes and lawsuits.

My approach and invitation:  To think of RESURECTION first as a Divine Principle, and not necessarily as a historical anomaly.

This doesn’t preclude thinking of it in literal terms, if someone wants to.  Over the years, I have known many conservative folks who, because of a literal belief in the resurrection, have found profound courage amidst life’s troubles.  But for those who struggle with the imagery … to first think of Resurrection as a DIVINE PRINCIPLE can restore dignity to Christianity.

For the divine principle is the basis of resurrection imagery throughout the world.

•  Sunsets that gives way to sunrises.

•  The fullness of the moon before an Easter Sunday morning.

•  he spring equinox when everything comes into perfect balance.

Resurrection is built into the very structure of the cosmos. 

•  Barren trees kissed by the springtime sun, sprouting new leaves.

• Seeds that sleep beneath the snow, forming multicolored flower blooms.

• Children giggling as they hunt, find, and wrap their little fingers around Easter eggs.

All nature sings, and around me rings this one fundamental truth about how God works in yours and my history: to erase all worry, and anxiety, and fear, even to take the sting from death itself.

Life will forever renew itself.                                                                           [TOP]