Adventures in the Word

Here’s a quote from N T Wright on resurrection that I thought was especially cogent. It reminds us that resurrection is truly a defeat of death.

“Death – the unmaking of the creator’s image-bearing creatures – was not seen as a good thing, but as an enemy to be defeated. It was the ultimate weapon of destruction: anti-creation, anti-human, anti-god. If the creator god was also the covenant god, and if the covenant was there to deal with the unwelcome problem that had invaded the created order at its heart and corrupted human beings themselves, it was this intruder, death itself, that had to be defeated. To allow death to have its way – to sign up, as it were, to some kind of compromise agreement whereby death took human bodies but the creator was allowed to keep human souls – was no solution, or not to the problem as it was perceived within most second-Temple Judaism. That is why ‘resurrection’ was never a redescription of death, but always its компютри втора употребаdefeat.”
— N T Wright pgs 727-728 The Resurrection of the Son of God.

Sound familiar?

So when this corruptible has put on incorruption, and this mortal has put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory.”
“ O Death, where is your sting?
O Hades, where is your victory?”
The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

— Paul the Apostle, I Cor 15:54-57

Cramped in a window seat – 21A,
I swallow . . . swal-low, air rushing by my ears,
popping, finally climbing above the haze
until the sun tells me to pull down the shade.

Me – flanked by 200 strangers – and packed
inside an aluminum can – and hurled
along the troposphere’s belly – hoping
to land right-side-up on a patch of Houston tarmac.

I try not to think of the million things that
could go wrong but – somehow – won’t again this time;
I marvel how that could possibly be.
Is it just the odds? or is it ground for a new ‘belief’?

But where’s a faith like this for everyday;
do our normal days call for less than that?
And if I could reach my own dirt patch with half
the panache, I’d surely be fine with that.

People – sleeping, talking, eating, laughing,
calmly gazing on the patchwork stitched below.
Is it normal life or is it thirty-thousand feet or so?
or why can’t we level off and live in both?

– David Herin

I love the hour or so before bed
after some have gone to sleep –
when the lights cast a quiet glow
and conversations slow and take a lower tone.

I often sit in my overstuffed, wide chair
and contemplate the universe
and think myself into places too lofty for me.
I tend to dizzy myself in the rarefied air.

I hear footsteps padding down the stairs
and distorted metallic voices on TV.
I listen to parts of one-sided talks on the phone –
muffled, masked behind the closed doors.

I hear someone open the fridge, and pans
and pots randomly clang against the kitchen’s hardness.
My son must be fixing a late-night snack to
numb the fickle phantom hunger pangs.

Darkened windows mirror the pair of lamps
in my room and shadowed cars swish across,
chasing each other; strangers all fixed on
racing to unseen, nameless places.

I feel alone in such a quiet fury – the flurry
of brave faces all in such a hurry to go their own way.
Sunk in my chair, I’m one more face in the subway mobs,
grasping, gasping to breathe some fresh air.

Up from my padded throne, I turn the corner
to wander from carpet to linoleum. (I’m not alone!)
Opening the freezer door, a cold gust washes my face –
I say: “Hey, let’s split this pizza, and maybe more.”

– David Herin