The Stories Of Life Are Far From Over (Jonathan Martin)

For if there is a God who not only creates but sustains and resurrects, then there can yet be life on the other side of death for all things. Then there is hope, not only for the yearning in you to drive you into union with God, but to be realized in union with those others. If death is not the final word, and chaos produces creation rather than destroys it, then many of the stories of the life you thought were long over are far from over yet.

How To Survive A Shipwreck by Jonathan Martin, p 70

The Creator God is the One Who Raises the Dead (Jurgen Moltmann)

It isn't enough to say that the Creator God is the one who fashions matter, the reason that there is something rather than nothing.  This is significant, but it is not enough.  "Creation" is more than the act of giving dead stuff it’s dead stuff-ness, to author a lifeless cosmos.

What is this God like? 

For Moltmann, the God who is Creator is inseparable from the God who raises the dead:

“The God who raises the dead is the same God who as creator calls into being the things that are not; and the God who called the world into existence out of nothing is the God who raises the dead.  Beginning and end, creation and resurrection, belong together and must not be separated from one another; for the glorification of creation through the raising of the dead is creation’s perfecting, and creation is aligned towards the resurrection of the dead.”

-Jesus Christ for Today’s World

“Just” a body? (Thomas Lynch)

Thomas Lynch, poet/undertaker, will be one of my literary companions this Lenten season.

Perhaps a proper Lenten beginning entails burying (pun intended) the idea that we should ever piously place the adverb “just”  prior to the noun “body” when we talk about the life and death of a human being.

"So to suggest in the early going of grief that the dead body is “just” anything rings as tinny in its attempt to minimalize as it would if we were to say it was “just” a bad hair day when the girl went bald from her chemotherapy.  Or that our hope for heaven on her behalf was based on the belief that Christ raised “just” a body from dead.  What if, rather than crucifixion, he’d opted for suffering low self-esteem for the remission of sins?  What if, rather than “just a shell,” he’d raised his personality, say, or The Idea of Himself?  Do you think they’d have changed the calendar for that?  Done the Crusades?  Burned witches?  Easter was a body and blood thing, no symbols, no euphemisms, no half measures.  If he’d raised anything less, of course, as Paul points out, the deacon and several others of us would be out of business or back to Saturday Sabbaths, a sensible diet, and no more Christmases."

The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade by Thomas Lynch, p21

The Resurrection (IOCC Newsletter)

I've been thinking a lot lately about the various ways that theologians speak of what "salvation" even is.  The differences between legal/forensic and ontological views of salvation are huge. Terms like "forgiveness" and "faith" are frequently described in fundamentally different ways. I found the view below to be a beautiful illustration of the “ontology” of salvation and the inherent participatory nature of it.

The following is just a quick blurb from the Spring 2016 International Orthodox Christian Charities (IOCC) Newsletter.  It's so rich that I thought it worth posting here.

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In the image of the crucified Christ who “takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), the Church also receives the tragic and sinful experiences and failures of man, for it is the Body of the Crucified Lord.  In order to save the world, the Church must pass through the reality of death.  As St. Paul says, death takes place within us (the Apostles), so that life can begin inside you (i.e., the Corinthians and members of the Church) (cf. 2 Cor 4:6-12).  This is what the real saints do.  Without this identification with the tragic destiny of the world, there is no salvation of the world.

The great truth that modern ignominious treatments of death ignore is that fear of death is conquered by taking upon oneself the death of others, so they might live.  To live truly means to die and then to live.  Fearless with regard to death are those who die daily by sacrificing for others.  If the spiritual fathers do not die, everlasting life cannot be born in their beloved ones (for example, spiritual children).  The Lord said, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24).  It is out of the Eucharistic perspective that St. John the Theologian proclaims: “He who does not love abides in death” (1 John 3:14).  Sanctity cannot exist outside of the “other” because the other serves as the “terminal” or “reference” of holiness.  This ontology of love leading to communion justifies the centrality of the Resurrection in the economy of salvation.

Bishop Maxim
Serbian Orthodox Church in North and South America
Diocese of Western America