What is Resurrection – Part 2
How the problems began for Sue
(Continued from last month’s Pastor’s Page)
Before I continue my story about "Sue," let me answer the question that I have been asked by a few people: "Did this all really happen!" Well, yes and no. This story is a composite of several experiences. Nearly all the elements of the story are actual events, but they happened at different times and in several contexts. I have combined them as single narrative. The dialogue is, of course, all reconstruction… although my shouting and Sue’s "creepy" are real. "Sue" is real but the character as presented here actually combines the "real" stories of three different people. "Karen" whom you will meet in a moment, is much the same, although she based upon only 1 ½ different people. And, of course, all of the names are changed. The point of the story is not for it to be "real" but to speak to the issue at hand: resurrection. So, on with the story:
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Over the next several weeks, I listened to Sue tell me her story. What emerged was a story of a young woman’s faith that was challenged in ways that she was not ready to be challenged. It was also a story of a friendship that was lost and in need of a resurrection of its own.
Sue grew up in what I would call a normal religious home. Her parents were Episcopalian and attended church regularly. She went to Sunday School from the time she was 5 until going away to college at 18. She was active in her churches youth group, although she did not do more than go to meetings a couple of times a month and go to the occasional youth retreat.
At home the family said grace at diner time and it was never hard to talk about God if there was a question. Religion was never forced on Sue or her two siblings. Her parents simply believed, went to church, and brought their children up as best they could to lead them to believe as well.
When Sue went away to college, one of the first things she did was to go the weekly ecumenical worship service at her school. She went faithfully each week the whole first semester. Towards the end of that semester she met Karen, a student who lived in the same dorm and who was very active in a campus student ministry that was run by one of the local churches as an outreach to the collage.
Karen (as well as most of the other students involved in the student ministry) was a very committed Christian. Karen, however, had a real talent for witnessing to her fellow students. She was inspiring, cheerful, and passionate about her work with the student ministry. For Sue however, Karen was simply someone with whom she connected. The "churchy" part was ok and she was glad it made Karen so happy, but for Sue, Karen was a friend with whom she connected.
One weekend, Karen and Sue went to a retreat for the student ministry group. There was music, worship, stupid icebreaker games that were lots of fun, tons of junk food, and lots of other college-aged people enjoying the same things.
On the 2nd night of the retreat, there was an evangelist who came to talk. He talked exclusively about the end times and how important it was for the students to be ready and to get others ready for the last days. He talked about it in such vivid detail that many of the students began to get uncomfortable. Karen sat next to Sue and was transfixed. She listened and never blinked. Sue, who had heard this kind of thing before, tuned it out and began to think about classes, which would begin the next day. The evangelist finished his talk, and the live music started and there was an audible sigh of relief from the crowd.
The next morning, everyone was back to classes. Sue met Karen for Lunch and there was some kind of space between them. Some wall. Karen could only keep talking about how she had never been taught the things that the evangelist said. She was always told about how Jesus saved you, loved you, and gives you eternal life. She always thought that this was about a spiritual thing—that one’s soul lived forever. If there was some end to the world, some judgement, some physical resurrection and "all kinds of weird stuff like that" Karen just did not know how she liked that. "The God that man was talking about is not MY God, and that’s for sure," she told Sue.
Sue was flabbergasted. How could Karen be such a magnificent witness for Christ and not have ever even heard about these parts of the faith? She tried to explain how she looked at all these kind of questions and ideas. She talked to her friend Karen for hours that day and days to come but slowly but surely, Karen just moved farther and farther from her faith.
Soon Karen was no longer going to meetings, no longer witnessing, and was no longer talking much at all. When she did talk she would say things like: "What did I do to all those people that believed what I said? God and Jesus are about spiritual things! It’s not all this magic hocus-pocus stuff."
Sue tried to explain what she was taught about the resurrection, but began to realize that she did not understand it either. Jesus was raised from the dead—he conquered sin and death. That had always been comforting to her. Now it was becoming weird. To her it was always something real and physical. Her parents taught her that she would get a new body, one that never had to sleep, eat, feel pain or get old. It would be perfect. That was a beautiful thought.
But Karen had had a completely different view. For Karen, the resurrection was only a spiritual thing. There were no physiological mysteries in it. The stories of the Risen Christ were about meeting a visible "soul" or "walking Spirit." For there to be anything other than just our Spirit involved was repugnant to her. It made the whole story of Jesus just another interesting story about the "gods" of the ancient world. Confronting even the possibility of this idea was crushing her faith; just as the idea of only a spiritual resurrection was beginning to crush Sue’s faith.
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"So that was it really." Sue told me one afternoon sitting on a bench behind Strong Hall at my seminary. "Karen became so cynical over time that she went so far as to track down people she had brought to Jesus and tell them she was wrong."
I looked off past the large blue sign of a strip mall that was a mile or so behind the seminary. It glowed cold blue even in the daylight—cold as I felt hearing Sue’s and Karen’s story. To be so disillusioned to actually seek to lead others away from faith sounded like a horrible experience. I could not help but think of St. Paul. It was almost the exact opposite of his story. He was the persecutor turned evangelist. Karen was the evangelist turned persecutor.
"What about you, Karen?" I asked. "Did you help her find people to "unconvert?"
Sue just smiled. "No," she said. "But I eventually did get her to at least stop doing that. Why mess up people’s lives even more? If they were happy with all this stuff, that was fine with me. I just ended up with so many questions that I gave up. How can a religion have a central idea like Jesus being raised form the dead and have the understandings of it be so vague and varied that it just confuses people? I just gave up. And the more I thought about it, even though I thought I may have been closer to the truth than Karen, what I did believe really was kind of creepy."
It was my turn to smile. After hours and hours of talks, Sue has finally hit on the question that really mattered. She saw me smiling and said "What? What did I say? Was I just really stupid or something?"
"No Sue," I told her, almost starting to laugh with relief. "No, you actually have finally asked the question that I think really matters the most to you. Sure you have questions about what the resurrection means, or is, or however you want to put it. But finding an answer to that is only part of it. When get through the actual nuts and bolts of the different ways to understand the resurrection, I think that you will find the answers matter much less than having asked the question."
"I hate you very much," She said with conviction, not budging from the bench. I just want a straight answer. OK? I don’t need more questions"
I said nothing. I just looked out past the blue mall.
After a few minutes she said, "OK. I don’t hate you. Does it have to be this hard?"
I laughed. "I love you too, Sue. And it is only as hard as we make it. God promised us eternal life and happiness. God never said it was always going to be easy."
(The conclusion will be in next month’s issue.)
How do you understand the Resurrection of Jesus of
© 2008 Mark H. Breese. All rights reserved.
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