Practicing Resurrection

By Rev. Ethan Brown

Pastor and Minister of Service & Community

I generally don’t go in for lots of decorations for different holiday seasons, but my office feels festive this Halloween. A couple of weeks ago, Caitlin surprised me with a new plant. The pot drew my attention first—a gleaming white skull, complete with a toothy smile, empty eye sockets and a flattened nose bone. Out of the top of the skull is growing my new and beautiful brain cactus. Green and pokey like any cactus, the stalk spirals and twists in on itself and actually appears a bit brain-like. It is quite something to look at and Caitlin proudly told me that she got it for my office. So this October, every time I open my office door, my eyes immediately track to my newest companion staring back at me.
 
The more I look at my brain cactus and its pot, the more I am reminded that life and death are intertwined together. Even we who believe and hope in a life beyond death, must first pass through that death. As the pastor Eugene Peterson once said, “Resurrection only happens where there are graves.” Paul, too, speaks about passing through death to find new life. In 1 Corinthians 15, he says,

“But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’ Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain.
But God gives it a body as he has chosen and to each kind of seed its own body…For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When this perishable body puts on imperishability and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled:
‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’
‘Where, O death, is your victory?
Where, O death, is your sting?’
 
Like a seed that is buried and transforms into something new, resurrected life will never look like what has come before. This transformation is true for our redeemed bodies and for the redemption we find in present lives. Sometimes it can be hard to see how our lives might be called to be different or how someone else may actually change; yet by God’s creative grace, even dry bones can be renewed. Each day as I look at my brain cactus, I am reminded that life can grow out of death. Each day that gleaming skull asks, “How will you practice resurrection today?”