{"id":1599,"date":"2014-04-22T09:06:01","date_gmt":"2014-04-22T13:06:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=1599"},"modified":"2014-04-22T09:13:13","modified_gmt":"2014-04-22T13:13:13","slug":"the-vorpal-bunny-an-eastertide-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/?p=1599","title":{"rendered":"The Vorpal Bunny: An Eastertide Post"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first church I served after surviving my M.Div. was in New Canaan, on what is known as the Connecticut Gold Coast.\u00a0 If you want some sense of New Canaan, take this concentrated website<\/a> and add two parts water.\u00a0 Not every single household there is super-duper-duper wealthy (and, of course, not everyone there is a man with a cigar) but it is definitely a Yankee form of swanky.<\/p>\n

My favorite Easter story comes from that year of ministry, with a man named John Gerlach.\u00a0 John was winsomely manic about his faith.\u00a0 He had left the craziness of the New York corporate world after Jesus found him, and he enjoyed stirring up holy mischief in this United Methodist parish.\u00a0 On Easter, wearing a huge grin, he greeted everyone coming in the door with \u201cHappy Day of the Resurrection!\u201d\u00a0 Loudly.\u00a0 With flourish.\u00a0 And, when people looked confused, he just kept going, on to the next person: \u201cHappy Day of the Resurrection!\u201d \u00a0It was gauche to be too verbal about one\u2019s religious convictions in New Canaan.\u00a0 And to be so fundamentalist as to believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ was downright tacky. God bless weird John Gerlach.\u00a0\u00a0 I have a hard time saying the words \u201cHappy Easter\u201d even today without feeling I am being hopelessly accommodationist.<\/p>\n

George Lindbeck was one of my favorite professors at Yale, and two of my best Lindbeck stories involve Easter.\u00a0 I\u2019ll tell the hard one first.\u00a0 Way back when I completed my dissertation, on which The<\/em> Treachery of Love<\/em> is based, George Lindbeck called me on the phone.\u00a0 He said such gracious things about the manuscript that I was genuinely confused.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t realize I had written something so well worth reading.\u00a0 But he was concerned about a conspicuous lack of the Resurrection in the book \u2013 that is, a conspicuous lack of Easter joy.\u00a0 I had so focused on the cross that I missed the next chapter, so to speak. (George Pattison also wrote as much, in Danish, in his review of the book.)\u00a0 I will return to this detail later.\u00a0 For now, the second story is important.<\/p>\n

As a second year M.Div. student (way before I ever read Kierkegaard) I was in a small seminar on ecclesiology.\u00a0 I think I was the only woman.\u00a0 And I was young.\u00a0 And confused.\u00a0 And when I am confused, I ask more questions.\u00a0 There were all of these unwritten assumptions going on in the seminar, and, at one point, while trying to understand something we had read, I used the word \u201csymbol\u201d in the same sentence with the word \u201ccross.\u201d Some of the students in the class gasped.\u00a0 I remember in particular the visiting scholar from Germany looking at me, visibly aghast.\u00a0 George Lindbeck ignored their remonstrations and tried to explain patiently the problem with seeing the cross as a symbol.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t understand, so I asked more questions.\u00a0 Were the silly trappings of Easter the problem?\u00a0 Like, the bunny and the eggs and the bonnets?\u00a0 \u201cNo, no, no,\u201d he said with a frustrated wave of his hand (confusing some of the dour students). \u00a0\u201cThe bunny isn\u2019t a problem.\u00a0 I don\u2019t begrudge the children a bunny.\u201d\u00a0 He then made up a pr\u00e9cis of a symbol-cross Easter sermon \u00a0\u2013 wherein the Resurrection is a symbol, an example, or an instance, of a universal experience of something or other.\u00a0 I finally got it!\u00a0 That is the problem with making the cross into a symbol.\u00a0 Whether on the grand scale (say, genocide) or the micro scale (say, domestic abuse) human horror is not the cross, and human redemption is not \u201cthe Resurrection.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cOh!\u00a0 That<\/strong> is the deadly bunny with the teeth!\u201d \u00a0It was the only time I made George Lindbeck LOL.\u00a0 (See this grisly video<\/a> if you are as lost as the German scholar was.)\u00a0 Making the Cross and the Resurrection into symbols might seem nice and cuddly and furry, but it is a dangerous shift in meaning.\u00a0 (This makes George Lindbeck into the character with the strange, horned hat in the skit.\u00a0 And Pierre Teilhard de Chardin into the foolish knight, maybe?)<\/p>\n

When John Gerlach went around scaring people with \u201cthe Resurrection\u201d that Easter Sunday in New Canaan, he was trying to take the symbol out of their Easter.\u00a0 He was declaring with annoying repetition that, when United Methodists say \u201cThe Lord is Risen Indeed!\u201d we don\u2019t mean that some concept of human hope is irrepressible.\u00a0 We don\u2019t mean that some vague sense of the human spirit is floating above the particulars of our bodies and delights and predicaments.\u00a0 We mean that Jesus Christ is Risen, from the dead.<\/strong>\u00a0 This crazy fact matters for our matter.\u00a0 But, if we make the cross into a symbol of some facet of something called human experience, or human history, or evolutionary theory, or the resilience of democracy, etc, then we make Jesus a malleable, useful thing for our projects.\u00a0 That is the bunny with the teeth.<\/p>\n

Now, for the harder part.\u00a0 What George Lindbeck said about my first book was right, in retrospect.\u00a0 Trying to name Easter joy has been hard for me.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t sure how to name Resurrection hope without betraying what I thought was my inescapable commitment to a very hard marriage.\u00a0 The Resurrection is not symbolic, I got that.\u00a0 Check.\u00a0 But I wasn\u2019t sure how to sort through the fact of God\u2019s redeeming grace for my own life.\u00a0 If Easter involves literal freedom from a literal tomb, and the redemption of our actual bodies, what did that mean for the actual me?\u00a0 I didn\u2019t know how to think that and still remain married.<\/p>\n

Thinking right alongside the literal Resurrection of Jesus is messy, and confusing.\u00a0 My daughter Emily made this point when she was about three years old.\u00a0 Our dog Ernie was on his last leg.\u00a0 He had lost control not only of his bladder but of his bowels, and we were doing doggie hospice at our house.\u00a0\u00a0 Emily asked me if Ernie would be in heaven.\u00a0 She then asked if Ernie would be chasing squirrels in heaven.\u00a0 And, would Ernie be eating in heaven?\u00a0 This led to her inevitable conclusion that there would be pooping in heaven, and that it would all be somehow ok.\u00a0 It turns out, reckoning with how God might redeem my own poopy life was much harder for me to do than to affirm the physical resurrection of Jesus for my dead dog.<\/p>\n

It is still easier for me to name a theological impulse gone wrong \u2013 making the Resurrection a symbol \u2013 than to live into the very weird affirmation that \u201cThe Lord is Risen Indeed!\u201d\u00a0 But, three years out from divorce, I am beginning to risk it.\u00a0 I am beginning to believe that, when Jesus Christ came out of that tomb, he brought me with him, even now, even here.<\/p>\n

We sang a song at Trinity United Methodist on Easter Sunday that had awkward words and an unfamiliar tune.\u00a0 (Our ambitious new music director is stretching us, hard.) \u00a0The hymn is by John Bell, and it is in the little, black paperback hymnal that we have to share awkwardly with our neighbors in the pew (because there are fewer copies than the red, hardbound hymnal).\u00a0 \u00a0The hymn is called \u201cChrist Has Risen,\u201d and I have been singing a phrase from it while sweeping and washing dishes.\u00a0 \u201cChrist has risen and forever lives to challenge and to change all whose lives are messed or mangled, all who find religion strange.\u201d\u00a0 I am not sure about Bell\u2019s use of the word \u201creligion.\u201d\u00a0 But I do know that this faith I am called to preach is strange.\u00a0 And I know my messed and mangled life has been challenged, and is being changed.<\/p>\n

So, \u201cHappy Day of the Resurrection!\u201d\u00a0 Indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first church I served after surviving my M.Div. was in New Canaan, on what is known as the Connecticut Gold Coast.\u00a0 If you want some sense of New Canaan, take this concentrated website and add two parts water.\u00a0 Not every single household there is super-duper-duper wealthy (and, of course, not everyone there is a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9,10,101],"tags":[118,184,136],"class_list":["post-1599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-church","category-ethics","category-theology-2","tag-easter","tag-george-lindbeck","tag-kierkegaard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7EotM-pN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1599"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1601,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1599\/revisions\/1601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.profligategrace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}