My pastor in Gloucester, Massachusetts would regularly need to stop mid-sentence during his sermon to collect himself as he fought back tears. I loved this characteristic in all of them, partly because I too know what it is like to be overwhelmed with emotion in the midst of preaching. But, also because I know their tears came from a well of gratitude. And genuine gratitude comes only when you understand the details of life as a gift, as grace.
The list works. I have found myself picking up the book and re-reading this list all week. But it is not because I share the dying man’s affinity for furnaces or raccoons—no offense to either. It works because this is the stuff that makes up a life. You get the sense that this unnamed man with only six days to live has lived all of his previous days with wide open eyes and a wide open heart
These are the things that matter to me. The cold quiet mornings at Apgar campground. The taste of a hotdog cooked over a campfire. Letting my mind wander on a walk in the woods. The smile on Jackson’s face when he hits a double. Mornings when Katie hits the snooze button on her phone and rolls over to rest her head on my shoulder; why do those 9 minutes go by faster than any other? Reading out loud to my kids. Chopping garlic and onions. The beginning of a season, the beginning of a new book, the beginning of a semester.
I started writing this essay several weeks before Easter but as I was reading John’s account of the resurrection this week in preparation for my Easter sermon, I was struck again by the specificity of the details John chose to include
how his head covering was neatly folded and placed by itself in the corner of the cave (20:5-7). It dawned on me that perhaps the first thing the risen Lord did after he defeated death, as his heart once again began to beat, was to fold his grave clothes
Weeping because the Jesus movement that she had become a part of looked like it had come to a violent and sudden end on a Roman Cross. Weeping because she could not even find Jesus’ body. The angels in the tomb ask her about her tears. And then a man she mistakes as the groundskeeper, the gardener, asks her the same question. “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?
If Jesus really was alive that first Easter morning, and I believe he was, then all the stuff of life matters. The resurrection is God’s “yes and amen” to life—not to some disembodied spiritual world of clouds and harps and angels in white but life on earth. Life we experience with our senses—taste and touch and smell and sight. Life with laundry that needs to be folded and fish-fries with friends.
The resurrection, read this way, becomes an argument for full embodied engagement with the material world — not escape from it. If the central claim of Christianity is that life matters enough to defeat death, then everyday details (laundry, meals, sensory experience) are not distractions from the sacred but expressions of it. Reasonresponse, “He is Risen indeed!” starts our service. We sing resurrection songs and celebrate the promise of new creation. We hear about an empty tomb and Thomas touching the risen Lord’s hand and side. We feast. And then Monday morning I have to drag the kids out of bed for school and pack yet another peanut-butter and Nutella sandwich
Christ is Risen! Fold the laundry
