Easter, Resurrection Day…

Hope your guy’s Easter was grand!  At my home church in the Midwest we used to call it Resurrection Day, to remember exactly Who and what this celebration was about.

That was kind of the gist of our sermon at Angelus Temple.  On a day when EVERYONE checks in, and just about everyone checks out…mentally…Pastor Matthew managed to make the message relevant to seat warmers and pew owners, alike.

Have you ever thought about the power of an icon?  That whole, “Picture says a thousand words,” deal?  Symbols that have become synonymous with organizations such as McDonalds, Nike, the Olympics, Microsoft Windows have impressed themselves into our consciousness. They have an impact when we look at them…they mean something.

But, the cross has lost its impact…probably because we forget what it meant; that it’s actually a tool for a humiliating, extended and certain death. 

 

Most people don’t wear a guillotine or mini-hanging noose around their neck.  Or get tatooed with a symbol for the Chinese water torture.  That’d be wierd.  And, people would think either you were really insane, or “OMG, like, tooootally cool. Love your chains, too.”

Point being, that the icon that symbolizes Christian life is a tool for death.  Like the very exposed kind of deliberate death.  Like the kind of death we get to put to those sins we like so much, if we can gain the courage to nail them there; and let the only One capable of conquering death set us free. 

Freedom Redefined

 The Saturday Night Redefined service at Angelus Temple lingers in my head. Master’s Commission Los Angeles — a group of God-hungry young people who have committed two years of their life to knowing the Lord — made a presentation about freedom. There was a dance, a shadow play, a testimony-slash-monologue, and more. It was a call to freedom, a perfect foreshadowing of Martin Luther King Day that would occur that following Monday.  The first question that occurred to me was, wait a minute – freedom from what? The answer came a few minutes later. It was freedom from the cult of cool. A rebellion against rebellion. We have been fooled by invented and imagined norms (most of which are perpetuated in the media) about what freedom is – it is doing what you want, being what you want, when you want. It is running through a crowd-filled concrete road half naked, adorned with multi-colored shiny necklaces at Mardi Gras, it is the freedom to drink as much as you want on a Friday night, and the freedom to roll out cuss words the way a coin machine rolls out quarters. Yet in Saturday Night Redefined, freedom is redefined. We can only really be free of we walk in obedience – unfettered by bondages and addictions that pull us down, desperate only for The Father’s approval, and wanting to be “cool” only in the eyes of Our Savior.

Definitions. We don’t really give much thought to them — unless, probably we’re about to take a test. Academics make us care about them but unfortunately, life doesn’t.  After SNR, I began to think of my own definitions. How do I  define love? How do I define happiness? Sometimes when asked questions like, when was the last time you had a boyfriend,  some women jokingly say, “well, what’s your definition of boyfriend?” We stop to think first.  But when something of a more serious nature comes along, like a profession of love  from someone whose trustworthiness is questionable,  we don’t even stop to ask ourselves,  “what is this person’s definition of love?”  Once, in the process of writing  a short story that  told the story of a  certain kind of love,  I ask one of my good guy friends — what is your definition of love?  He unhesitatingly tells me that  physical attraction, and attention, to him is love. I really  am not surprised — this is the world’s standards — it just reminded me of how much we have been deceived. The bible says in 1 Corinthians 13 that Love is patient and kind, does not keep a record of wrongs and rejoices in truth — in a nutshell.

That is just a micro case study. Love. What about happiness? How do we define that? What thoughts do you have about peace, fairness, justice, and hope?

Definitions are the framework from which we act — the template that houses our decisions. Do you need to redefine your definitions?