Talking Point

Photo by Jennie Roberts Jenkins

 

Easter is
   a fine talking point,
especially on Sunday morning,
   boldly proclaimed
to the gathered,
   who know the story
all too well.

   But, unlike
our political talking points,
   that tell the faithful
what they want to hear,
   and lull the masses
into a hypnotic state
   when they've been
repeated ad nauseum,
   resurrection will not
hold true
   in the middle
of the week,
   when all hell breaks loose,
unless we have
   actually lived and experienced
it ourselves.

The world, and even we,
   will be beckoned
to risk living love
   only when resurrection
is reflected in the actions,
   words, and thoughts
of real people
   in the here and now.

   It is birthed in the story
of the empty tomb,
   but must grow up
in our living, otherwise
   it's just another idle tale.

© 2019 Todd Jenkins

Now, what?

Photo by Kally Thompson Elliott

 

   In a post-Easter world,
   the tasks of ministry
   are to name the ways
   that death continues
   to exist,

 to sit with those
 who are neck-deep
 (or deeper)
 in their graves,

and proclaim
the ways and places
where God continues
to surprise us
by raising up new life
from tombs filled
with the stench
of death
that’s way older
than three days.

   It’s disingenuous for us
   to try and pull corpses
   out of caskets ourselves,
   as if the mystery
   of life and death
   has been solved,
   as simply
   as working today’s
   New York Times crossword;

 but it’s courageous
 to point toward
 the places where
 resurrection is happening
 all around us,
 sometimes, even
 in spite of us. 

© 2019 Todd Jenkins

He Came to Live

 

“He came to die!”
  he said, as if
  God was somehow possessed
  by a rage that could
  only be assuaged
  by murderous retribution.

    “No,” I replied.

    He came to show us
  how to live;
  how to bring forth grace
  from the bones
  which we were given;

how to breathe it
  through the skin
  in which
  we were birthed
  into the world.

    He came
  to give us life;
  life more abundant
  than we ever imagined possible.

    He came to live.

“The thief comes only
to steal and kill and destroy.
I came that they may have life,
and have it abundantly.”
(John 10:10)

© 2019 Todd Jenkins

4 Steps

 

Love
Betrayal
Death
Resurrection;
four steps
of the dance of life.

Forth and back we go,
moment by moment,
step by step;
dips, turns, spins;
often breathless,
even dizzy.

Seldom are the people
in our inner circle
all on the same measure,
much less the same note.

Rarely do our tempos coincide.

But if we pay attention,
and hold one another
with tender, open hands,
the dissonance
of our differences
is significantly overshadowed
by the rhythmic sway
of the cosmos’ heartbeat.

Thump, thump.
Thump, thump.

Breathe.

© 2018 Todd Jenkins

Raised

Painting by Rosalind Golden Saline

Surely light years beyond
wildest hopes and
deepest imaginations,
he is raised,
not just from the tomb,
but also from the debasing
of mocking, the torture
of scourging, and the excruciating
execution of crucifixion.

Was his appearance
nearly incognito because
of the impossibility of it all,
or because transcending death
alters persona far beyond
human fathomability?
Perhaps it was both.

His face, tilted skyward,
eyes closed,
no longer in agony,
now in serenity.

His skin at one
and the same time ashen,
yet fully thrushed with life;
its shading defies
ethnocentric limitations.

His lips, resting in a fashion
best-described as tranquility.
Completely antithetical
to terrestrial powers that sought
his demise via violence,
his presence exudes a gentleness
only love can elicit;

right hand lowered and open,
both revealing a lack
of animosity and weaponry,
and clearly displaying
still-fresh wounds,
beckoning us toward
our own deepest healing;

his left hand pointing heavenward,
living water flowing from it,
new life springing up
from a parched desert floor;
light bursting from above,
revealing creation’s eternally-held dream.

Last, but also perhaps first,
the robe;
swirling transfiguration's glow
with stone-rolling angel's ensemble;
but even those two foreshadowings
are inadequate descriptions
of its hope-infused cloud.

Sit with the elements;
letting life's river wash over you,
divine wind swirl your heart,
and corpus  of unconditional love
carry you into the grace
of each tomorrow's resurrection.

© 2017 Todd Jenkins

IS

Photo by Anne Shurley

 

So many stories surrounded
with 'splainin’ on all sides,
to help us engage
senses, mind, and spirit;
historical and geographic settings,
names and titles, details galore.

Did you ever notice
how little detail is provided
for the gospel accounts
of resurrection?

How the women arrive in the garden –
always the women –
with their minds set on one thing,
when their hearts are taken aback
both by the presence of angels
and the absence of a body?

How no one – neither narrator
nor character nor angel – 
wastes any ink
or breath to tell us how?

Nothing but active verb
in present tense.
He IS risen.

That's what we need to know.
From there, we follow,
letting the IS of resurrection
bring us straightforward
into the world's active presence.

Metaphor and poetry may be
the heart of our God-speak,
as no vocabulary or alphabet
are capable of capturing
the divine self;
but faith's foundational eruption
from the tomb simply IS.

© 2017 Todd Jenkins

Easter Excerpts

 

Matthew’s gospel has a whole lot of quaking going on. I want you to think about this quaking. Why is it here in the story? What does it mean?

27:50-53 …&…….  28:2

Sometimes it takes a little quaking to get us out of our ruts and our comfort zones, but our quaking differs considerably from God’s. Power’s shaking can’t hold a candle to love’s quaking.

I was going to race to the tomb,
but the women beat me to it.

I would have tried to roll away the stone,
but the angel-quake took care of that.

I might have raced
to tell the rest of the disciples,
assuming I wasn't among them,
behind locked doors,
quaking with fear.

The problem is
that most of these opportunities
are 2,000+ years gone.

Here’s the question I think both supersedes and surpasses our fascination with “Some bright morning, when this life is o’er, I’ll fly away.” It’s this:

“In the big scheme of things, if death doesn’t have the last word, what does this change about life?” That is, “What difference does resurrection make in your and my here & now?”

28:7 The great hope & promise of resurrection is “he is going ahead of you”. Where would we be willing to go, what would we be willing do to, and who would we be willing to become if we really believed that he is still going ahead of us?

28:8 Resurrection sets us free from having to be God & from the burden of keeping ourselves alive. THAT’s the bizarre combination of “fear and great joy” that the women feel as they leave to keep moving toward the place to which the risen Christ is calling them.

This Easter, I'm praying
for the courage to set aside
all the shoulda, coulda,
and wouldas of my life.

Then, the only things left
 to do are to:

look for him among the living;

& reflect his light
 into the pain, suffering,
and grief of others;

& believe I'm forgiven
so I can practice forgiving others;

& step aside so grace can expand
into the places I'd rather it didn't;

& share my broken-hearted love
in broken ways,
with other broken people;

& take a pinch of bread
and a sip of wine,
believing that sacraments
make him real in ways
beyond my fathoming;

& practice the laying on of ears,
listening to both the entombing
and the untombing stories of others.

& finally, to breathe –
just breathe –
when I cannot
muster the wherewithal
to do anything else;

This is what I'll do,
trusting it will be enough.

Yes, the reality of resurrection
comes to pass, not just
"Some bright morning,
when this life is o'er..."
but also each day
in the here and now;

not by my own acts
or righteousness,
but by the love of God
in, through,
and around us all.

Easter’s quake keeps trembling,
raising the hair on your arm
and the back of your neck,
raising hope in your heart,
raising your capacity for compassion,
raising you and I to levels of love
we’ve never imagined.

By the grace of God,
Easter's not
our burden to prove.
It's our gift to live.

© 2017 Todd Jenkins