My niece Lisa
got married in India yesterday. My mom who is 86 years old is suffering from
acute dementia. The Lord is giving her His grace and blessing every day.
I shared in a
service of death and resurrection yesterday for Francis. Francis was 91 years
old. She was a pioneer missionary going to college and Bible School,
and teaching in Bible College and Schools. She was a very joyful person and a
very faithful servant of Jesus our Lord. She lived a very full and blessed life
serving Jesus all the days of her life. She died peacefully in her sleep. John
Wesley said, "Our people die well." Indeed, those who love Jesus and serve him
die well to go on living with Jesus in the Eternal City, the New Jerusalem.
Francis was full of humor and laughter. It is written "weeping may tarry for
the night but the joy comes in the morning." Also, "You have turned my mourning
in to dancing".
In a Peter
Devries novel a character was buried alive in a landslide of tons of garbage at
the city dump. When you least expect it he rises from the garbage with a
cantaloupe rind on his head, singing the doxology. What an image! Can we rise
from the garbage pit of failure singing, "Praise God from whom all blessings
flow" and laugh the laugh of the great reversal?
When we experience Christ's resurrection the final form of laughter becomes that of rejoicing. The Laughter of Rejoicing is to cry out in victory over the worst this old world can dish out: "O death where is your victory?" The venom does not destroy us.
Conrad Hyers
tells of the early Greek Orthodox tradition of clergy and laity meeting in the
sanctuary the day after Easter to tell stories, jokes, and anecdotes. It seems
so fitting since Satan thought he had won at Golgotha. Yet the last laugh is at
the resurrection; not a laugh of ridicule or even of reversal, but a laugh of
rejoicing. Sin, death and sorrow have been swallowed up by redemption, life and
joy.
In Eugene
O'Neill's play Lazarus Laughed we hear the modern echo:
Laugh Laugh
Death is
Dead
There is
only laughter
Here is the
great reversal and we are caught up in it. How can we not rejoice? Can't you
imagine Mary getting together with Jesus later and saying, "And I thought you
were the gardener!" The couple on the road to Emmaus would also be having a
good laugh with Jesus: "We were trying to tell you about the one who had died."
But it wouldn't end there. Mary and the two on the Emmaus road could now laugh
at the power of death.
Thomas
Moore joked with the hangman because his conscience was clear; he was serving
his God. A bishop in Hungary in the 1950s was imprisoned by the Communists
because he stood up to them. In a six-by-eight solitary confinement cell he
could not be broken: "For in that room the Risen Christ was present and in
communion with me I was able to prevail." Luther said it in his great hymn:
"The body they may kill, his truth abideth still."
May this be our
soul's response to the Resurrection, for when Easter invades our lives, and
when we see the spirit of the risen Christ prevailing around the corner and
around the globe, we realize that the Resurrection is a laughing matter.
Please join us
for our Friday Evening weekly Television Presentation tonight at 7 PM on Time
Warner Cable channel 4.
Happy Easter.
Our Savior lives. He reigns. He has the last word. He is our Captain who has
never lost a battle.
In
Him,
Brown
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