There is so much going on in the world right now and it all can feel kind of overwhelming. Let us keep it simple and straightforward.

Jesus is with you. Always.

It’s Trinity Sunday and I am not going to strain any of our tired minds diving into the deep end of what that means. Don’t get me wrong. It’s great. Sit under the stars some evening and talk about the three-in-oneness of God the Creator, Son, and Spirit.

Here is what I find life-giving about this mystery way of being called the Trinity: it shows that God loves community. God is always in community, this divine dance. It is not good for anyone to be alone and God proves that within God’s own being.

I can’t remember if the question was “Where is God?” or “Where is heaven?” But it was a question that the pastor of the church I grew up in asked frequently and he wanted the congregation to physically respond by pointing to the ceiling. I remember one time him encouraging folks to hold their fingers aloft when not enough initially responded. He cited this week’s passage—the Ascension of Jesus—as the reason for the belief that heaven is up.

I never pointed up. This is probably my dad’s fault. He drilled into my siblings and me that words and specifics matter. If Jesus ascended to a heaven that was literally up then it would posit that somewhere out in the vastness of space was heaven. It would also be an up that was up from the Middle East at a certain moment in earth’s daily rotation and revolution around the sun. Odds are the up-pointing of a 1990s congregation in upstate South Carolina was lightyears in the wrong direction from the literal up of Jesus’ ascension (this is giving you some insight on what a strange kid I was).

I am not sure whether our pastor believed that heaven was literally up out there in space or in some kind of sky bound pocket dimension or what. It wasn’t a malicious act, but it bugged me. Beyond the logistics of literalism, it galled me that everyone was told to point up as if heaven was some kind of fixed point that we could comprehend. Much later, I also realized that casting heaven as the sky neglected a major theme of what Jesus preached throughout his ministry: that heaven is also breaking through here on earth.

Adaptation has been the hallmark of this weird season that we’re in. The important things in life have to continue even as the world as we’ve known it has ground to a halt. We try to do school from home as best as we can. We reach out and connect with friends and family over FaceTime and Zoom calls. We keep going where we are able.

My ministry with my students is the area where I have had to adapt on the fly the most. I am not always sure how we’re doing. The hallmark of a youth group is community and while we can see each other’s faces on our screen, I know that it is not the same as being in a room together or sitting down to a meal with friends.

But you do all you can to try and meet the needs of your community. We’ve kept meeting on Sunday mornings and nights over the internet. We have Bible studies through the weeks and gather once a week to just hang out and play some games. It has been encouraging to see those faces pop up on the screen to still talk about faith and share stories. You adapt. You keep moving forward.

The first Sunday of May at our church is traditionally Youth Sunday in which our students lead in morning worship. As the days of sheltering in place stretched into weeks, it became evident that we were not going to be able to follow the usual script for this capstone to the school year. But cancelling was never an option in my mind. Our church has been doing virtual services for weeks now, so we were going to put our spin on the service.

Like Thomas
I want to see something
That will make me believe

I have no need for nail-scarred hands
Nor wounded sides
Of a Savior back from the dead

But I want to see something
That will make me believe
Resurrection is possible

For I have my doubts
Not in the risen Christ
But in the rising rest of us

There’s a darkness I see
Inside myself
More often than I’d like

And I am tired
Of cruel avaricious kings
And their power-craving priests

The tomb is silent and cold and dark as a starless night. Sealed on Friday, the grave was the lifeless void that first day, so also the second, and so it began on the third. It would persist undefeated. The cold midnight hush would envelope that space until the world caved in.

Yet something stirred. The flutter of a heartbeat; nearly imperceptible. The silence reasserts its dominion for a time before another pulse briefly flickers to life. This is how it begins: a tug of war between life and death. If what the writer of the epistle says is true and to God a day is as a thousand years then decades elapsed between those first new heartbeats.

A thin line of musty air is drawn in and barely inflates the lungs. A breath more shallow than the damp dust from the first drop of rain touching the ground. The sound is a nearly inaudible hiss. A space of silence. Then another wisp of air is drawn in and then another. For some time he hangs there a breath towards the living and a silence towards the dead.

Several hundred, some may say several thousand, years worth of anticipation hung in the air. Like summer humidity that sticks to your shirt the second you step outside, you couldn’t avoid it. Not today. Not on Passover week.

A guy claiming to be the Messiah or at least someone who people said was the Messiah was nothing new. There had been tons of guys going around saying that they were the One; saying that they were going to show Rome what’s what. So a messiah making his way to Jerusalem was about as common as a singer-songwriter making their way to Nashville.

But this guy was different. There was a good deal of discussion over whether he was the right kind of different. It wasn’t so much that he talked like he was the Messiah. Word had it that he had tried to keep a lot of that talk and even tales of his miracles under wraps. But the stories still got out: dead men walking, the blind seeing, demon-possessed pigs plunging over a cliff, and thousands fed with a lunch meant for a kid. It is hard to keep those type of things hush-hush.

His name certainly carried great weight. Yeshua, which translates to Joshua or—as the Greeks put it—Jesus. It means “the Lord saves.” It’s true that tons of people gave their boys this name. What parent doesn’t want their child to be the redemption of his people? You have to name the kid to fit the bill. Poindexter isn’t going to quarterback the state championship team and Biff isn’t going to find the cure for cancer. Joshua, like Messiah talk, was nothing special. But it seemed special. At least with him.

All of this—the miracles, the name, the hope that he was the Messiah—mixed with Passover week like a molotov cocktail. Jerusalem seemed like it could explode at any moment. Roman officials were squeamish enough with all of these people that they had underfoot flooding into the city. The last thing they wanted was for another revolution-driven Messiah to take the religious devotion of the masses and turn it into a riot.

“Death itself would start working backwards.”

From the moment when I read that line in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it has taken root in my imagination. There comes this point when you realize that a great deal of this world is in the throes of entropy. Everything that lives on this planet dies. Relationships drift and then fall apart. As a sensitive child, all fo this decay frightened me. I wanted something to help us escape all this gravity. And so C.S. Lewis’ regal God-lion reminded me of a concept that is essential to all of scripture: resurrection.

What fascinates me is not so much the idea of the resurrection of the dead. I believe that is part of this grand narrative; at least I do on most days. That is the concept to which a lot of the Christian faith pays attention. Rather it is the idea that God is in the art of taking the things that are falling apart, broken, dying, and decaying and throwing it into reverse. Death does not have the final word. There is always the chance for life.

That is the image that we see in Ezekiel. It starts with a valley full of bones and God asks the prophets whether they live can live again. Ezekiel wisely answers that only God knows whether resurrection is possible. Thus God orders Ezekiel to prophesy over the bones. To go out where there is seeming hopelessness and dead ends and to preach the word of the Lord. And what is that word?

When your job revolves around questions of God, faith, and the mysteries of the universe, you need to become comfortable with an important three word phrase: I don’t know. That is not to say that there are some things that you do not know or at least about which you have an informed, educated opinion. Every person of faith should spend their lifetimes learning and seeking to know all they can about God.

There are simply times that our finitude crashes into the infinity and you realize that you don’t know that much. Like I do not know why God allows bad things to happen. I don’t believe God causes things like the Covid-19 virus or tornadoes or starving children. But I don’t know why God allows it. I hope that there is a good reason behind it. But I don’t know. When you get right down to it, there is much both good and bad about which we just don’t know.

All of which sets up what I love about this passage in John. Jesus heals a man born blind and the story veers into an episode of Law & Order: Strict Pharisee Unit. The healed man and his parents are interrogated about what happened. The second time this particular group of Pharisees are talking to the formerly blind man—who has to be confused as to why people are so upset that he has been miraculously healed—they demand that he give glory to God because Jesus has to be a sinner. You can almost hear the one playing bad cop slamming on the interrogation room table as he yells it.

What if we named places the same way that they did during biblical times? Moses named a location in this week’s passage Massah and Meribah—which respectively mean “test” and “quarrel”—because that is exactly what his people were doing in that place. They threw verbal hands and they tested God.

So what if we did that? Like if Moses ventured out to Chicago’s Navy Pier with our family this morning and saw St. Patrick’s Day revelers stumbling out to various booze cruises, might he have dubbed that place Poor Drunken Decisions? Granted, he might have looked at our family exploring pandemic-era Windy City and dubbed wherever we went Poor Sober Decisions by our actions (we changed flights last night to head home tomorrow rather than several days later as originally planned).

But it seems incredibly harsh to name a place by the terrible thing that happened there. It is true that sometimes the place was named for something wonderful that happened. Jacob gave the name Bethel or “House of God” to a place in which he had an incredible encounter with the Divine. Yet I am stuck thinking about Moses making some future Geography Bee contestant answer “Test and Quarrel.” It forces me to ponder on the places in my life that might have been dubbed Apathy or Cowardice. I don’t like to dwell in those cities, but I do need to remember that they could exist. Moses heavy-handed naming was meant to be a reminder. We need to remember that we’re fallible.

It’s a bit of insufferable cliche, but the most diehard fans of a musical act will cite the most obscure songs as their favorites. Sure, they like the hits, but they prefer Track 9 from their underrated sophomore album or the unreleased track that the band only plays during sound checks. Anyone can know an artist by the hits, but you really don’t know them until you love the deep cuts (Sometimes this is true. Have you heard U2’s “Acrobat”? It’s an unbelievable song. My absolute favorite Coldplay song is “Till Kingdom Come,” which is a hidden track on X&Y. Okay, I’m going to stop).

The Bible is a bit of a different beast than an artist’s discography. It’s the work of many different artists over thousands of years so it is not a one to one comparison. Yet it’s true that too many people know the hits, but not the deep cuts. And the Apocrypha is deeper than the deep cuts. It’s not in the Protestant biblical canon. Still it is someone’s response to an encounter with God. It’s connected, but Protestant churches don’t hold it at the same level. It’s like when Bono and The Edge composed that Broadway Spider-Man musical. That may not be a fair comparison, because Turn off the Dark was apparently crazy (but I guess you could say the same about Bel and the Dragon).

Yet you should still pay attention to the Apocrypha, because like with an artist’s b-sides, outtakes, or side projects, you might find a gem. Each week the Revised Common Lectionary often includes a reading from the Apocrypha as an alternative reading. I don’t normally pay attention to those apocryphal readings and have never considered one for Weekly Lectionary.