Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing Up in Christ

by Eugene H. Peterson

Truth, Goodness, Beauty - are organically connected. Without Beauty, Truth and Goodness have no container, no form, no way of coming to expression in human life. Truth divorced from Beauty becomes abstract and bloodless. Goodness divorced from Beauty becomes loveless and graceless.

The resurrection of Jesus establishes the conditions in which we live and mature in the Christian life and carry on this conversation: Jesus alive and present. A lively sense of Jesus' resurrection, which took place without any help or comment from us, keeps us from attempting to take charge of our own development and growth. Frequent meditation on Jesus' resurrection - the huge mystery of it, the unprecedented energies flowing from it - prevents us from reducing the language of our conversation to what we can define or control. "Practice resurrection," a phrase I got from Wendell Berry,4 strikes just the right note. We live our lives in the practice of what we do not originate and cannot anticipate. When we practice resurrection, we continuously enter into what is more than we are. When we practice resurrection, we keep company with Jesus, alive and present, who knows where we are going better than we do, which is always "from glory unto glory."

Church is the core element in the strategy of the Holy Spirit for providing human witness and physical presence to the Jesus-inaugurated kingdom of God in this world. It is not that kingdom complete, but it is a witness to that kingdom.

Church is an appointed gathering of named people in particular places who practice a life of resurrection in a world in which death gets the biggest headlines: death of nations, death of civilization, death of marriage, death of careers, obituaries without end. Death by war, death by murder, death by accident, death by starvation. Death by electric chair, lethal injection, and hanging. The practice of resurrection is an intentional, deliberate decision to believe and participate in resurrection life, life out of death, life that trumps death, life that is the last word, Jesus life. This practice is not a vague wish upwards but comprises a number of discrete but interlocking acts that maintain a credible and faithful way of life, Real Life, in a world preoccupied with death and the devil.

These practices include the worship of God in all the operations of the Trinity; the acceptance of a resurrection, born-from-above identity (in baptism); the embrace of resurrection formation by eating and drinking Christ's resurrection body and blood (at the Lord's Table); attentive reading of and obedience to the revelation of God in the Scriptures; prayer that cultivates an intimacy with realities that are inaccessible to our senses; confession and forgiveness of sins; welcoming the stranger and outcast; working and speaking for peace and justice, healing and truth, sanctity and beauty; care for all the stuff of creation. The practice of resurrection encourages improvisation on the basic resurrection story as given in our Scriptures and revealed in Jesus. Thousands of derivative unanticipated resurrection details proliferate across the landscape. The company of people who practice resurrection replicates the way of Jesus on the highways and byways named and numbered on all the maps of the world. This is the church.

The practice of resurrection is not an attack on the world of death; it is a nonviolent embrace of life in the country of death. It is an ope...

In the face of all the easy dismissals, the widespread condescension, and the epidemic disillusionment, how are we going to maintain the practice of resurrection in the company of the men and women in the church?

Obviously, the church is not an ideal community that everyone takes one look at and asks, "How do I get in?" Clearly, the church is not making much headway in eliminating what is wrong in the world and making everything right. So what's left?

Ephesians is a revelation of the church we never see. It shows us the healthy soil and root system of all the operations of the Trinity out of which the church that we do see grows. It does not describe the various expressions of what grows from that soil into cathedrals and catacombs, storefront missions and revival tents, tabernacles and chapels. Nor does it deal with the various ways in which church takes form in liturgy and mission and polity. Rather, it is an inside look at what is beneath and behind and within the church that we do see wherever and whenever it becomes visible.

not so much the way the church appears in our towns and cities, but the essence that is behind the appearances: God's will, Christ's presence, the Holy Spirit's work. This, not what we do or do not do in belief and doubt, in faithfulness or betrayal, in obedience or disobedience,

There are fifteen named churches in the New Testament.2 All but two (Antioch and Jerusalem) had letters addressed to them.

Sometimes we hear our friends talk in moony, romantic terms of the early church. "We need to get back to being just like the early church." Heaven help us. These churches were a mess, and Paul wrote his letters to them to try to clean up the mess.

"Glory" is a large word in our Scriptures, radiating the many dimensions of God's grandeur, brightness, effulgence, and illuminating everything around it.

And what comes clear is that church is not what we do; it is what God does, although we participate in it.

Ephesians documents the Trinitarian realities from which congregations are formed, however incomplete or fragmented the formation.

we read Ephesians as the revelation of all the operations of the Triune God that are foundational beneath what is visible among us and at work throughout each congregation.

Here were tried-and-true methods developed in the American business world that had an impressive track record of success. Pastors, I learned, no longer preached fantasy sermons on what the church should be. We could actually do something about the shabby image we had of ourselves. We could use advertising techniques to create an image of church as a place where we and our friends could mix with successful and glamorous people. We could use media manipulation to get people to do something they were already pretty good at doing: being consumers. All we had to do was remove pictures of the God of Gomorrah and Moriah and Golgotha from the walls of our churches and shift things around a bit to make our meeting places more consumer friendly.

Marketing research quickly developed to show us just what people wanted in terms of God and religion. As soon as we knew what it was, we gave it to them.

This is the Americanization of congregation. It means turning each congregation into a market for religious consumers, an ecclesiastical business run along the lines of advertising techniques and organizational flow charts, and then energized by impressive motivational rhetoric.

I began with the Acts of the Apostles in which the term "church" occurs twenty-four times, more times than in any other book in the Bible. It is also the book in which Ephesus is first mentioned.

Jesus never left that world he had been born into, that world of vulnerability, marginality, and poverty.

It happened as they were at worship on the Jewish feast of Pentecost in the city of Jerusalem. The first conception gave us Jesus; the second conception gave us church.

Paul's account of the first-generation church is totally devoid of the romantic, the glamorous, the celebrity, the influential: "Consider your call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God" (1 Cor. 1:26-29). He still does.

Here is another way to put it: "Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don't see many of `the brightest and the best' among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, cho...