Sunday, April 06, 2008

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Responsive resurrection?

I’ve talked a few times in these pages about the marquee sign on a church that I pass on my way to work. This week, the sign has this mystifying (to me) slogan:

PRACTICE RESURRECTION
LIVE RESPONSIVELY

OK, gentle readers, I haven’t a clue as to the meaning of this one. Can any of you help? Or is some wag just messin’ with their sign?

4 comments:

Julietta said...

Well, I think of resurrection as "rising above," not coming back from the dead. And I believe that a lot of religious leaders spoke to this concept of resurgence/revival in the past few weeks. It's SO much more believable, don't you think?

JP Burke said...

Your guess is as good as mine. I suppose it's too much to hope that the second line means your life should be lived as a rational response to human experience of the observable world.

The first part sounds like it has to do with zombies.

briwei said...

Dr. M - Way too much, I'd say.

My take is that since Easter celebrates the resurrection that they just want people to be more like Jesus. Not the feed the poor and be kind to everyone Jesus. The stone the queers and hate the libruls Jesus.

Barry Leiba said...

Julietta, I really do think of resurrection as rising from the dead (literally or figuratively), and "ascension" as the rising above part, the "sitting at God's side". If I get this right, Christian mythology has it that Jesus was betrayed on Thursday, was killed on Friday, rose from the dead (resurrected) on Sunday, and walked among us for 40 days before ascending.

So, to me, even taking it figuratively, I might replace a hard drive to "resurrect a dead computer", but, say, installing nifty software or adding more memory to make a working computer more useful... wouldn't be "resurrection", as I'd use it.

So I still find it odd to tell people to "practice resurrection", unless we really are talking about an Extreme Makeover for someone who's face-down in the gutter. Maybe, getting a severely drugged-out guy into rehab, or something... laudable, very much so, but not likely to be applicable to very many parishioners in the affluent community where this church is.

And I can't even begin to guess what "live responsively" is, James's comment notwithstanding.