3-22-16 - Who Moved My Stone?

In 1988 a business book was published which became a phenomenon. Who Moved My Cheese: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life is an allegory about anticipating, dealing with and/or seeking to avoid change. It is a bit irreverent to associate this best-seller with the scene outside Jesus’ tomb on Easter morning, but we can blame my unconscious which makes these leaps (and has more than a slight penchant for irreverence).

The women who were coming to anoint Jesus’ body for proper burial were already concerned about how they were going to move the massive stone which sealed the tomb and protected its contents from marauding animals. Upon arrival, they found that problem had been solved, and they faced a worse one:

They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body.

Now they had two questions: Who moved my stone – and who moved my Lord? The most likely explanation was that someone had stolen the body, perhaps Jesus’ enemies who’d heard his claims that he would rise again after being killed. But what if his friends had moved it, to avoid just such a tactic by his enemies? In John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene weeps outside the tomb that day, crying, “They have taken my Lord, and I don’t know where they have laid him.”

That lament sums it up for many who find changes in church life hard to absorb, whether it’s new forms of worship or fewer people or changes to the lay-out. Part of the reason many embrace religion in the first place is as a refuge from what our prayer book calls “the changes and chances of this life.” But Jesus was not promoting religion. He was offering relationship with God, intimate access with the Holy One through faith in His Son. Jesus was a change agent to a religious system that had grown calcified and brittle. And I would argue Jesus is still a change agent.

When we begin to believe in this Lord we cannot see but whose presence we can feel and know, we find he moves a lot more than our cheese. He shifts our priorities so we allocate resources, time, love differently. He adjusts our vision so that we see things and people we used to overlook. He invites us into new ways of doing things, a radical level of trust in the Spirit’s power rather than our own. He removes the stones that keep us from new life, obstacles that seem insurmountable. And he is never in the place we think we’re going to find him, certainly not in the chill of a lifeless tomb.

What stones in your life need moving out of the way? Can you believe God can do that?
Where have you been seeking for Jesus? Can you stop looking and believe he is with you?

Embracing Easter life requires us to embrace the unexpected, the new, the living, breathing reality of God all around us, drawing us into new scenarios, new ministries, new relationships, new ways of being.
The one eternal and unchangeable God is the only fixed point; everything else is on the move, in a beautiful dance of change and growth. That is the promise of Easter.