The age-old curse is breaking
April 25, 2011
An Easter poem by C. S. Lewis, appearing in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950-1963(HarperSan Francisco, 2007), p. 955. The poem is from a June 1958 letter to Francis Turner. It’s not the kind of thing that could stand on its own, but for echoes of Narnia and a vision of the cosmic significance of the resurrection, it’s good Easter reading.
Lords coeval with creation,
Seraph, Cherub, Throne and Power,
Princedom, Virtue, Domination,
Hail the long-awaited hour!
Bruised in head, with broken pinion,
Trembling for his old dominion,
See the ancient dragon cower!
For the Prince of Heaven has risen,
Victor, from his shattered prison.Loudly roaring from the regions
Where no sunbeam e’er was shed,
Rise and dance, ye ransomed legions
Of the cold and countless dead!
Gates of adamant are broken,
Words of conquering power are spoken
Through the God who died and bled:
Hell lies vacant, spoiled and cheated,
By the Lord of life defeated.Bear, behemoth, bustard, camel,
Warthog, wombat, kangaroo,
Insect, reptile, fish and mammal,
Tree, flower, grass, and lichen too,
Rise and romp and ramp, awaking,
For the age-old curse is breaking.
All things shall be made anew;
Nature’s rich rejuvenation
Follows on Man’s liberation.Eve’s and Adam’s son and daughter,
Sinful, weary, twisted, mired,
Pale with terror, thinned with slaughter,
Robbed of all your hearts desired,
Look! Rejoice! One born of woman,
Flesh and blood and bones all human,
One who wept and could be tired,
Risen from vilest death, has given
All who will the hope of Heaven.
Truth
April 25, 2011
Here is the video we showed in the Easter service. A number of folks were asking for it.
That’s Easter
April 16, 2009
Below are two videos we showed in last Sunday evening’s Changed by Jesus service. They are produced by an Anglican church in London, St. Helen’s Bishopsgate:
Flavel: Lord, the condemnation was yours
April 9, 2009
John Flavel (courtesy of Justin Taylor):
Lord, the condemnation was yours,
that the justification might be mine.The agony was yours,
that the victory might be mine.The pain was yours,
and the ease mine.The stripes were yours,
and the healing balm issuing from them mine.The vinegar and gall were yours,
that the honey and sweet might be mine.The curse was yours,
that the blessing might be mine.The crown of thorns was yours,
that the crown of glory might be mine.The death was yours,
the life purchased by it mine.You paid the price
that I might enjoy the inheritance.
John Flavel (1671), from his sermon, “The Solemn Consecration of the Mediator,” in The Fountain of Life Opened Up: or, A Display of Christ in His Essential and Mediatorial Glory.
Ave atque vale: John Updike
January 29, 2009
American novelist, poet and literary critic John Updike died this week at the age of 76. Here is his “Seven Stanzas at Easter”:
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that—pierced—died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
All ye that pass by
April 4, 2007
Chip Stam, Director of the Institute for Christian Worship at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, has a weekly “Worship Quote of the Week” you can receive as a free email (click here for more info). This week’s is a Charles Wesley poem about the atoning death of Christ. The opening line is based on Lamentations 1:12:
Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?
Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which was brought upon me,
which the LORD inflicted on the day of his fierce anger.
ALL YE THAT PASS BY
All ye that pass by, to Jesus draw nigh:
To you is it nothing that Jesus should die?
Your ransom and peace, Your surety He is:
Come, see if there ever was sorrow like His.
For what you have done His blood must atone:
The Father hath punished for you His dear Son.
The Lord, in the day of His anger, did lay
Your sins on the Lamb, and He bore them away.
He answered for all: O come at His call,
And low at His cross with astonishment fall!
But lift up your eyes at Jesus’ cries:
Impassive, He suffers; immortal, He dies.
He dies to atone for sins not His own;
Your debt He hath paid, and your work He hath done.
Ye all may receive the peace He did leave,
Who made intercession, “My Father, forgive!”
For you and for me He prayed on the tree:
The prayer is accepted, the sinner is free.
That sinner am I, who on Jesus rely,
And come for the pardon God cannot deny.
My pardon I claim; for a sinner I am,
A sinner believing in Jesus’ Name.
He purchased the grace which now I embrace:
O Father, Thou know’st He hath died in my place.
His death is my plea; my Advocate see,
And hear the blood speak that hath answered for me.
My ransom He was when He bled on the cross;
And losing His life He hath carried my cause.
—Charles Wesley, 1707-1788, from METHODIST HYMNS, 1779.
