the last judgement you'll ever need

This is a bad polaroid of a painting I did in the summer of 2001. I painted it in my office on the 8th floor of a web company. The company down the hall was closing and they had this large canvas frame, which they'd removed the painting from. I asked for it and they gave it to me. I took it too my office and stretched the canvas onto it and gessoed it. And then I painted this evocation of Greenwich Village. I had been to Manhattan that April and I loved the energy of the "City." The guy in the middle on the bottom is checking his watch - and the judgement goes on, unnoticed by most of the people, who carry on with their lives: an "end of the world as we know it and I feel fine" moment. I've wanted to transcribe that REM song into a hymn for years now. I have this image of a whole congregation singing the chorus, smiles on their faces. Avoiding a fiery judgement has never been a good reason to be a Christian. You can avoid a fiery judgement in most scenarios by being more moral, more rule guided - as if the God of Grace, for whom whatever righteousness we might contrive is filthy rags, would give a shit about what we ate or didn't eat, who we picketed or didn't picket. The religious impulse that is guided by moralism, and hence by the need for fire insurance, is the same impulse that straps bombs onto people and blows up a market, or that counts human life (life created in the image of God) as cheap, because that human doesn't agree with someone's moral list.
A good reason to be a Christian is because Jesus effected you so deeply that you feel compelled by that love to love God's creation and those who bear God's image - in short thankfulness is the guiding motive. These are the kind of people who can sing the end of the world and I feel fine. These are the kind of people for whom the judgement passes as a second hand sweeps across the dial, but for whom life is too precious and too much to be cherished to notice or to respond with fear.
This painting is now in a friend's home in McLean, VA. They've hung it in their stairwell. I hope soon, when Jami and I visit friends in DC that we can stop by and visit this couple and see this painting.
I may have a gig preaching this Easter. I can't preach often enough. And I'm excited because there are so many texts in the liturgy available. The revised common lectionary people touched all the bases: Isaiah 25; Jerimiah 31; Matt 28; John 20; Psalms 114, 118; Col 3:1-4; 1 Cor 5: 6-8; Acts 10: 34 ff, Luke 24 - dive right in! I'm enchanted by all of Isaiah 25 (not just the passages they selected) and I'm thinking of the 1 cor text - if only because it is echoed in the eucharistic celebration: Christ our paschal lamb is sacrificed therefore let us keep the feast. I love that banquet imagery: I love it because Jesus so often uses feasts to characterize the kingdom of God and because the last supper binds us all in history and over the world in Christ via the Holy Spirit with Jesus. We are going to keep a feast. We are going to be filled. This is the judgement: that God is generous but people are stingy; that God gives freely but humanity feels compelled to hoard. While we have become fixated on death, God brings to life and restores to health. In God no one dies, but we taste life forever in the presence of Christ. And how should we therefore live our lives if we believe this, if we believe that the resurrection is the hope of creation's restoration? What will knock us out of our fears? our fears that cause us to join the hoarding crowd. Is our faith so weak and miserable, so grounded in contingency, that we blanch at living out the words, at living in a world where abundance is the reality and scarcity the lie? How we've reversed the two, and it bombards us in our newspapers, our movies, our books, our politics. But the power of the resurrection is something different. It is something different than resuscitating a corpse - a parlor trick. The resurrection is a new fact of life, but a fact as old as creation, that death is not the final event and the fear of death does not lead to a love of humanity. There is no image of God in the fear of death - these two are not the same. God is sovereign over death, though death is not a created thing. Death has power over human beings only when human beings think that they exist without God. Death is a negation, a nothingness - as Barth points out in CD 3.3 and In CD 4.1. Death rules human beings when we become convinced of our own rightness and the corresponding wrongness of other. Like Schubert's Erlkoenig we would rather take by force than lose in an argument. When we think we exist independent of God, we cannot take no for an answer from another human being. We cannot tell ourselves no, and we lie to ourselves and others to maintain the illusion of autonomy.
Who will free us from this?
Jesus, whose life is the unique expression of God's sovereign servanthood, who lived out a life of obedience and love among us, who showed us the Father and gave us the Spirit: Jesus in his life death and resurrection leads us to that place of generosity, where we see and can rest in what God has given us. Where we can express the gratitude we are called into - that there is abundance, that there is enough, and that we shouldn't be afraid of scarcity.
Let us keep the feast.