Why I love books.

About mid-January of this year, during a sermon, I committed in front of God and my church to stop buying books until Easter. It was unplanned, but it was good - although I did experience some fairly severe Barnes and Noble withdrawal. And once Easter rolled around, I was back to the bookstore as fast as possible. Since Easter Sunday, thanks in large part to my birthday being so close, I have "acquired" 13 new books and read six of them already (probably going to finish number seven and start number 8 eight sometime today). As I commented to my wife, I feel like I'm "drunk on words." And I absolutely love that feeling.

One of the books I read this week included the following statement by one of its main characters:

"...my relationship to books remains mysterious to me, but I know from my own collection that ownership is the most intimate tie we can have to objects."

I find this particular quote among my favorites ever about books. There is something mysterious about the way that books get inside us, how they transform from words to something more, something potentially life-changing. A good book is often called a work of art. And indeed, this is true - books like East of Eden by Steinbeck or Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand are works of art just as surely as Monet's paintings of waterlilies and Picasso's cubist masterpieces are works of art. To be honest, though, I think there is something about books - about the written word - that places it a cut above a visual work of art, no matter how great.

No matter how many times you look at the Mona Lisa or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the colors of the figures aren't going to change. Neither are their expressions. A visual work of art remains, to a large extent, the same. It is immutable, stolid, unchanging. You cannot look at a painting and then close your eyes and picture something different without altering in your mind the essence of the art. To be sure, there is an emotional experience of art that is as varied as the people who gaze at it. The emotions evoked in me by Tintoretto's Last Supper may be completely different than those evoked in you. Or any other viewer, for that matter. Nonetheless, you and I and that other viewer all see the same thing, the same colors, the same figures.

Such is not the case with a book. Words paint pictures as vivid as the greatest canvas. They give color to scenery and expressions to people. When you read the above quote from The Secret of Lost Things by Sheridan Hay, you paint a picture in your mind. No doubt it is different from my picture - I see stacks and stacks of books: old, new, paperback, hardcover, well-worn, never opened, fiction, nonfiction... And that picture in my head evokes emotions just as a painting does. What separates it from a painting, though, is the picture painted by a book is mine and mine alone. I do not have to share it with anyone, and probably couldn't if I wanted to. Now, not only are the emotions evoked by it different, the very picture itself is different.

That - if it's remotely understandable - is partly why I love so many books!

What's it All About?

I confess that this year I have been having difficulty getting "into" the Easter spirit. What I mean by that is that I have let comparably little things - problems, issues, emotions - get in the way. Instead of preparing my heart and mind for Holy Week and for Easter, I have been treating it as "the big week" of ministry and trying to be sure that I'm "doing my job." And to tell the truth, it's been killing me...almost like Thomas trying to preach about the resurrection before placing his hands in Jesus' side.

This morning, though, as I sat down to begin preparing for my Easter sermon - even as the thought ran through my mind that there's only so many ways to preach that Jesus is alive - I looked at my sermon planner and the text I had selected many months ago for this Easter. In fact, the series I am preaching this year is one that I put together while at Indiana Wesleyan, so I selected this text closer to two years ago. I open up my Bible to Luke 24.13-34 without thinking about it, getting ready to read familiar words about women going to anoint a body that wasn't there, angelic visitors and the like. Then I started reading and realized that, instead of a traditional resurrection text, I had selected the story of the two disciples on the Road to Emmaus. I kid you not, my first thought was, "At least I'll be able to come up with something creative."

I began my preparation by glancing over a book by Frederick Buechner titled The Faces of Jesus (GREAT, GREAT BOOK!!!!!!). In the section where he talks about the resurrection, I ran across the following quote:

If we are to believe in his resurrection in a way that really matters, we must somehow see him for ourselves. And wherever we have so believed, it is because in some sense we have seen him. Now as then, it is not his absence form the empty tomb that convinces men but the shadow at least of his presence in their empty lives.

About ten seconds after reading that, a realization hit me that instantly and dramatically changed my approach to Easter:

The empty tomb is irrelevant.

We Christians are too obsessed with the empty tomb. We talk about it all the time, we send out Easter cards to people with pictures of the empty tomb on them. We arrange our Easter celebrations around it. I can even recall several Easters as a child where the stage at the church was almost covered with an empty tomb backdrop from our Passion play - complete with movable stone.

Perhaps our obsession with the empty tomb is understandable. After all, it is the only tangible, physically real aspect of resurrection that we can hang onto. The empty tomb and the empty grave clothes are the only pieces of real "evidence" of what happened on the first Easter Morning. The problem, though, is that an empty tomb and empty grave clothes only convey one message - they are about absence. When we talk about the tomb, it is in the context of the absence of Jesus' body. The words of the women who first visited Jesus' tomb ring in our ears, "They have taken his body and we do not know where he is." An empty tomb sends a message of absence - "He is not here."

Easter, though, is not about absence. It is about presence. It is about the risen Jesus meeting Mary near the tomb. It is about the Jesus that appeared to the disciples, the Jesus who allowed Thomas to place his hands in the wounds of the cross. It is about the Jesus who walks down a road with two sad and confused disciples as they head for home. Easter is not about the absence of Jesus' body from the tomb - it is about the presence of the resurrected Jesus in the lives of his disciples. To wit, Buechner also writes:

But the fact of the matter is that in a way it hardly matters how the body of Jesus came to be missing because in the last analysis what convinced the people that he had risen from the dead was no the absence of his corpse but his living presence. And so it has been ever since.

The question the angels asked the women who came to anoint Jesus is our question as well:

Why do look for the living among the dead?