Our lunch stop was the little watering hole on the Cane. There is a place to tie up the boat. The boat is equipped with a grill. It was determined that docking the boat for a while would give a great opportunity for lunch. As a master-marine chef, I warmed the baked beans and started on the hot dogs. The whole crowd had been fed and was hanging out in the docked boat. I was sitting in the bow pondering an Easter sermon oblivious to the world.
My daughter-in-law Hannah shouts, “Wasp!”
Then she says, “Oh no, my debit card.”
When I looked up from my musings, I saw the occupants of the boat looking over the port side into the water. Since I had not been looking I had assumed that Hannah had swatted the wasp with her debit card and it flew overboard. I was partially correct. I opined that it would be easy to get another debit card with all of the bankers in the family. Hannah’s mother-in-law and her father are both bankers. My statement was greeted with “the look.” It was explained to me that Hannah’s debit card was in that little pouch on the back of the iPhone case.
Hannah chunked her iPhone into the Cane River. It was a new iPhone 6 turbo-charged!
My son doesn’t like to spend his own money. He did the math on the replacement cost leaving the phone in the river verses replacing a water logged phone. He jumped in after it.
If you are not a river person, you need to know that the Cane River is still winter cold. Andrew was in it up to his shoulders. A debate broke out on the boat as to the trajectory of the phone into the river. Andrew was freezing as he was squeezing river bottom mud between his toes. He was receiving mixed directions from the port side pointers.
After 20 minutes of cold water and river bottom mud, Andrew’s toes discovered the iPhone. Hannah was thrilled and wanted to immediately post something on Instagram about finding the drowned phone. Andrew wanted her to dry the phone first. If you have ever baptized your cell phone you know the rice trick. There are two ways of drying a cell phone, sticking it in rice or surrounding it with those ubiquitous silica packs.
Andrew wanted to dry the phone. Hannah wanted to use the phone. The innocent bystanders voted that no iPhone could live after 20 minutes at the bottom of the Cane River. Later that evening Hannah was talking on her working iPhone. It was a resurrection miracle, but not quite. Don’t hang up yet, I’m coming back to the phone.
Easter is about resurrection. We believe that Jesus was raised from the dead. The resurrection of Jesus is God’s guarantee that we will be resurrected. The resurrected Jesus walked, talked, prayed, cooked, and ate. He was alive. He told Thomas to touch the marks of crucifixion. He was the same Jesus, yet very different. He had a resurrected body. We will be resurrected like He was.
We stop short of believing in resurrection. We actually believe in resuscitation. We want God to put things back the way they were. Upon someone’s death some have the thought, “I want them back.” That ignores resurrection and is a bidding for them to return as they were, right? What do you mean, you want them back? How do you want them? Just as they were, before they were sick, younger, stronger, do you want them back as they were twenty years ago? Do you want them back as they were before you knew them? We stop short of understanding our true hope because we want resuscitation. We want things returned to the way they were. We need bigger resurrection hope.
Resurrection promises a new us. We are finally whole. Nothing we have been will be lost. It will be redeemed.
Hannah illustrated resuscitation hope for her phone. She wanted it to work as it had before. For a while that evening, it appeared as though her resuscitation hope was valid. The phone worked, mostly. That is the problem with resuscitation, the resuscitated die again.
In resurrection, we are freed from the power of sin and death. The resurrected will never die and will never be afraid of death. That is very important, when you understand that ultimately it is the fear and denial of death that is the catalyst for many of the silly things we do.
In case you are wondering, the iPhone completely died on Monday and was replaced with a new iPhone. The contents of Hannah’s old phone were transferred into a brand new phone.
Got it?
