resurrection

At our last kids' service at church my friend and I read the story of the road to Emmaus at stations around the church. I made special Wegweiser to hang up for the occasion.

Wegweiser à la Susannah. I had a minor crisis when I realized that I'd printed them all pointing clockwise and we'd planned to walk around the church counterclockwise - and then just when I was trying to make some more as fast as possible it started raining so I couldn't go outside to use the spray adhesive. I may have screamed. And in the end did anyone even notice these, or their not-as-professional-looking glue-sticked cousins? I have no idea. But they made me happy, so there.

Today there was a service at the protestant church to celebrate the retirement of pastor Ulrike Müller, who has been an inspiration and mentor to me for the past three years. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do without her...but that's another story. As the theme for her service she chose the road to Emmaus. Which was cool. I mean, this is an obvious post-Easter reading and a good one for the theme of retirement and she had no idea about my kids' service, but I felt a sort of professional-by-association warm fuzzy being able to listen to a sermon about a reading that I myself had recently been occupied with? if that makes any sense? 

What struck me today is how the story ends. The disciples have been on a long walk from Jerusalem towards Emmaus, they're emotionally exhausted and confused by what's happened, the day is almost over. Then they recognize Jesus as he sits down to eat with them, he disappears, they're amazed...and what happens next? They get up and run back to Jerusalem! The word for resurrection in German is Auferstehung, which literally and in a word-origin sense contains steh auf! Stand up! Jesus's resurrection gives his friends the courage and the energy to, literally, stand up. 

I guess I'd always thought of resurrection in the sense of an amazing, miraculous, one-time occurrence (/ difficult article of faith). But this makes it feel so practical. I have a lot of mornings when the energy to stand up is not, at all, a given. Where does that energy come from? Does religion have anything to do with it? Friendship? Love? Something to think about tonight...