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Morning Devotion for the Season of Lent
April 2, 2025
Reading: Romans 8:11
If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit which dwells in you.
Meditation - Peter Vanderveen
You may have heard these words before, most notably if you have ever participated in a Committal, which is the last element of a Burial Service, conducted at the grave. The Prayer Book assigns these words to be read just prior to one’s remains being lowered into the ground. It’s not hard to imagine why they were chosen.
In this use, however, this is a verse taken out of context. For in Paul’s letter, this statement is part of his exhortation that, if any believe in Christ, then how they live their lives will be different. They will take a different form, shaped by different acts. Those who believe will no longer be driven by unbridled and misdirected passions. They will, instead, show something of the eternal, even within the rather lowly confines of day to day habits and concerns.
We have largely lost sight of this possibility, which is deeply unfortunate. For what if others could see this vast dimensionality in how you lived?
Nonetheless, I am also glad that the Prayer Book gives this verse a clear misreading. For when it is read at the very last, when our mortality is most painfully evident, then it seems to suggest that even at this point, where we can do nothing and can effectuate nothing, God is still able to give us life again. Our mortality is not our end.
This verse is accompanied in the Committal by a verse from Psalm 16, which, at such an intense moment of burial, is an especially bold statement. It reads: “Wherefore my heart is glad, and my spirit rejoices, my flesh shall also rest in hope.”
I have often wondered whether people actually hear these words as they are spoken, whether they realize how comprehensively beautiful and powerful they are. I have read them more than a thousand times, when death has been an awful interruption and a wrenching tragedy, and when it has come almost as a relief after someone’s long demise, when some have fought death up until their final breath, and when others have silently slipped away. Every occasion is different. And yet these words remain the same. They never lose their relevance. They speak of us. They speak to us. And without any fanfare at all, they declare that God resides with us, whether in life or in death.
And every time I leave a cemetery and walk from the stillness of a grave back into the schedule of life I am grateful to have been poignantly reminded not of something that I take to be true but of the truth within which God has gathered us all.
Prayer
Heavenly Father:
Hold not our sins up against us,
but hold us up against our sins,
so that the thought of Thee when it wakens in our soul,
should not remind us of what we have committed,
but of what Thou hast forgiven,
not of how we went astray,
but of how Thou didst save us.
Amen.
Kierkegaard
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