A Note From Dean: “He Lives”
Dear Friends,
Fifty years ago, Jim and I spent a summer during seminary in rural Vermont, up near the Canadian border. Our town was small. It had a general store with homemade cider doughnuts, and the post office was in the house of the postmistress who kindly let us watch her TV the day Nixon resigned.
There were two one room churches, with no plumbing or heat in the winter. Jim was assigned to the United Church of Christ parish, and the other church – only several yards away – was Pentecostal. During worship on Sunday mornings, the Pentecostals’ singing would drown out our own.
We organized and led a Vacation Bible School (VBS) while we were there, and Jim made pastoral calls and led worship. Our son, Andy, was two months old when we moved into the trailer the church provided for us. The women in the congregation stocked our refrigerator with homemade bread and butter pickles. “Granny Smith” would babysit Andy when I travelled into the closest town that had a laundromat.
There was a woman in her twenties who was a member of our church. She had formerly been a member at the Pentecostal Church, but after she divorced her abusive husband, they took away her membership. She was shunned and shamed.
Valerie had a beautiful voice. She and the congregation taught us wonderful old gospel songs that we had never heard in our suburban or urban churches before arriving in Vermont. The church used the old “Rodeheaver” hymnal. One of the great hymns in there was entitled: “He Lives.”
Compared to many Easter hymns, “He Lives” doesn’t recount the biblical narrative of witnesses to the risen Christ, such as Mary or the disciples on the Road to Emmaus. Neither does it explore classic theological themes of the Resurrection like Christ the victor over death. Instead, the Presbyterian writer’s claim, as articulated in the refrain, is personal:
You ask me how I know he lives?
He lives within my heart.
From his own experience, as well as the testimony of many others, he believed in Christ’s resurrection. The song's central message is not in an intellectual argument, but in a felt faith –“He lives within my heart.”
That’s good enough for me.
But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. (Romans 6:8-11, NRSV)
Hoping to see you in church on Easter!
Dean