Decoration Day

Have you ever been to a Decoration Day?  In many rural cemeteries it is a day to clean up and decorate the graves.  Then the families of those buried there share a pot-luck, picnic type meal together.  Usually there is a business meeting to go along with it.  I am old enough to remember going to a few Decoration Days at the Pilot Grove Cemetery outside Yoakum when I was younger.  This may seem like an odd event but I saw in the local paper this week that there will be a cemetery Decoration Day in our area.  They still survive.

I had a pastor friend in a nearby church when he and I were both pastoring our first churches.  The Decoration Day in the cemetery in his rural community was an annual event, always on a Sunday.  It was so big, the church did not meet for worship that day.  When all the people told my friend about this, he did not know whether to believe them.  He showed up for church ready to preach on that first Decoration Day Sunday.  Sure enough, no one came.  They were all out at the cemetery.

What happens when God buries someone?  I am not knocking Decoration Days, but look at what he did with Moses, "He buried him in Moab, in the valley opposite Beth Peor, but to this day no one knows where his grave is.'  Deut. 34:6.  He seems to be a God more focused on the living.

Recently I read this from Dr. Jim Denison, "Today Muslims visit the remains of Muhammad in Medina.  Baha'i visit their founder's body at the Shrine of the Bab in Haifa, Israel.  Buddhists go to the Temple of the Tooth in Sri Lanka, where the tooth of the Buddha is kept.  Confucians visit the remains of Confucius in his hometown of Qufu, Shandong Province, China.  But no one can visit the corpse of Jesus, because it has never been found."

God does not seem to have a long term plan for his people's graves.  He certainly doesn't have a decoration day here on earth, he never calls a business meeting to deal with our graves.  God has an even better plan for his people's resurrection.  I will take a resurrection day over a decoration day any day.  But how do we use the resurrection of Jesus on a daily basis?  Can we?  The answer is, "Yes."  God wants to give us a daily dose of resurrection power.  Have you had yours today?  That is what we will talk about Sunday.

for the journey...

Tim