Jesus Is Alive and Well
Drama
Hoof 'N Mouth Disease
Biblical Monologues and How to Do Them
Object:
Jesus is alive and well.
I know, for I saw Jesus face to face.
No, it wasn't some magical, mystical vision.
I saw her in the little inner-city Eloise United Methodist Church
of which I was part-time pastor in the mid-1980s.
The congregation was so minuscule, she would have been almost impossible to miss.
She was a "country-girl" type, petite with blond hair --
age 36.
Her smile was contagious,
in spite of the terrible burden of tragedy that haunted her.
Annie was born on the wrong side of the tracks to a large,
poor,
and dysfunctional family.
She married very early --
perhaps to escape that setting.
She soon had a son,
followed shortly by a daughter.
The man she married was a good and decent fellow,
but for whatever reason,
the marriage eventually fell apart.
The children she bore were lovely,
intelligent,
and well-behaved.
She was a great mother.
Someplace along the line Ann met the Master,
and a young man named Steve as well.
As a Florida Southern College business major,
Steve worked part-time to fill the Eloise pulpit for two years preceding me.
Together, the family developed an unusually close walk with the Christ.
She was the youth group counselor and Sunday School teacher.
Young people took to her like ducks to water.
When Steve graduated from Florida Southern College,
he got a great position as a stockbroker with Merrill Lynch,
but they continued to worship in the Eloise church.
Their future was extremely bright --
or so it seemed.
Almost simultaneously with Steve's graduation,
Annie's beloved sixteen-year-old daughter Vicki
was killed in a head-on wreck.
That was just six weeks before I became pastor.
Yet, for weeks, I knew nothing about it.
Certainly, nothing in Annie's bearing indicated to me her deep sorrow.
In spite of a full-time job running her own business,
Ann was very involved in the church,
and in the community as a volunteer.
Some of her work I was totally unaware of until almost a year after I left Eloise.
Mark Rivera, the president of Anchor House Ministries,
a Christian residence for troubled and delinquent boys,
told me that she voluntarily cut the hair of the boys who resided there.
You see, she was a beautician.
She owned her own shop,
a block from the Winter Haven, Florida, mall.
She named the shop "Transformation."
She felt herself to be like a caterpillar,
transformed into a butterfly because of her relationship with Jesus Christ.
She was a simple kind of person that drew people to herself.
Out of those encounters,
she wanted to become a part in their transformation inwardly,
as well as outwardly.
When her clients would ask about the strange name for her shop,
she would launch into her transformation story.
Then one day in my first months at Eloise,
her younger brother was killed by a railroad train as he was walking along the tracks --
the second close member of her family to die within a period of months.
If her faith faltered, one would never know it.
However, her mother-in-law found these words written on a sheet
of paper in Annie's Bible,
and gave them to me after Ann's own death.
"How long does it take for a mother's heart to heal? Probably a lifetime."
Outwardly things were fine in spite of tragedy,
but inwardly she was hurting and bruised.
One day, months after the death of her daughter, Annie visited the grave site.
It was hot --
like it can be in the summer months in Florida.
When she parked her car she, therefore, left the windows down a ways.
She put her purse on the seat and walked over to the tombstone to pray.
A teenage boy came by, reached in, and stole her purse.
Ann ran after him, yelling.
A guard noticed them and also gave chase.
The lad dropped the purse.
After the guard went home, the young man came back.
Most of us would have had harsh words for him --
not Annie.
She struck up a conversation,
told him about her daughter Vicki,
and she told the fellow that Jesus loved him.
Then, in her own sweet way, she prayed aloud for him before she left.
Just before the following Christmas --
a bit after the first anniversary of Vicki's death,
Ann asked me to pray for her.
She wasn't feeling well.
Her shop was very busy during the holiday season.
She didn't want to disappoint any of her customers.
As a result, she didn't take off to see a physician.
When she did,
it was too late.
I loved Annie and Steve deeply.
Until that time, I had never loved and lost anyone who meant so much to me.
I wasn't alone.
When people heard of her cancer,
hardly any of our members missed church.
Never have I seen so much prayer go up for one person.
The little church was much fuller than usual, as people came and prayed for her.
All around, people talked of her works --
love, benevolence --
They prayed.
One man made a vow that he would fast until he knew she was healed.
I, personally, thought of little else.
I also fasted and prayed on several days,
off and on for weeks.
How could it be God's will that one so young and good --
who had so much love to give
that she gave so freely -- could die?
Die while yet in her mid-thirties.
Before Easter, I preached her funeral.
Annie Springer was dead at the tender age of 37,
leaving many heartbroken friends and loved ones.
I never in my life came so close to a breakdown.
My faith was sorely tried.
In some ways, it has taken years for me to recover.
I wondered how such goodness and productivity could disappear,
while evil and destructiveness never seem to terminate.
I particularly wondered why my prayers, and the earnest prayers of so many people, seemingly had no effect.
Where was the authority that I and others have --
authority Jesus delegated to us when He said,
"Ask whatever you will in my name and it shall be done for you."
One day I'm going to ask the Almighty about that question.
That may be, in fact, the very first question I ask of Him when I get to the other side.
You may remember that Job, too,
in that ancient Old Testament writing,
angrily shook his fist in the face of his Creator,
asking questions.
He got an answer eventually --
yet it was no answer.
When the Almighty finally spoke it was only to ask a question of Job (38:4, 12, 32).
"Answer me [Job]: "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?
Tell me if you understand ...
Have you ever given orders to the morning,
or shown the dawn its place? ...
Can you bring forth the constellations in their season?"
I understand very well why the two persons on their way to Emmaus
were sad as they walked the seven miles from Jerusalem on that
early Easter A.M.
With a very sad heart, they pondered the loss of their
33-year-old friend.
They pondered the rumors they heard from other friends --
friends who, because of their great loss,
were so saddened that they seemed to be hallucinating.
Even when Jesus appeared to them, and explained from the scriptures,
beginning with Moses and down through all the prophets,
why the Christ had to suffer these things to enter His glory, they were kept from recognizing Him.
It was only as He came into their house,
sat down at the table opposite them,
and broke bread in the familiar way,
that they recognized Him.
Then He disappeared.
At that time, the rejuvenated couple returned at once, the seven miles to Jerusalem,
and added their witness of His resurrection.
This story, with different characters,
was repeated over and over in the weeks after Easter --
disciples in despair and fear --
He appears --
they scarcely can believe their eyes.
Then, just before the Feast of Pentecost,
He ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father.
The world so often appears to us as though it is going to hell in a handbasket --
especially as we read the morning papers,
or view the evening news.
The resurrection of Christ says loudly and clearly that,
though evil will exist until the end of time as we know it,
the Almighty knows what He is doing.
He is active.
He is doing His work.
Now He incarnates Himself in believers.
We become the body of Christ in our times,
as we allow Him to live in us.
Look around you.
There is evil in this world.
No doubt about it.
There is even evil in us to the extent that we do not follow Him.
Look around again, though.
Take a second look --
even a third and fourth look --
and you will see acts of mercy,
acts of goodness,
even acts of self-sacrifice done in the name of Christ.
Because He lives,
we live.
Because He lives,
I saw Him in the person of Annie Springer,
and my life was enormously enriched.
Because He lives, others will see Him in you,
for sometimes, He comes to us as He did to his disciples,
and we don't even recognize Him.
Lutheran minister Walter Wangerin speaks of this in his parable The Ragman.
Even before the dawn one Friday morning I noticed a young man,
handsome and strong,
walking the alleys of the City.
He was pulling an old cart filled with clothes both bright and new,
and he was calling in a clear voice:
"Rags!"
"Rags!
New rags for old!
I take your tired rags!
Rags!"
"Now this is a wonder," I thought to myself,
for the man stood six-feet-four,
and his arms were like tree limbs,
hard and muscular,
and his eyes flashed intelligence.
Could he find no better job than this,
to be a ragman in the inner city?
I followed him.
My curiosity drove me.
Soon the Ragman saw a woman sitting on her back porch.
She was sobbing into her handkerchief,
sighing,
and shedding a thousand tears.
Her shoulders shook.
Her heart was breaking.
The Ragman stopped his cart.
Quietly he walked to the woman.
"Give me your rags," he said so gently,
"and I'll give you another."
He slipped the handkerchief from her eyes.
She looked up,
and he laid across her palm a linen cloth so clean and new that it shined.
Then, as he began to pull his cart again,
the Ragman did a strange thing:
he put her stained, snotty handkerchief to his own face;
and then he began to weep,
to sob as grievously as she had done,
his shoulders shaking.
Yet she was left behind without a tear.
"This is a wonder," I breathed to myself,
and I followed.
"Rags!
Rags!
New rags for old!"
In a little while, the Ragman came upon a girl whose head was
wrapped in a bandage,
whose eyes were empty.
Blood soaked her bandage.
A single line of blood ran down her cheek.
Now the tall Ragman looked upon this child with pity,
and he drew a lovely yellow bonnet from his cart.
"Give me your rag," he said,
"and I'll give you mine."
The child could only gaze at him while he loosened the bandage,
removed it,
and tied it to his own head.
The bonnet he set on hers.
And I gasped at what I saw:
for with the bandage went the wound!
Against his brow it ran a darker, more substantial
blood --
his own!
"Rags!
Rags!
I take old rags!" cried the sobbing,
bleeding,
strong,
intelligent Ragman.
"Are you going to work?" he asked a man who leaned against a telephone pole.
The man shook his head.
"Do you have a job?"
"Are you crazy?" sneered the other.
He pulled away from the pole,
revealing the right sleeve of his jacket.
It was flat,
the cuff stuffed into the pocket.
He had no arm.
"So," said the Ragman.
"Give me your jacket,
and I'll give you mine."
Such quiet authority in his voice!
The one-armed man took off his jacket.
So did the Ragman --
and I trembled at what I saw:
for the Ragman's arm stayed in his jacket,
and when the other put it on,
then he had two good arms,
thick as tree limbs;
but the Ragman had only one.
"Go to work," he said.
After that he saw a drunk, lying unconscious beneath an army blanket,
an old man.
He took that blanket and wrapped it round himself,
but for the drunk he left a new suit of clothes.
The Ragman was weeping uncontrollably,
and bleeding freely at his forehead,
pulling his cart with one arm,
stumbling for drunkenness,
falling again and again,
exhausted,
old,
old and sick.
I wept to see the change in this man.
I hurt to see his sorrow.
The little old Ragman --
he came to a landfill.
He came to a garbage dump.
He sighed.
He lay down.
He pillowed his head on a handkerchief and a jacket.
He covered his bones with an army blanket.
And he died.
Oh how I cried to witness that death!
I slumped in a junked car and wailed and mourned as one who has no hope --
because I had come to love the Ragman.
Every other face had faded in the wonder of this man,
and I cherished him;
but he died.
I cried myself to sleep.
I did not know --
how could I know? --
that I slept through Friday night
and Saturday and its night, too.
But then, on Sunday morning, I was wakened by a violence.
Light --
pure, hard, demanding light --
slammed against my sour face,
and I blinked,
and I looked,
and I saw the last
and the first wonder of all.
There was the Ragman,
folding the blanket most carefully,
a scar on his forehead,
but alive.
And, besides that, healthy!
There was no sign of sorrow nor of age,
and all the rags that he had gathered shined for cleanliness.
Well, then I lowered my head and,
trembling for all I had seen,
I myself walked up to the Ragman.
I told him my name with shame,
for I was a sorry figure next to him.
Then I took off all my clothes in that place,
and I said to him with dear yearning in my voice:
"Dress me."
He dressed me.
My Lord, he put new rags on me,
and I am a wonder beside him.
The Ragman,
The Ragman,
the Christ!
I know, for I saw Jesus face to face.
No, it wasn't some magical, mystical vision.
I saw her in the little inner-city Eloise United Methodist Church
of which I was part-time pastor in the mid-1980s.
The congregation was so minuscule, she would have been almost impossible to miss.
She was a "country-girl" type, petite with blond hair --
age 36.
Her smile was contagious,
in spite of the terrible burden of tragedy that haunted her.
Annie was born on the wrong side of the tracks to a large,
poor,
and dysfunctional family.
She married very early --
perhaps to escape that setting.
She soon had a son,
followed shortly by a daughter.
The man she married was a good and decent fellow,
but for whatever reason,
the marriage eventually fell apart.
The children she bore were lovely,
intelligent,
and well-behaved.
She was a great mother.
Someplace along the line Ann met the Master,
and a young man named Steve as well.
As a Florida Southern College business major,
Steve worked part-time to fill the Eloise pulpit for two years preceding me.
Together, the family developed an unusually close walk with the Christ.
She was the youth group counselor and Sunday School teacher.
Young people took to her like ducks to water.
When Steve graduated from Florida Southern College,
he got a great position as a stockbroker with Merrill Lynch,
but they continued to worship in the Eloise church.
Their future was extremely bright --
or so it seemed.
Almost simultaneously with Steve's graduation,
Annie's beloved sixteen-year-old daughter Vicki
was killed in a head-on wreck.
That was just six weeks before I became pastor.
Yet, for weeks, I knew nothing about it.
Certainly, nothing in Annie's bearing indicated to me her deep sorrow.
In spite of a full-time job running her own business,
Ann was very involved in the church,
and in the community as a volunteer.
Some of her work I was totally unaware of until almost a year after I left Eloise.
Mark Rivera, the president of Anchor House Ministries,
a Christian residence for troubled and delinquent boys,
told me that she voluntarily cut the hair of the boys who resided there.
You see, she was a beautician.
She owned her own shop,
a block from the Winter Haven, Florida, mall.
She named the shop "Transformation."
She felt herself to be like a caterpillar,
transformed into a butterfly because of her relationship with Jesus Christ.
She was a simple kind of person that drew people to herself.
Out of those encounters,
she wanted to become a part in their transformation inwardly,
as well as outwardly.
When her clients would ask about the strange name for her shop,
she would launch into her transformation story.
Then one day in my first months at Eloise,
her younger brother was killed by a railroad train as he was walking along the tracks --
the second close member of her family to die within a period of months.
If her faith faltered, one would never know it.
However, her mother-in-law found these words written on a sheet
of paper in Annie's Bible,
and gave them to me after Ann's own death.
"How long does it take for a mother's heart to heal? Probably a lifetime."
Outwardly things were fine in spite of tragedy,
but inwardly she was hurting and bruised.
One day, months after the death of her daughter, Annie visited the grave site.
It was hot --
like it can be in the summer months in Florida.
When she parked her car she, therefore, left the windows down a ways.
She put her purse on the seat and walked over to the tombstone to pray.
A teenage boy came by, reached in, and stole her purse.
Ann ran after him, yelling.
A guard noticed them and also gave chase.
The lad dropped the purse.
After the guard went home, the young man came back.
Most of us would have had harsh words for him --
not Annie.
She struck up a conversation,
told him about her daughter Vicki,
and she told the fellow that Jesus loved him.
Then, in her own sweet way, she prayed aloud for him before she left.
Just before the following Christmas --
a bit after the first anniversary of Vicki's death,
Ann asked me to pray for her.
She wasn't feeling well.
Her shop was very busy during the holiday season.
She didn't want to disappoint any of her customers.
As a result, she didn't take off to see a physician.
When she did,
it was too late.
I loved Annie and Steve deeply.
Until that time, I had never loved and lost anyone who meant so much to me.
I wasn't alone.
When people heard of her cancer,
hardly any of our members missed church.
Never have I seen so much prayer go up for one person.
The little church was much fuller than usual, as people came and prayed for her.
All around, people talked of her works --
love, benevolence --
They prayed.
One man made a vow that he would fast until he knew she was healed.
I, personally, thought of little else.
I also fasted and prayed on several days,
off and on for weeks.
How could it be God's will that one so young and good --
who had so much love to give
that she gave so freely -- could die?
Die while yet in her mid-thirties.
Before Easter, I preached her funeral.
Annie Springer was dead at the tender age of 37,
leaving many heartbroken friends and loved ones.
I never in my life came so close to a breakdown.
My faith was sorely tried.
In some ways, it has taken years for me to recover.
I wondered how such goodness and productivity could disappear,
while evil and destructiveness never seem to terminate.
I particularly wondered why my prayers, and the earnest prayers of so many people, seemingly had no effect.
Where was the authority that I and others have --
authority Jesus delegated to us when He said,
"Ask whatever you will in my name and it shall be done for you."
One day I'm going to ask the Almighty about that question.
That may be, in fact, the very first question I ask of Him when I get to the other side.
You may remember that Job, too,
in that ancient Old Testament writing,
angrily shook his fist in the face of his Creator,
asking questions.
He got an answer eventually --
yet it was no answer.
When the Almighty finally spoke it was only to ask a question of Job (38:4, 12, 32).
"Answer me [Job]: "Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?
Tell me if you understand ...
Have you ever given orders to the morning,
or shown the dawn its place? ...
Can you bring forth the constellations in their season?"
I understand very well why the two persons on their way to Emmaus
were sad as they walked the seven miles from Jerusalem on that
early Easter A.M.
With a very sad heart, they pondered the loss of their
33-year-old friend.
They pondered the rumors they heard from other friends --
friends who, because of their great loss,
were so saddened that they seemed to be hallucinating.
Even when Jesus appeared to them, and explained from the scriptures,
beginning with Moses and down through all the prophets,
why the Christ had to suffer these things to enter His glory, they were kept from recognizing Him.
It was only as He came into their house,
sat down at the table opposite them,
and broke bread in the familiar way,
that they recognized Him.
Then He disappeared.
At that time, the rejuvenated couple returned at once, the seven miles to Jerusalem,
and added their witness of His resurrection.
This story, with different characters,
was repeated over and over in the weeks after Easter --
disciples in despair and fear --
He appears --
they scarcely can believe their eyes.
Then, just before the Feast of Pentecost,
He ascended into heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father.
The world so often appears to us as though it is going to hell in a handbasket --
especially as we read the morning papers,
or view the evening news.
The resurrection of Christ says loudly and clearly that,
though evil will exist until the end of time as we know it,
the Almighty knows what He is doing.
He is active.
He is doing His work.
Now He incarnates Himself in believers.
We become the body of Christ in our times,
as we allow Him to live in us.
Look around you.
There is evil in this world.
No doubt about it.
There is even evil in us to the extent that we do not follow Him.
Look around again, though.
Take a second look --
even a third and fourth look --
and you will see acts of mercy,
acts of goodness,
even acts of self-sacrifice done in the name of Christ.
Because He lives,
we live.
Because He lives,
I saw Him in the person of Annie Springer,
and my life was enormously enriched.
Because He lives, others will see Him in you,
for sometimes, He comes to us as He did to his disciples,
and we don't even recognize Him.
Lutheran minister Walter Wangerin speaks of this in his parable The Ragman.
Even before the dawn one Friday morning I noticed a young man,
handsome and strong,
walking the alleys of the City.
He was pulling an old cart filled with clothes both bright and new,
and he was calling in a clear voice:
"Rags!"
"Rags!
New rags for old!
I take your tired rags!
Rags!"
"Now this is a wonder," I thought to myself,
for the man stood six-feet-four,
and his arms were like tree limbs,
hard and muscular,
and his eyes flashed intelligence.
Could he find no better job than this,
to be a ragman in the inner city?
I followed him.
My curiosity drove me.
Soon the Ragman saw a woman sitting on her back porch.
She was sobbing into her handkerchief,
sighing,
and shedding a thousand tears.
Her shoulders shook.
Her heart was breaking.
The Ragman stopped his cart.
Quietly he walked to the woman.
"Give me your rags," he said so gently,
"and I'll give you another."
He slipped the handkerchief from her eyes.
She looked up,
and he laid across her palm a linen cloth so clean and new that it shined.
Then, as he began to pull his cart again,
the Ragman did a strange thing:
he put her stained, snotty handkerchief to his own face;
and then he began to weep,
to sob as grievously as she had done,
his shoulders shaking.
Yet she was left behind without a tear.
"This is a wonder," I breathed to myself,
and I followed.
"Rags!
Rags!
New rags for old!"
In a little while, the Ragman came upon a girl whose head was
wrapped in a bandage,
whose eyes were empty.
Blood soaked her bandage.
A single line of blood ran down her cheek.
Now the tall Ragman looked upon this child with pity,
and he drew a lovely yellow bonnet from his cart.
"Give me your rag," he said,
"and I'll give you mine."
The child could only gaze at him while he loosened the bandage,
removed it,
and tied it to his own head.
The bonnet he set on hers.
And I gasped at what I saw:
for with the bandage went the wound!
Against his brow it ran a darker, more substantial
blood --
his own!
"Rags!
Rags!
I take old rags!" cried the sobbing,
bleeding,
strong,
intelligent Ragman.
"Are you going to work?" he asked a man who leaned against a telephone pole.
The man shook his head.
"Do you have a job?"
"Are you crazy?" sneered the other.
He pulled away from the pole,
revealing the right sleeve of his jacket.
It was flat,
the cuff stuffed into the pocket.
He had no arm.
"So," said the Ragman.
"Give me your jacket,
and I'll give you mine."
Such quiet authority in his voice!
The one-armed man took off his jacket.
So did the Ragman --
and I trembled at what I saw:
for the Ragman's arm stayed in his jacket,
and when the other put it on,
then he had two good arms,
thick as tree limbs;
but the Ragman had only one.
"Go to work," he said.
After that he saw a drunk, lying unconscious beneath an army blanket,
an old man.
He took that blanket and wrapped it round himself,
but for the drunk he left a new suit of clothes.
The Ragman was weeping uncontrollably,
and bleeding freely at his forehead,
pulling his cart with one arm,
stumbling for drunkenness,
falling again and again,
exhausted,
old,
old and sick.
I wept to see the change in this man.
I hurt to see his sorrow.
The little old Ragman --
he came to a landfill.
He came to a garbage dump.
He sighed.
He lay down.
He pillowed his head on a handkerchief and a jacket.
He covered his bones with an army blanket.
And he died.
Oh how I cried to witness that death!
I slumped in a junked car and wailed and mourned as one who has no hope --
because I had come to love the Ragman.
Every other face had faded in the wonder of this man,
and I cherished him;
but he died.
I cried myself to sleep.
I did not know --
how could I know? --
that I slept through Friday night
and Saturday and its night, too.
But then, on Sunday morning, I was wakened by a violence.
Light --
pure, hard, demanding light --
slammed against my sour face,
and I blinked,
and I looked,
and I saw the last
and the first wonder of all.
There was the Ragman,
folding the blanket most carefully,
a scar on his forehead,
but alive.
And, besides that, healthy!
There was no sign of sorrow nor of age,
and all the rags that he had gathered shined for cleanliness.
Well, then I lowered my head and,
trembling for all I had seen,
I myself walked up to the Ragman.
I told him my name with shame,
for I was a sorry figure next to him.
Then I took off all my clothes in that place,
and I said to him with dear yearning in my voice:
"Dress me."
He dressed me.
My Lord, he put new rags on me,
and I am a wonder beside him.
The Ragman,
The Ragman,
the Christ!
