KISSING THE EARTH
Thoughts for Easter 2000 at Inavale Farm
Texts
“In him was LIFE and the LIFE was the light of men/women/children.”
“They came and took hold of his feet and worshiped him.”
I want to start out with a story. This one I know to be true.
We were in the terminal at Cabo San Lucas waiting for our flight home. The first thing you do is look up on the reader board to check on your flight. The word following our flight number to Los Angeles was — “Delayed.”
You don’t like to see that. It was to be delayed two hours. We could live with that. But when two hours came and went, we wondered. We especially wondered when we saw fire trucks and other emergency vehicles going out to the runway. 
In a few minutes we saw the plane coming down. We looked for smoke but saw none, except from the smoke of tires touching down on the runway, then following the plane as its brakes were applied heavily. The emergency vehicles took off after the plane.
The plane stopped at the very end of the runway, sat there a few moments, then turned around and came back to the terminal.
They wheeled out the steps and soon passengers began coming down the stairs. Some threw arms in the air. One man prostrated himself on the ground and kissed the earth.
We learned later that the plane (Alaskan of course) had wing-flap problems. The pilot did not think he could stop the plane without the flaps. He called for an emergency landing. No doubt the people were told to get into the crash landing position. There must have been terror on that plane with thoughts of the recent Alaskan Airlines crash.
But when they landed and found themselves alive, they wanted to kiss the ground. They were thankful to be alive.
The central theme of Easter is life.
The very most important thing to us personally is our own life.
The single most important wonder and miracle in the whole universe is the fact that life is. In this swirling cosmos of icy and fiery rocks, how amazing that there is anything that is alive. We are part of that life.
John Steinbeck, in “Sea of Cortez” adds:
 “The first rule of life is LIVING.”
 “Life has one end; to be ALIVE!”
Jesus asks,
“What if a man gains the whole world and forfeits his LIFE?”
Jesus said,
 “I came that you might have LIFE and have it more abundantly.”
Let’s think for a minute about life. I’m going to offer what Buddhists call Ko-ans. These are paradoxes. You think about them and when you figure them out you have insight. I derive these from our texts.
      1. There is more to life than being alive.
      2. You can be dead without being dead.
      3. Easter is more about raising the dead who are alive, than about raising the dead who are buried.
Think about all the ways in which you can be only partially alive, or in which you are partially dead. We can be “dead” in our heads, hearts, souls, minds, relationships, marriages, faith, hope, and spirits. When you read what Jesus said and did you see that it has to do with renewing life to the death within us. “I came that you might have LIFE and have it more abundantly.”
Back to the air terminal at Cabo.
While people were pouring off the airplane downstairs and going through the baggage claiming and customs process, thankful for being alive, we who were upstairs saw the readerboard tell us that our flight was changed from “Delayed” to “Canceled.” That plane wasn’t going to take us back to Los Angeles.
So, while the people downstairs were buoyed up by their fresh awareness of life, the upstairs people were faced with the problem of finding another flight and getting through the four or five hours of waiting. It was interesting to see how people coped.
The bar filled right up. Some opened books. One fellow next to me on the plane worried whether his rather large book would last through the wait. It did—barely. Others went to the food line. The shops did good business. Almost three hours of the time was spent standing in lines, waiting for new flight arrangements, food vouchers and food. Young people who missed video and TV suffered big time boredom. Some children played school—spelling test—with their mother as “dictionary.” Others played “Simon Says.” 
People thought of it as “killing time.”
I philosophized about the whole process with a man in line with me. We talked about how interesting it was to see people sort of go into neutral while waiting to leave. I said, “This is part of my life too. I don’t want to miss it. I don’t want to kill time. I want to live time.”
I want to “take each moment and live each moment in LIFE eternally…”
I want to claim the reality that Jesus talked about when he said,
“I came that you might have life and have it more abundantly.”
I want to remember Steinbeck’s wisdom,
“The first rule of life is living.”
I thought of the evening when Jean and I were driving into town on Bellfountain road and two deer jumped out in front of us. I swerved and skidded and hit the ditch, and cartwheeled and totaled our Porsche. My first words to Jean were, “I’m alive.” She answered, “I’m alive.” I said, “Let’s get out of here!” 
We climbed up out of the ditch, the Porsche’s headlights shooting up into the night sky, the stars above. We held each other and were grateful for life. We knew how those people getting off that plane felt. You want to kiss the ground.
Easter celebrates the availability in our midst to claim abundant life and rise above death. Thanks be to God who raises up life.
To life! 
Say it! To life!
Say it again. To life!
And once again. To life!