Good morning…

On Easter morning, our college students requested to go to the Cobb Energy Center for the Passsion City worship service. So, we as a family of seven (my husband and I, our four kids, plus our year long Chinese exchange student) hopped in two cars and drove into the crowded excitement.

David Crowder, Kristian Stanfill, and other talented singers whose songs play on Christian radio stations filled the packed place with powerful praise. Then pastor, Louie Giglio, shared God’s passionate, personal invitation into life altering relationship.

One small insight Louie shared stuck in my curious brain. He said the root word for “cemetery” means the same thing as the root word for “dormitory.” I came home and researched this tiny, compelling truth. Indeed, the word “cemetery” in Latin, is a variant stem of “koimân,” which means to put to sleep, which is also the Latin equivalent to “dormī,” meaning to sleep.

For the last few days, my mind has been mulling over this intriguing connection. A dormitory is a place we rent for a short season, while in college, a mission trip, or traveling abroad, and, for those of us who accept God’s promise of eternal life, a cemetery is just a short term resting place. Both are temporary, borrowed sleeping spaces in a place someone else owns on earth. On the first Easter morning, God rolled away the stone from a borrowed tomb, not so that Jesus could get out. Louie told us, God rolled away the stone so that ordinary people could get in. To see. To touch. To experience first hand that Jesus’ short term grave could not end his abundant life. When loved ones came to care for his sleeping, lifeless body, his temporary dorm room was miraculously empty.

Jesus appeared to over 500 people personally, face to face, following his resurrection. The same resurrection power raising Jesus from the dead now wakes from temporary sleep all of us who respond “yes” to God’s invitation to see, to touch, to experience first hand abundant, ever lasting life. Some of us are still lulled to sleep, sleepwalking spiritually, and some of our loved ones have slept temporarily in a cemetery, but as the footnote in my Bible from the passage below reveals: “God tearing the veil of the Holy of Holies (on the first Easter morning in Matthew 27:51) is significant in that it symbolizes that God’s presence was now open to all people and not just the High Priest.” God’s presence available to all people tears the veil between those asleep and those awake, on earth and in heaven.

Now from the sixth hour (noon) there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour (3:00 p.m.). About the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud [agonized] voice, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”…And Jesus cried out again with a loud [agonized] voice, and gave up His spirit [voluntarily, sovereignly dismissing and releasing His spirit from His body in submission to His Father’s plan]. And [at once] the veil [of the Holy of Holies] of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; the earth shook and the rocks were split apart. The tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints (God’s people) who had fallen asleep [in death] were raised [to life]; and coming out of the tombs after His resurrection, they entered the holy city (Jerusalem) and appeared to many people,
Matthew 27:45-46, 50-53 (AMP),

Sue