Dear Hyde Park Family,

There is a legend that someone once asked Ernest Hemingway to write a story using only six words. His response? “For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.” Since then, the idea of a “Six-Word Story” has grown in popularity. One article defines it as “a short narrative that can have all of the emotional themes of longer stories—from funny to dramatic, sad to scary …. They have a subject and verb that give the reader a sense of what’s happened and a bit of conflict.”

Scan the internet for examples, and you’ll find lots of gems, from the funny (“Won food fight. Used canned vegetables.”) to the sorrowful (“The smallest coffins are the heaviest.”) to the poignant. (“He died happy, knowing he lived.”)

But did you know that the original six-word story, the most important in history, first coined two-thousand years ago, is in the Bible?

It is a simple, clear narrative that appears fourteen times in the gospels, in Acts, and in Paul’s letters:

“God raised Jesus from the dead.”

That’s it. That was Christianity in a nutshell over the first centuries of the church. When the first Christians gathered in house churches to worship, this was their creed. The resurrection was the central feature of the faith, and this six-word story reminded them that just as Jesus died a real death, he was brought back to real life.

And the most important part of that story is this: Jesus did not raise himself.

To put this six-word story in grammatical terms, Jesus was the direct object, not the subject. God did the raising; Jesus did the receiving. Of course, we can split theological hairs remembering that God the Father and God the Son are one in the same, so that technically, God did in fact rise from the dead.

But let’s not miss this important point: We cannot raise ourselves, either. God does the resurrecting, not us. We cannot rise on our own; we need the power of God to raise us to new life.

See you Sunday!

Magrey