Ted was 93. People who knew him for 40 years, 60 years, 20 years, talked about him. About his compassion, his encouragement, his hospitality. His leadership, his diligence, his career. His faith. We gathered for an hour and more. There were two hundred and fifty of us.

Much of my professional life was in that room, a room where I worked for seven years, worshiped for several more. A man I met forty years ago. People I taught with 25 years ago. People I went to church with, people I cried with, 10 years ago. People I work with now. People from every place I’ve worked for the past 25 years.

The funeral was a resurrection of memories. People I helped. People who helped me. People whose opinions I feared and curried and respected and ignored. That husband has died, who hired me and was mad at me and forgave me, and I him. That husband has died, who annoyed me but also grew in my respect. Those people left, those didn’t and the relationships have never been the same.

If the resurrection of the body we affirm in the creed is like this resurrection of memories, I’m not sure I’m interested. I lived them once, I’ve relived some of them too often. As Ricky Nelson wrote, “if memories were all I sang, I’d rather drive a truck.”

But a resurrection of the body, that’s different. A real touchable body. A body without the Alzheimer’s and pneumonia and allergies and age. A body that is somehow us, and yet not us now. A body that is not part of some collective consciousness, but is individual. A body that exists on an earth that exists even if this body was burned to ash and spread.

But all those molecules mingled would take a miracle to individually resurrect.

Precisely.