Song Story from Sunday

Lisa Burchnall does a beautiful job of decorating our church for the holidays. Every Easter she covers the cross at the front of our sanctuary with white silk Easter lilies.

This Sunday night, we sang Kristian Stanfill's version of the hymn "Jesus Paid it All". At the end of the song, Melody, Kaelin and the congregation sang the chorus a cappella, which ends with these words,
"... sin had left a crimson stain
He washed it white as snow...".

Those words took on a special meaning for us Sunday night, as we looked at the image of the cross before us covered in white Easter Lilies. Think of the text, "Sin had left a crimson stain..." When Jesus body was taken down from the cross, the cross wasn't clean. It was covered with dirt and with the blood that was pouring out of Jesus body as he hung there. The crimson stain was on that cross because of my sin and the sin of humanity.

"... He washed it white as snow." I grew up in Minnesota, which is snow covered 13 months of the year, (at least sometimes it feels that way!). The baseball season opener was last night, and if the Twins didn't play in the Metrodome the game wouldn't have happened, because it snowed 8".

All that to say I know a little bit about snow. When snow covers something, it looks clean...for a moment. Then the wind blows dirt off the fields and the snow gets "dirty". Or it starts to melt, and looks more like ice than it does snow. If snow were to fall on a cross, it would cover the top side of the cross, but you would still see the cross, the blood stained cross. Evidence of my failures would still be seen. So for me the snow analogy comes up a little short.

However, as I looked at the cross covered with lilies it was this amazing contrast of death and life. It was as though those lilies, a powerful symbol of beautiful life, sprang out of that blood stained cross. Its that image that gives us hope! We can have new, beautiful life because of what Jesus did for us on that cross. The sin stained cross cannot be seen anymore, because it has been covered by Jesus death and resurrection. Can we live in that freedom? Can we forget our sin as God does, throwing it as far as East is from the West? Can we truly live AND LOVE as free people?