Saturday, Northrop-Grumman’s New Orleans Shipyards dedicated the “New York,” the one billion dollar amphibious transport ship that will belong to the Marines. The front of the ship, the bow, the section that parts the waters and leads the way, is made up of 65 tons of steel salvaged from the World Trade Center. A number of New Yorkers were on hand Saturday for the dedication.

My son Neil who works for Northrop-Grumman in Human Resources was assigned to one of the buses moving dignitaries around the area. He stood at the front, held a mike, and gave explanations and answered questions for the guests. Later, when asked if he had seen any celebrities, he said, “Charlie Daniels.”

I love the “in your face-ness” of this gesture, taking steel from the twisted girders of the collapsed skyscrapers and recycling them into a mighty vessel that will defend this nation against the Osama bin-Ladens of this world. I applaud whoever first thought of doing this, and doff my hat to everyone responsible for pulling this off.

In the crest–not sure what they call those things–on the side of the ship, its motto clearly proclaims: “Never Forget.”

Godspeed, New York, and all who go with you.

“They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep…. He bringeth them into their desired haven.” (Psalm 107:23-24,30)

This business of taking the ruins of life’s failures/disasters and recycling them into mighty forces for good has a long and honorable tradition. In fact, Scripture teaches us that God is always at work in our lives pulling off the same trick, turning our stumbling blocks into stepping stones.

“The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.” That’s Psalm 118:22 and it’s quoted again and again throughout the New Testament. The various writers of Scripture thought it summed up this divine transaction in a way that was uniquely God-like.

Divine alchemy, we might call it. Taking the mundane and turning it into precious.

The pseudo-science of alchemy, you will remember, was a fool’s pursuit for many a misguided scientist throughout the Middle Ages. People felt there had to be some way to go into the laboratory with common material–dirt or lesser metals–and transform it into gold or silver. Nature seems to do it, after all, so we’re just trying to find her secret. Alas, they never pulled it off.

But God does it all the time. Takes your everyday experiences, the worst that life hands you, and incorporates it into your life in such a way as to strengthen you and perfect you. You become stronger in the broken places.

They crucified Jesus, then oversaw His friends as they took the dead body down from the cross and buried Him in a borrowed grave newly hollowed out in a small hill. They stationed guards at the entrance of the tomb lest His disciples try to steal the body and then claim He had risen, the way He had prophesied. Oddly, only the executioners remembered that particular prediction of our Lord; the disciples were so in shock from the death of their Lord, it was the farthest thing from their minds.

That was a dark day. For the disciples and other followers of Jesus, the event carried all the shock and horror and sadness which September Eleven did for our generation. They wandered in a daze, unable to absorb all that had happened, incapable of making sense of it. Some left town, others went home.

Meanwhile, the executioners gloated. They had won the three-year struggle against this itinerant preacher from Galilee who had been filling the citizens’ heads with wrong ideas, poisoning their minds against their true spiritual leaders, and pulling them away into what had the makings of a religious cult. True, they had been underhanded and shifty in the methods employed in ambushing Jesus. They had bribed unscrupulous citizens to tell lies on him at the trial, but in the end it didn’t matter when He came right out and admitted He was the Son of God. If anyone had any doubts about Jesus, He forever settled them when He burst out, “I am the Christ! And hereafter you will see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of Power and coming in the clouds of Heaven!” (Mark 14:62)

How I would have loved to have been in the room with these religious potentates on that first Easter Sunday morning when runners brought word that “something mysterious is happening down at the tomb!” These would have been followed a moment later by others rushing in to tell them that the tomb is standing wide open, the place is empty, and the guards act like they’ve been drugged. “We don’t know what happened!”

Scripture tells of the various disciples checking out the empty tomb, but we’re never told of the religious leaders–the ones responsible for this tragedy in the first place–making personal visits to see for themselves. But surely some must have gone, unwilling to take the hearsay reports of breathless gossips.

For a while, they must have thought the disciples did as they had expected and stolen the body. That is, until they stepped into the tomb itself and saw evidence which announced as nothing else could have that Jesus Christ had indeed risen from the dead: the empty graveclothes.

No one who steals a dead body, lifeless for several days without the benefit of embalming, would remotely think of unwrapping it and leaving the graveclothes behind. They would have brought a couple of quilts and thrown around the body, but unwrap it? Not in a million years.

Then, as they stare at the graveclothes, they notice something even more unsettling. The clothes are not unwrapped. They are lying just as they had been when the body was inside, except the body has vanished from inside their folds.

Only gradually does it dawn on these men what has happened in this tiny rock room and what it means. He is risen.

We can be sure these Sherlock-Holmes-wannabes returned to their religious leader friends and made their report. That’s when the kingpin made his brilliant call. “Bring in the guards,” he ordered. The Roman soldiers walked in, their heads bowed in shame. “Here’s some money,” a chief priest said. “If anyone asks, say you had fallen asleep on your watch and that while you slept, Jesus’ disciples stole the body.” Someone else ventured that if the report of this comes to Pilate, who is not going to be happy hearing his soldiers admitting to sleeping at their posts, a deed punishable by execution, they will handle it with the governor.

If anyone thought of the incongruity of the soldiers knowing what had occurred “while we slept,” they didn’t say. When you’re doing damage control, you don’t have time to think of all the niceties.

One wonders why the chief priests–the real executioners, no matter what the Romans did in carrying out their will–did not consider the implications of the resurrection of Jesus. But I think I know. They were blinded by their own ambition and relentless drive for power over people and coins in their bank account. These still dull the spiritual hungers of vast numbers today.

“The stone which the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone,” the disciples began preaching soon afterwards. (See Luke 20:17, Acts 4:11, and I Peter 2:4-7.)

“God forbid that I should glory except in the cross of Christ my Lord,” said the Apostle Paul.

To the world, Paul said, the cross is nothing. The Greeks see it as foolishness and the Jews as a stumblingblock. But from where we sit, the cross of Jesus Christ is nothing in the world except the wisdom of God, the power of God, and the salvation of man.(See I Corinthians 1:17-31)

“Cursed is he who hangs on a tree,” the Old Testament had warned. (Deuteronomy 21:23) The cross was a Roman invention but carried special meaning to the Jews because of that curse.

After the resurrection of Jesus, once His followers began to realize how His death had been God’s plan all along and all that was accomplished as Jesus paid for our sins, the disciples did the strangest thing: they took the cross as their symbol.

How audacious was that. Imagine the family of Abraham Lincoln taking John Wilkes Booth’s pistol as their symbol, or the Kennedy clan choosing to let Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle represent them. It was crazy.

It would have been without the resurrection. That’s what turned the believers around and gave them a whole new viewpoint on the business of Jesus’ death. That’s why Peter could stand a few weeks later and preach that what the perpetrators had meant for evil, God had used for good. (See Acts 2)

The symbol of our “defeat” has become the means for our conquest. For Christians, it’s not about 65 tons of steel slicing through the oceans of the world, but a wooden cross stained by blood and pockmarked by nail-holes.

Paul ransacked his vocabulary and beggared the human language trying to describe all that occurred as a result of Jesus’ death on that cross. Here’s a little of what he wrote in Colossians 2.

“You who were dead in your sins…he has made alive together with him, having forgiven all your trespasses, blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that were against us, which were contrary to us, and took them out of the way, nailing it to the cross, and having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it.”

Now, that’s a passage that cries for some modern updating. Here’s how Eugene Peterson put it in The Message.

“When you were stuck in your old sin-dead life, you were incapable of responding to God. God brought you alive–right along with Christ! Think of it! All sins forgiven, the slate wiped clean, that old arrest warrant canceled and nailed to Christ’s Cross. He stripped all the spiritual tyrants in the universe of their sham authority at the Cross and marched them naked through the streets.”

And so, as a result of that incredible event on the ugly hill outside Jerusalem and due to the earthshattering miracle on that first Easter Sunday morning, we don’t just look back and smile. More than that–we “glory in the cross.”

Finally, one tiny little aspect of this great story gives me pleasure for some reason.

“And behold, there was a great earthquake. For the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door…AND SAT ON IT.” (Matthew 28:2)

I’m still smiling at that.

That’s as near as we ever come in Scripture to an angel gloating. “In your face, death, hell, and the grave!” I can hear him thinking to himself.

This Easter Sunday, when you attend a sunrise service, choose one held in a cemetery. The symbolism is delicious.