How not to start a religion

            If you were going to start a new religion, you would first of all want a well-organized publicity team at the top of their game.  You would want to get some celebrities involved, and you would want your most important information to be communicated by people who exude the instant trustworthiness of an elderly news anchor.

            In short, if you were going to start a new religion, you would not ever in a million years think of going about it in the way that Luke describes. 

            You have just heard Luke’s entire account of the morning of the Resurrection.  He does not describe, or even mention, Jesus’ appearance to Mary or to the women. He wants us to hear the story from the viewpoint of the remaining eleven disciples, and the women’s whole account is just so much “blah, blah, blah” to them.  Twice Luke mentions people standing around trying to process what has just happened, or is happening: first it is the women who are “wondering,” then it is Peter.  Ancient people were not stupid.  They knew that dead people stayed dead. That is why the disciples called it an idle tale, and why the women and Peter could not get their minds around the evidence of their eyes and ears.  

            This is how people are in real life.  On the way to the airport last Sunday, Phyllis was telling me about a very moving show of photographs of 9-11 that she saw in Norfolk.  You could not at first tell what was being photographed.  The photographer just pulled out her camera and started shooting.  Only after a while did the pictures make sense.  It reminded me of how we all seemed stuck for hours in front of the TV, watching the same footage over and over and trying to process it, waiting for more information that might make it clearer.  This is exactly how you respond to incredible news.

            All of that – the disorganized, demoralized disciples, the women as witnesses (they couldn’t even give evidence in court…not to mention Mary Magdalene’s history of mental illness), everyone’s inability to grasp what their eyes were seeing – adds up to some powerful evidence that that’s the way it actually happened. It’s told that way not because people set out to invent some new way of being spiritual, but because it’s true.  There was no reasonable explanation, then or later, for the empty tomb plus the appearances of Jesus – robust, bodily appearances – no explanation that fits all the facts as well as this one: he was alive.  He rose from the dead.

Making sense of it all

            Actually, I suspect that a lot of people are willing to allow that Jesus rose from the dead without thinking that it has any real effect on life today.  “Well, of course,” they might think, “he’s God; he could do that if he wanted to.”   We don’t always explain as clearly as we ought to the problem with that idea.  Jesus was not a “holy hologram,” some sort of spiritual projection of God: he was a real man (he still is).  When we say that he is fully God and fully man, we mean that a dead human body somehow had to become alive again in order for the tomb to be empty.

            Now that is harder to dismiss as irrelevant.  That has immense relevance to every person on earth, since we all die: “Could this be for me, too?”  But that is only part of its importance.  What was that message of the angels, the part after “he is risen”?  It is this: “Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: 'The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified and on the third day and be raised again.'”  What they were saying was, “See?  Everything Jesus told you is true.  God has vindicated him.”  And what that also meant, and means, is this: “The Kingdom of Heaven is here, just as he said…and you are living in it.”

All things made new

            This was, after all, the promise: that God would remake this world, which was made good but now suffers in many ways having to do with death and evil.  When Isaiah speaks of the “new heavens and the new earth,” in modern language that would be “a new universe,” in which there will be no harming or destroying.

            We do not see it yet but this new universe is underway.  I am not talking about the myth of progress that we so often hear: that people will get smarter and richer and social evils will be overcome with more education, and so forth.  No.  The new universe is coming about in every good that we see, and in those too small to see.  As our friend – I think by now I may call him that! – Tom Wright puts it, “what was begun with the resurrection of Jesus will be continued until it is thoroughly finished; every act of faith and love, of justice and mercy, of beauty and truth in this present world will be part of God’s eventual new world.” [N. T. (Tom) Wright, The Way of the Lord]

Getting heaven into people

            Now, in focusing on the Kingdom here and now, I don’t want to slight what the resurrection of Christ has to say about the life to come.  To know that our loved ones who died in Christ live now in what a great preacher once called “a world of love” [Jonathan Edwards, Heaven is a World of Love], and that, in Christ, we are parted from them for a time but not forever, is immensely important.   It’s just that there needs to be balance: the Resurrection is as much about getting heaven into people as getting people into heaven.

            Misunderstanding that, I think, is why you hear people say things like, “I’ll wait to ‘get saved’” –as if salvation in Christ has to do only with the life to come.  No.  It has to do with life now, as well. “The Kingdom of Heaven is here, just as he said…and we are living in it.” The consequences are enormous; here are a few that come to my mind:

• That all the suffering and evil and trouble that we meet in life are not things we must go through alone and unaccompanied. The question is not if we are going to go through trouble, but when.  Everyone does.  No one can opt out.  The difference comes in having what a few weeks ago Bill brilliantly called “a resource of hope.”
• That our doubts can be worked into strengths. If the disciples had not had to go through confusion and doubt, as one early Christian [Leo the Great] pointed out, they could not have laid such a strong basis for our faith.  On its own, doubt, like fear or cynicism, can corrode our lives.  Doubt in God’s hands – our doubts committed to God – can be shaped into a deeper, more mature faith, and a stronger hope.
• That every good we do in Christ – or even try to do, or intend – becomes of lasting significance. So much never works out the way we think or hope.  But what if the good parts remain?  What if God works those things for good, too: the relationships that go wrong, the dreams that die?  That is what redemption means.  It means we – even you and me – can make a difference in the amount of justice and the amount of love in the world. If death has been defeated anything – anything – is possible.

Living in the New

            That is why we have this cross here.  It is not just an ornament to the sanctuary – although it is a very striking and beautiful one.  This is the same cross to which, week by week in Lent, we have nailed our prayers: our needs, our longings, and the things we shared with God in the time of self-examination.  I think I might not be unusual in saying that, over these weeks, I have had to work over some of the same territory several times.  The deeper the issues, the longer it takes to dig them out before God. Every year, I wish that I had dug even deeper, and what we see here today says why.  The little record of our private pains has burst into flower.  It’s a symbol for the difference that the Resurrection makes: that all we have committed to God is being reconciled through Christ.  What we have brought to God is being worked on, and worked out, and “worked together for good.” So every year I wish I had gone even deeper.

            What Easter does for us is not so much give us a happy ending – the happy ending to the story of a good man unjustly killed – as to give us a joyful beginning. We only discover what Easter is about by living it: each one living his or her own life in Christ, living in the newness of the Easter world.  The only way to discover it is to do it.  Living in the new life of the Resurrection often goes against common sense and inclination.  But it is life with a long view.

            Just how long a view is in the striking picture on the cover of your program.  It is one of those great old classic pictures that we like because they express deep truths.  It is not the usual sort of Resurrection scene – no crosses in the background – although Christ is in, literally, a blaze of glory.  He is standing on the gates of Hell, which have broken down and fallen in the shape of a cross.  They lie over an endless blackness filled with locks and chains.  The two old people he is pulling from their graves are Adam and Eve (I told you it was life in the long view!).  David, Daniel, John the Baptist and many others are gesturing in delighted wonder.  But notice where Jesus is looking.  He is looking straight at you.  “This is all for you!” he says, “You’re next!”

            That is why we come to his Table.  That is what it means: the hands that first broke the bread and first filled the cup are now just beyond sight.  But he is truly here, alive, listening.  Come to his altar and you will find that his hands are still reaching out, and still strong to save.

Amen.

Rev. Dr. Linda Schwab

Clarion Free Methodist Church

Clarion, Pennsylvania 16214