Audio Recording
We disciples of
Jesus Christ have some statements to make about reality. I call them statements rather than beliefs
because if you call them beliefs they are immediately thrown into the world of
comparative religions and Christian faith is not religion. Christianity can certainly be called religion,
all the pomp and circumstance we have created and dogmatized around Christian
faith, but Christian faith is not that.
What God is doing for his Creation in, through, and as Jesus of Nazareth
the Messiah or Christ is not a matter of personal religious belief. It is reality, real historical and indeed physical
reality.
At the top of that
list of these statements is that God is Trinity – the loving communion of the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In,
through, and as Jesus Christ God has revealed God-self to be Trinity - three Persons
who give themselves so utterly completely and unselfishly indeed sacrificially
to one another in unconditional love that they are One. If we miss this, that God is loving communion
of Persons then we miss what it is to be humans created in the image of God and
certainly miss what it is to be the Church.
Another statement
about real historical and scientific reality that we followers of Jesus Christ
have to make is that Jesus Christ is God the Son become human flesh. This was a hard one to believe from the very
start. For a Jew, it was blasphemous to
say the God became human. Gentiles
didn’t buy it either asking, “Why would divinity, which is pure and perfect,
become human? We are weak, dull, sickly,
routinely break out with fungi, stinky, and we die.” It wasn’t until the 300’s that the Christian
church stated definitively that Jesus is God the Son become human with neither
his divinity nor his humanity being diminished.. The reason we state this as
fact is as Gregory of Nazianzus said back in the 300’s, “What was not assumed
is not healed.” To heal his fallen
Creation and us humans of the futility of sin and death, God had to take upon
himself our fallenness and die with it so that it would be once and for all
dead. Jesus’ death on the cross and his
resurrection has opened up a new way to be human that will come to its fruition
when Jesus returns. The Apostle John in
his Gospel liked to call that new way Eternal Life, a new human form of being
in which we are indwelt by God the Holy Spirit through whom we are in union
with Jesus the Son to share his relationship of steadfast love and faithfulness
with the Father to the Father’s glory. In,
through, and as Jesus God has brought human being, history, and even physical
matter into his very self, into the loving communion of his very self, and therefore
he has and will heal it.
A third Christian statement
that is readily dismissed these days is that God raised Jesus bodily from the
dead. Many not just scientists and
philosophers but even Bible scholars today are resolute that this did not
happen. Many will say that Jesus' body
was simply stolen by his disciples and buried elsewhere and then they made the
whole thing up. If that was the case,
then why did the disciples of whom we have historical record live lives of
poverty and die horrible deaths just to continue a lie. If you
are a fan of the DaVinci Code, then you say Jesus' disciples staged his death
and he went on to live a long and happy life marrying Mary Magdalene and having
children. If you are bent towards
psychology and looking for a quasi-scientific explanation, you will say that
the post-resurrection experiences that his disciples had were just communal
experiences of grief that involved a common hallucination of Jesus caused by
mass hysteria among twenty-some people.
To my knowledge, such a hallucination has never been documented as ever
happening among any group of people.
Most people just fall back on reason and say that Resurrection is
impossible. Therefore, it never
happened. Yet, they believe there was
something God-special about this Jesus and so they follow his teachings and
enjoy private spiritual experiences. And
finally, there are Christians who wholeheartedly believe in re-incarnation
because for some reason that seems more plausible than resurrection. I could handle re-incarnation as long as I
come back as a roach in the kitchen of a kind old grandma in rural Mexico;
all-you-can-eat real Mexican food. Sign
me up.
The Gospel
proclamation is that God the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit raised
Jesus, God the Son become human, from the dead.
Jesus in his resurrection has a real human body that could eat and be
touched. Yet, his body was a resurrected
body and that leaves us hanging a bit.
What is a resurrected body?
According to Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, it is a spiritual body that is
immortal and imperishable. That's a bit
misleading for us, for whenever the word spiritual comes up, we start thinking
ethereal or ghostlike wisps of energy. But,
by a spiritual body Paul meant not only a person who is personally related to
God, but also a body that has been made alive by God that will indeed never
die; a body in which every particle is infused with the life of God.
As Christians, the
resurrection is at the heart of our very real hope. Resurrection means that death is not the
final answer; that though we die, we will not die. We will live again in bodies; not as angels
with harps sitting on clouds in heaven or as stars, none of those lies people
tell their children. Even though this
physical fallen body will and must die, we will not experience death, complete
cut-off-ness from God. As Jesus told the
thief on the cross, when we die we will be with him in Paradise, a (I presume)
bodiless state, until the resurrection when we will be given resurrection
bodies, bodies of real human flesh in which every particle about us knows the
living and loving God and will never die again.
So, since it is the
case that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is where this Creation is heading,
we should therefore begin to live the resurrected life now. Let’s talk about Baptism for a minute. Paul says that if we have been baptized into
Christ, we have then been baptized into his death. Basically, we are already dead. This old self of ours has been crucified with
Jesus, in his crucifixion in order that this body of sin might be brought to
nothing, that we may no longer be enslaved to sin for a person who has died has
been set free from sin. Hear this, in
our union with Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit at our Baptism (and it doesn’t
matter whether we were an unknowing infant or even how it was done) we died
with him and we are now raised with him to share in his resurrected life now by
means of the Holy Spirit. If his Spirit,
the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the living, loving Communion of the Trinity
lives in us, then the state of our being, our very existence is that we are
free from death and our enslavement to sin and are now free to live in and for
God.
Therefore, Paul instructs
us in Colossians to seek the things that are above where Christ is for
our lives are hidden in God with Christ.
Live according to that hunger to be with your brothers and sisters in
Christ in worship, in study, in fellowship.
Live according to that hunger to pray and read the Bible and hear the
Trinity speak to you. Live according to
the hunger for seeing justice happen in this world, of seeing the poor fed and the
sick healed. Live according to the
hunger to know oneself as always being in the presence of God. Live in constant reminded that no matter what,
you are a beloved child of God in whom he takes great joy”. Live this way and you will be living Eternal
Life. Amen.
This Resurrection Sunday
marks a new beginning in the life of this congregation and three others, a new
way of shared ministry that I personally think resembles more what the New
Testament Church may have looked like.
But, I am reluctant to can say that doing Church a new way is an example
of Resurrection. Resurrection is what
happens when each of as are enlivened by the Holy Spirit to live our life in
Christ. So, today I think it is
important that we remember our Baptisms and reaffirm our vows to be his
faithful disciples. It is in the midst
of faithful discipleship that resurrection becomes evident. Let us gather to the fount.
