Risen indeed! 3.31.13

Mark 16:1-8

When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. ²And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. ³They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” ⁴When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back.

⁵As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. ⁶But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. ⁷But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” ⁸So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

1 Corinthians 15:1-7, 12-26

Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, ²through which also you are being saved, if you hold firmly to the message that I proclaimed to you—unless you have come to believe in vain. ³For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, ⁴and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, ⁵and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. ⁶Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. ⁷Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.

¹²Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? ¹³If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; ¹⁴and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. ¹⁵We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. ¹⁶For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. ¹⁷If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. ¹⁸Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. ¹⁹If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

²⁰But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. ²¹For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being; ²²for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. ²³But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ. ²⁴Then comes the end, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father, after he has destroyed every ruler and every authority and power. ²⁵For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. ²⁶The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

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            The Easter story is the core of the Christian faith. It’s also a little hard to swallow. For many of us the basic story of Jesus makes sense. We grew up hearing stories of Jesus and his teachings. We’ve learned about his commitment to justice, his love and welcome for surprising people. We connect with his call to love others as we love ourselves and treat other people as we want to be treated. Even if we didn’t grow up in a church, our greatest values as a society were shaped by Jesus’ teachings.

            We can probably understand Jesus’ conflict with the religious leaders too. He guided people to God directly without getting obsessed with religious rules and traditions and authorities. That made the leaders uncomfortable, like serious change does in any institution. They couldn’t dismiss him, so they found a way to put him to death. We know enough about human selfishness and violence to believe that. It’s tragic and terrible, but it fits with what we know is wrong with the world.

            The resurrection is harder to believe. It doesn’t fit with what we know at all. When people die, they don’t come back. We’d like to believe in the resurrection, but it’s awfully hard to accept. We want to believe. We want love to be stronger than death. We long for a reason to hope that the world’s story has a happy ending, but we almost don’t dare.

            We’ve been disappointed before. So many things that we’ve hoped for haven’t materialized. The world is hard, and we don’t want to look soft. We don’t want to be suckers. It’s easier not to trust too much, and the resurrection is a huge leap of faith.

            We’re in good company when we have trouble believing the resurrection. Thomas couldn’t believe until he’d seen Jesus himself. The women in our story today were not only amazed, but afraid as well when they heard the news. They saw the angel with their own eyes and heard his message in the same tomb in which they had seen Jesus’ body laid. Still, the enormity of the angel’s announcement overwhelmed them, and they couldn’t share the message. If they struggled then, how can we believe now?

            I wasn’t there myself, and I can’t prove the resurrection to you. What I come back to every time is the testimony of the disciples. The women who followed Jesus from Galilee saw him alive after his death. The eleven disciples who had spent the last three years with Jesus saw him alive again after his death. Other disciples who had met Jesus along the way saw him alive on the road to Emmaus, or in a locked room or somewhere else in the month after his resurrection. Paul says Jesus appeared to more than 500 believers after his resurrection.

            They saw him alive, after they knew he had been killed. And more than just seeing him and telling others about it, which they could have made up if they wanted to, they committed their lives to his message. Many of the apostles died for their faith. Many other early Christians did too. They bet their life on the truth of Christ’s resurrection, the truth of Christ’s victory over death. They wouldn’t have done that if they weren’t really sure.

            Beyond that, the apostles and the growing community around them experienced the power of the risen Christ in their lives. People kept meeting Jesus, even those who hadn’t known him during his live. People, like Paul, who had never met Jesus experienced his presence in a transformative way, and gave their lives to the good news of God’s love in Christ. The power of the resurrection went beyond Jesus.

            That’s what Paul’s talking about in our passage from First Corinthians. The resurrection we celebrate today starts with Jesus, but it goes beyond him. From Adam and Eve until Jesus, death was the end of the line. Death had the final say. All the money, all the success, all the power in the world couldn’t stop death.

            Jesus changes all that. Human power, hatred and jealousy did their worst. The religious leaders and political powers fought against him. They tortured and killed him. But for Jesus death was not the end. In that moment death lost its victory. In Jesus’ resurrection love triumphs over death once and for all, not just for Jesus, but for all of us too.

            On the outside, it seems like nothing has changed, but everything has changed. Jesus has been raised and one day we will be raised up too. The power of the resurrection offers us new life. When we read about the early church, we see that the power of the resurrection is true. Those men and women decided to trust the risen Christ. They chose to believe that death wasn’t going to win. They didn’t just believe it in their heads; they bet their lives on it. They spend their lives telling other people about God’s amazing love. They spent their lives building community so strong that people shared everything.

Some traveled across the world to share the message of love. Others dropped everything to host missionaries in their towns. When a deadly plague struck Rome, everyone who could, left the city, except the Christians. The Christians in Rome stayed to care for the ill and dying. They did that because they knew they didn’t need to fear death, because Jesus had already conquered it.

That resurrection power, the faith that God can overcome every evil and deadly force, that hope is stronger than death, that love is stronger than fear runs through the history of the church. It was at work in nameless Christians teaching new believers when they knew the Empire might kill them for it. It was at work in St. Augustine watching barbarians destroy Rome, the center of Christian faith, but still trusting that God could use even that disaster for some good purpose.

The power of the resurrection was at work in St. Francis, serving the poor and restoring a church fallen into cynical isolation. It was there in Martin Luther, facing death for his faith, and in Martin Luther King believing God’s promise that in Jesus Christ all human divisions are overcome.

The power of Christ’s resurrection is still working in the world. It’s working in churches in Africa where there are so many people coming to know Jesus that they can’t fit into the church buildings. It’s working in Egypt, where it’s risky to follow Jesus, but people are following anyway. It’s happening in Chicago where a church of 30 that everyone expected to close rediscovered their neighborhood and the power of Christ in community.

It’s happening right here at Laurelton, where years of declining membership and finances are starting to turn around. A small congregation is opening its doors to the neighborhood and finding new life in the power of Jesus. Neighbors are discovering relationships and community in a simple breakfast. People are learning and growing by talking about the Bible over supper. We’re building community with new people and learning to ask deeper questions about what it means to follow Jesus today.

I’ve found in my own life that the more I trust Jesus, the more I cling to the resurrection, the more I let go of my fear, the better my life gets. Resurrection power isn’t just life after death, it’s also more life now.

Jesus bet his life that God’s calling was real. He faced death on the cross for you and me, and sure enough, love triumphed over death as he rose from the grave. Since then women and men across the centuries and around the globe have been betting on the resurrection, trusting that life conquers death. I’m betting my life on the resurrection now, and I invite you to join in the adventure of following the risen Jesus.

The power of the resurrection doesn’t mean everything is clear or easy. Things still go wrong, we make mistakes, recovery is fragile, people we love still die. But we can trust that death or error or fear or financial trouble will not have the last word. Christ is risen, and one day we will rise with him to see the redemption of all creation. We have nothing to fear because love is stronger than death. Christ is risen indeed.

Thanks be to God.

justice and extravance, 2.10.13

Mark 7:24-30

²⁴From there he set out and went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, ²⁵but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. ²⁶Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.

²⁷He said to her, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” ²⁸But she answered him, “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” ²⁹Then he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” ³⁰So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

Mark 14:1-9

It was two days before the Passover and the festival of Unleavened Bread. The chief priests and the scribes were looking for a way to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him; ²for they said, “Not during the festival, or there may be a riot among the people.”

³While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. ⁴But some were there who said to one another in anger, “Why was the ointment wasted in this way? ⁵For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.” And they scolded her.

⁶But Jesus said, “Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. ⁷For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. ⁸She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. ⁹Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”

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            I’ve been struggling this week with how to preach these passages. They’re very different, and in a way, the only thing that joins them is that they are stories of women in the New Testament. They’re stories of women who spent time with Jesus.

            The story Susan read is always a hard one for me. I love Jesus, and one of the things that’s always attracted me is his welcome, his concern for people on the margins, his preference for the poor, vulnerable and excluded. But in this story he calls the gentile woman and her daughter dogs. He shows the strong tendency of some Jewish men of his time to feel that everyone who wasn’t religiously “pure” was a lesser kind of person. It’s funny because he just finished condemning the Pharisees for their obsession with religious laws, and now he’s acting like a Pharisee.

            It’s tempting to smooth it over. Some people believe Jesus is testing the woman to see if she’s faithful enough. I guess that’s a more comfortable way to read it, but I don’t really buy it. Luke doesn’t include this story at all, and I don’t blame Luke for leaving it out; each writer has their own version of the story to tell. Each version of the story of Jesus gives us a different angle on Jesus, and that’s a blessing.

So when we read Mark, we are stuck with this story. And in some ways, the story fits just fine. The truth is, Jesus left heaven, left the glory of being divine, behind to join the human condition. When Jesus chose to take on human flesh he could have been born in a palace, but he chose instead to be born in a stable to a working class family. And Jesus could have chosen to be born the son of a philosopher or a rabbi, but he chose to be a carpenter’s son.

Jesus chose to be human, really, actually human. He chose to be limited, to be imperfect, to be vulnerable. Often we have the idea of Jesus as a perfect man, and there’s truth to that. He is a great example of faithfulness to God in a human life. But it is human faithfulness. In his human life, Jesus was limited by his circumstances, by his upbringing, by his culture, his time period, his family, his experience. In his wisdom and in his miracles, he often seems more than human, but maybe it shouldn’t surprise us if his limits show through from time to time.

Maybe he was having a bad day and didn’t want another conversation. God chose the people of Israel to be especially close to God, so it makes sense for Jesus to put his own people first. And maybe Jesus feels like he has so many people to heal, so many lives to change, so many outcasts to welcome within the people of Israel, that the time is going to run out before he finishes. The practical, budgeting side of Jesus knows that there are only so many hours he has to spend, so he needs to spend them well.

If Jesus was really human, he must have felt overwhelmed sometimes by the scope of his mission, by the human need that surrounded him and constantly pressed against him. Maybe this was one of those times.

But the woman in the first story is a mother. Maybe she could have lived with Jesus saying “no,” if she was seeking healing for herself, but it’s a different story when we’re talking about her daughter. When it comes to her daughter, she is not going to leave without trying everything. And here’s the lesson for the life of faith, perseverance is part of it, but not the only part. Our culture is all about getting what we deserve, but that’s not the main message of the Bible.

When you read the Psalms, which is the song book and prayer book of the Bible, one thing you notice is that most of the time when the writer asks God for something he or she doesn’t ask based on what they deserve. There are a few psalms where the writer says, “God, be good to me because of my righteousness,” but that’s the minority. When the Psalms ask for God’s kindness the two reasons they give most often are God’s love, or the need of the person asking. It’s much more common for the psalmist to say, “Grant my request, Lord, because I’m desperately in need,” than for the psalmist to say, “Grant my request, Lord, because I’ve earned it.”

I don’t know if the woman in this story had ever read the psalms, but it fits. When Jesus says it’s not right to give the children’s food to dogs, she doesn’t argue or protest. She says, “Lord, even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the table.” It’s not about what she and her child deserve, it’s about what they need and about what Jesus can give.

"Death to life" Easter, 2012

Luke 23:55-24:12

⁵⁵The women who had come with him from Galilee followed, and they saw the tomb and how his body was laid. ⁵⁶Then they returned, and prepared spices and ointments. On the sabbath they rested according to the commandment. But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. ²They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, ³but when they went in, they did not find the body.

⁴While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. ⁵The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. ⁶Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, ⁷that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” ⁸Then they remembered his words, ⁹and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest.

¹⁰Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. ¹¹But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. ¹²But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.

Romans 6:1-11

What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? ²By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? ³Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?

⁴Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. ⁵For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.

⁶We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin. ⁷For whoever has died is freed from sin. ⁸But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. ⁹We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. ¹⁰The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. ¹¹So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.

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            Jesus had been traveling for three years. He had healed and taught, welcomed outcasts and called sinners to repentance. Often huge crowds followed him to hear his comforting and challenging words.

Besides the crowds, Jesus had a core group of followers who went everywhere with him. Twelve leaders, called apostles were the most famous, but there were also others Jesus sent out in his name to teach and heal. Other disciples supported and cared for Jesus in his ministry, especially many women.

            Jesus and his followers started to make their way to Jerusalem, the capital of Jewish life and worship. Along the way, Jesus told his disciples that he would be killed in Jerusalem, but that he would rise again. The disciples knew enough to be sad about that prediction, but they didn’t really understand, even though Jesus repeated it three times.

            When they got to Jerusalem, a huge crowd welcomed them with shouts of praise and songs to crown a king. Israel hadn’t really had a king in 600 years, but the people’s hope for someone to trust and follow hadn’t died. A welcome like that must have been a high point for the disciples. All Jesus’ talk about the kingdom of God seemed to be coming true. On top of that, the excitement of the big city at festival time thrilled these small-town fishermen.

            Then things went horribly wrong. The religious leaders had never liked Jesus. They worried about his teachings and were downright terrified of the attention he might bring from the Roman rulers. They also worried that Jesus’ teachings could weaken their power. As Jesus’ ministry continued, the conflict with the religious leaders got more and more intense, until they finally decided to kill him.

            At the Passover supper, Jesus told his closest friends that one of them would betray him and the rest would run away. Despite their passionate denials, that’s exactly what happened on Thursday night when officers from the Temple came to arrest Jesus.

            A whirlwind of interrogation, trial and torture followed, and by Friday evening Jesus had died on a Roman cross and been buried. True to his prediction, the disciples ran away. A few women and a man named Joseph made sure Jesus was buried decently before sunset, and the women made plans to go back to the tomb on Sunday morning after the Sabbath was over.

            That morning, Jesus proved once again that he wasn’t interested in playing by the rules. He’d been surprising people since birth, and death wasn’t going to limit Jesus any more than tradition had. The women came expecting to find their teacher’s body, expecting to anoint him with spices as a sign of their love for him, a last expression of care. Instead, they found the rock door rolled away from the front of the tomb and no body to be found. 

            It’s a great story, but all that happened almost two thousand years ago, so what difference does it make for us today? That answer will be a bit different for everyone since faith is a bit different for each of us, but Paul’s words to the church in Rome ring true today: faith is about deep questions, life and death importance.

            Christian faith is about following Jesus. Like the first disciples, we never do it perfectly. We misunderstand and fall short of our calling. A lot has changed over the two thousand years since the women and Peter found Jesus’ tomb empty. The early church was surrounded by threats from religious leaders and the Roman Empire. Following Jesus was very obviously a matter of life and death.

In the US in the 21^st century, we face different threats. We’re free to worship or not, and we’re free to believe whatever we want to. I thank God for our freedom, but I worry that the Christian majority in this country makes it easy to follow Jesus halfway and easy to forget that following Jesus is still a matter of life and death.

When we choose to follow Jesus we aren’t picking a club or a team or a style. We are choosing to join Jesus in his death. We are choosing to leave our sin and selfishness behind, to die to the world and begin a new life with Jesus. We are choosing to put Jesus first, to make him the center of our existence.

Faith can seem complicated and confusing. There are so many churches, so many opinions, so many points of view. Christians think different things about the Bible, politics, organization, money, family and everything else.

At the same time, faith in Jesus is simple because it means choosing to trust and follow Jesus. All the complications are second, and very distantly second. The point is following Jesus; everything else falls into place when we put Jesus first.