Jesus Has Left the Building    

Luke 24:44-53

Christ is risen!

Christ is risen, indeed!

I remember it like it was just yesterday.  I was sitting in the backseat of the next door neighbor’s car on my way to a day as a new first grader at Our Savior Lutheran School.  The parent who was driving turned on the radio to the blaring voice of the news announcer reporting that Elvis was dead.

I had no idea who Elvis was, but he was clearly someone important to the lady driving the car, because I remember she pulled over to the side of the road, put her head on the steering wheel and sobbed while all the kids sat there in silence.

In later years, as I watched reruns of Blue Hawaii on the television, I of course knew who Elvis was.  I never knew him, however, like the throngs of teenaged fans who crowded concert halls, screaming and climbing over each other just to get a glimpse of the King of Rock ‘n Roll himself.  No, I never experienced that, but Rick Goodman proudly gave me this report: “It was one of the top thrills of my life.  I was a sophomore in college in 1974.  We took a road trip to Wichita Kansas, the thrill center of the universe.  Sitting there with a college buddy, we had just seen and heard Elvis live, what an amazing over the top experience.  He was such an engaging, entertaining, charming performer, and of course we knew all the words to his songs, and could almost hear them as he sang them over the screams of the teen age girls in the huge audience.   Then, it was over.  The top performer of rock and roll, for a certain era, the person who defined rock and roll…he had been there big as life (in fact, this was the Fat Elvis era!), ….and then the void, he was gone…..but everyone lingered….until we heard the words over the loudspeaker…”Ladies and Gentlemen, Elvis has left the building”.   We were then freed to resume our daily, mundane, normal, lives…”.

As I mentioned, I am far too young to have experienced this phenomenon in person, but I imagine that it must be something incredible to have so much attention and so much energy trained on the presence or absence of just one person.  It wasn’t the first time in history, either.  You know that word must have spread like wildfire throughout Galilee after the tomb was empty and Jesus started appearing unexpectedly.

The Gospel of Luke is one of the Gospel accounts that really gives us quite a bit of detail about what Jesus had been up to in the days following his resurrection.  Luke includes the two post resurrection accounts of Jesus’ appearance that are not found in the other gospel accounts.  The first is the Emmaus story, where Jesus appears to two disciples on the road to Emmaus and he breaks bread with them.  Today we hear the second account of a post resurrection appearance Jesus when we read about his appearing to the disciples and actually eating a meal with them.  After they ate together, they went for a walk with Jesus, which is where we find ourselves in this story.

They listened to him preach that day, not really understanding him, the text tells us . . . but then again, what was new about that?  I imagine that they just nodded appreciatively and thanked their lucky stars that things were back on track. 

And, just like they remembered, there was a time that afternoon when Jesus would stop preaching and they could ask questions.  When that time came, they took the opportunity because, as you might imagine, they had so many questions. 

When, they asked?

When would this kingdom come to be?

It was a reasonable question, given all they had been through.  They wanted to know: now that you have shown the Roman rulers who’s boss and put the leaders of the temple in their rightful places, when is what we’ve all come to expect going to happen?  When will you become the guy in charge and all of us, your faithful followers, distinguished members of your cabinet?  When?  We saw you conquer death . . . what more could be left?

I can’t blame the disciples for asking what seems to me to be a most logical, reasonable question.  We’ve been your faithful followers for some time now.  How much longer will we have to live on the fringe of society, believing and hoping that everything you tell us about the kingdom of God will actually come to be?  When, Jesus?  We want to know . . . we need to know.

But as they asked the burning question of when this would all come to be, and he answered them . . . something about being his witnesses to the whole earth . . . , he suddenly started floating, rising up into the sky, away from them, away from them all over again.

What??!?! 

You can imagine their confusion and downright horror.  They’d lived through crucifixion, against all odds.  They were ready to follow him to whatever was next.  And then . . . away he went.  Away.  Unbelievably, there they were on the hillsides of Galilee hands cupping their eyes, staring up into a brilliant blue sky, trying desperately to understand what Jesus was up to now.

And then he was gone.

Given all they had been through and all the circumstances surrounding that day, I have to admit that if I had been among the group of disciples there I also would have stared, mouth gaping open, at the clouds in the sky and the wisp left behind as Jesus ascended.

And . . . I might have been just a little bit mad. 

Where did Jesus think he was going, just as the tide had started to turn and their political hopes were rising?  Where did he think he was going after all the grief and pain they had all experienced?  How could he leave them after all they’d been through?

This turn of events is commonly known in standard church parlance as a festival called, The Day of Ascension.  2000 years of tradition have led us to turn this event into a feast day.  But all I can think of when I read it is how those disciples must have felt when Jesus left—Maybe abandoned?  At a loss?  Unsure of what to do next?

That’s how I would feel, I’ll admit.

But Luke uses this event to begin his story of the first Christian church, telling the story of the first church in the book of Acts in the form of a letter for his student and friend, Theophilus.  What could Luke have been thinking?  What could this turn of events possibly mean, other than utter devastation in the lives of people who had already been traumatized beyond reason?

You heard what the disciples want to know: “Is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”  For years they had been following him around listening to him talk about the restoration of the kingdom, hope for the oppressed, comfort for those who are living with grief.  They wanted to know—we love the message you’ve been preaching.  After all we’ve been through, is now the time you have in mind to “show us the money,” as it were?

2000 years later, having heard the message of Jesus and attaching our lives to its promise, we also wrestle with this question.  We read these events and beg again, “Don’t leave us by floating off into heaven.  Please . . . stick around and bring this kingdom you talk about so often into tangible and stark reality.  Please . . . because we are pinning all our hopes on this healing and promise.  Please don’t leave us . . . we want to know: is this the time when everything you taught us about God’s healing and transforming presence in the world will really come to be?  We want to know . . . we need to know, because believing is hard and we just don’t know how much longer we can keep it up.”

It has become the custom of some Christian traditions to assess the situation in which we find ourselves—2000 years after Jesus’ ascension—and take the position that our obligation as modern-day followers of Jesus is to stand staring up at the sky. 

We talk about heaven like it’s the best all-inclusive resort we can imagine. 

We pine for a heavenly reality wholly other than the one we live in. 

We long grab onto the hem of Jesus’ robe, floating up to the sky to a place in which all our worldly cares will be insignificant. 

And . . . because we love to join the disciples in a dreamy, heavenly focus, as an organized church, an institutional expression of what Jesus came to teach us, we have tended to neglect what’s going on right here on earth, staring up at the sky unwilling to believe that Jesus has left the building. 

How can we go on without him?

In her book Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott writes movingly about the death of her best friend Pam.  After Pam’s death Anne and her son Sam went away for a few days to the beach, where Anne says she cried a lot behind her sunglasses and wished the inside of her snorkeling mask had windshield wipers.  The grief she felt was so debilitating she couldn’t imagine how she might ever resume normal life.

During her various forays to the beach and the pool Anne noticed a man also vacationing there who only had one leg.  He’d remove his prosthetic leg to go swimming and she’d noticed it lying next to the pool.  One day Anne happened to see the man, prosthetic leg laying on the ground again, nimbly climbing a trapeze ladder at the afternoon circus school held behind the haciendas.  The man climbed the ladder, she writes, “with disjointed grace, asymmetrical but not clumsy, rung by rung, focused and steady and slow.  Then he reached the platform, put on his safety harness, and swung out over the safety net, his one leg hooked over the bar of the trapeze, swinging back and forth, and finally letting go.  A teacher on the other trapeze swung toward him, and they caught each other’s hands and held on, and they swung back and forth for awhile.  Then he dropped on his back to the safety net and raised his fist in victory.  “Yes,” he said, and lay there on the net for a long time, looking at the sky with a secret smile.”

Anne says she shyly approached him, complimented him on his fortitude and asked if he was going to do the trapeze again.  He said, “Honey?  I got so much bigger mountains to climb.”

The next day Anne saw his plastic leg lying on a beach towel at the far end of the beach, where the wind surfing lessons take place.  And she thought of the words of the Persian mystical poet Rumi, who wrote: “Where there is ruin, there is hope for treasure.” (Traveling Mercies, p. 74-76)

When the Day of Ascension had come, Jesus led the disciples up to the top of a hill and was talking to them about this elusive, strange concept he kept prattling on and on about: the kingdom of God.  When they asked him to tell them when, he answered with a rather puzzled response . . . what do you mean when will it come?  It’s coming to be right here and now, and after today you will receive power from the Holy Spirit to be my witnesses here and in all of Judea and Samaria, and even to the ends of the earth.  The kingdom of God is not something far-off or other-worldly . . . it’s something that’s coming to be right here and now.  How could you have missed what I have been telling you this whole, entire time?

But still, they did. 

And still, we do. 

All of us, in some form or another, stand there gazing at the blue, empty sky, trying to get our minds around the fact that Jesus, this one we have come to believe is God among us . . . is gone. 

For the first disciples it took two angels, the angels some of them had seen at the tomb, to descend from the sky and shake them out of their reverie and tell them plainly that standing around staring into heaven was not going to bring about the kingdom Jesus had been describing this whole time.  The angels told the first disciples it was time for them to stop just standing there . . . to stop cowering in fear . . . to stop running for cover, denying they knew him, feigning misunderstanding when he asked them to step up.  Why are you standing there looking up into heaven?  Jesus has left the building.

And so it is for you and me.  We may feel bereft on this Sunday of Ascension, a church feast day commemorating the time Jesus, who came to earth to teach us how to live, left.  What’s so celebratory about that?  Jesus has left the building.

And maybe its not celebration so much as conviction.  Because so much good can come out of situations that seem so painful, and though Jesus had left the building, he’d given the disciples and us, a challenge unlike any we have ever had before.  Jesus is gone, but we are the ones here, teaching the promise, living the possibility of God’s kingdom coming to be right here and now.

So, go now.  You are witnesses of these things.  Amen.

Poetry Corner

Maybe

Sweet Jesus, talking
   his melancholy madness,
     stood up in the boat
       and the sea lay down,

silky and sorry.
   So everybody was saved
      that night.
         But you know how it is

when something
    different crosses
       the threshold — the uncles
          mutter together,

the women walk away,
   the young brother begins
      to sharpen his knife.
         Nobody knows what the soul is.

It comes and goes
   like the wind over the water –
      sometimes, for days,
        you don’t think of it.

 Maybe, after the sermon,
   after the multitude was fed,
     one or two of them felt
       the soul slip forthlike a tremor of pure sunlight
   before exhaustion,
      that wants to swallow everything,
         gripped their bones and left them

miserable and sleepy,
    as they are now, forgetting
       how the wind tore at the sails
          before he rose and talked to it –

tender and luminous and demanding
   as he always was –
      a thousand times more frightening
         than the killer storm.

                                 —Mary Oliver

We Pray for Children

As the Children, Youth and a New Kind of Christianity Conference closes today, I was asked to pray this prayer.  It’s adapted from a piece written by Ina Hughes, and it’s too beautiful not to share.

We pray for young people

Who put chocolate fingers everywhere,

Who like to be tickled,

Who stomp in puddles and ruin their new pants,

Who ask for $20 before they leave with their friends,

Who erase holes in math workbooks,

Who never put away their shoes.

 

And we pray for those

Who stare at photographers from behind barbed wire,

Who can’t bound down the street in new sneakers,

Who never “counted potatoes,”

Who aren’t anybody’s Facebook friend,

Who are born in places we wouldn’t be caught dead in,

Who never go to the circus or to a concert,

Who live in an X-rated world.

 

We pray for young people

Who bring us sticky kisses and fistfuls of dandelions,

Who sleep with the cat and bury goldfish,

Who hug us in a hurry and forget their lunch money,

Who leave make-up all over the sink,

Who slurp their soup.

 

And we pray for those

Who never get dessert,

Who never had a safe blanket to drag behind them,

Who can’t find any bread to steal,

Who don’t have any rooms or lockers to clean up,

Whose pictures aren’t on anybody’s iphones,

Whose monsters are real.

 

We pray for young people

Who spend all their paychecks before Tuesday,

Who throw tantrums in the grocery store and pick at their food,

Who like ghost stories,

Who stay out past curfew while their parents wait for them,

Who get visits from the tooth fairy,

Who think they’re far too old to be hugged good-bye,

Who squirm in church and scream on the phone,

Whose tears we sometimes laugh at and whose smiles can make us cry.

 

And we pray for those

Whose nightmares come in the daytime,

Who will eat anything,

Who have never seen a dentist,

Who are never spoiled by anyone,

Who don’t have a loved one to come out to,

Who go to bed hungry and cry themselves to sleep,

Who live and move, but have no being.

 

We pray for young people

Who want to be carried

And for those who must,

For those we never give up on

And for those who never get a second chance,

For those we smother,

And for those who will grab the hand of anybody kind

enough to offer it.

 

We pray for children.

 

Amen.

Words of Oscar Romero, for North Carolina Today

It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts,
it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work.
Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of saying
that the kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
It may be incomplete,
but it is a beginning, a step along the way,
an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference
between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.
This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation
in realizing that. This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well.

Amen.

Jazzy Prayers

I wrote recently at Associated Baptist Press about my friend G. Travis Norvell and his quest to take prayer to the streets.  Because of space I didn’t have time to tell some details I wanted to share, so here’s some more on the Rev. G. Travis Norvell’s prayer station at Jazz Fest in New Orleans last week.

Here’s a little background.  Rev. G. Travis Norvell staked out a little station outside the front gates of New Orleans’ Jazz Fest last week.  He set up where the crowds would pass by, with a sign that read: “Above Average Prayers @ Below Market Prices (Donations).”  There he sat, with his manual typewriter, writing prayers for people who wanted them.

I was so curious about Travis’ experience that I asked him for more information.  Here’s what I wondered and what he answered:

Where did you get the idea to do this?

A few years ago I wanted to set up a table and two chairs on St. Charles Avenue. On the table would be an urn of coffee, two coffee cups and sign that read Conversation? I would be in clerical garb. But I chickened out and never did it. I wondered if anyone would take me up on it… Then last week I heard the story on NPR about a guy who quit his job on April Fools Day a few years ago to write poetry. On any given day he sits on the side walk in San Fran with his typewriter and writes poetry for people. I thought that is great. I said, “I’m going to take my typewriter and write prayers for people as they enter Jazz Fest.”

Why the typewriter?

I love manual typewriters. But I also wanted people to have something they could physically hold in their hands or put in their pockets. People would stand around as I typed and then insist on reading them as soon as I finished. For a few people I read the prayer but even afterwards as soon as they had it in their hands they would read it aloud for their own ears.

What did you learn about people and how they think about prayer/God/the church?

A friend who grew up in the French Quarter put my experiment in an interesting perspective last night. He watched conservatives force their style of religion on people whether they wanted it or not whereas I offered prayer only if people wanted it. The amazing thing: people actually wanted it! They didn’t ask for direction or forgiveness or answers to deep questions. They asked for other kinds of help – blessings for a wife who couldn’t be there, blessings for on a class action lawsuit, continued happiness in their wedding, blessings for continued friendship. I would say it was first time I was around a group of people who were concerned with the present moment.

How did people respond to your offer of prayer?

People told me what they wanted me to write. No one would tell me at first, they would just talk. Then I would ask them what bands or music they were going to see then I would ask them what food they wanted to eat. Then I would start typing, about a sentence into it the person would then dive into a deeper level. It was like they knew I was serious and they didn’t want to lose the chance for an authentic prayer.

Why Jazz Fest?

Jazz Fest, for me, is like Christmas and Easter and Birthdays all wrapped up into one event. I’m already “at church” why not pray with and for “the congregation?”

Did this experience change the way you prayer of think about prayer?

I don’t know if the experience will change the way I pray but it will change the way I approach the blessing aspect of pastoral ministry….  As a pastor you always give of yourself but rarely either receive or let others receive. In some way I was offering at Jazz Fest for others what I need myself.

Give us an example of a Jazz Fest prayer.

Love Supreme,

Help these people find life anew

May the rhythms of this day fill their souls

May they fill their bodies with bowls of pheasant gumbo

May they let go of judgment

and allow You to love this mass of humanity

so that they can be the children you have called them to be.

Amen.  

Everything Changes: From Barren to Bountiful

John 15:1-11

Christ is risen!

Christ is risen, indeed!

In the light of the resurrection we’re considering today and in these days following Easter, how life has changed.  What about the message of Jesus becomes clear and compelling, finally, now that we know the tomb is empty? 

As we discussed last week, our lectionary takes us back, back to before the resurrection, back to the ministry and teaching of Jesus.  As you know, there was incidence after incidence in which Jesus tried to preach, heal, teach, all to demonstrate this new way of seeing the world and living in it, but all the people around him—even his disciples—didn’t quite get it.  And we often don’t get it, do we? 

How do we live the Gospel in this world in which we can’t often see our way clearly, when the voices of the world pull at us and confuse us, when we get stuck and turned around, not sure where our faith in Jesus Christ would have us move next? 

Thank goodness that everything changes in the light of the resurrection, that we understand with new clarity that if God can bring life out of death, and if God can overcome desolation and hopelessness, then surely we can summon the courage to live the Gospel with conviction and purpose.

Today’s parable, the parable of the vine and the branches, is one that you surely learned if you ever attended Sunday School.  It comes from part of the Gospel of John that we think of as Jesus’ final words to his disciples. 

If we follow the timeline in John’s Gospel, this collection of teachings, of last words, happened on Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday and the crucifixion.  The parable was part of Jesus’ last shot at instilling his teachings in the minds and hearts of his disciples. 

What was the essence of what he wanted them to remember?  What were his last and most important words? 

Thinking about that this week, I learned that what you say at the end of your life, apparently, is often telling with regard to what you valued during this lifetime.  The final words of famous people are the source of much interest.  Here are some:

How were the receipts today at Madison Square Garden?

~~ P. T. Barnum, entrepreneur, d. 1891

Friends applaud, the comedy is finished.

~~ Ludwig van Beethoven, composer, d. March 26, 1827

Now comes the mystery.

~~ Henry Ward Beecher, evangelist, d. March 8, 1887

I don’t know about you, but I think I’ll start working on mine now….

In his parting discourse, his last words, found in John chapters 15-17, Jesus tells a vintner’s tale.  The parable of the vine and the branches is part of several “last words” from Jesus—statements from Jesus trying to clarify who he was and who THEY were—who WE are—in relationship to God.

In this part of the passage, Jesus talks about himself as the vine, with God as the vine grower.  We are the branches in this metaphor, he says.  We can’t grow into the possibility of all we are created to be if we’re not connected to the vine—and not just connected, abiding, trading nutrients, giving sustenance.  There are many things that can grow on a vine, of course, but those branches that are not bearing fruit, in Jesus’ metaphor, are cut off and thrown into the fire.  Those that abide in me, Jesus said—who stay connected to the vine—will bear much fruit.

Vine, branches, fruit, abiding, cut off and thrown into the fire?  What is Jesus talking about here??!?  It all sounds so final and so violent…if you don’t do what I say, then you get cut off, burned up forever. 

Believe me, there are many folks in my profession who have made good use of this passage as a tool to scare their version of Jesus into folks.  But I am not so sure that scaring people was what Jesus had in mind here.

I recently attended a class taught by a master gardener.  In this class I learned about carefully placing your garden beds to receive the best sunlight.  I took copious notes about soil quality and mixing in compost.  Water was a big topic of discussion—how much and how often to water your beds.  Choice of plant was another important area he addressed.  It was fascinating, I have to say, but in the end his presentation had very little to do with my yard.

See, my yard is, with all grace and kindness, a big, huge mess.  I have recently moved into a house whose yard has not received the kind of tender care that Katie Harvey orPat Neighbargermight apply toward their yards.  Before we got there, it had seen years and years of neglect; beds long covered under excess growth, and vines all over, well, everything.  When I looked at my yard in the light of the master gardener’s class, I just had to sigh with despair.  Water, sunlight, choice of plants?  I don’t think so.  For now the biggest task is clean up.

And so I’ve begun.  Machetes, roto tillers, weed wackers, shovels, and some hired help later, I now have a yard that is bare as can be, a yard in which we can just now begin to watch for the new grass to grow and dream about what will live in the newly designated flower beds around the edges of the porch.  And, as a result of all the work to clear things out, the back yard is now littered with a huge, huge pile of dead branches.  Branches and vines, weeds, and undergrowth, all of the things growing in the yard that were choking out possibilities and causing me to leave the master gardener class in utter despair.

Jesus’ message about the vine and the branches sounds harsh, and it’s true that many, many preachers have used this parable to scare people into strange standards of compliance.  But Jesus was using a metaphor, remember?  And the life of someone who tends a vineyard as his livelihood is filled with carefully picking and choosing which vines should be nurtured and which vines are choking out new life and good fruit.  Jesus is not talking about people burning in hell; he is talking about the good work of a vine grower, which involves cutting, pruning, and burning waste to make room for good growth. 

It’s like my backyard.  In order to even begin to think about what needs to grow, there is much that needs to come out…to be cut down and pulled out, to be thrown away and burned.  It’s hard work, but it’s only when those tasks are done that we can see clearly the expansive possibilities of what might begin to grow.

As followers of this one who calls himself the vine, I wonder about the many ways in which we are called to prune and discern, to clear out and get back to basics, to abide in him…so that our lives can bear the good fruit of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. 

Jesus knew that his disciples would hear many voices calling them away, distracting them from the task of abiding, of focusing on the essence of Gospel living, so our lives don’t become so choked with other things that we forget.

I thought about that this over the last few days, when there has been quite a bit of news coverage about the upcoming vote inNorth Carolinaover Amendment 1 to theNorth Carolinaconstitution. North Carolina’s Amendment 1 says that marriage between a man and a woman is the “only domestic legal union” that should be valid or recognized in the state. 

In other words, on May 8^th,North Carolinians will be voting on the issue of marriage equality when they vote on Amendment 1.

In the wake of all the conversation and controversy over Amendment 1, there has been quite a bit of religious talk, commentary by pastors, and use of Christian faith to advocate against this amendment, to use faith in Jesus Christ as an excuse to exclude people, to treat them unfairly, and to sometimes even damn them to burn in hell. 

For example, Sean Harris, pastor of Berean Baptist Church in Fayettville, NC, preached a scathing diatribe last Sunday, which joined the efforts of arch-conservative Christians all over the state to scare people into voting for the amendment, a sermon in which he advocated hurting children you think might be gay, of beating the “gay” out of them.  What this message has to do with equal civil rights, I am not so sure, but…

Marriage equality threatens family structures, they claim.  It goes against the BIBLE, they profess.  It violates the rules, they preach.  Jesus wouldn’t like it.

When we Christians say things like this, I begin to suspect we were not listening very hard to the last words of Jesus.  When Jesus talked about the vine and the branches, he was not advocating the imposition of more rules, the adding of layers of rigorous requirement that pile onto the simple words of the Gospel an unachievable standard that excludes people and obscures God’s hope for the world and, worst of all, dilutes that rigorous mandate Jesus gave us.

Love God, love each other. 

Abide in me, Jesus said.  Stick close and hold tight.  The world will try to complicate your faith, to distract you from the life-altering way of Jesus.  But don’t let yourself be choked out or misled by those who would try to catch your attention. 

Abide. 

And when you do, your life and the life of our community will begin to bear fruit, fruit that will shock the world with its courage and expansiveness, fruit that will begin to appear in places that were so cut off from the rest of the family of faith but who bloom and grow and bear fruit when they are welcomed in to the way of Jesus.

I think what Jesus was trying to say in his final words is that the life of faith is hard.  It can be easily choked out by other things that pull at our attention and energy.  It can even be choked out by the riotous growth of what the world might consider religion.  It happens all of the time.

I think Jesus was trying to say that following the way of Christ is hard work; it takes discipline and prayerful discernment; it is not for the faint of heart. 

I think that Jesus was trying to say that when we stick close…when we abide in Jesus, then we’re going to be constantly clearing out space for new growth, for more possibility, for a life of faith that is ever evolving and always becoming, and in new an unexpected ways, bearing fruit.

In the light of the resurrection, everything changes.  While we thought God’s way was a way of rules and rituals, walls to hold people in and keep people out, really the way of Jesus invites us to cut back, clean out, stick close.  Abide in me, he said…and you will bear much fruit.  Amen.

Everything Changes: From Indifference to Interdependence

John 10:11-18

Christ is risen!

Christ is risen, indeed!

For the past few weeks, since Easter to be exact, we’ve been reading Gospel accounts of Jesus’ post resurrection appearances.  Today is different.  As you may have noticed, there’s no story of Jesus appearing suddenly in a locked room, joining in on the disciples’ potluck. 

Today we go back a little in the gospel of John to hear some words of Jesus describing himself as the “good shepherd”.

Well, that’s very nice.  We all like to imagine Jesus the gentle shepherd, his long, wavy brown hair blowing in the afternoon breeze, his blue eyes twinkling with mischief, his robes swaying as he picks up a little fluffy white lamb and puts it gently on his shoulders.

Yes, that’s all very nice, but it doesn’t help all that much with this post resurrection situation, in which we find ourselves shaking our heads, wondering what just happened, trying to get our minds around resurrection.  What really did happen, and how does life change for us in the light of the unbelievable? 

Today the lectionary leads us back to a story about Jesus’ ministry, and part of our work today is to try to figure out why.  It could be an oversight by the planners of the lectionary, right?  Or we could be reading this for a reason.

It was St. Ignatius, founder of the Jesuit order and Spanish knight who lived in the mid 1500s who reminded us to, “think with the church,” and so today we will trust that the planners of the lectionary had a reason for leading us today to the good shepherd passage in John’s gospel. 

Maybe we misunderstood the first…or second or third time, or, like most in the crowd, shook our heads in disbelief when we heard Jesus’ teachings. 

But now, now everything changes.  In the light of the resurrection, how can we think with the church, as Ignatius said, to understand a little more clearly what Jesus really meant? 

And so today we follow the rest of the Christian church (like sheep…) to the words of Jesus long before he was crucified and resurrected, in John chapter 10.

If there’s anything I learned growing up as one of five children, it was a fool-proof strategy for Easter egg hunt dominance.  Since I am the oldest I had a natural advantage, but that didn’t stop me from discovering and perfecting some tried and true strategies.

For example, to dominate at Easter egg hunting, preparation is key.  Clear advantage number one: take off those shiny, pinching church shoes and put on sneakers.  You can get around the yard much more quickly and effectively in sneakers!

Make sure you have a big basket with lots of room—it won’t help anything if the eggs you find fall out of the basket.

Scout out the search site ahead of time.  Offer to help your Mom water the plants…or take out the garbage…or feed the dog.  It’s worth your parents’ suspicion to gain a few advanced minutes in the yard.

Plan your strategy ahead of time.  Will you dominate by quickly appropriating the easiest eggs, or will you leave the most obvious ones for the amateurs and go instead for those second tier eggs—the ones everyone can find with just a little effort?  Will you grab the colorful ones first, and hope the green ones blend in until you can get back to them? 

Point your opponents in strategic directions.  That is, “helpfully suggest” to the littler kids that you saw an egg “over there”—away from the mother lode.

Run faster, look harder, grab quicker…whatever it takes.

And best strategy ever: offer to help your parents hide the eggs.

It took me very little time this week to remember some of these genius strategies I perfected in the dog eat dog Easter egg hunts of my childhood.  That fact in itself is rather troubling, as I now am pretty sure that, in the light of resurrection, dominance and exploitation of those who are weaker might not have been the true message of Easter.

And maybe something like that is key to why the church reads passages like the good shepherd passage during the weeks following Easter.  In case we missed the point…in case we thought Easter was all about us…in case we thought of resurrection as a get out of jail free card, in case we sit back relieved that we’re finally and totally off the hook…we hear again Jesus’ words about being the good shepherd, and they remind us one more time that resurrection is a reality that changes all of us in the here and now, that moves us from indifference to the fate and wellbeing of others, to an interdependence that reminds us our lives are tied together…that we belong to each other…and that all of us belong to God. 

Faith is not a competition to see who gets to the end first. 

Who wins is of no consequence to God, even in Easter egg hunts. 

Dog eat dog is nowhere to be found in our life together. 

In the light of the resurrection, everything changes, and we are moved from indifference to interdependence, a reality in which my wellbeing and yours are critically intertwined.

If we go back to look closely at Jesus’ words we must read them within the context in which they were preached to hear the deeper message.  Turn with me in your Bibles to our Gospel passage today, John 10:11-18, on page 872 of your black pew Bibles.

The parable of the good shepherd comes after repeated, frustrating attempts at conversation between Jesus and the Pharisees.  The Pharisees were some of the ruling religious party in the temple, remember.  They were the pious ones, in charge of making sure everyone followed the rules.  They were the overachievers, the ones who had worked for years to perfect the best strategy for getting to the front of the line, the top of the pile, when it came to relationship with God.

Right before the parable of the good shepherd, Jesus had been teaching in the temple, as was his custom.  He and the Pharisees got into discussion after discussion about who Jesus was, exactly, and conversation got so heated—the misunderstandings so intense—that Jesus had to run and hide—they had picked up stones to throw at him they were so frustrated with what they were experiencing. 

Outside the temple, things got even more confused.  As Jesus was passing along the road he ran into a man who had been blind from birth.  Jesus healed the man, but the day happened to be the Sabbath, and in the eyes of the Pharisees Jesus had broken the law.  Arguments ensued—Jesus was accused of violating religious rules; the Pharisees just couldn’t understand why Jesus would break the law.  Jesus just couldn’t understand why the Pharisees didn’t put the wellbeing of one of their weaker members above everything else.

And so, it was into that context that Jesus told the parable of the good shepherd.  When he did, you could hear that he was presenting a completely different paradigm than the standard by which all of them were living by up until that point.  It was radical.  It was different.  It invited them to change…everything.

In Jesus’ parable, he talks about a herd of sheep.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t often interact with sheep.  The closest I have ever come was a year that I lived inNew Zealand and worked for a few weeks on a sheep farm during the season of shearing.  That experience was enough to teach me that it takes a real calling to be in charge of a group of sheep.  Their care and upkeep is not for the faint of heart (or nose).

You and I don’t know much about sheep, but everyone listening to Jesus talk that day surely knew what it took to manage a herd of sheep.  While those listening would certainly have been a mixture of tradespeople, they lived in a society in which sheep were very important.  Their milk, their wool, their meat, their use as sacrifices in the temple, their presence on the hillsides of Galilee…everyone was acquainted with the reality of sheep, and so they surely caught the differentiation Jesus was making when he talked about the good shepherd and the hired hand.

The good shepherd, Jesus pointed out, lays down his life for the sheep.  He is not like a hired hand—someone who is hired to care for a flock.  Oh, no, no!  The good shepherd would do anything for the sheep—it is his duty to insure their well-being and good health, safety and nourishment.  Why?  Well, because, the good shepherd owns the sheep.  He invests everything he has in those sheep because he and the sheep depend on each other.  The hired hand, by contrast, does not.  And since the hired hand has no investment in the sheep, the last thing he’d be willing to do is to lay down his life for them.  The hired hand is there to make a buck; he is there to do a job and nothing more.  The shepherd and the sheep belong to each other.  Do you see the difference?

“I am the Good Shepherd,” Jesus said.  In the new reality of God’s kingdom, we belong to each other…we depend on each other.

I wondered this week about how mutual investment changes relationships.  By coincidence, I’ve been wondering for awhile about the Capital Bikeshare program, especially since a new rack of bicycles was installed last year right across the street from Calvary’s front door.  You know those red bikes that are all over the city?

So I called John Lisle, head of media relations for the DC Department of Transportation.  He proudly let me know that DC was the first city in theUSto launch a bikeshare system in 2010.  The collaborative qualities of the program, he bragged, are countless.  Not only is the entire idea built on the idea that people pay into a system and share responsibility for and use of the bikes, but now the system is shared with Arlington and soon with the cities of Alexandria and Rockville.

I tell you, John Lisle is the perfect person to be doing media relations for the DoT, because when he talks about Capital Bikeshare he’s almost giddy.  He calls the program “genius” and claims that when people pay an annual membership they seem to have some ownership over the bikes—so much so that incidences of vandalism or neglect are very, very low.  People like the convenience of having a bike where and when they need it, and so they take care of the bikes.  And with mutual investment, the city can afford bikes all over—enough for everyone who wants to ride.

It’s striking to me that we followers of Christ, people who live in the light of the resurrection, have a powerful metaphor for how our lives now change…right across the street from the sanctuary.  The Capital Bikeshare models a little bit of exactly what Jesus was talking about when he explained the difference between the good shepherd and the hired hand.

Because, don’t forget, in the light of resurrection, everything changes.  We are not followers of the one who rose to overcome death just so we can get what we want or climb to the top of the pile at the expense of others.  No, in the light of resurrection we see that we follow the one who models a relationship in which he cares so deeply for us he would even give up his very life for us. 

He is wholly invested in who we can become; he will act ever and always in our best interests and for our highest good.

And in the light of the resurrection, so may it be with us, among one another.  We are followers of the one who would lay down his life for us, and as such we claim ownership for each other.  We must care for each other as we’d care for ourselves.  We must nurture and love each other as if we had a stake in each other’s wellbeing…because we do. 

There is no more independence and walled off indifference.  We belong to each other, just as we belong to God.  We rise and fall together; our lives are predicated on the investment we make in the success of the other.

Indifference to interdependence.  This can be a hard word to hear, especially in our society of fierce, independent, private individualism. 

But in the light of resurrection, everything changes. 

When we experience again the one who would lay down his very life for us, we begin to hear even more distinctly the radical call to live our lives for others. 

In the light of resurrection, we belong to God; and we belong to each other.  May it be so.  Amen.

Everything Changes: From Fear to Faith

John 20:19-31

Christ is risen!

Christ is risen, indeed!

Well, everything changed for us last week, didn’t it? 

For one thing, we got the alleluias back in worship, something over which Harold Robinson is clearly extraordinarily relieved.  We heard the most beautiful music and we worshipped with the scent of the lilies wafting through the sanctuary.  Brunch was amazing and, at least based on what I could see from my vantage point near the dessert table, folks were really celebrating.

And for good reason!  Last Sunday was Easter, we were marking the resurrection of Jesus…and in a world where death is inevitable, that is no small thing to celebrate for sure.

This week we realize, however, that someone forgot to send a memo about the celebration to Jesus’ first disciples, whose lives we are able to shadow through the written memories of the gospel writers.  All of the Gospels talk about what happened to the disciples and Jesus’ other followers and friends on the day of resurrection and into the week following Jesus’ resurrection, and I think it’s safe to say that what they were doing was not celebrating. 

No, I think the word for it is more: cowering. 

On the day that the women ran to the tomb in the early hours of the morning to tend to Jesus’ body, that day they discovered, much to their shock and amazement, that his body was not there in the tomb and, in fact, he was no longer dead at all.  Depending on which account you read, the women either ran into an angel who told them the news or into Jesus himself, disguised as the gardener.  Either way their world was shaken to its very core and they tried to make sense of this new set of circumstances.  As you recall from Mark’s account last week, the overall news about the women was: they were afraid.

Cut to the male disciples, who did not go with the women to the tomb but instead were sequestered away, hiding behind locked doors, scared for their lives.

And, even more than the women, the men had good reason to be scared.  After the events of the past few days, the entire city was up in arms.  The temple leadership had done everything in its power to get rid of Jesus, stirring up the crowds and orchestrating a PR campaign for the record books. 

Still, so much dissention reigned that the Roman government had had to get involved and Roman governor Pontius Pilate placed guards at the sealed tomb to make sure the rebellion was squelched, once and for all.

The men should have been afraid.

If they were publicly recognized as followers of Jesus, not only were they in danger from the rulers of the temple, now the Roman occupation leaders were involved, too.  And if the women were right…if somehow the stone had been rolled away and Jesus’ body was missing…then they surely would be recipients of the wrath of both the temple leaders and the Roman rulers; people would think they’d stolen the body to continue the rebellion. 

I don’t quite know to what kind of resolution the men thought hiding in a locked room would eventually lead, but they were scared, and their fear kept them hidden, unsure what would happen next.  Jesus had died—they’d seen it with their own eyes.  They’d given up everything to follow; they’d put their families at risk.  They had given up their professions; they’d thought he was the one to overthrowRomeonce and for all.  But as they sat there huddled in fear, listening with disbelief to the reports of the women, all they could see flashing before their fear-filled eyes were those images of his crucifixion, images burned onto their brains, images that totally changed the vantage point from which they each saw the world.  When death and tragedy are the lenses through which you see the world, see your own life, well then fear is a reasonable response, don’t you think?

I recently had to have my eyes examined.

I explained to the eye doctor at my appointment that I thought something was probably wrong with my glasses.  I have been having a hard time seeing things clearly, especially at night.  Sometimes I can’t focus well, and as of late preaching has been a little more challenging (thank goodness for easy font size changes!).  I thought perhaps it’s the type of glasses I’ve been wearing or maybe I needed a slight adjustment in prescription.

The doctor was so kind to me.

Choosing his words very carefully he explained that sometimes, as we age, the lenses in our eyes lose their elasticity.  This means they do not focus as quickly or as accurately as they used to.  It’s not really a problem that can be solved with an adjustment to the prescription, he told me.  Instead, it’s time to start thinking about: bifocals. 

Yes.

A minor adjustment to the eye’s normal focusing power is not going to cut it anymore.  Instead, I will need two separate lenses, one for work like, say, preaching, and one for tasks like driving at night.

The exam proceeded then to the part when the doctor makes you look through the lenses and starts all this flipping action.  Is it better with 1 or 2?  1 or 2?

As an aside, I hate this experience more than anything, as I am one who worries constantly about getting the right answer.  I’ll get so nervous that I won’t be able to tell, really, which lens is clearer.  1?  I’ll say hesitantly.  If all I hear from the doctor is silence then I’ll say, “Okay, maybe not.  2?”

After a lot of lens-flipping, the doctor finally settled on the right two lenses.  One would help me see far away and one would help me see close up, for tasks like preaching.  And it will take awhile, he explained, for me to learn how to navigate the double prescription.  One lens will help see the world more clearly in some instances; the other lens will work under different circumstances.

Think about this metaphor of lenses when you think about the disciples huddled in that locked upper room for that week following the Jesus’ death.  They were seeing their world through the lens of the crucifixion, which understandably left them filled with fear.  And when you’re filled with fear, a very normal response is to stop…to stop and to cower, to become incapacitated because the fear with which you see the world is so intense.

It’s into this kind of situation, one where the disciples were frantically thinking about what their lives would look like now that Jesus was dead, that Jesus showed up. 

John’s account tells of two of Jesus’ appearances, one to the group of ten disciples minus Thomas, and then again a few days later to the whole group.  Poor Thomas gets a bad rap here, known throughout all of Christendom as the fateful doubter, but we know from reading the other Gospel accounts that the same was true for all the disciples.  The women had run to tell them, but all of the disciples were so afraid, they were viewing the world through the lens of fear, that they adamantly insisted they would not believe the women until they saw for themselves.  All of them, not just Thomas!

I’d like to point out here that you’ll notice how everything changes.  It doesn’t change from doubt to faith, it changes from fear to faith.  Of course the disciples had doubts—wouldn’t you?  All of them had to see for themselves and even after they did you have to know they sat around in that room, rubbed their blood shot eyes, and stared at each other incredulously.  Was that really Jesus?  You mean he really meant what he said about spreading the Gospel message in the world?  You mean this is more than just a political campaign?  You mean he’s really (gulp!) the son of God?

Are you sure?

And you know they were having a hard time, because when Jesus appears the first thing he says is: “Peace be with you.”  Can you imagine?  All those disciples, crowded into that upper room, scared to death?  The physical affects of fear are real and very intense.  Although I am fairly sure I could have come up with these myself, I actually looked them up:

Difficulty breathing

Racing or pounding heart

Chest pain or tightness

Trembling or shaking

 Feeling dizzy or lightheaded

A churning stomach

Hot or cold flashes; tingling sensations

Sweating 

Fear…it was real and it was palpable, and, understandably, they couldn’t seem to figure out what came next. 

Jesus must have known that a group of fear-filled disciples who could only see the world through the limited lens of their own fear would never, ever change the world. 

The lens needed to change; resurrection needed to become real for the disciples to embrace the promise of what was ahead—a whole world that would be changed by the Gospel message.

So Jesus shows up.  And when they see him—both the 10 disciples the first time and Thomas the second time—a little click occurs.  Like seeing the illuminated letters on the wall in the darkness of my eye doctor’s office, it was like the correct lens was finally put into place and the disciples could see again.  Jesus was alive, and so fear—heart-stopping, life-crippling fear—was miraculously transformed into faith.

And so faith was born.  It may have been small at first…tentative and weak.  But faith is what fear became when everything changed, when the truth of the resurrection became real in the lives of the first disciples.  With the perspective of resurrection to change the way they looked at the world, the disciples were incapacitated no more.  They were miraculously able to move from fear—utter, disabling fear—to faith. 

And that faith was just enough faith to lead them to unlock the door to that upper room and head out intoJerusalem. 

It was just enough faith to turn insecure, unsophisticated fishermen into bold proclaimers of Jesus’ Gospel. 

It was just enough faith that they gave up their very lives, so convicted that this Jesus, this resurrected one, had the words of eternal life.

It took a little while, but when the truth of the resurrection had sunk in, finally, everything changed.  The disciples saw the world in a whole new way; their perspectives radically shifted; they moved from fear…to faith…and everything changed.

In the light of resurrection, what has changed for you?  Is fear still nipping at your heels, keeping you from stepping out in faith to whatever is next for you? 

Well, I have to tell you that Christ is risen…and because Christ is risen, everything changes. 

Unlock the door, come out of hiding, embrace the promise of the Gospel in your life, move from fear to faith.  Look around, through the lens of Jesus’ resurrection, will you? 

When you do you will see that everything has changed.

After Resurrection

 

He must have been tired.  So tired.

You know it has to be exhausting, all that suffering and dying and rising again.

 

I’m tired this morning after resurrection…

and I wasn’t even the one who died. 

Every year it’s the same…Easter wears me out.

 

But even in the craze of dyed eggs and chocolate bunnies, Easter lilies and overworked choir members, there’s something about resurrection.

 

Resurrection gives you courage to step into what’s new, even though it doesn’t seem plausible. 

Resurrection means possibility, even when yesterday you seemed totally out of ideas.

Resurrection hints at life even where death has already declared a victory. 

 

It’s hard to keep believing in resurrection.

 

But it’s harder to envision a world without it.

 

And so we keep at it, even on those mornings after resurrection.  

A Promise Kept

Mark 16:1-8

Christ is risen!  Christ is risen, indeed!

Today it’s Easter, everyone dressed in finery, the sanctuary decorated unlike any other time of the year.  The music is bigger, the program is bigger, everything is ramped up to celebrate.  It’s the biggest day of the year, and I don’t know about you…but I need it.  I need a reminder that life comes in the face of death, that God wins in the end, that even the most unbelievable thing can happen—has happened—and has changed the whole world.

Some of you know my friend Stan Hastey.  Stan remembers a sermon he heard just a few days after Easter in 1968.  He was a student at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.  Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated two weeks before.  Race riots had broken out in Memphis, and in this city, and in others.  A dark shadow had fallen across the American landscape.  The students who gathered for chapel on that April day needed to hear an encouraging word.  They looked up hopefully as the Reverend Charles Boddie, an African-American preacher from Nashville, Tennessee, made his way to the pulpit.  They shifted in their pews and then waited, expectantly, for Boddie to speak.  When he did, his voice was little more than a whisper.   Pointing back to the Sunday before he said, “Easter, this year, came just in the nick of time.” (Thanks to Jim Somerville for this recounting.)

It came just in the nick of time…when darkness still covered the city and the disciples were huddled in hiding in fear and the women were making their way toward the tomb…something happened.  God kept a promise.  God kept a promise that God would not leave, that death was not the end, that there would be something more.  Just in the nick of time.

We may not be sure it happened, if we’d only had the Mark passage from this morning to go by.  Mark leaves us hanging a little bit this morning.  You’ll recall that our Gospel reading ends rather abruptly in Mark chapter 16, verse 8.  The verse reads: “they (meaning the women) went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

Honestly, if I had a few minutes to chat with Mark I would like to tell him that this not a very nice way to end his story of Jesus.  All the other Gospel writers put in some nice post-resurrection appearances of Jesus that help to tie everything up as neatly as a bow on an Easter bonnet.  But Mark ends here, almost as if he’s been interrupted and the story is not quite done. 

In fact, this ending of Mark is so troubling that those who came after Mark amended his memoirs by adding on the remaining verses we find in our modern texts.  The language of verses 9-20, commonly known as “the longer ending of Mark” is so very different from grammar and tone of Mark’s Gospel that most would place their addition to the text some 200 years after Mark finished writing.

And, we can understand why!  We didn’t work so hard to dye those Easter eggs, slave over favorite recipes or dress up extra nice to be left hanging!  We’ve just been through some of the darkest days of the Christian year, days where we pondered over and over again the pain and sorrow of our sin and the horror of Jesus’ death on a cross.  We came to church this morning for resolution—for a nice, tidy wrap-up of the story so we can get on with our lives, thank you very much. 

We’ve been talking during this season of Lent about God’s promises to us.  Story after story after story shows God making promises and keeping promises to people who could never seem to keep their promises to God.  Today we celebrate the best promise of all, life in the face of death, and the only thing we can think to do is to join the women, who saw once and for all God’s conquering work…and were afraid.

We need all the help we can get to believe that this man Jesus died . . . dead and crucified, spirit given up and gone, dead, dead, dead, just like we die, and then defied the grave and rose again.  But the way Mark leaves things, well, it’s not that easy, is it?

On this, the most triumphant day of our faith, the day in which we embrace what we believe to be a divine conquest over death and pain, I think it might be worth it to consider that perhaps Mark intended to end there.

Perhaps a trailing, open end, with what we know was certainly true—that Jesus’ followers were so desperately afraid for their lives, so confused and so bewildered by this turn of events that they ran away—is really the BEST way to end the story.

Why?

Because that wasn’t the end.

If that early morning 2000 years ago was the end, what we would have here is a very nice story about a great man who challenged a political system, loved and healed people and rose from the dead in a way that defied the laws of nature as we know them. What we would have would be a nice fairytale to tell our children at bedtime, a lovely little folktale to use when teaching culture and tradition. What we would have would be a static, encapsulated piece of historical lore that could be pulled out once a year, dusted off and read one more time, then carefully tucked away until next time.

Mark knew that this was not the end of the story. In fact, in order for it to be believable at all, this better had be . . . just the beginning.

The only way those fearful followers believed . . . the only way they came to finally understand that their friend Jesus was, in actual fact, who he said he was, the only way the unbelievable became real to them was . . . by keeping their promises to follow…to keep following…until the story could reach its way into their lives and changed them, until they could summon the courage to believe.  That empty tomb was their wake up call—it was what compelled them to get up and finish the story with their very lives.

And today, this Easter, that empty tomb better jar us into awareness, too.  The invitation to you and me is clear: we’re going to have to finish the story of resurrection ourselves.

What difference does the risen Christ make in your life? This is not about new clothes for Easter or ham or Easter eggs. This is not about lilies or candles or even beautiful music. This is about the fact that life is hard, that death and pain and uncertainty and fear, injustice and war are tangibly here. Right here, part of our lives all the time. What good is it to go around once a year retelling a fairytale if it doesn’t mean anything?

Well, let me tell you. We’re not here because we want to recount every post-resurrection appearance of Jesus, to try to bring back to life the accounts of those first disciples. We’re not here to try to image a Galilean man in rough burlap robes and rustic sandals making his way into our sanctuary. We’re not here to uncover archeological evidence of resurrection.

We’re here because we’re human and we hurt; because we want hope for our lives; because we believe, we know, that to finish this story means to keep our promises to God, to wake up to possibilities and hope we never imagined before. 

We’re here because in our humanity we have turned from the tomb in utter defeat and crippling fear and, despite that, have the end of this story to tell.

We’re here because we have seen the living power of the resurrected Christ in our lives and in our world, and what was once so strangely unbelievable has now become an urgent proclamation, not of a dusty ancient text, but of our immediate, 21^st century lives.

Something happened after that morning at the tomb. The women left, the text says, too scared to say anything to anyone. But in less than 50 years the entire world had been transformed by the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus. His radical mandate to love each other, his offer of direct connection to God, the healing grace of his death and resurrection changed the women at the tomb . . . and changed the world, because those women had the courage to keep their promises to follow, the courage to finish the story.

And it didn’t stop.  No, the story continues. The story of new life and relationship with God is a story that is lived out over and over again in my life, in your life, in the lives of people all over this world who will follow the one who proclaimed that death is not the end, that there is more to this story, and that it is our job to gather our wits about us, our hopes and dreams, our fears, failures and grief, and turn from this incredible sight to live out the ending . . . that death is not the final word and that we have new life in Christ.

“He is not here; he is risen,” the man at the tomb said, but that was only the beginning of the story.

Can we keep our promise to God?  Can we gather the courage to turn from the empty tomb, maybe fearful and maybe unsure, and allow the power of the resurrected Christ to enter our lives and transform them, until we are absolutely, positively compelled to finish the story . . . starting right here, in our own hearts?

We can.  And, by the grace of God, we will.  Because God has kept God’s promise…because resurrection is here…and it has come just in the nick of time.  Amen.