Agape Feast, early Christian catacomb artwork

I have to be careful what I eat, particularly where carbohydrates are concerned. When I cut back on breads and sugar, I lose weight; when I eat them the way I want, I quickly turn into Pastor Puffy.

The trick, I’ve found, is to indulge only on special occasions. An equally important trick is not to declare every other day a special occasion. (This second part is where I still struggle.)

A Very Big Special Occasion is coming up this Thursday. It is, of course, Thanksgiving. For the vast majority of us who find ourselves blessed enough to do so, we will feast in the midst of family, and in my case, when it comes to carbs, I will be like a little child who has yet to learn how to count.

In preparing this sermon, I thought I would go in search of texts related to eating and feasting. Naturally, I managed to find a troubling one.

Proverbs 23:19-21: “Hear, my child, and be wise, and direct your mind in the way. Do not be among winebibbers, or among gluttonous eaters of meat; for the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty, and drowsiness will clothe them with rags.”

Now, as we know, all Scripture is God-inspired and useful, so we have to take this proverb about the dangers of gluttony seriously. But ahead of us there is turkey, stuffing, gravy, cranberries, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, beans, corn, broccoli salad (much better than it sounds, kids), pecan pie, pumpkin pie, and whatever else the beloved cooks in the family may create via the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. After eating all of it, I even plan to be a little drowsy. A little scriptural reconciliation is in order.

Hey, when in doubt, turn to Jesus. He was a good Jew, and I’m sure he understood the above proverb as a lesson in the importance of moderation. He also, however, understood the deeper meaning of the occasional feast, and abundance was a regular theme of his ministry.

Take his first miracle, for example. The savior of the universe, God among us in the flesh, turned water into wine at a wedding feast, after some prodding from his mother. We can presume Jesus did this because shame would fall on the newlyweds if the feast fell apart because of lack of food or drink. Through this miracle, he demonstrated there are no shortages when God is present.

We’re also talking about a Savior who more than once fed thousands after starting with what should have been enough to feed just a few, letting everyone eat until sated, with leftovers to spare.

Just before his death on the cross, Jesus used a feast to explain what was about to happen to him. His followers didn’t immediately understand what he was talking about, but it’s interesting to me how he used a moment of tremendous grace—a Jewish thanksgiving—to illustrate what would be the most abundant act of grace of all time, the death that would reconcile all to God.

Even after Jesus’ resurrection, the risen Christ continued to eat. There is what I would call a feast on the beach, a story found at the end of John’s gospel. Along with the abundant fish, abundant love—always a submerged theme during feasting—rose to the surface. Jesus forgave the denials and betrayals of his disciples, strengthening them to create the church.

We also cannot forget where we are headed, toward the “marriage supper of the Lamb,” the author of Revelation’s way of describing the experience of reunion with God. Grace and forgiveness finally cause heaven and earth to intersect, and at the heart of it all is a banquet table where Christ presides. We will feast with people who departed our earthly banquet tables long ago.

May your 2012 Thanksgiving be as full of grace and love as the great feast to come.

Luke 19:29-40

Declaring Jesus king is easy when we’re outside the city gate, marveling at the signs and wonders we have seen, cheering with a like-minded crowd.

The hard part is doing the same inside the city gate, Jesus’ destination. This is where enemies gather and plot, where evil seems to have the upper hand, where our reputations and our very lives seem to be at stake.

Most Christians have an outside-the-gate moment. The truth seems so clear; Jesus makes himself very visible. He is in charge. He is our hope. It’s easy to lift up words of blessing, declaring his kingdom is present. We baptized two young men Sunday at Cassidy UMC, and I pray they had such an experience. I pray they continue to see God walking with them.

They and we need to remember, however, that the real test comes when we as Christ’s followers must live inside the gate, when the situation becomes muddled. Because let me tell you, who’s winning in the battle of good vs. evil can be incredibly unclear at times. That’s just the nature of the time in which we live, the time of waiting, where we look to the skies and say, “Jesus, where are you?”

Jesus’ followers found themselves very confused when the Temple plotters finally schemed a way to get Jesus arrested. We find ourselves similarly confused when we see the church seemingly bound, looking like its glory days are behind, ready to fall to secularism.

Jesus’ followers found themselves in despair when their leader went to the cross, naked and bleeding, dying the most shameful death possible. It was over, over, over. We know what it’s like to be in situations where it seems all over, too. The deaths of those around us, particularly those untimely deaths, can seem so final. A marriage ends, and our sense of trust is vanquished. We don’t reach the heights in life we imagined in our youth, and we’re sure all our dreams were for nothing.

That’s life inside the gate. And it’s how we live inside the gate that defines how fully we believe.

It’s okay to weep. It’s okay to feel an occasional tremor of doubt or fear. But can we cling to hope? Can we carry within us a sense of assurance that what we’ve been promised is real?

Jesus told his followers the whole story of his time inside the gate before he ever climbed on that donkey. He said he had to go to Jerusalem, die, and then on the third day be raised to life. And on the third day—well, I’ll bite my tongue for now. That’s a story for next week, isn’t it? The disciples simply needed to believe and remember what Jesus had told them.

Jesus has told us the whole story of his time inside human history, too. He has told us he will come again. He has told us our pain and the brokenness of the world are only temporary, that they will be put away for good one day if only we believe.

Courage—have courage. We look forward not just to Easter 2013, but to the great Easter, when all is set right. We will rejoice not just in Christ’s resurrection, but in our very own, and our joy will overcome all sorrow.

Luke 24:1-12

If two angels ask a question, it is a question worth pondering.

The question comes as part of the angelic announcement that Jesus is risen from the dead, his body remade to be indestructible, a state of eternal living we describe as “resurrected.” It is a truth we celebrate whenever we gather as Christians to worship, and it is a truth celebrated in particular on Easter Sunday.

The question, “Why do you seek the living among the dead,” almost sounds rhetorical. I don’t think God intends us to read it that way, however. The question is as valid today as it was in the middle of a Jewish cemetery nearly 2,000 years ago. For those of us who acknowledge the truth of the resurrection, the question challenges our view of the world, our very approach to life.

Sometimes we can see people literally looking for life in the midst of death. A few years ago, at the last church I pastored, our community had problems for a few weeks with a group of what were either older teens or young adults. They had became enamored with the rural community cemetery next to our church building.

Dressed in black, they lounged against the headstones at twilight like they were on living room couches. Sometimes they took pictures of each other draped across the tombstones. I heard some of the photos were on a web site. It was weird.

I feel certain this was more than mischief, however. As misguided as they were, like all human beings, they were seeking some kind of deeper truth, some sort of connection with each other and to a larger purpose. But you cannot find life in the midst of death. We as a church wanted to reach them, but it was like trying to approach a conspiracy of ravens—their instinct was to fly away.

Other than paying our occasional respects to a loved one, most of us are not going to be found lingering in cemeteries. There are other similarly wrong ways to pursue truth, however, and we can inadvertently find ourselves hovering in the world of the dead. When we find ourselves in these situations, it’s good to ask ourselves why we seek Christ where Christ is not.

So many people seek truth through anger these days. But anger is something of the cemetery. Anger is rooted in woundedness and bitterness over slights and losses, real or perceived. How are we to find the living, resurrected Christ where there is anger?

“Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” Those were Jesus’ words after nails had been driven through his flesh, pinning him to the wood to bleed and dangle until death.

Other people seek truth through what is temporary, and the world is full of temporary distractions. The distraction can be as noble sounding as deep commitment to work or sports or as deadly as drugs, but if it is not of God, then it obviously is not where you will find the risen savior.

Here’s a test for whether we’re searching where there is life. Remember the story of the resurrected Jesus on the road to Emmaus? We know when we’re in the presence of the living Christ. What we are doing creates a holy burning within us.

When we sense the presence of the living Christ, everything begins to change. In the midst of a broken world we can feel the joy of eternity. Life, we realize, has boundless potential, simply because the resurrection tells us there are no more boundaries.

We also begin to live into the truth that even the cemetery one day will no longer contain death. In Christ, there ultimately is no death, no pain, no fear. Like Christ, we shall rise, remade holy and indestructible, ready to live forever in the presence of our creator.

Why would we look for anything else?

John 20:19-31

What is doubt? And what is doubt’s antidote?

In the 20th chapter of John, beginning at the 19th verse, we find the story of Jesus appearing to a terrified band of disciples. Mary Magdalene had told them Christ is risen from the dead, but the news gave them no comfort.

Certainly, these disciples were afraid of the Jews who had crucified Jesus. It’s also likely that they, having failed Jesus in his time of need, feared what the risen Christ might say or do. They doubted the resurrection had really happened; and if it had happened, they doubted where they stood with the one who had overcome death.

The door to the room where they huddled was locked, but a lock is no barrier for a body that has defeated death and is now indestructible, infused with the unrestrained power of the divine. Jesus appeared among them. It was not to chastise them, however. Instead, the risen Christ told them repeatedly, “Peace be with you.”

And peace they had, it seems. They moved from fear to rejoicing; doubt had vanished.

All of Jesus’ key disciples were present except Thomas. When he returned, he refused to believe in the appearance until “I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side.”

A week later Jesus appeared to Thomas with the same message: “Peace be with you.” He even invited Thomas to touch the scars. And of course, Thomas believed.

So, what is doubt? Looking at this story, it seems to be more than just lack of evidence. It is a guardedness brought on by a belief that a situation cannot improve, despite what others are saying. Certainly, we are more likely to feel doubt when we find ourselves in a particularly sticky mess.

There is a lot of doubt in our world today, and I’m not talking just about religious doubt. People feel stuck in all sorts of ways, and a lot of them don’t feel any kind of institution, agency, cause or movement can free them.

As the church, bringing people an experience of the risen Christ is our way of helping to cure some of that doubt. We are, after all, a people who believe in the resurrection, a people of hope. Our rallying cry is “Peace be with you.” And there are actions that must coincide with our words, actions that bring peace.

Somewhere in our community, there are children who fear each day because they face abuse, hunger or neglect. The true church, acting as Christ’s body on earth today, finds them, rescues them, feeds them and loves them, bringing the peace of Christ to their lives. We participate in such activities now, but we need to do more.

Somewhere in our community, there are people suffering a crisis of identity, people who feel they have no value because they lack a job or a family or a relationship. The true church finds them, helping them learn they are first and foremost children of God. We brush against these people occasionally, but it’s time to fully embrace them.

Somewhere in our community, there are sinners, hard-core sinners, sinners who believe their evil is so great that nothing can be done to redeem them. They feel they can only smirk at or fear the church.

The true church tells them the work of redemption already is complete; belief is all that is required. And like the cowering disciples, these sinners find that in a relationship with Christ, there is no condemnation, only peace. We say our doors are open and we wait for these people to come to us, but we need to learn to go to them.

Somewhere in our community there are the mentally ill, the drunks, the drug abusers, the unwed mothers, the prisoners, the sick, the dying. The true church finds ways to rely on the Holy Spirit and creatively say to them, “Peace be with you.”

After all, we are the body of Christ on earth until Christ returns.

When we think of what Jesus accomplished for our benefit, the concept of his ascension into heaven often vanishes behind the darkness of his crucifixion or the brilliant life-giving light of his resurrection.

The ascension is a critically important part of our salvation, however. In many ways, it completes the work done by God in the crucifixion and resurrection.

The key to understanding the ascension is to comprehend what is carried up.

Luke, a companion of the Apostle Paul, gives us accounts of the ascension in the end of the gospel of Luke and the beginning of the book of Acts. After appearing repeatedly to his followers in his resurrected form, Jesus led them about two miles outside Jerusalem to Bethany.

He then did several important things: He opened their minds to understand the Jewish Scriptures, in particular how they predicted Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. He told his followers they would spread throughout the world the good news that salvation is available. He promised them the Holy Spirit would come to empower and support them.

And then the ascension happened. It’s described a bit mysteriously; in Luke, Jesus “withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.” In Acts, we get a little more detail, where we learn “he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.”

The point is that Jesus physically left this world and entered the realm of the holy, God’s abode, the place where only things unstained by sin can go.

Later in Acts, the first martyr, Stephen, cried out shortly before being stoned to death, “Look, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” From this we see that the earliest Christians understood that after the ascension, Jesus resumed his role as part of what theologians sometimes call the “Godhead,” God in all of his aspects.

 I know these ideas are theologically “heavy,” perhaps even painfully so. God expects Christians to think a little, though.

So, why does it matter that Jesus went “up”? Well, it matters because of what Jesus took with him—his resurrected human body. Human flesh now exists as part of the Godhead, a strange change in the nature of heaven. What was unacceptable anywhere near the throne is now on the throne.

And that is why salvation is now so easy for us, if we will only believe that Jesus died to free us from punishment for our sins. When we appeal to God, we are appealing to the one who loves us so much that he made himself like us in order to save us.

I also should point out that the ascension left something of a void. For a brief time, humanity was again separated from the full presence of God. But then, just as Jesus had promised, something came down, another aspect of God, the Holy Spirit.

That’s an event we celebrate next Sunday, which is Pentecost.

So, we’ve talked about what it means to gather ourselves in search of God, and we’ve talked about how God is consistently revealed in Scripture. What is an appropriate response to God’s presence?

A celebration! The third part of worship is like a thank-you, praise-you party thrown for God, where we declare our Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer the jolly good fellow, the one worthy of honor.

Again, it’s one of those reasons I like to put the declaration of God’s word up front as much as possible in a worship service. I think a lot of people struggle with worship because we don’t spend enough time rejoicing, and it’s hard to celebrate until we’ve really heard from God. When we fail to celebrate in worship, we miss out on the joy of being Christian, a joy available to us regardless of our circumstances.

I know—we may not always feel like rejoicing. Poor? Sick? Lonely? Broken by sins committed? Victimized by another’s sin? Those aren’t ideal situations to be in, but our current circumstances brighten considerably when we put them in the light of what God has done for us through Jesus Christ. The temporary nature of this life becomes obvious when the Holy Spirit begins to work in us through God’s word, giving us a taste of what it means to be citizens of an eternal kingdom.

The joy of the resurrection—first, Christ’s, and later, our promised own—is something God offers us whenever we immerse ourselves in his story and praise him.

You see such celebratory worship in the Old Testament. One example would be the story in 1 Chronicles 16:1-6, when David returned the Ark of the Covenant—Old Testament evidence of God’s presence—to Jerusalem. Even before these verses, there are recorded acts of worship on the way to Jerusalem: sacrifices, singing, dancing and music, most of it quite exuberant. It all continued once the Ark was in place, with people appointed to keep it going.

Celebratory worship continues in the New Testament, particularly after the victorious nature of Christ’s work on the cross is made clear in the resurrection. We’re told in Colossians 3:16-17, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”

God’s word begets gratitude, and with gratitude in our hearts, we sing and direct our celebration toward our audience, God. We can rejoice in such ways during appointed worship times, at 11 a.m. on Sunday, for example. We can rejoice when gathered in small groups. We can rejoice in our one-on-one time with God.

I know not everyone rejoices and celebrates in the same way, just as people will enjoy a party in different ways. I’ve always been more of a wallflower at a party. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy parties; it just means I’m not necessarily going to put a lampshade on my head.

You may be a fairly laid-back, reserved person in worship. Not everyone wants to jump up and shout “Amen!” while holding their hands up in the air. (Thank God for the worshipers who do such things; they are great help to a preacher and to worship in general.)

But if you’re reserved in nature, ask yourself this: Am I celebrating? Does that joy regarding Christ’s gift wash over my soul, at least as a quiet, tender experience?

Do I let the music take me back to the revelation of God I’ve just heard, connecting my emotions to my logic? Do I understand the prayers we lift up corporately as an open door to heaven? When I come to the table for communion, am I expecting to meet the one who will feed me for all eternity?

God calls you to such celebratory experiences whenever you stand before him in worship.

Matthew 28:1-10

At the end of each worship service, I “send us forth,” to use the language of fourfold worship. The obvious question is, “Send us forth to what?”

The answer, of course, lies in the word of God.

Our text today is typically used as an Easter reading. Easter—the day we celebrate the resurrection of Christ—also is the key to understanding “sending forth,” however. We’re going to use Matthew’s story of Christ’s resurrection, focusing on the characters, to help us better understand what we’re sent forth to do.

Jesus doesn’t appear until late in the story, but as he is the starting point for all things, we’ll begin with him. Even if you’ve heard this core story of Christianity a thousand times before, try to hear it with fresh ears today.

In the resurrection, Jesus is revealed fully as the Christ, the son of God, the promised gift of God sent to redeem the world. As we understand the resurrection more fully in the context of other holy writings, we see he is God in flesh, God among us.

In Jesus’ resurrection, we are exposed to the most effective mystery creation has ever experienced. It is mystery because how it works can never be fully grasped in this life; it is effective because it proved in a single moment that sin and its result, death, were overcome by holy Jesus’ wrongful death on the cross.

The other characters in Matthew’s version of the resurrection are two Marys, an angel of the Lord, Roman soldiers assigned to guard the tomb, and Jesus’ disciples.

The two Marys. One is clearly identified as Mary Magdalene, a woman Jesus freed from demon possession. She was clearly devoted to Jesus. The “other Mary” is less easily identified; Matthew would never have referred to Jesus’ mother in such a way. She was likely the “mother of James and Joseph” identified as being at the cross. If you haven’t figured out by now, Mary (Miriam in Hebrew) was a very common female name in Jesus’ day and place.

What I take away from their part in the story is faithfulness, likely combined with an expectancy that something more was to happen. Unlike the other gospels, Matthew says the Marys merely went “to see the tomb,” rather than going with a specific purpose, such as to anoint Jesus’ body more thoroughly. I think that unlike many of the male disciples, the women had fully heard Jesus’ words about what was to come after his death, and hope remained in their hearts.

Through their faithful attendance to Christ, even when all seemed lost, they became important witnesses to mighty events surrounding the resurrection, standing at an intersection of heaven and earth. They also became the first humans to declare the truth about the remarkable event that changed the world.

The Angel of the Lord. The angel leaves no doubt that the resurrection is a God-ordained event directed from heaven. He brings glory and majesty to the story, a reflection of the One who sent him. The angel’s job was simple; roll back the stone and deliver a message. How he did his job underscored what had just happened.

I would think mighty angels have little need to sit and rest. This one sat on the stone, however, a symbolic act reminding us once again that death has been defeated. His decision to take a seat has almost military overtones, that of a conqueror forcing something into submission. It also comes across like a challenge: “Anyone want to try to roll it back?”

His message to the women had two parts: Jesus has been raised from the dead; go tell others he has been raised from the dead, in particular, the disciples.

The Guards. Let’s understand something here—these are Roman soldiers, part of the toughest fighting force on the planet. They represent worldly power, a kind of power that seemed insurmountable to the people they had conquered. But when faced with just one of God’s angels, they collapsed into a quivering mass. The word translated as “shook” in relation to these soldiers has the same root as the word used to describe the earthquake that occurred when the angel rolled the stone away. All that was worldly trembled at the resurrection.

The Disciples. Just as they were Jesus’ primary audience in his three years of ministry, they seem to be his primary audience immediately after the resurrection. The angel told the two Marys to go to them with word of the resurrection. Jesus repeated this instruction when he appeared to the women suddenly, as they ran to the disciples.

Later in Matthew, we’re told something interesting about the 11 remaining key disciples—despite seeing Jesus, some doubted. I wonder if they muttered in Aramaic, “It’s just too good to be true.” Jesus told them to go forth and spread the word of the resurrection, however, baptizing believers in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. It’s clear they finally did believe. After all, we’re here on the other side of the planet, worshiping Christ as Savior.

As people who gather to worship Christ, we have the potential to fulfill some of these roles today. Where do you fit in the story?

I would assume we have taken at least one foot out of the world. By that, I mean a full-blown encounter with God won’t leave us on the ground, quivering like a jellyfish. At a minimum, we’re like the disciples, following Jesus, even enamored with Jesus.

And yet—doubt creeps in. The question is, can we join the Marys? Can we declare what has been revealed to us through God’s word? Can we live as if we expect greater things to happen?

That is what we’re sent forth each week to do. We’ve gathered here week after week and equipped ourselves through the word. We’ve celebrated what has been declared.

Now share the good news about Jesus Christ with those who so desperately need to hear it!

***

Note: Any good church does more than just tell its members to tell others about Jesus. We also equip people to tell the story successfully. If you’re near Cassidy UMC, you’re invited to join a small group where we develop our evangelism skills and keep each other in loving accountability. If you’re interested, contact me.

If you’re going to hear from prophets past or present, there are three overarching messages they’ll use repeatedly. Understand these broad concepts, and you’ll understand how prophecy remains relevant and life-changing even today.

I’ll work from the book of Joel today, including our reading, Joel 2:23-32. It’s a concise little book of prophecy, just three chapters, and it illustrates these three messages well. I would encourage you to read the whole book start to finish to get a feel for it.

Message no. 1: Life actually is full of trouble.

Joel had a particular form of trouble that was the context for his prophecies. Locusts had overwhelmed the land of Judah, destroying everything in sight, and then a drought ensued. The livestock longed for food; we can assume people were starving to death. Joel prophesied during a particularly bad time, but it was the kind of bad time the world has seen repeatedly.

Trouble as an ongoing event is an underlying theme of the Bible. The Bible as a whole doesn’t pull any punches about that particular truth. If you know your Book of Genesis, you know the root of that trouble, sin. God made things right and holy, but he also gave his creation free will. When that free will was exercised wrongly, sin occurred.

It was like tapping a perfect porcelain vase with a hammer. Cracks ran everywhere, and the brokenness impacts every aspect of our lives.

Fortunately, the prophets never just leave us with our troubles.

Message no. 2: God gives us tremendous promises and signs assuring us of his love. Despite our unholiness, God relents in regard to the punishment we deserve.

Much of the Old Testament contains promises that God will provide us a way out of trouble. That promise largely has been fulfilled through Jesus Christ, whom Christians acknowledge as the promised Jewish Messiah. Through Jesus’ death on the cross, sin has been overcome, extending God’s grace to all the world. The resurrection of Christ is a sign this work has begun.

Pentecost, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the early church, is another sign of God at work in the world. Look at Peter’s Pentecost sermon. He spent a lot of time quoting Joel, placing Christ and the church in the context of Joel’s promises.

Message no. 3: Full, permanent restoration of creation is coming. God’s work will be complete; creation will be re-made as holy and unbroken.

It’s a fulfillment we await today. Faithful Christians know they move toward this time each day, regardless of what trouble we may face now.

As we hear from Joel or any other prophet, the question before us becomes simple: Where in the prophetic pattern are we going to live? Do we stay mired in misery, letting the locust years of our lives consume us? At a minimum, I would prefer to live in a state of expectant watchfulness, excited by glimpses of God at work now and trusting the signs that there is more to come.

Occasionally, we even run across people who seem to be able to live at least some of their lives as if the promises already have been kept in full. Call them what you want—kingdom people, the perfected ones, saints. I call them “forward thinkers.” At the end of his life, Paul was one of these people, facing trouble after trouble yet clinging joyously to what was already his, eternal life with God.

“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith,” a battered Paul writes in 2 Timothy 3:7-8. “From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have longed for his appearing.”

I also feel I’ve known such people. In particular, I think of a woman prayer warrior I once knew who could take any situation and make you see it in the light of the resurrection and a fully restored relationship with God.

Spiritually, these forward-thinking people already are what we hope to be when Christ returns and completes his work in the resurrection of creation. I look at them and wonder what the world would be like if more of us were to bear such holiness now.

It’s Easter. Let’s hear the story again—how about the account in the twentieth chapter of the Gospel of John?

This story is the core of our faith. To a Christian, this story is everything: proof that what happened on the cross was effective, evidence that this world is becoming so much more than we can imagine.

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.  So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”  Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes.

Panic and confusion—that’s the initial reaction to the empty tomb. We have no scientific description of the actual resurrection, of what happened to Jesus at the precise moment he moved from death back to life. It was a unique moment; even when Lazarus was raised from the dead, he was not truly resurrected. That is, Lazarus was not transformed into something indestructible and mysterious, made of matter and yet impervious to the laws of physics. We know Jesus underwent just such a transformation.

We don’t know if the Jesus event happened with a great flash of light or in the near silence of a small, still voice whispering, “Live and be transformed.” Like the disciples, we begin our understanding merely with an empty tomb, a missing body.

Things go missing in our lives all the time, and usually these vanishings cause us grief. It’s no wonder the two male disciples walk away, seemingly perplexed. We’re told the unnamed disciple finally looked in and “believed,” but that, in itself, is puzzling. Believed what?

Apparently, the disciple believed Jesus had somehow beaten death. It’s not a complete belief, yet, not the kind of belief that makes you fully Christian. But the empty tomb was a beginning, at least for this one disciple. He would have to see Jesus in full later, the walking, eating, breathing Jesus who also could walk through walls as if they were vapor.

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet.  They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”

What an astounding vision. Angels in white, appearing from nowhere within the tomb! Yet Mary was so grief-stricken she could not process what she was seeing. She could not move past the human explanation that someone must have taken Jesus’ body.

We’ve been there, so stricken by brokenness and sadness that we forget the hope and glory God constantly offers us. We forget the story we’re hearing now.

When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher).

Even with Jesus before her, Mary Magdalene could not immediately comprehend through her grief and tears whom she was seeing. We also may be gaining some insight into resurrected forms. In their perfection and unhindered glory, they may not be immediately recognizable. We have become so used to the imperfection and brokenness of this world. At our own resurrections, I wonder if we may struggle at first to recognize our loved ones in perfectly healthy bodies, the flaws they may have carried even from birth gone. But we shall recognize Jesus, and surely, we shall recognize one another as people changed for the better.

Here’s an important point I want you to take away today. Jesus’ resurrection lets us  shift from seeing the world as it was to seeing it as it will be. When we accept the truth of the resurrection, we find ourselves able to see the goodness and perfection toward which we head.

Have you ever wondered why we talk about Christian joy being something that remains in our hearts even in the midst of sadness? We understand this story of Jesus’ resurrection and remember we as part of God’s creation are to experience resurrection, too.

We can witness horrors on the news or in person and know that when the time comes, God is going to put that situation right. We can think of the worst kinds of sins, sins committed by us or inflicted upon us, and know that God’s power is greater than the effect of those sins. We can stand and look at the body of a loved one, and know death is not the end.

Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

Here is a glimpse into how salvation works. Jesus brings humanity back into full relationship with God despite sin. At the ascension 40 days later, Jesus would carry human flesh into heaven, making it part of the Godhead. What was barred from paradise may now re-enter, and God wants to dwell in human flesh even now, through the Holy Spirit. These are ideas we’ll talk about as the church year continues, as we consider Ascension Sunday and Pentecost Sunday.

Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

“I have seen the Lord.” See that shift in viewpoint? Everything is going to be okay. All we’re called to do is be like Mary and declare the great wonder of what God has done.

Do you accept that you have seen the Lord? Certainly, none of us stood at the tomb with Mary that day, but at the same time, most of us worship on Easter Sunday because in one way or another, we have seen the Lord.

As people who have seen, we also have a responsibility to tell others. Go this day and tell the story!

El Greco, “Christum am Kreuz,” c. 1578, oil on copper, via Wikimedia Commons

1 Peter 1:17-23

What is salvation worth?

Strictly in terms of what it costs us, salvation is worth very little. In fact, we usually talk about salvation as a free gift from God. And like a lot of life’s freebies, even people who accept the general idea of the gift can begin to devalue it.

They may even treat the free gift as something to be taken seriously only when necessary, maybe in old age, near death. To do so, they of course must first deny the possibility that life could deviate from the course they have imagined. But once they’ve firmly deluded themselves on this point, salvation becomes like a gallon of milk to be picked up on the way home from work, except salvation seems cheaper.

Such a human perspective is very wrong, however. Salvation should never be treated as if it is worth what it costs us. The value of salvation is rooted in what the gift cost God. Writing this down, I almost feel silly stating something that seems so obvious. And yet, even people who call themselves Christians sometimes act as if they don’t get it.

The Apostle Peter addressed the cost of salvation in a general letter he wrote to be circulated among churches, a letter we now call 1 Peter. We cannot even begin to quantify the value of salvation in terms of earthly wealth, he tells us. A perfect, sinless being, a man who also was fully God, died so we would not face the punishment we are due for defying our creator.

Why? Simply because the one who made us loves us so much.

In this Easter season, let’s revisit the cross. Most of us have heard stories of Jesus’ humiliation, beating and gruesome death. There was another kind of pain, however, a deeper suffering.

Think on your worst sins. Think of the pain they caused, the damage they did to those around you. Christ absorbed the effect of those sins, removing the power those sins had over you. Now we begin to understand the real pain of the cross—Christ bearing our sins and every sin ever committed. What astounds me is that the tremendous weight of our sins did not rip Christ from the cross and crush him.

I also suspect it was more than just the sin in humanity that caused Jesus to suffer. When evil first escaped into the world, creation was fractured mightily, like a porcelain vase tapped with a hammer. In his suffering and dying, Christ repaired all the cracks, pulling them together with his pierced, outstretched limbs in ways we cannot comprehend.

One drop of his holy blood is worth more than all the gold in the universe, and much more than one drop was shed in the remaking of creation. We already have seen an initial sign of this remaking in the resurrection, and because we are freed from sin, we will see the remaking in full.

When we accept this truth, we begin to live in new ways—not because of any rules we’re following, but because we know we can never provide an adequate response to what God has done. We begin to live as if we’re actually astonished by God’s love.

How do we not respond with everything we have: our time, our money, our very lives? In Wesleyan denominations, we speak often of sanctification, of growing in our love so we respond to God and those around us as Jesus would. Every step on this path to holiness is made by better absorbing the truth of what Jesus did, of what he continues to do this day in the world through the Holy Spirit.

I ask you again: What is salvation worth? Let your answer guide your life.

Several years ago, back when I could easily call myself a young adult, I awoke after sleeping in one Sunday morning and went about my usual routine. I ate a late breakfast, watched television on the couch, and wandered through the day carrying out some other activities that must have been fairly mindless, as I cannot remember them now. It was only later in the day, prompted by an item on the evening news, that I discovered something: It was Easter Sunday.

Realizing I had let Easter go by almost unnoticed left me more aware than ever of a strange, empty feeling that had been within me for awhile. Partly, I was nostalgic, missing the childhood connection to the day. My parents had always made sure my little brother and I went through the rituals that made Easter fun—the coloring of the eggs, the basket with the hollow chocolate bunny (one year the basket itself was made out of candy), the afternoon trip to Granny’s house. In my memories, Easter always happened on a warm spring day, although that couldn’t have been true every Easter.

I also sensed, however, that my emptiness really had little to do with my need for a chocolate bunny. There were other pictures in my mind, too, glowing pictures full of stained glass and candles, reminders of the mystery of Easter Sundays in church. Smells and sounds from worship remained alive in my mind, too, and they all came back to me at once.

“Resurrection of Christ,” Michelangelo, c. 1532

Those images, sounds and smells existed to declare a powerful message: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again. It’s a truth we should hear declared every Sunday, and it should be declared in an especially powerful way on Easter Sunday.

Yes, even for adults, the concept of the resurrection is a mystery. As a pastor, I try to explain as best I can that the resurrection is evidence sin and death have been defeated, and we have nothing to fear. But even the greatest theologians cannot fully explain the magnitude of what God is doing through the resurrection.

That’s a good thing; the mystery surrounding Christianity is evidence God, not humanity, is at work. We need to learn to revel in the fact God has done something inconceivably great and immeasurably loving through Jesus. Hey, that’s why we need the light, the smells and the music in worship. We’re trying to grasp a truth beyond words.

I say all of that to say this: Easter Sunday is April 5 this year. If you want to worship by coming to Luminary United Methodist Church, we’ll have a sunrise service outside (weather permitting) at 7 a.m., and worship services in the sanctuary at 8 a.m., 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. No special clothes or fancy hats required—just come expecting God to fill the emptiness.

Mark 16:1-8

Many scholars think the original version of the Gospel of Mark ends with its three women witnesses to the resurrection fleeing from the empty tomb. “And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid,” the closing line reads.

Yes, in all of our Bibles, there is more there in Mark, brief accounts of Christ’s resurrection appearances, his instructions and even his ascension. You don’t have to be an expert, however, to see how the writing seems different, how everything beyond verse 8 feels added on in some way. Indeed, the extra material cannot be found in most of the oldest manuscripts, and most good translations today mark “for they were afraid” as the original ending of Mark.

It makes for a relatively bleak Easter account, one noticeably different from the other gospels, where Jesus appears repeatedly, comforting his followers and offering them peace. The author of Mark may have been deliberately trying to communicate a different idea, however. His ending captured something we sometimes miss, the fear that must have run through Jerusalem when word of the empty tomb first began to spread.

Let me illustrate. I’m going to tell you a story that’s not exactly biblical. When you consider a couple of incidents that are in the Bible, however, a version of this story very well could have happened.

You may recall from Matthew that when Jesus was before Pontius Pilate to be sentenced to death, Pilate was reluctant to send Jesus to the cross, believing him innocent. Pilate passed sentence only because he felt politically pressured to do so. He also performed a symbolic act, however. He ritually washed his hands to show he did not consider himself guilty of Jesus’ death.

As he washed his hands, he declared to the crowd, “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves.”

We are told the crowd answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!” For all practical purposes, they were calling down curses on themselves.

Imagine, if you will, a father and mother in the crowd with their two children, a little boy and little girl. Led in what to say by powerful looking Jewish leaders and swept up in the mob mentality, they join the cry, nervously looking at their little ones: “His blood be on us and on our children!” It would have been a powerful oath to make, a powerful curse to risk, particularly for a people raised on the idea that God punishes sin for three generations or more.

Jesus, of course, is taken away and nailed to the cross. With the large number of witnesses, word of his death quickly spreads. The parents of these small children, perhaps a bit embarrassed at what they said, mostly are relieved the day’s strange events are over. Until …

Until Sunday. Until word begins to spread the tomb is empty. And everyone, everyone who doubted Jesus, everyone who had discounted him, feels a shiver of fear.

Imagine being those parents, looking at those precious children and considering what might be in store for this cursed family. Jesus demonstrated great power before; now it is clear he has power to overcome even his own death! What will the punishment be for those who sent him to the cross? Death for the son? Barrenness for the daughter?

Except for the fortunate few who encountered the resurrected Jesus, that fear must have continued for some time—for seven weeks, I figure, until the day of Pentecost. That’s the day the Holy Spirit falls on Jesus’ followers; that’s the day Peter preaches to the crowds who gather at the scene. I like to think the family with the two children are there as he preaches.

Oh, Peter lets them all have it. He makes it clear they were all complicit in Jesus’ death. But as they declare how they are cut to the heart with guilt, Peter begins to tell them about the promises. The resurrection is about hope. It is about a glorious future with God.

“For the promise ….” Hear what Peter says? The promise, not the curse. “For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him.” Imagine the relief as the parents grip their children close to them.

Here’s a strange notion: It is good to have the blood of Christ on us and our children. By his blood, all curses are reversed. The sin at the root of all our stupid decisions, our foolish statements and our bad acts is washed away. And eternity is ours.

John 20:19-31

Nonbelievers aren’t the only ones with doubts. People who call themselves Christian sometimes have doubts about Jesus, the resurrection, and how it all applies to them.

It’s not surprising we can struggle in such ways. The Easter story lives on the edge of fantasy—a man most undeniably dead leaves his rock-sealed, heavily guarded tomb and appears to hundreds in an indestructible state. Even more remarkable, we are to understand this event as a mere beginning, a foreshadowing of a radical change in creation that eventually will result in our own transforming, death-defeating resurrections.

Our doubts arise for a simple reason. Despite the promises of the Easter story, the world keeps smacking us around. We lose people close to us. Worry about the immediate future overwhelms us. Sometimes we simply experience intellectual doubt, our rational minds telling us to stick to what we can see as the basis for reality.

In today’s resurrection story in the Gospel of John, we find the disciple Thomas very doubtful. Thomas had seen the man he called teacher, Lord and master crushed by the power of the world, and he quickly fell into a rigid cynicism. Even when his fellow disciples excitedly told him they had seen the risen Christ, he was not impressed.

Let me see the hands, he said. Let me stick my fingers in that horrible wound in his side. I wonder if we’re supposed to read his words with a tone of bitter sarcasm. “Look, they riddled him with holes, including a spear-sized one running through his lungs and heart,” I hear him saying in the deepest, darkest corner of his soul. “You really think he is walking around?”

Thomas had to wait a week, but Jesus accommodated his request, appearing for his wavering disciple’s sake. Touch the wounds, Jesus said. Believe.

We see Thomas’ doubt cured. I believe that in this story we also can find a cure for our own doubts.

Even if we don’t see Christ physically present, our doubts can be relieved by an inner experience of God. That idea certainly fits with today’s story. Even the disciples needed to experience something more than the physical Christ to grasp the truth of Christ’s resurrection. This is why we have this account of Christ breathing on them, providing an early Pentecost, an experience of the Holy Spirit to sustain them.

The risen Christ breathes on us, too. We simply have to put aside doubt long enough to open ourselves to a similar encounter with the Holy Spirit, that aspect of God resident in Christ.

I am perplexed by how resistant people are to the simple acts that trigger the experience, even people who have long called themselves Christians. When I spend time with Christians struggling with doubt, I find they have a basic problem: They’ve forgotten how to spend time with the one who gave them their first taste of eternal life.

We encounter God most directly by spending time in prayer, learning the stories of the Bible, and worshiping so the Holy Spirit can work in us and through us as a group.

I know. I sometimes sound like a broken record with all this talk about praying, reading our Bibles and going to church. It is the Methodist in me. We suffer needlessly when we fail to methodically use the means God has given us to draw near him. When we do draw near, we allow God’s Spirit to whisper to our spirits.

Those who spend significant time in such activities can testify that the ensuing experience is as good as seeing Jesus in the room. Christ breathes on us, and doubt flees.

Luke 24:13-35

The seven-mile-long walk home to Emmaus from Jerusalem must have seemed daunting for two weary travelers, one known as Cleopas. They had been in the city as it went into an uproar over Jesus of Nazareth, its people finally succumbing to political intrigue and a spasm of emotion that led to Jesus’ crucifixion.

Just before leaving, they also heard wild stories that only disturbed them more, tales of a tomb flung open, visions of angels, and a dead man walking. Yes, they would travel the seven miles home, but when they got there, could they even sleep? Which would win out, weariness or worry?

A man joined them along the way. We know the story; we know he was Jesus. Why two people who had followed him could not recognize him is not clear. Perhaps it was their grief. Perhaps a resurrected body is different enough that it is not immediately associated with its mortal predecessor. Or perhaps God simply willed that their eyes be veiled for a time to enhance their understanding later.

The man, oddly enough, seemed ignorant of all that had transpired, despite traveling from the same place they had been. They explained what they had seen. He proceeded to make them feel ignorant.

“Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?” the man asked. He began to explain the Scriptures to them—he worked from what we would now call the Old Testament, of course—showing them the events of the previous days had to happen.

We don’t know what he specifically cited. Surely he mentioned Genesis 3:15, the condemnation of the serpent for bringing temptation to the garden: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike your head, and you will strike his heel.”

Also, the promise from God to Abraham in Genesis 12:3: “I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

They must have discussed Deuteronomy 18:15—”The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people; you shall heed such a prophet”—and how Jesus’ role exceeded even that of a prophet.

And of course, they would have discussed prophesies from Isaiah 9, 11 and 53. It was, after all, a long walk.

They must have been intrigued. And being good, hospitable Jews, the kind of Jews who would not leave a man to travel dangerous roads at night alone, they invited him into their home when they finally reached Emmaus.

The stranger must have seemed pushy when they sat down to share a little bread. He took the bread to bless it, a role usually performed by the host. And when he broke it—Jesus! They knew they had been walking with Jesus! And then he vanished!

A seven-mile-long walk back to Jerusalem should have seemed particularly daunting. They should have been exhausted. They should have been fearful, for it was night, and bad things happen on the road at night.

But they walked back down that road anyway—when you’ve experienced the risen Christ, there is no fear.

I suspect they ran as much of the road as they could. When they paused for breath, did they laugh as they gasped for air? Did they discuss how crazy this all would sound once they reached Jerusalem?

Know that Jesus walks with you. Through the revelation of the Bible we’ve already been given, see Jesus for who he is—experience his presence. Then run and tell others. Living the Christian life can be that simple.

There are stories in the Bible so powerful that I find it daunting to elaborate on them in any way. To do so is like standing in a gallery before a beautiful painting and breaking the holy silence by saying, “Note how the lines merge at this point.”

In this Easter season, I want to share with you such a text. It is, by the way, my favorite story in the Bible, the place I go for comfort. For me, it captures everything being revealed about God from Genesis to Revelation.

And yes, I feel like I’m already over-explaining it.

As a reader, do me a favor. I know we often read blogs as part of our hurried lives, our eyes racing over the words while our e-mail and texts beep for attention. Don’t do that today.

Please, either slow down or come back when you have more time, and carefully read John 21:1-19 the way you would read a really good novel. There are characters in pain in this story; remember, the disciples know Jesus is alive, but they also know they ran and hid when Jesus needed them most. And most of all, there is the resurrected Jesus, bringing healing.

—————–

Now that you’ve read it, let me share with you a few of the thoughts this text has given me over the years.

• Even when faced with miraculous evidence of God’s presence, the best of us, when confronted with our sinful weaknesses, may want to turn back to what we used to be.

• Because of the resurrection, we are a people of abundance. We simply have to see and accept that abundance.

• The resurrected Jesus is exalted and glorified, and yet he meets us where we are, with love, grace and forgiveness, even if the sin is abandonment and betrayal. (I wonder, had Judas lived, how would Jesus have offered him forgiveness?)

• And of course, as we are restored by Jesus, there is a mission—perhaps a difficult one—but a mission that gives us purpose beyond our former lives.

Because of Jesus, we know we worship a God of love, a God who asks only that we return to him by accepting the free gift of forgiveness and salvation. It’s also nice if we respond to the gift as best we can.

God forgive me if I just got in the way of a good story.

He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

Many of us who are Methodists make this statement every Sunday as part of the Apostles’ Creed. This declaration of the importance of “the ascension” seems to flow naturally from our affirmations that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins, and that he was resurrected from the dead.

In conversations with fellow churchgoers, however, it sometimes seems the ascension is more tightly wrapped in mystery than the idea of the crucifixion and resurrection. (Not that we can fully grasp those two astonishing ideas!)

As best we can, we want to understand all three ideas—crucifixion, resurrection and ascension—so we can see how they work together to make salvation possible.

The key to understanding the ascension is to comprehend what ascends, what is carried “up.”

Luke, a companion of the Apostle Paul, gives us accounts of the ascension in the end of the gospel of Luke and the beginning of the book of Acts. After appearing repeatedly to his followers in his resurrected form, Jesus led them about two miles outside Jerusalem to Bethany.

He then did several important things: He opened their minds to understand the Jewish Scriptures, in particular how they predicted Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. He told his followers they would spread throughout the world the good news that salvation is available. He promised them the Holy Spirit would come to empower and support them.

And then the ascension happened. It’s described a bit mysteriously; in Luke, Jesus “withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.” In Acts, we get a little more detail, where we learn “he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.”

When explaining all this to Luke, Jesus’ followers were trying to describe something almost incomprehensible, the visible crossing of Christ from one plane of existence to the next. They struggled for words as children sometimes struggle when confronted with a new idea.

A couple of years ago, at the funeral of my wife’s aunt, the preacher had a unique habit of kneeling whenever he prayed, even if he was standing behind the pulpit. At one point as he kneeled to pray, disappearing like a puppet behind a box, a three-year-old girl asked loudly, “Where’d he go?” I wonder if some of Jesus’ followers uttered a similar phrase in Aramaic as the Christ vanished from sight in such a mysterious way.

The point of the account as described by Luke is that Jesus physically left this world and entered the realm of the holy, God’s abode, the place where only things unstained by sin can go.

Later in Acts, the first martyr, Stephen, cried out shortly before being stoned to death, “Look, I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” From this we see that the earliest Christians understood that after the ascension, Jesus resumed his role as part of what theologians sometimes call the “Godhead,” God in all of his aspects.

So, why does it matter that Jesus ascended into heaven? Well, it matters because of what Jesus took with him—his resurrected human body. Human flesh now exists as part of the Godhead, a strange change in the nature of heaven. What was unacceptable anywhere near the throne is now on the throne.

And that is why salvation is now so easy for us, if we will only believe that Jesus died to free us from punishment for our sins. When we appeal to God in heaven, we are appealing to the one who loves us so much that he made himself like us in order to save us.

We’re also to understand that Christ’s return, perhaps to occur while we are all alive, will be a real, physical event, a moment when God-in-flesh will once again stand within his creation and claim it as his own.

I also should point out that the ascension left something of a void. For a brief time, humanity was again separated from the full presence of God. But then, just as Jesus had promised, something came down, another aspect of God, the Holy Spirit.

That’s an event we celebrate next Sunday, which is Pentecost.

John 6:24-35

Today is a communion Sunday. In just a little while, we will share some bread and some grape juice, and in doing so we are supposed to be drawn into the mystery of God’s work in the world.

Every time we perform this ritual, we all need to ask the same question. Do we get it? Are we penetrating the mystery deeply enough so that it changes our lives? I’m not saying we can grasp what is going on completely—I call this moment a “mystery” for a reason—but if we gather here and go through the motions of this act we call a sacrament, we want it to make some sort of a difference, right?

We don’t want to be like the crowd in our gospel reading today. We don’t want to be pursuing Jesus but completely missing the magnitude of his work.

A little background: Just before our reading in the Gospel of John, Jesus fed the 5,000 with five loaves and two fish. Sensing the crowd was about to seize him and declare him king, he withdrew to the nearby mountains. That evening, he walked on stormy water to catch up with his disciples who were crossing the Sea of Galilee by boat, arriving in Capernaum with them.

By the time we reach today’s story, the crowd had actually decided to pursue Jesus in a flotilla of boats, showing up in Capernaum themselves. Why? Well, they were thinking Jesus seemed a whole lot like Moses. Their stories told them Moses provided free food and liberated people from political oppression. Jesus certainly had provided a lot of free food recently. Even if he never got around to the liberation part, all the bread and fish you could eat seemed like a pretty good deal.

But when they again asked for a sign—what they meant was, give us more food—Jesus tried to adjust their perspective. In essence, he told them, your ancestors missed the big picture, and you are missing it now. It was God who sent the manna from heaven; it was God who provided the Israelites quail in the desert and water from a rock. And while those signs, like Jesus’ signs, were to demonstrate power, they were not an end unto themselves. God was doing something much bigger. God’s reach is far greater than we usually want to admit, touching every point in time and space.

In the case of the Israelites in the desert, God was trying to teach a group of people to follow and obey. They were a ragged bunch of recently freed slaves wandering the desert, doubting and arguing the whole way. And yet God could see how through them he could heal a fractured universe.

Jesus was trying to get the crowds to understand the bigger picture, too. Specifically, he wanted them to see that he was the Christ, the apex of the plan that was unfolding in the desert thousands of years before when manna fell from the sky. When Jesus said, “I am the bread of life,” and later, “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” he was saying, here is the great opportunity from God, the life-sustaining gift. Simply believe to receive.

The bread metaphor followed Jesus all the way to the cross. On the night in which he gave himself up to death, he took bread and broke it, using that simple act to show what would happen to his body because of our sins. The wine stood in for his blood.

And when the real body was broken and the precious blood was shed less than 24 hours later, everything changed. Sin was vanquished; the devil lost his hold on us as the holy, perfect God-man died like the worst of sinners. A night followed by another night followed by a glorious morning proved the victory over death in the resurrection.

Do you get it? Do you see how God has been at work from the dim moments of prehistory through Christ up to now to make it possible for all of us, each and every one of us, to be in union with him?

I know it’s hard to understand in full. I work with these ideas every day, and I cannot grasp them in full. To say you can understand God’s work in full is to claim you have the mind of God, that you can see the very fabric of the universe disrupted by sin and then put back together by a holy carpenter nearly 2,000 years ago—a carpenter still at work through the Holy Spirit in us today.

But we can get it in the sense that we can be in awe of what God has done and is doing. We can see past our immediate concerns and wants and live as people who know there is something more.

Members of this congregation (and readers of this blog) may have heard me tell this story before in other settings, but it bears repeating. About ten years ago, I learned the power of communion by taking it to an elderly couple who roomed together at a nursing home, sleeping on floor mats near each other. In an odd twist, both had developed dementia within about a year of each other, and by this visit, they could barely speak.

Having lost everything—possessions, positions, even knowledge of who they were—they responded to communion with the awe I have mentioned. The wife took communion first, leaning on one elbow, and said the only words she could find that day: “Hallelujah.” Her husband said nothing at all, but he too propped himself up and received the bread and juice eagerly. His wife watched from her mat and said the words for him: “Hallelujah. Hallelujah.”

When you come to take communion today, approach the table like people who have nothing. Upon taking communion, know you have everything. The God of the universe lives among us and has died for our sins. When we believe, we have eternity.

John 11:32-44

I am a big Star Trek fan. As a pastor and preacher, I am aware others may not share my love of these shows, so I put severe limits on how often I reference Star Trek in conversation, and certainly, in my sermons. I don’t want people’s first thought about their pastor to be, “What a geek!”

That said, I decided to use one of my Star Trek reference rations today. I recently was watching an episode from 1994, the last season of “The Next Generation” Star Trek series, the one with the bald-headed captain with the English accent. A scene brought to mind what we are doing as we gather here on this All Saints’ Sunday.

We are, of course, considering what it means to remember those who have passed on. And frankly, I was disappointed as I watched this episode with pastor’s eyes for the first time. If this episode were to truly represent the future, the future would be a bleaker time than what we experience now.

Oddly enough, this is one of the few episodes with at least an oblique reference to Christianity. It opens with a graveside service for the grandmother of the ship’s doctor. As the service concludes, the character filling the role a minister would normally play says, “And so, we now commit her body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope that her memory will be kept alive within us all.”

Pretty words, largely because they are rooted in a prayer that goes back centuries from our own time. But ultimately, they are hollow words. The prayer has been changed in one key way. That alteration represents a devastating shift in thinking and a loss of hope. (Odd for a show that is beloved because it so often projects hope.)

As we see in our Bible text today, Jesus confronted a similar loss of hope. From this text we get our shortest Bible verse, “Jesus wept.” I provided it in the King James Version so this one verse would come out the way people raised on childhood Bible drills in Sunday school would remember.

Jesus knew he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead. He made that clear before he ever headed for Bethany. And yet, before performing this great miracle, he cried in solidarity with the grieving people around him.

Jesus understood the deep pain we experience when we feel we have lost all hope. He shared that pain with his friends, even knowing the great healing he was about to perform. I take great comfort in knowing God doesn’t watch our pain from a distance and impassively; instead, as Jesus, God understands his creation’s suffering intimately. And when Jesus called, “Lazarus, come forth,” he replaced pain with hope.

Now, as spectacular as the event was, Jesus’ raising of Lazarus from the dead was a short-term fix, a microcosm of what was and is to come. We have no reason to believe Lazarus did not eventually experience death again, although I think probably at a ripe old age. Jesus’ greatest work remained.

Death met its resounding defeat in Christ’s resurrection from the grave—at that point, death lost any real grip on us. We are promised that through our belief in Jesus Christ, we will experience resurrection and eternal joy, too, even if our physical death comes before Christ’s return.

That truth should color our view of life, even when we do inherently sad activities like visit our loved ones’ graves. Some might find it strange, but I actually enjoy walking through cemeteries. The headstones (sometimes, you have to study them together as a family) often tell little stories. It is possible to imagine the broad outline of people’s lives—their loves, their relationships, their pain.

And so often, in the midst of one of those stories, you see evidence of Christ at work. Bible verses on tombstones tell us a lot. I particularly enjoy little inscriptions referencing the resurrection. They can be as short as “Rest in Peace,” an acknowledgement a person is in a physical and spiritual state that will result in renewed, eternal activity one day.

That’s why I didn’t like that alteration of the prayer in Star Trek. Just one clause was changed, but it is critical. How long can we truly live on in the memory of others? A couple of generations, maybe three at most?

The proper prayer, the prayer you can still hear at many funeral services today, goes this way: “And so, we now commit this body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of resurrection to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

As Christians, that is the prayer of hope we bring to the world.

Luke 24:1-12

In Luke’s version of the discovery of Christ’s resurrection, there are two “men” waiting at the tomb to announce that Christ has risen from the dead. I place “men” in quotation marks for a reason.

Luke also writes of their “dazzling” clothing and the stunned response of the women at the tomb. In describing their clothing, Luke uses the same Greek word here that he earlier used in 17:24 to describe a flash of lightning. Clearly, he wants us to understand that these “men” are angels.

When I hear this story, I wonder if angels find humans perplexing. Along with announcing the resurrection, these two angels find themselves called to restate what Jesus had already said several times. “Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and be crucified and on the third day rise.”

As the women ran back to tell the others, did one angel look at the other and say, “What did they expect?”

One of the angels could have noted the humans had hundreds of years of prophecy to guide them toward an understanding of what must happen to the Christ. For example, these Israelites would have repeatedly heard the words of Isaiah 53:10: “When his soul makes an offering for sin, he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days; the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.”

And then there are all those Psalms—16:10, for example. “For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption.”

“But that prophecy stuff is pretty vague for sin-cloaked humans,” the second angel might have countered. “They don’t see God the way we do.”

“Okay,” I imagine the first angel saying. “But then Jesus came along and performed all those miracles to demonstrate who he is. And then he said who he is. And then he told them again and again that he must die in Jerusalem and be raised from the dead.

“What did they expect? Did they think they would actually find his decaying body this morning?”

I also wonder whether angels find us perplexing in our modern day. First of all, reports of Jesus’ resurrection are widely available, in all four gospels and other New Testament writings. His resurrection is the centerpiece of history, shaping Western civilization. The power of this truth to spread globally is evidence something miraculous is happening.

Second, Jesus made promises that go far beyond his personal resurrection. He has promised that a day is coming when he will return, and his resurrection will then be ours, leading to eternal life or eternal punishment. “Stay dressed for action,” Jesus says in Luke 12:35.

Angels certainly must expect those of us who call ourselves Christian to take such an admonition seriously. And when we lapse into the short-sighted lifestyles we often lead today—lifestyles of hoarding and self interest, of lewdness and meanness—we must seem strange to heaven.

Easter is our chance to adjust our perspective, to see the big picture and make the truth of the resurrection a part of everything we do. With the Holy Spirit’s help, perhaps we can even see the world with the eyes of the angels.

This is the first in an Easter season series on Revelation.

Revelation 1:4-8

When I was in seminary, one of my pastoral duties was to provide support for a very large assisted-living apartment complex in Lexington, Ky.  A dozen ladies there asked if I would lead them in a Bible study focused on the Book of Revelation.

What surprised me was the reason they wanted to have the study. In short, they were afraid.

At the time, there was a lot of talk about Revelation, in particular because a set of books known as the “Left Behind” series had been getting a lot of attention. Not one of these ladies could have been younger than 80, and I’m sure most of them had been going to church most of their lives. But all of a sudden, what is essentially the end of the biblical story kept them awake at night.

That was when I first began to understand that teaching—or in this case, preaching—is a special case where Revelation is involved. A lot of Christians have poorly formed or misinformed ideas about the book, and I generally have to convince people to put their preconceived notions aside if we are going to travel to the place Revelation wants to take us.

The author’s name is John, a man we know to have been imprisoned for his faith on the island of Patmos. He may or may not have been the Apostle John; that matter is highly debatable, although ultimately irrelevant to the message the book sends. John’s point in writing Revelation was to communicate a powerful vision he had to churches who apparently knew of him.

The first thing I want to note is how, in his greeting to the churches, he used a couple of important words to set the tone for his vision. “Grace to you,” he told them. “Peace.” And he rooted this greeting in the holy, loving nature of God, as expressed in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

His greeting expressed freedom, particularly freedom from the power of sin. John spoke of power and hope for Christ’s followers, not punishment. Fear was not an emotion he seemed to be trying to elicit.

John’s greeting continues to remind us of where our story is headed. Christ will return in a most undeniable way. The “tribes of the earth” may wail, but only because they failed to acknowledge a great truth still serving as the core of our faith, the truth of Jesus Christ as savior for all of humanity.

These words of hope and peace make Revelation a wonderful way to explore the continuing Easter season. Christ’s resurrection was just a beginning, a promise of more to come. A remaking is underway, and it will continue until it ends with everything in heaven and earth conformed to the will of God, made holy by the sacrificial work of Christ on the cross.

I want you to keep that good news of the ultimate outcome in mind as we go through the next few weeks. Because, again, Revelation is a strange book, and it is easy to become confused.

Part of the problem arises because we have no other forms of literature like it. Westerners try to read it like a story, a standard kind of narrative familiar to our culture, but it was never intended to be read in such a way.

Instead, it is:

A special genre known as “apocalyptic.” Time flows differently than it does in a standard Western narrative. Viewpoints shift from heaven to earth with little warning. Reading Revelation as a straightforward narrative can generate some bad theology.

Highly symbolic. Very little of it is intended to be taken literally, but at the same time, there’s a deeper meaning communicated by the symbols. For example, after the text we’re hearing today, John launches into a vision of Christ in heaven. This description symbolically shows our Savior’s deeper nature—his purity, his all-knowing mind, and his uttered words as the purest truth, capable of cutting through worldly confusion.

An invitation to imagine. Apocalyptic literature was written for audiences facing persecution. They were being asked to see a better day, a great Day of the Lord promised since the Old Testament. We also are being invited to imagine and work toward the same dream.

Back to my ladies in Bible study: When we were finished studying Revelation, one of the oldest ones, a lady around 90, came up to me with tears in her eyes. “I’m not afraid any more. It’s about joy!” she said.

I pray that when we’re done with this series, we will all feel the same way.