Happy Easter!
When it comes to Lent, Holy Week and Easter, we are reminded that the seasons
of the church year are more about the seasons, the fluctuating temperatures
and changing pressures of our inner dispositions and human relationships than
about a calendar that sets when leaves will fall or new shoots spring forth.
Furthermore, some of what becomes our most vital growth starts off looking like
feared death. Yes, while we are worrying about the point at which life ends
and death begins, God is there creating, no matter what. So the seasons are
not as fixed as we think; and, of course, neither is God. When we are fixated
on determining for others where the line between right behavior and sin is,
there’s Christ drawing a line in the sand, getting people to drop stones
in favor of allowing hearts to beat. And just when you thought you had gotten
your spirituality properly ordered, so that you could fell you are faithfully
waiting for God, there’s the Holy Spirit suggesting you get up and do
something for Christ’s sake!
Get up; rise up! Resurrection is what we are all about, even in these down-turned
times. Such times confronted the Apostle Paul in his leadership of the ancient
church. Depressed times threatened to deflate the people’s faith. He records
in his letters an occasion when the church in Corinth was showing signs of a
receding spirit. The people were saying to him, “What if we are not raised;
what if we do not experience the Resurrection; what if our faithfulness doesn’t
bring about God’s New Creation?” Paul wrote to them right away,
with a very stern comment. You might expect his retort to have been something
like this; “If you are not raised, if you are not saved, then it is because
you are not worthy, your faith is not strong enough.” But, that is not
what Paul says. Rather, Paul responds, “If it happens that you are not
raised from the dead, then it’s because Christ wasn’t either!”
Can you sense how Paul has played with the people’s question in order
to stimulate their faith? He is trying to rebuild their confidence. “If
you are not raised, it’s because there was no resurrection for Jesus.”
In other words, he is saying, this isn’t about your fault or your worthiness.
God has already injected God’s self into history and God didn’t
send the Son to give us yet one more testimony to what we already know—that,
at worst, we hurt and kill each other and, at best, our best efforts to help
others don’t always work and never eliminate the possibility of new problems.
That is, God didn’t enter into the conditions of our humanity in order
to repeat history. No, rather, God makes a bold move to get us to shake off
lifestyles of resignation, like so much dirt from the grave, and to come out
from our tombs of “make do”.
Paul’s challenge to the church: Recognize that Christ’s resurrection
is not a prize at the end of time if we are good enough. The rising with Christ
is already our life source. God’s New Creation is already here; it’s
not about “making do” but making new.
The Resurrection is not a promise we await while riding out the hard times.
Christ’s new life is the gift that motivates our living now.
Resurrection Life: not a reservation for the future, not hope in a better future—trusting
in eternity—abiding this earth now, entering God’s heaven later;
but the Eternal Now—Resurrection Life: converting hope into the energy
of committed action. What God has already done, once for all in Christ, is our
energy source.
Jesus did not come into the world to teach, heal, inspire, die and rise for
us then to sit back, watch his going and then wait for his coming again in some
sort of repetitive rescue scenario. No, his loving us to the end and rising
again transforms us into New Creation, starting now. That’s why Paul says
to the church, “Christ is raised and you shall have a resurrection body
like his.”
What does the Resurrection Body look
like? The Risen Christ looks like the person who has just gone through quadruple
joint surgeries who was determined to be amidst this Easter congregation, just
as much as the Risen Body looks like the woman in pain who wanted to be here
this morning but her continuing circulatory disease crippled her ability. Yet,
propped up in her bed, no sepulcher, we hear her exclaim “He is risen;
God is good.”
The Resurrection Body sounds like the very young children who throughout the
Liturgy of the Word can be heard crying or laughing or exclaiming, “I’m
bored… (or) Is it time to go home yet?” but, during The Peace, one
of them at two years old, is toddling the center aisle looking to exchange a
holy greeting. There’s also the equally young boy who, after telling his
mother “no…no…no” to her requests that he keep quiet,
comes to the communion rail with cupped hands outstretched for God’s food.
The Resurrection Body sounds like the choir, which reaches notes that reach
you where you live, or where you lived when your loved one was alive, or where
you know you yet want to live.
This is not sentimentality, wishful thinking or dumbing down Resurrection. For
such individual resurrection appearances to us call up the Holy Spirit in and
between us, raising us up into the Body of Christ, giving us new eyes to see
the Resurrection Body that sleeps curled in darkened doorway or wandering the
streets, wondering why they don’t offer Easter dinners the way soup kitchens
do at Thanksgiving. The church as Resurrection Body has new courage to ask why
education and childcare are the first cuts, even in good economic times, or
why bombs are more evident and guns more available than are renewable resource
strategies and affordable medicine.
Not that living the Resurrection Life will eradicate disease in our lifetime
or the next. And walking around in a resurrection body could well expose you
to suspicion and target you for ridicule. After all, you won’t be the
life of the cocktail party in your resurrection body reminding people that a
war in Afghanistan is not more moral than a war in Iraq. War is war and we cannot
use the recession to shield us from violence and bloodshed.
Living in the resurrection body delivers bread and wine, promises flesh and
blood, real people alive, really present to help other people in need. The Resurrection
Body is not in the habit of looking to the future with the question What will
God do for us next? But rather gets down on its hands and knees now so as to
leave a resurrection blessing with others.
The Resurrection Body
is audacious; is humble.
The Resurrection Body is peaceful; is militant about peace.
The Resurrection Body is what happens when heaven and earth, kissing at Christmas,
grows up, lives, dies, is born anew.
The Resurrection Body cannot be cloned, drafted, disenfranchised, marginalized,
down-sized, ordered on-line, or ordered out of Dodge by Noon!
The Resurrection Body is God’s way of gathering us up when we have lost
our way, is God re-centering our living and our dying in Christ who is our life.
And the truth, the Christ-centered beating heart truth of our life in the Resurrection
Body is that we are all made for each other. AMEN.
©Thomas F. Reese
12 April 2009