The Resurrection: In Accordance with The Scriptures (part of a sermons series with the Rev. Canon Dane Boston)
This afternoon, in continuing the series begun so brilliantly by my colleague last week as Dane preached on Jesus’ bodily resurrection, I will focus on how Jesus’ resurrection is Scriptural. Continue reading
Earlier this week, everybody’s favorite scientist from the 1990s, Bill Nye, went head-to-head with Ken Ham, founder of the Creation Museum. It was the sort of showdown that you hoped both sides knew better than to engage, and yet there they were on network television on Tuesday night. They were there to try to settle once and for all whether the world was created by God or came to be through evolution.
The problem that neither one seemed to notice, however, is that effectively, one of them came with a goalie stick, full hockey pads, and a helmet, while the other one came dressed ready to play catcher in a game of baseball. They were both well-prepared, they had worked through all the proper arguments, each one was well-versed in the game that he was ready to play.
The problem is that they were ready to play different games, and even worse, they’d both showed up on a soccer field. Let me explain:
Bill and Ken have gotten caught up in “lofty words” as Paul puts it in today’s Epistle lesson; they’re trying to use “plausible words of wisdom” to explain the “mystery of God.” In 1 Corinthians, Paul cautions us against this kind of attempt, knowing that few, if any, converts have ever been made through intellectual persuasion or clever reasoning. Paul explains to his friends in Corinth that when he came to witness to them as a missionary, “[he] decided to know nothing among [them] except Jesus Christ, and him crucified’ (1 Cor. 2:2).
If you’ll excuse the crassness of the analogy, the mystery of God is the soccer field. So if we’re not playing hockey, and we’re not playing baseball, how can we find and put on our soccer cleats instead?
We live in a world where knowledge is power. Paul’s world wasn’t much different in this way; the educated people were the ones who held powerful offices in the government and in the community, and as Paul is quick to remind the Christians in Corinth, these powerful people were exactly the ones who sentenced Jesus to death (1 Cor. 2:8). In the first century, as today, we learn from a very young age that there is a price to pay for doing something wrong. We’re located just across the street from the Supreme Court of South Carolina; we know well that there are consequences for our wrong actions.
But what happens when Jesus comes on the scene? There are plenty of questionable women, shifty businessmen, and mentally-ill people who have been shoved to the edges of the community, paying the price for their wrong actions. Jesus walks straight toward them, embraces the ladies of the night, goes to dinner at the crooked shopkeeper’s house, and opens his arms to those who are made helpless by problems with their minds. We don’t see consequences, we see love.
What does Paul mean when he says he knew only Jesus Christ and him crucified? This is the Gospel. This is why we come to church on Sundays, why we pray, why we do hard, good things like asking each other’s forgiveness, like forgiving someone who doesn’t ask, like getting married, like continuing to keep your word by showing up even if there’s no one to notice you’re there.
The mystery of God is contained in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. We believe that God walked among us in a person, Jesus. We believe that God’s way of living is so unreasonable in the middle of a consequence-ridden world that through our fellow human beings back in the first century, and through our own sinfulness today, Jesus was killed (1 Cor. 2:8). We believe that even when evil did its worst—when the wise and powerful of first-century Judea murdered God incarnate, God brought Jesus back to life. Jesus submitted himself to consequences even though he spent his whole life forgiving everyone else’s.
This mystery doesn’t change. We see echoes of it in the Old Testament, when God tells Abraham that somehow, a child, a son, will be born of two very old shriveled up bodies–the unreasonable, the impossible—our living God makes it happen. The birth of Isaac, along with other Old Testament stories, point toward Jesus’ resurrection–these are not the sort of “plausible words of wisdom” that Paul speaks about as the stumbling block in Corinthians; they are, as Paul puts it “a demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (1 Cor. 2:4).
We’re not supposed to be able to explain everything in our world, how it came to be, how it all adds up. We are supposed to witness to how it is that God builds a relationship with each one of us. Our hope is not in words like “evidence” or “proof,” words that have come to bear a lot of weight in our society.
The living God, who we have all come to worship and encounter here today, sets for us the example of forgiving every person who hurts us, of not holding a grudge against anyone. This God loves us just as much, whether we choose to pray and to study his Word, or to profess that he does not exist. None of this, none of the Gospel, makes sense to us in a world where there’s always a price to pay if we’ve done something wrong.
This grace—the mystery of God’s love for us—cannot be explained away in a primetime debate, nor can it be put into words very well at all, despite our great literary efforts over the last many centuries. God’s grace is best known by its being shown to us in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, God incarnate.
God shows us that there is no power, no evil, stronger than himself. Though we may feel helpless to our sins, unable to control our reactions, unable to forgive or let go, as if we can’t escape the way this world teaches us about consequences—despite all this–we prayed at the very beginning of our time together this morning that God would set us free. We asked God to loose the bonds of sin that tie us up, the ways that we hurt each other and hang on to hate. We asked God to then fill us up with his grace, with the abundant life that he first revealed fully in Jesus Christ.
“Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit that is from God, so that we may understand the gifts bestowed on us by God” (1 Cor. 2:12). Amen.
A few weeks ago, there was a mindfulness retreat in Asheville, led by the yoga teacher who made it all click for me last summer, and though I desperately wanted to learn more from her, I couldn’t go (you know, occupational responsibilities, like, Sunday morning).
After the retreat, she posted about the weekend on facebook, commending mindfulness as “where it’s at.” I lay in bed with my phone very early Sunday morning, wishing I could have been there and learned something with that community, and I commented, “what should I read to learn more?” I could almost see my teacher smiling compassionately as her comment appeared, “find a quiet place, sit comfortably, breathe, let go!” I rolled my eyes–of course!–I wanted to study the practice of meditation and to learn about mindfulness, but doing the actual thing? Learning by practicing? No, no, that was too hard. It was much easier to let my mind just run about while I dove into a book, or let my thoughts wander around while I discussed the theory.
That’s what Paul’s telling us this afternoon about the cross (1 Corinthians 1:10-18). For many reasons, we’ve become a people who believe that knowledge is power. We’ve seen how our medical advances save, or at least prolong, life. We pay lots of money for diplomas on our walls that symbolize years of reading, writing, and testing. Our obsession with study and learning, while they are goods, can begin to blind us to the Gospel. I do not believe that being a “thinking church” or the “church where you don’t have to check your brain at the door” is a badge of honor; it is a condemnation.
God did not come into the world as a scholar, though he has all knowledge. When God the Father sent his Son to be among humanity, and to be human himself, he did not set his kid up in the hotbed of intellectualism, or in the most prestigious city in the world. God showed by his example in Jesus’ life that knowledge is not the core of our faith.
A former rector of mine always used to say that, “the Episcopal Church is David dancing before the Lord.” We understand grace; we depend on it–we dance because of it! What a beautiful gift for our brothers and sisters in other denominations in Christ’s regrettably divided body. However, as Paul said elsewhere, though everything is permissible, not everything is beneficial (1 Cor. 10:23); sometimes our deeply-held belief in the grace poured out for us, we think that we decide to believe whatever else we want, because of the grace safety-net. We can slurp up the newest theories of Jesus’ wife, or find the “real person”-Jesus behind the text, we can obscure the view of Jesus’ death on the cross all together with the more pressing, more important matters of social justice. Again, Paul says, “while physical training is of some value, godliness is valuable in every way, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come” (1 Timothy 4:8).
Our first charge as disciples of Jesus is to sit at the foot of the cross. Jesus’ sacrifice of love through his death on the cross is the foundation of our faith. “The wisdom of the cross stands against worldly wisdom” (Feasting on the Word Commentary, Year A, Volume 1, pg 282; Timothy F. Sedgwick). We understand God’s love not by reading about it, or by studying the details of the Gospel accounts; we learn by practicing. We sit, and stand, and bow, and kneel in front of the altar, the most-ancient symbol of sacrifice. It is at the altar, the table–the cross–where God, through Jesus shows us the Good News. The Gospel is that we are no longer helpless to evil, there is no longer any reason that we should drown and die in our sins. The one person in the history of the world who had the power to fight evil from the beginning, the one person who lived a perfect, blameless, sinless life–he died a violent death for each of us.
Jesus taught using words on the Mount, in the Temple, on the road, and on the sea, but we do not spend every Sunday remembering any one of those places or moments. The most important moment was not when disciples’ minds were being given a work out, the most important moment was when Jesus gave himself up to death, even death on a cross, because of God’s great love.
When the church tries to argue its way into converts, it will always lose. Our world doesn’t set us up to understand the Gospel as making sense and as the respectable thing to do. Our world is a place of division and dissension; just as Paul talks about in the Epistle lesson today–how the church in Corinth was prioritizing their spiritual lineage over their identity as Jesus’ disciples. I wonder how much we prioritize our lineage as Episcopalians, or as Methodists, or as Roman Catholics above our identity as belonging to Jesus Christ because of his life in backwoods-Nazareth, his death on the cross and sacrifice on the altar/table, and because of his resurrection from death, the complete triumph over evil on Easter Day.
Each time we celebrate the Eucharist, we gather together, sitting quietly at the foot of the cross, waiting for God to reveal himself to us again, to enlighten our hearts with his saving grace. May we be ever-humble, knowing that we do not have the whole picture, eager for the reunion of all the disparate pieces of Jesus’ body, the church, throughout the world, and placing our trust and faith in Jesus Christ alone.
hope of things not seen 