Three Times of Resurrection

Easter Sunday April 11, 2004

Acts 10:34-43; Psalm 118:14-17,22-24; Colossians 3:1-4; Luke 24:1-10

I don’t know if it was something he picked up living in the fairly "high church" diocese of Chicago, but my father taught us that instead of saying "good morning" or "Happy Easter" on Eater morning, the appropriate greeting was, "The Lord is risen", to which the appropriate response was "He is risen indeed!"

Let’s practice:

The Lord is risen - He is risen indeed.

Good – that makes me feel a little like a real preacher. It makes me feel a little like my dad.

There are three times of resurrection.

One is in the past. The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth who "suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified , died and was buried, and the third day he rose again…..", the first Easter, wherein the Christian faith arose as well. That place, that time, is the source of our tradition: a tradition that involves the transcendence of place and time, but never its abandonment. It’s the tradition of which Peter speaks as foundational for the Church.

I remember when I was in college studying Indian religion, and very taken with the Hindu notion of the ultimate God – Brahman. Non-dual, without qualities, the impersonal source of the wholeness of the universe, which was essentially one with the innermost self. Being good Episcopalians, my parents invited the local university chaplain over to see just how far off base I’d gone and to debate the case for Christianity on what they, flattering to me, felt was a comparable philosophical level. I remember that he focused on this idea of the personality of God. I remember him arguing that the Christian God, being personal, was superior to the Hindu idea of God, since personality was better than impersonality. I remember disagreeing with him, at least inwardly, since in spite of my outward show of sophomoric sophistication and arrogant philosophizing, I didn’t really like myself very much. Personality seemed too messy to be the bearer of ultimate truth, too chaotic and imperfect. Real life was, for me at least, a spiritual embarrassment.

I think, in some ways, we feel the same way about history. It seems so limited, almost absurd, to see one point in time as the focus for divine revelation. And the whole history, really, of our church tradition is filled with similar embarrassing moments: from the Hebrew’s genocide of the native populations as they entered the Holy Land, to the crusades and conquistadors who were motivated far more by greed than piety, to the patriarchal pomp and falseness of so much of the church….the role playing and game playing, catering to the elite of each era with all our social and political and economic compromises. History is messy, as messy as the personalities that inhabit it. But it’s part of who we are. And, in some way or another, it provided the crucial context for resurrection. It tells us that it’s not in "spiritual" escape from the messiness of life that we find God, but right in its midst, with all its embarrassing features, all our embarrassing features as the building blocks of divine creation and salvation.

Our faith connects us to that time, and brings that time into our lives as a people of that resurrection.

But that’s not the only resurrection, and faith is not the only, or even really the primary, attitude governing our Christian life.

The idea of resurrection, as it emerged in post-exilic Judaism, was always associated with the end of time. The resurrection of Jesus, for the early Church, basically marked the beginning of the end.

I think that now the most common Christian belief is that the resurrection is something that happens at the end of an individual life, rather than the end of time.

But whether it is at the end of the age or the end of our life, resurrection is seen as a future event. And the primary attitude with respect to such a future is one of hope.

Hope in the resurrection was all that sustained most people during much of Christian history when life was very hard and death and suffering much closer at hand, more palpable and inevitable than they seem to be today.

But it is really very interesting. Even as day to day life has become easier in the modern world the centrality of hope has not been left behind. In fact, it’s become stronger. Even for people who aren’t particularly religious the idea of a new life, the focus on a goal, the idea that "what you see now, what you have now, is not what you have to settle for," has been brought down from heaven to earth to become the main motivating attitude in our society.

We plan. We invest. We save. We build. All because we believe the future will be better. And that approach to life began with the hope of the future resurrection.

I had a point in my life when I could have been hopeless. I had been suspended from ministry. My marriage had failed. But something in my faith, something I may not have, at the time, even recognized as faith kept hope alive. And the hope kept me going until I was restored to the ministry, called to a new parish, and began a new marriage. For me that’s been a miracle of resurrection. And in my continued hope it’s only a small taste of what is to come.

As Christians we can have a sense of hope and possibility throughout our life. We need never feel lost. We need never despair. We need never feel abandoned. And not even death puts an end to this resurrection hope. That’s what the letter to the Colossians is about today. God isn’t finished with us yet – not nearly.

And yet resurrection is also very near. It isn’t only past or future – it’s now. Here and now.

Jesus said, "I am the resurrection and the life." Jesus said, "today you will be with me in paradise." The angels said to the women at the tomb, "Why do you seek the living among the dead?" We say "The Lord is risen….. He is risen indeed."

Resurrection in the here and now opens to us the presence of eternity. Our normal sense of time as flowing and passing, of the past being gone and the future as not yet, is essentially an illusion brought on by the limitations of our self-centered consciousness. It would be as if I believed that since I left Iowa in 1985, Iowa ceased to exist, or that until I go home to Pacific Grove this afternoon, Pacific Grove doesn’t yet exist. For God – that is in ultimate reality, in ultimate truth – there is no time as we know it, no flow of time, no passing of time, there’s only the fullness of time. And that’s the resurrection. It’s in that resurrection, resurrection here and now in the eternal here, the eternal now that we realize our full life in communion with God.

Such a realization has tremendous effect.

So much of life is crippled by fear. We fear terrorism and death. We fear high gas prices and job loss. We fear the collapse of our health care system and the institution of marriage. (I mean we fear the collapse of the institution of marriage). War comes from fear. Much illness comes from fear. All hatred and prejudice come from fear.

But just as a sense of the resurrection in the past calls forth faith, and a sense of the resurrection in the future calls forth hope, the realization of our participation in the resurrection now calls forth love – perfect love – and "perfect love casts out fear." In the perfect love of the resurrection in the here and now, we can transform our usual re-action to people and things and thoughts and emotions into action through which we become co-creators with God, tying together with our risen lives, the past and the future, into the wholeness of heaven.

As we heard once again this week, and as we know from the struggles of our own lives, it takes the cross to get there. But the prize is worth the price.

In speaking these words I can only point. Whenever we think we have the resurrection defined, described, pinned down or penned up with words, our faith, hope and love objectified – we kill it. So we point – and we worship -- and we sing -- and we make Eucharist.

In a little while we’ll come to the altar. We’ll share in bread and wine as Jesus did with his disciples in the past. And in doing so, we’ll have what’s been called "a foretaste of the heavenly banquet." But mostly we gather in the eternal now to share in communion the presence of resurrection as we incorporate the strength of the body and the life’s blood of Christ, to go forth and proclaim the good news of love to a world that so desperately needs it.

The Lord is risen. He is risen indeed.

Thanks be to God.