GOD’S NEW THING
First Congregational Church of Evanston
April 8, 2007 (Easter – Resurrection Sunday)
Luke 24:1-12 and Isaiah 65:17-25
Rev. Dr James E. Roghair, Interim Minister
Isaiah 65:17- 18 For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind. But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating ...
Why Are You Here?
Here we are today. I am an interim minister in this church, and so this is my first Easter here. It is not my first Easter in ministry – I’ve been at it a long time. But it is my first Easter here in this First Congregational Church of Evanston. But I do not feel like a stranger, here. And the celebration of Easter is not new to me. No, because wherever we go in the Church, the story of the Resurrection is the central story of faith.
Here you are today. How did you come to be here? What does it mean to you to be in worship on the day of Resurrection? I know some of you very well, I see you here every week, and it’s great to see you today. You and others who may be out of town today, are the backbone of this church. You sing in the choir. You teach Sunday School. You usher. You make pledges and pay the bills. You do this all lovingly because this is your church.
Others of you are here less often, maybe you haven’t been here since last Easter. To you we say, “Greetings, it’s good to have you back.” We pray that the hope and the joy of this Easter day will be pervasive in your life – that it will make a difference in your life, not just between now and your Easter dinner, but every day of the year. Is this your church? Some of you say “Yes,” others say “No, not yet,” and still others say, “We are not sure how to answer that. Explain the question.”
Some of you are here for the first time. Perhaps you are in Christian worship for the first time, ever. Or maybe it’s been years since you worshiped. But maybe you feel strangely at home here, anyway. It’s as if this is a place of deja vu. It’s like a place you have known well – a place you miss and would like to return – or a place you wish you could return to, but know you can’t.
Or maybe you are strangely uncomfortable here today, because you didn’t know what to expect and don’t really know why you came. That’s OK, too. You won’t be put on the spot. To all of you we say in the name of Jesus Christ, “How wonderful to have you here today!” May the wonder of this day be yours. May the joy of the Resurrection surround you with its hope and its peace.
Passover
This is a very special day, and so I am reminded that when the Jewish family gathers around the table for the Passover, the adult who is leading the celebration, asks the youngest child, “Why is this night different from every other night?” And the child begins to tell the old, old story of God’s rescue of the Hebrew people from their slavery in Egypt. Of how God took those scraggly, uneducated, and uncertain tribes of slaves and molded them into God’s people. The story of their Exodus from Egypt is the story of God’s salvation. The story of the Exodus is the beginning of the Jewish Faith.
For Christians the story of Easter has that same seminal character. Jesus was a wandering rabbi in Palestine. He taught as rabbis do, and he healed the sick. He taught people to love God and to love their fellow human beings. These teachings are cornerstones of the Hebrew/Jewish faith. And they were the center of Jesus’ teachings: Love God, Love your neighbor. Jesus faced the torture of the Roman government with the collusion of Jewish authorities who were under the thumb of Rome. Jesus was put to death. His band of followers were devastated. They were ready to go back to their former lives – victims of yet another failed attempt to make the world a better place.
But something amazing happened to them. They began to experience the presence of Jesus – to believe that he was among them again – alive again. He wasn’t with them as he had been before, but he was present. And they were changed it was not very easily explained.
Paul’s is one of the earliest written records we can read about the resurrected Jesus. Paul speaks of a spiritual body – as different from the original body as a planted grain of wheat is from the wheat that will grow. John writes that Jesus appears among the disciples as they met in a locked room. And Luke tells of a stranger who traveled along the road to Emmaus and is known only through the breaking of bread.
The experience of the resurrection was a real spiritual experience, but not to be explained. But that band of forlorn and timid followers of Jesus became a formidable force that changed the world! The one who denied even knowing Jesus, and the ones who fled when Jesus was in trouble, became a bold and forceful group within days. They began to change the world.
Physics or Spirit of Resurrection
So here we are gathered in 2007 – not to proclaim to you the physics of the resurrection. Not to ask you to believe in something that you can’t possibly believe. But to proclaim what the church has always known since the very beginning, that Jesus’ death became not the end of his ministry, but a new beginning! That the prophet from Galilee, who should have been forgotten in a few weeks or at least a few years, has become known as the Son of God and the King of Kings. We will sing it today, with Christians down the ages using Handel’s musice: Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
Resurrection is a spiritual victory – not something to explain in scientific language – something to proclaim in the language of faith – a language of the spirit. Sometimes the language of the spirit collides with other languages we know. We can’t explain it, and we shouldn’t try. But as the church has always known, spiritual language is the language of meaning.
Scandals
Perhaps you saw the article in Newsweek recently, or heard about it in some other media. Bone jars (ossuaries) possibly containing the bones of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and others of Jesus’ family have been found in graves in Jerusalem! What do you think of that? Of course with an announcement like that sparks begin to fly. It is predictable.
I try not to be cynical, but it is amazing to me how Newsweek (and others) seem to come up with something like this every Lenten season. I believe it was the Da Vinci Code last year, or was that the year before? There was the movie The Passion of the Christ. The media knows how to itself. It is predictable.
The sparks fly because the resurrection of Jesus the Christ is one of the central tenants of traditional Christian faith. It was faith in the resurrection – that gave the earliest disciples the strength to move forward, and to eventually become the dominant religious movement in the world.
But what does it mean to believe in the resurrection? Here we are 20 centuries later. And what are we to believe? A joke has been going around that if Paul Tillich, one of the twentieth century’s premier theologians, (and one I have found personally greatly influential) ... if Tillich had heard about the bone jars found in Jerusalem, he might have said, “So, Jesus was real, after all!”
How are we to know what to believe about the resurrection? What is it that we can know, and what is it that we have to simply take on faithm, or live with, in faith?
We live in a time and a place quite separate from the early Christians. And yet for some contemporary people, there can be no questioning or even discussion of what the resurrection stories actually mean. The stories are to be taken at face value as historical fact. End of discussion. Period.
But for others, there is more to say. I have been interested this past year to read John Dominic Crossan’s The Birth of Christianity: discovering what happened in the years immediately after the execution of Jesus. It is a thick and scholarly book – one that takes me back into worlds I can hardly imagine. And there I find a world view so different from the world we live in – a world of mystery and wonder – where the dead regularly appeared to the living – it was common experience.
But the dominance of the appearances of this particular dead person, Jesus of Nazareth, to the people who weren’t necessarily expecting anything from their dead friend – turned them into a power group that no one could have predicted. And wherever they went and whatever they did, the felt the presence of Jesus anew. It was particularly true when they broke the bread and shared the cup that he was present and alive. He directed their lives. In Jesus, God was doing a new thing in the lives of the believers!
So when they looked back at the stories of Jewish faith – the story of the Exodus – God’s salvation of the Hebrew slaves. The Christian believers knew that God was doing something like that in their midst. Jesus was the new Moses – coming back from the dead to save them.
And when they read poetry about the salvation of the Jewish exiles in the third part of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah – those prophecies written in the dark days just before the Exiles were to go back to Jerusalem – the Christians knew that God was doing a new thing among them like the acts of God among the exiles.
They read in Isaiah’s prophecy: “... I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind...” And the Christians knew this was their experience, too. John quoted it in the Book of Revelations and Handel quotes Revelations in the Messiah. The early Christians suffered much for their faith. But the wonder of God’s new thing – what God was doing in their midst, sustained them.
First Congregational Church
So here we are gathered as First Congregational Church – those I know pretty well, those I see from time to time, and those I’ve never met before. You are listening to this Interim Pastor, you’ve met a few months ago at best, or perhaps a few minutes ago, who will not be here long term.
Is it a time of serendipity, or is it a time of confusion? Is it a time for hunkering down and saying, “I don’t know what to believe or where the church is going. Call me when things are more settled and life is more predictable.” Or is it a time for saying, “Surely God is doing a new thing here. We don’t know for sure what it is, nor where it is all going, but the Spirit of God is moving in ways God has not moved for a long time.” Me? I believe the Spirit of God is moving here. The God of resurrection is alive. I invite you to open yourselves to the Spirit.
The sorrowing female disciples went to the tomb to do the only things they knew how to do – to bring the spices to take care of the body, but they were caught up in a whole new thing that they had no control over. Just so, I invite you to open yourselves to God’s new moving of the Spirit, present in this place as we gather. We say the words of faith the only way we know how: “Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed.”
Just as no one could have anticipated the experience of the women and their male counterparts, so no one here can predict what you will experience when you go about doing what you do – bringing spices? Perhaps. Maybe something else. But here in the normalness of it all, the Spirit breaks in and reminds us that God is doing a new thing,
A Story of Faith
I want to share with you a story from a book I’ve been reading, by Dorothy Butler Bass, Christianity for the Rest of Us: how the neighborhood church is transforming the faith. This is a book that may have great significance for this church as you move ahead. It is a study of faithful Mainline Protestant churches. Here is the story:
Deanna did not grow up as a Christian, or in any religion. A few years ago, when she decided to join Phinney Ridge [Church in Seattle], she called her parents – one in Washington, the other in North Carolina – to find out if she had been baptized. Neither could remember. “They can’t recall much of my childhood,” she says cryptically. “All my life, I’ve felt like an orphan.”
She found her way to the church in a time of personal crisis, when she felt overtaken by depression and could not figure out the source of her negative emotions. “I felt bad for no known reason.” Then, she realized “that something in me felt unforgiven.”
I began to review the world religions in my mind, looking for a balm for my crabbiness. Of all the world religions, I found Christianity the least understandable and appealing. I mean, couldn’t they find a more appealing symbol than a dead guy on a cross? How inviting is that? However, upon reviewing and searching for an inspirational figure to help me out of my funk, I thought of Jesus. Wasn’t his big gig forgiveness?
This did not make Deanna feel better. “So I began to mutter to myself, ‘Okay, Jesus, if you are the big guru of forgiveness, give me forgiveness, how about sending some my way?!’” Angry and upset, she screamed at God, “I’ve tried to be good, what am I not forgiven? If you’re the great forgiver, then give me some ---- ing forgiveness NOW!”
Much to her surprise, she “felt Jesus’ presence in the room.” She says that, “wordlessly, he communicated that he’d been waiting a long time to be asked and that forgiveness was mine.” Immedieately, she felt “peaceful and calm,” feelings that “stayed with me the rest of the day.” She struggled to figure out what had happened. But she had the strangest sense that she had really experienced “a visit from Jesus.” Knowing that she had to “look into this fellow named Jesus a little more,” she walked into Phinney Ridge, the church right down the street from her house, the next Sunday (63-4).
Purpose
Yes, First Congregational Church, gathered this Easter, people are looking for forgiveness and love. People have to be taught to love and not hate – to seek peace, not war. People need to be reminded that true life is not to be found in the commodities we buy and sell. People need to be reminded of the spiritual realities that cannot be measured. People need the comfort of a group of spiritual travelers, as we face our own illness and death. What are you seeking today? What is the person on the other end of the pew seeking?
Are you trapped in your surroundings sometimes? You don’t know which way to turn. But look, God is doing a new thing. Perhaps you will find it in Church. God is doing a new thing in your life. Will you open yourself to be a part of God’s new thing?
Ever since they first saw Jesus again, the Church has recognized God’s new thing, proclaiming: Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Amen.
Last Updated: Wednesday, February 6, 2008