Easter Message
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Easter Message April 12, 2009
Title: The Promise of Easter
Text: John 20; 1 Cor. 15:42-44, 53-55, 58
When I was in my last year of high school, I remember walking out to the end of our drive way one afternoon and opening up our mail box and pulling out a letter, from a school that I had applied to—I remember the silver logo on the envelope. I paused. Took a deep breath. Opened the letter, read the first two sentences and sensed that my life would take a new direction—through this new, open door. It was just a letter, but a letter that held a promise.
Another moment that I will always remember… I was riding the bullet train from Osaka to Tokyo, after having spent part of a week together with Sakiko, I said, “One day I hope to marry you,” and she responded by saying, “I feel the same way.” I knew my life would change. No ring at the time. It was spontaneous, but there was an implicit promise made.
We celebrate Easter today, with billions of others, because it represents a promise greater than admission to a school or even into marriage.
In our text that Mark and Sharon recited for us, we saw how Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance and that she assumed that Jesus’ body had been stolen.
Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus' body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.
They asked her, "Woman, why are you crying?"
"They have taken my Lord away," Mary said, "and I don't know where they have put him." At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.
He asked her, "Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?" Thinking he was the gardener, she said, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him."
Jesus said to her, "Mary." She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, "Rabboni!" (which means "Teacher").
Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: "I have seen the Lord!"
All four of the gospels point out that the first eye witnesses who saw Jesus risen from the dead were women. Women’s social status was so low in the first century that their testimony was not considered admissible in court. New Testament scholar, Tom Wright, argues there must have been enormous pressure on the early proclaimers of the Christian Gospel to remove the women from the resurrection accounts. If this story of the resurrection were being simply made up, there would be no advantage in stating that the first witnesses were women.
The women are described as the first people who actually saw Jesus risen from the dead in the Gospels because they were the first people who saw Jesus. This is the way it actually happened.
Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and a woman named Joanna are the first people to see Jesus risen from the dead, but there are others as well--literally hundreds of others according to Paul (in 1 Corinthians 15) who see him as well. The people who see the risen Christ are powerfully changed as a result.
One of the most compelling evidences that Jesus rose from the dead was the fact that Jesus’ disciples went from being fearful cowards, who fled for their lives when Jesus was arrested on Thursday night (the eve of good Friday), to being fearless proclaimers of the message that Jesus had risen from the dead the following Monday (the day after Easter Sunday). From Thursday to Monday, they went from zeroes to heroes.
All of those early disciples of Jesus, with the exception of John, died for their belief that Jesus rose from the dead.
The only plausible explanation for this radical transformation in the lives of Jesus’ disciples was that they believed that Jesus actually rose from the dead.
People don’t die for something they know is an April’s fool’s joke—they don’t die for a hoax.
But what does Jesus’ rising from the dead mean for us? Why does a third of the human race celebrate Easter?
We celebrate this day because Jesus’ rising from the dead means that God accepted Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross for our sins--and the sins of the world.
Jesus’ death on the cross and his rising again is a promise that our sins can be forgiven, that we can have a new relationship with God, and out of that relationship with God we can be made new people.
Sometimes we suspect that if we give our lives over to God we will lose the unique part of our personhood. But when God’s light shines into our lives, we become our true self, the person that we were created to be. As C.S. Lewis says in his classic Mere Christianity, “Give yourself up to God, and you will find your real self.”
I was reminded recently of a time when my wife and I were driving through Burgundy, France. As we passed by fields of sunflowers, we noticed that when it was dark and cloudy, the sunflowers would be closed, but when the sun came out, the sunflowers would open and all point their faces in the direction of the sun. (Prop)
So it is for us when the light of God’s presence begins to shine in our lives. Like those sunflowers we open up and become the selves that God intended us to be.
As a young person in my teen years, as you may know if you attend here regularly, I loved adventure, whether it was the adventure of sports or motorcycles or shoplifting (I thought I was Robin Hood, stealing from the rich stores and giving to my “poor” me) or joy riding in cars borrowed from the local gas station that were being worked on.
But when God’s light began to shine on me, he didn’t take away that love of adventure—it was just redirected. I remember my heart pounding as I was attempting to smuggle contraband Bibles, theological books, and medicine into Romania when it was still behind the iron curtain. I remember when the border guard dressed in military fatigues and armed with a machine gun announced he was going to inspect our car trunk, which was I knew was full of Bibles, theological books. I knew because I put them there myself! I heard the car trunk open, and I held my breath, and he got distracted… He told us to move along.
I remember the first time I watched Star Wars, the scene where Luke and Obiwan cruise into town on Luke's landspeeder, with C3Po and R2D2 in the back. They get stopped by Imperial Stormtroopers, and Ben says with a wave of his hand, "These aren't the droids you're looking for." And the stormtroooper says, "These aren't the droids we're looking for." Back then, I thought that Jedi Mind trick was cool, but God allowed me to experience something even cooler.
The resurrection of Jesus means that we can be made new. We can become our real selves—the self that God intended us to be. The resurrection also means that one day, like Jesus, we will rise from the dead, as well. The Scriptures teach those who have joined their lives to Christ--at the end of time our bodies will be resurrected from the dead, as well. We will then inhabit, what the Bible calls, “the new earth.”
There is a lot of interest in a city like ours in health. Vancouver is an easy place to be healthy, with the beautiful outdoors, the opportunities to exercise, and the emphasis on eating healthy. My mom and dad recently went to Japan to see my grandmother (my mom’s mom). My grandmother is 95. She is very healthy. As far I know, she has never had any serious illness, and she eats chocolate and drinks Asahi beer every day, but has never had a single cavity. As I said, she is 95 and she still plays tennis several times a week. Some years ago she was bragging to me that she was ranked number 2 in the nation. But I said, “Yes, but in your age category there are probably only two of you.” That's when she showed me her backhand.
She is very healthy and she has already lived a very long life. But one day she will die. And so will we.
I was reading about some multimillionaires here in North America who have arranged for their bodies to be cryogenically frozen at death, confident with the progress of medicine that they will one day be able to bring them back.
It is not necessary to freeze our bodies--because the promise of Easter is that if our lives are joined to Jesus Christ then we, too, like Christ will one day rise from the dead in resurrected bodies.
We don’t know exactly what our resurrected bodies will be like. There has been lots of speculation. I’ve heard it has been taught that our resurrected bodies will be similar to whatever we looked like at our peak. Some of you will be happy to hear that. Perhaps others... were hoping for more (We still have space available for boot camp by the way).
The Scriptures, however, are not specific as to what we will look like in our resurrected bodies. It is clear on the basis of Jesus’ resurrected body that people will recognize who we are and that there will be some continuity between our bodies on earth and our resurrected body. (Jesus still had the nailing markings on his wrists in his resurrected body). We also know that our resurrected bodies will be glorious.
The promise of Easter is that we can be made new now and that we will one day have glorious resurrected bodies. Just as a person who’s gotten a letter of admission from a school where they really want to study or has gotten engaged to a person they really want to marry, can live with a sense of hope and joy even before they actually enter the school or get married, so we too can live with hope and joy and peace now, knowing that one day, like Jesus, we will experience the resurrection.
But Easter is not only a promise that we can be made new in this life time and that we will be resurrected at the end if time; but it is also the promise that the earth itself can be made new.
Just as Jesus’ death on the cross and resurrection can be a turning point in our lives—breaking the power of sin and evil—so his death and resurrection—can break the power of sin and evil in the world.
Just as Jesus’ death and resurrection, is a promise that we will one day be resurrected, it also a promise that the earth will be made new, as well.
In Revelation 21, God promises that he will create a new heaven and a new earth. In Revelation 21:5 God says, “I will make everything new.”
As my friend and colleague Darrell Johnson points out, “God does not say ‘I will make all new things, but I will make everything new’.” Hear the difference? God doesn’t say “I will make all new things” but “I will make all things new.” He will renew the earth.
And just as there is continuity between our present bodies and our resurrected bodies, so there will be continuity between this present earth and a new earth to come. The good we do on this earth will one day be magnified in the new world.
If we understand this truth, we will be really motivated to work for justice for the poor--to alleviate hunger and disease, create beauty in art or music, and to care for the environment.
Many people who do not believe in God also care about justice, creating beauty, and care for the environment. But if you don’t believe in God and believe this world of ours was simply caused by accident, and that one day the earth will burn up when the sun goes expands going supernova, you don’t have nearly the motivation to work for justice, create beauty, and to care for the earth, as you have if you believe that the world is going to be renewed by God.
The promise of Easter is that God will make one day renew the earth and the good we do here will manifest itself in that new earth.
Therefore, Paul in 1 Cor. 15:58, says, “Always give yourself fully to the work of the Lord because you know your labour in the Lord is not in vain.”
Our labour in the Lord is not in vain because the things that we do on this earth, whether it is working to break the cycle of poverty in people’s lives, create beauty through art or music, or caring for the environment will somehow make its way into the world to come.
The reason that we are motivated here at Tenth to help provide temporary shelter and food for the homeless and to help them take steps toward finding homes and reintegrating into society by finding meaningful work, or helping people who have been trafficked into the sex trade whether here in Vancouver or in Cambodia find a way out, is because we believe that all human beings are made in the image of God and will live forever… So our work with them is not in vain. The healing they and we experience in this life will in some way carry over into the world to come.
My colleague here at Tenth, Patrick Elaschuk and his wife Inneke and their family moved from their comfortable home in North Vancouver to spend 7 years living in a slum in Davao City, the Philippines to help people in that community experience a fuller life: by bringing health care (Inneke as a mid-wife helped deliver babies in slum), better education, and start small businesses. They did so with the knowledge that that work is not in vain, that somehow their investment would carry over into the world to come.
Steve Hayner is a person who serves as part of World Vision (an organization I serve as a trustee).
Steve recently talked about going to Rwanda on a World Vision trip with his daughter Emily.
While there, they met an African woman who warmly welcomed him and Emily in her tiny little house. She began to tell them her story.
She said just before the genocide in Rwanda, she was living in this same village with 54 of her relatives (her husband, her 4 children, her parents, her cousins, and her extended family were living in this one area). They thought that they were safe—because their family was full of both Tutsis and Hutus.
But, one night the militia came and began to murder her entire family with machetes. She was raped by the soldiers and left to die.
When she woke up in the morning, she made her way slowly toward Burundi where she got medical care. A couple of months later she was feeling better, so she began to make her way back to her village.
She said, “Two things I brought back from Burundi that I didn’t have before I left. One is that I was pregnant by one of the men who raped me; and the second was that I was now HIV positive.”
At that point in her story an 11-year-old beautiful boy, the child of this rape walked into the room.
Steve asked, “How do you live?” She thought he was saying, “How do you make a living?” She said, “Well, I am a digger. Every day I take my hoe, and I go and I rent myself out to one of the farmers in the neighborhood, and I dig all day for 12 hours not for money, but for food, so I can feed my family.” (She had a daughter too.)
Steve asked, “How do you survive when your soul has been so beat up?” She looks at him quizzically, and she hops up, runs into the other room and brings back into the room a vinyl diaper bag. She begins to unpack it and says, “This is my medical kit.” She begins takes out a towel, some soap, and a little tube of some kind of medicine, and some aspirin.
She says, “You know what? World Vision has given me a bicycle and a medical bag, and I get to go and visit the ten people twice a week in my village who are dying of AIDS.” She said, “I get to care for them.” And then she began to describe how Jesus had changed her, gave her the ability to forgive, and what it meant for her to experience healing because she served and gave her life for her children and to these ten people in her village who were dying.
At the end of their visit, Steve and his daughter Emily walked out of her little hut and down the little stone path and were weeping.
The work that woman is doing in her village in Africa to make her world a better place will make its way into the new world that will be redeemed.
The promise of Easter, as Tom Wright points out, is that every act of love and kindness, every work of art or music inspired by the love of God, every minute spent teaching a special needs child to read or to walk, or listening to a lonely, elderly person, every act of care for the earth, every act that spreads the good news of the Gospel, will all find its way into the new creation that God will one day make.
It must have been a slow news day because the final story that ran in the broadcast news was a fluffy piece about kids taking ice skating lessons at the local ice rink.
The last shot was of 2 kids maybe 5 years old on the ice doing what 5 year olds can do--holding hands shuffling across the ice—trying not to fall, but then something unexpected happened—they did a slow cross dissolve and the kids were transformed into a pair of Olympic figure skaters and just at that moment, the man threw his partner high into the air and she spun more times than you can count and when she came back to earth she nails the landing perfectly—with breathtaking artistry and grace…
Someone made the connection between where those skaters begin and where they can go.
So it is with God. Whatever hard work and intention we put in today will one day manifest into something glorious than we can imagine in the new world.
And this is the promise of Easter. Admission to school you want to study at or an engagement to someone you love is only a faint echo of the great promise of Easter that God will make all things—including us and this world---new in Christ. So we live with the joy and hope that God’s work in us and through us is not in vain.
PRAYER: Inviting people to experience the resurrection power of Jesus Christ by joining their lives to his.
(before benediction: announce: Faith and Doubt following Easter)
That first Easter Mary and Thomas and some of the other students of Jesus, did not believe that Jesus had risen from the dead. Like many of us, they simply assumed people don’t rise from the dead. They had their doubts and so do we. So beginning next Sunday and for the next several weeks, we’ll begin a new series here on faith and doubt.
Easter Message April 12, 2009
Title: The Promise of Easter
Text: John 20; 1 Cor. 15:42-44, 53-55, 58
When I was in my last year of high school, I remember walking out to the end of our drive way one afternoon and opening up our mail box and pulling out a letter, from a school that I had applied to—I remember the silver logo on the envelope. I paused. Took a deep breath. Opened the letter, read the first two sentences and sensed that my life would take a new direction—through this new, open door. It was just a letter, but a letter that held a promise.
Another moment that I will always remember… I was riding the bullet train from Osaka to Tokyo, after having spent part of a week together with Sakiko, I said, “One day I hope to marry you,” and she responded by saying, “I feel the same way.” I knew my life would change. No ring at the time. It was spontaneous, but there was an implicit promise made.
We celebrate Easter today, with billions of others, because it represents a promise greater than admission to a school or even into marriage.
In our text that Mark and Sharon recited for us, we saw how Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance and that she assumed that Jesus’ body had been stolen.
Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus' body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.
They asked her, "Woman, why are you crying?"
"They have taken my Lord away," Mary said, "and I don't know where they have put him." At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus.
He asked her, "Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?" Thinking he was the gardener, she said, "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him."
Jesus said to her, "Mary." She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, "Rabboni!" (which means "Teacher").
Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: "I have seen the Lord!"
All four of the gospels point out that the first eye witnesses who saw Jesus risen from the dead were women. Women’s social status was so low in the first century that their testimony was not considered admissible in court. New Testament scholar, Tom Wright, argues there must have been enormous pressure on the early proclaimers of the Christian Gospel to remove the women from the resurrection accounts. If this story of the resurrection were being simply made up, there would be no advantage in stating that the first witnesses were women.
The women are described as the first people who actually saw Jesus risen from the dead in the Gospels because they were the first people who saw Jesus. This is the way it actually happened.
Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and a woman named Joanna are the first people to see Jesus risen from the dead, but there are others as well--literally hundreds of others according to Paul (in 1 Corinthians 15) who see him as well. The people who see the risen Christ are powerfully changed as a result.
One of the most compelling evidences that Jesus rose from the dead was the fact that Jesus’ disciples went from being fearful cowards, who fled for their lives when Jesus was arrested on Thursday night (the eve of good Friday), to being fearless proclaimers of the message that Jesus had risen from the dead the following Monday (the day after Easter Sunday). From Thursday to Monday, they went from zeroes to heroes.
All of those early disciples of Jesus, with the exception of John, died for their belief that Jesus rose from the dead.
The only plausible explanation for this radical transformation in the lives of Jesus’ disciples was that they believed that Jesus actually rose from the dead.
People don’t die for something they know is an April’s fool’s joke—they don’t die for a hoax.
But what does Jesus’ rising from the dead mean for us? Why does a third of the human race celebrate Easter?
We celebrate this day because Jesus’ rising from the dead means that God accepted Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross for our sins--and the sins of the world.
Jesus’ death on the cross and his rising again is a promise that our sins can be forgiven, that we can have a new relationship with God, and out of that relationship with God we can be made new people.
Sometimes we suspect that if we give our lives over to God we will lose the unique part of our personhood. But when God’s light shines into our lives, we become our true self, the person that we were created to be. As C.S. Lewis says in his classic Mere Christianity, “Give yourself up to God, and you will find your real self.”
I was reminded recently of a time when my wife and I were driving through Burgundy, France. As we passed by fields of sunflowers, we noticed that when it was dark and cloudy, the sunflowers would be closed, but when the sun came out, the sunflowers would open and all point their faces in the direction of the sun. (Prop)
So it is for us when the light of God’s presence begins to shine in our lives. Like those sunflowers we open up and become the selves that God intended us to be.
As a young person in my teen years, as you may know if you attend here regularly, I loved adventure, whether it was the adventure of sports or motorcycles or shoplifting (I thought I was Robin Hood, stealing from the rich stores and giving to my “poor” me) or joy riding in cars borrowed from the local gas station that were being worked on.
But when God’s light began to shine on me, he didn’t take away that love of adventure—it was just redirected. I remember my heart pounding as I was attempting to smuggle contraband Bibles, theological books, and medicine into Romania when it was still behind the iron curtain. I remember when the border guard dressed in military fatigues and armed with a machine gun announced he was going to inspect our car trunk, which was I knew was full of Bibles, theological books. I knew because I put them there myself! I heard the car trunk open, and I held my breath, and he got distracted… He told us to move along.
I remember the first time I watched Star Wars, the scene where Luke and Obiwan cruise into town on Luke's landspeeder, with C3Po and R2D2 in the back. They get stopped by Imperial Stormtroopers, and Ben says with a wave of his hand, "These aren't the droids you're looking for." And the stormtroooper says, "These aren't the droids we're looking for." Back then, I thought that Jedi Mind trick was cool, but God allowed me to experience something even cooler.
The resurrection of Jesus means that we can be made new. We can become our real selves—the self that God intended us to be. The resurrection also means that one day, like Jesus, we will rise from the dead, as well. The Scriptures teach those who have joined their lives to Christ--at the end of time our bodies will be resurrected from the dead, as well. We will then inhabit, what the Bible calls, “the new earth.”
There is a lot of interest in a city like ours in health. Vancouver is an easy place to be healthy, with the beautiful outdoors, the opportunities to exercise, and the emphasis on eating healthy. My mom and dad recently went to Japan to see my grandmother (my mom’s mom). My grandmother is 95. She is very healthy. As far I know, she has never had any serious illness, and she eats chocolate and drinks Asahi beer every day, but has never had a single cavity. As I said, she is 95 and she still plays tennis several times a week. Some years ago she was bragging to me that she was ranked number 2 in the nation. But I said, “Yes, but in your age category there are probably only two of you.” That's when she showed me her backhand.
She is very healthy and she has already lived a very long life. But one day she will die. And so will we.
I was reading about some multimillionaires here in North America who have arranged for their bodies to be cryogenically frozen at death, confident with the progress of medicine that they will one day be able to bring them back.
It is not necessary to freeze our bodies--because the promise of Easter is that if our lives are joined to Jesus Christ then we, too, like Christ will one day rise from the dead in resurrected bodies.
We don’t know exactly what our resurrected bodies will be like. There has been lots of speculation. I’ve heard it has been taught that our resurrected bodies will be similar to whatever we looked like at our peak. Some of you will be happy to hear that. Perhaps others... were hoping for more (We still have space available for boot camp by the way).
The Scriptures, however, are not specific as to what we will look like in our resurrected bodies. It is clear on the basis of Jesus’ resurrected body that people will recognize who we are and that there will be some continuity between our bodies on earth and our resurrected body. (Jesus still had the nailing markings on his wrists in his resurrected body). We also know that our resurrected bodies will be glorious.
The promise of Easter is that we can be made new now and that we will one day have glorious resurrected bodies. Just as a person who’s gotten a letter of admission from a school where they really want to study or has gotten engaged to a person they really want to marry, can live with a sense of hope and joy even before they actually enter the school or get married, so we too can live with hope and joy and peace now, knowing that one day, like Jesus, we will experience the resurrection.
But Easter is not only a promise that we can be made new in this life time and that we will be resurrected at the end if time; but it is also the promise that the earth itself can be made new.
Just as Jesus’ death on the cross and resurrection can be a turning point in our lives—breaking the power of sin and evil—so his death and resurrection—can break the power of sin and evil in the world.
Just as Jesus’ death and resurrection, is a promise that we will one day be resurrected, it also a promise that the earth will be made new, as well.
In Revelation 21, God promises that he will create a new heaven and a new earth. In Revelation 21:5 God says, “I will make everything new.”
As my friend and colleague Darrell Johnson points out, “God does not say ‘I will make all new things, but I will make everything new’.” Hear the difference? God doesn’t say “I will make all new things” but “I will make all things new.” He will renew the earth.
And just as there is continuity between our present bodies and our resurrected bodies, so there will be continuity between this present earth and a new earth to come. The good we do on this earth will one day be magnified in the new world.
If we understand this truth, we will be really motivated to work for justice for the poor--to alleviate hunger and disease, create beauty in art or music, and to care for the environment.
Many people who do not believe in God also care about justice, creating beauty, and care for the environment. But if you don’t believe in God and believe this world of ours was simply caused by accident, and that one day the earth will burn up when the sun goes expands going supernova, you don’t have nearly the motivation to work for justice, create beauty, and to care for the earth, as you have if you believe that the world is going to be renewed by God.
The promise of Easter is that God will make one day renew the earth and the good we do here will manifest itself in that new earth.
Therefore, Paul in 1 Cor. 15:58, says, “Always give yourself fully to the work of the Lord because you know your labour in the Lord is not in vain.”
Our labour in the Lord is not in vain because the things that we do on this earth, whether it is working to break the cycle of poverty in people’s lives, create beauty through art or music, or caring for the environment will somehow make its way into the world to come.
The reason that we are motivated here at Tenth to help provide temporary shelter and food for the homeless and to help them take steps toward finding homes and reintegrating into society by finding meaningful work, or helping people who have been trafficked into the sex trade whether here in Vancouver or in Cambodia find a way out, is because we believe that all human beings are made in the image of God and will live forever… So our work with them is not in vain. The healing they and we experience in this life will in some way carry over into the world to come.
My colleague here at Tenth, Patrick Elaschuk and his wife Inneke and their family moved from their comfortable home in North Vancouver to spend 7 years living in a slum in Davao City, the Philippines to help people in that community experience a fuller life: by bringing health care (Inneke as a mid-wife helped deliver babies in slum), better education, and start small businesses. They did so with the knowledge that that work is not in vain, that somehow their investment would carry over into the world to come.
Steve Hayner is a person who serves as part of World Vision (an organization I serve as a trustee).
Steve recently talked about going to Rwanda on a World Vision trip with his daughter Emily.
While there, they met an African woman who warmly welcomed him and Emily in her tiny little house. She began to tell them her story.
She said just before the genocide in Rwanda, she was living in this same village with 54 of her relatives (her husband, her 4 children, her parents, her cousins, and her extended family were living in this one area). They thought that they were safe—because their family was full of both Tutsis and Hutus.
But, one night the militia came and began to murder her entire family with machetes. She was raped by the soldiers and left to die.
When she woke up in the morning, she made her way slowly toward Burundi where she got medical care. A couple of months later she was feeling better, so she began to make her way back to her village.
She said, “Two things I brought back from Burundi that I didn’t have before I left. One is that I was pregnant by one of the men who raped me; and the second was that I was now HIV positive.”
At that point in her story an 11-year-old beautiful boy, the child of this rape walked into the room.
Steve asked, “How do you live?” She thought he was saying, “How do you make a living?” She said, “Well, I am a digger. Every day I take my hoe, and I go and I rent myself out to one of the farmers in the neighborhood, and I dig all day for 12 hours not for money, but for food, so I can feed my family.” (She had a daughter too.)
Steve asked, “How do you survive when your soul has been so beat up?” She looks at him quizzically, and she hops up, runs into the other room and brings back into the room a vinyl diaper bag. She begins to unpack it and says, “This is my medical kit.” She begins takes out a towel, some soap, and a little tube of some kind of medicine, and some aspirin.
She says, “You know what? World Vision has given me a bicycle and a medical bag, and I get to go and visit the ten people twice a week in my village who are dying of AIDS.” She said, “I get to care for them.” And then she began to describe how Jesus had changed her, gave her the ability to forgive, and what it meant for her to experience healing because she served and gave her life for her children and to these ten people in her village who were dying.
At the end of their visit, Steve and his daughter Emily walked out of her little hut and down the little stone path and were weeping.
The work that woman is doing in her village in Africa to make her world a better place will make its way into the new world that will be redeemed.
The promise of Easter, as Tom Wright points out, is that every act of love and kindness, every work of art or music inspired by the love of God, every minute spent teaching a special needs child to read or to walk, or listening to a lonely, elderly person, every act of care for the earth, every act that spreads the good news of the Gospel, will all find its way into the new creation that God will one day make.
It must have been a slow news day because the final story that ran in the broadcast news was a fluffy piece about kids taking ice skating lessons at the local ice rink.
The last shot was of 2 kids maybe 5 years old on the ice doing what 5 year olds can do--holding hands shuffling across the ice—trying not to fall, but then something unexpected happened—they did a slow cross dissolve and the kids were transformed into a pair of Olympic figure skaters and just at that moment, the man threw his partner high into the air and she spun more times than you can count and when she came back to earth she nails the landing perfectly—with breathtaking artistry and grace…
Someone made the connection between where those skaters begin and where they can go.
So it is with God. Whatever hard work and intention we put in today will one day manifest into something glorious than we can imagine in the new world.
And this is the promise of Easter. Admission to school you want to study at or an engagement to someone you love is only a faint echo of the great promise of Easter that God will make all things—including us and this world---new in Christ. So we live with the joy and hope that God’s work in us and through us is not in vain.
PRAYER: Inviting people to experience the resurrection power of Jesus Christ by joining their lives to his.
(before benediction: announce: Faith and Doubt following Easter)
That first Easter Mary and Thomas and some of the other students of Jesus, did not believe that Jesus had risen from the dead. Like many of us, they simply assumed people don’t rise from the dead. They had their doubts and so do we. So beginning next Sunday and for the next several weeks, we’ll begin a new series here on faith and doubt.
posted by Shigematsu at 1:37 PM
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