Sunday, March 30th, 2008 1st Sunday of Easter Season

Sermon Title: "Practicing Resurrection Week 2"

First point: I hope last week in the sermon time you did not hear me underselling the resurrection of Jesus as an actual historical event. It was not my intention to do that. It WAS, however, my intention to say that because of the God we serve, people being resurrected from the dead, and even, in the case of Elijah and Enoch, people not dying at all are not foreign to us.

If anything, as Christians, when we are asked if we believe Jesus actually rose from the dead and ascended to heaven, it shouldn’t be something we need to convince ourselves about. Instead, for us, it might sound like, “Well, yes, of course Jesus rose from the dead. God has done this kind of thing time and again in history. He created everything, and he showed not even death can stand in the way of his purposes. So of course Jesus conquered death. That’s who our God is!” Why can we say this with confidence?

The history of Israel is our history, the ancestors of Israel are our ancestors, to make it more personal, the founding fathers and mothers of Israel are our founding fathers and mothers. (what was true in Genesis 1 and 2 about God’s power was true in the time of Jesus’ earthly ministry and remains true to this day, which is how our brother Howard Simpson right here witnessed a woman rising from the dead in Manassas, Virginia just a couple years ago)

Our God is who our God is, and that means he has complete power to do what he wants, whether people or organizations want to stand in his way, which they ultimately can’t, and whether certain powers try to stand in the way, like fear and hatred and death, and they ultimately can’t.

The deeper point I wanted to make was that the way Jesus lived, what he taught, how he faced and treated people conspiring to murder him, his willingness to die rather than to start a violent revolution as everyone around him expected the Messiah to do, and his resurrection, were all ultimately examples for us of how we are to live.

And Jesus’ resurrection, Jesus’ conquering of death, was meant to make a forceful point to his people that death is not the end, that we don’t have to be afraid of anything, that we can freely follow God in the middle of any situation, whether it be the Shenandoah Valley or and extremely violent SC LA or Ethiopia, where my sister in Christ Selamawit, a fellow student from the seminary, has scars on her body from being beaten for following Christ.

Jesus was and is truth and light, God made flesh, the complete revelation of God to his creation, and when we consider that Jesus is the fullness of truth, that the earthly ministry of Jesus picked up in the story of what God had already been doing with his people for thousands of years and held them to God highest standard of truth.

God had met them where they were at in the midst of a culture that worshiped a multitude of gods, had shown them time and again through signs and wonders who He was, had given them a mission to follow and boundaries to observe so that they would be different from others around them, and Jesus entered onto the scene in the fullness of time to lead his people into a deeper understanding of faithfulness and truth.

And sometimes that truth seemed like common sense, and sometimes it sounded like sheer idiocy, and sometimes it directly contradicted what the Israelites had already know to be true before. And even after Jesus’ resurrection, the disciples still

He set us free to work for God’s justice

What works against doubt?
(Doubting Thomas) Proof (See my hands and my side, stop doubting and believe)

We human beings get so locked into what we think is good in this life and we try to force God to work in our categories.
- Problem with that kind of thinking is the God is God and we are not, and when we step into the place where we are defining what our lives look like, where we are telling God he doesn’t really know the truth, the scene shifts for us all the way back to the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve decided to ignore their Creator’s purpose and did what felt right to them.
- Now, we as Christians often talk about pagans in this way, that they are confused and walking in darkness
- But we can find ourselves in the same predicament either if we are completely ignorant about God’s expectations for our lives, or we know how clearly God has spoken in Jesus and we choose to justify our actions away

But Jesus was and is truth, Jesus was and is the light, Jesus was God made flesh, the complete revelation of God’s truth, and expected us to obey.

Emphasis on self-sacrifice this Sunday to underscore the high accountability we live under to practice God’s resurrection, to follow faithfully in the footsteps of Jesus, to maintain hope for the world when the world doesn’t know what hope is.


How do we prove to the world that Christianity is more than us nodding our heads and saying we believe that this guy Jesus existed 2,000 years ago and he died on the cross for our sins and rose again as conqueror over death?

Karen Ward “Most postmoderns don’t hate Jesus, in fact, the opinion that Jesus is an admirable teacher remains consistently high. What obscures things, then, for postmoderns, is that Christians so consistently stand for things Jesus didn’t stand for, and often so deeply identify with what they are against that they end up hating both the sinner and the sin.”

Integrating what we consider “spiritual” with what we consider “physical” or “routine” to make it all “spiritual”

Mountaintop Removal

I have made a friend in seminary named Robert just a couple months ago. He’s a new student at Eastern Mennonite, and Robert’s an interesting looking dude. He’s got tattoos all over his arms, a nice scruffy mountain man beard, and wears suspenders with jeans from time to time.

Robert lives in northwest North Carolina, but spends most of his weekends and breaks traveling up and down the eastern part of the United States as an intern for a group called Christians for the Mountains. Now, if you heard Robert talk about the things he’s passionate about and his home church communities, you would NOT hear harebrained, crazy ideas coming out of his mouth, he almost sounds like a passionate Baptist pastor when he gets fired up. He’s a Biblically-rooted, solid young man.

And what Robert gets fired up about is something taking place in the mountains of NC, VA, and WV called mountaintop removal, which was something I knew literally nothing about three months ago. Robert has completely changed that for me.

Most of us in this room have known about coal mining as a practice. In fact, Mary Fint’s husband and Livonia’s dad Don worked in a shaft mine in West Va for a little while. Well, shaft mining isn’t the safest job in the world for the common workers, not by a long-shot, and it’s that way for multiple reasons that we won’t get into today.

Mountaintop removal / valley fill coal mining (MTR) has been called strip mining on steroids. One author says the process should be more accurately named: mountain range removal.

1. Forests are clear-cut. Wildlife habitat is destroyed and vegetation loss often leads to floods and landslides. Next, explosives up to 100 times as strong as ones that tore open the Oklahoma City Federal building blast up to 800 feet off mountaintops. Explosions can cause damage to home foundations and wells. “Fly rock,” more aptly named fly boulder, can rain off mountains, endangering resident’s lives and homes.

2. Huge Shovels dig into the soil and trucks haul it away or push it into adjacent valleys.

3. A dragline digs into the rock to expose the coal. These machines can weigh up to 8 million pounds with a base as big as a gymnasium and as tall as a 20-story building. These machines allow coal companies to hire fewer workers. A small crew can tear apart a mountain in less than a year, working night and day.

4. Giant machines then scoop out the layers of coal, dumping millions of tons of “overburden” – the former mountaintops – into the narrow adjacent valleys, thereby creating valley fills. Coal companies have forever buried over 1,200 miles of biologically crucial Appalachian headwaters streams. Coal companies are supposed to reclaim land, but all too often mine sites are left stripped and bare. Even where attempts to replant vegetation have been made, the mountain is never again returned to its healthy state.

5. Community Impacts: Coal washing often results in thousands of gallons of contaminated water that looks like black sludge and contains toxic chemicals and heavy metals. The sludge, or slurry, is often contained behind earthen dams in huge sludge ponds. While the solid waste becomes valley fills, liquid waste is stored in massive, dangerous coal slurry impoundments, often built in the headwaters of a watershed. The slurry is a witch’s brew of water used to wash the coal for market, carcinogenic chemicals used in the washing process and coal fines (small particles) laden with all the compounds found in coal, including toxic heavy metals such as arsenic and mercury. Frequent blackwater spills from these impoundments choke the life out of streams. One “spill” of 306 million gallons that sent sludge up to fifteen feet thick into resident’s yards and fouled 75 miles of waterways in 2000, has been called the southeast’s worst environmental disaster. The coal company, Massey Energy, based in Richmond, called it “an act of God.”
An Eastern Kentucky University study found that children in Letcher County, Ky., suffer from an alarmingly high rate of nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, and shortness of breath -- symptoms of something called blue baby syndrome -- that can all be traced back to sedimentation and dissolved minerals that have drained from mine sites into nearby streams. Long-term effects may include liver, kidney, and spleen failure, bone damage, and cancers of the digestive tract.

Larry Gibson's family has lived on Kayford Mountain for 200 years. Forty seams of coal lie beneath his 50 acres. Gibson could be a millionaire many times over, but because he refuses to sell, he has been shot at and run off his own road. One of his dogs was shot and another hanged. A month after my visit, someone sabotaged his solar panels. In 2000, Gibson walked out onto his porch one day to find two men dressed in camouflage, approaching with gas cans. They backed away and drove off, but not before they set fire to an empty cabin that belongs to one of Gibson's cousins. Gibson knows he isn't safe. "This land is worth $450 million," he told me, "so what kind of chances do I have?"

This situation is compounded by federal officials who often appear more loyal to corporations than to citizens. Consider the case of Jack Spadaro, a whistle-blower who was forced out of his job at the U.S. Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration precisely because he tried to do his job -- protecting the public from mining disasters. when a 300-million-gallon slurry pond collapsed in Martin County, Ky., in 2000, causing one of the worst environmental disasters this side of the Mississippi, Spadaro was again named to the investigating team. What he found was that Massey had known for 10 years that the pond was going to break. Spadaro wanted to charge Massey with criminal negligence. There was only one problem. Elaine Chao, Spadaro's boss at the Department of Labor, is also Kentucky Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell's wife; and it is McConnell, more than anyone else in the Senate, who advocates that corporations are persons that, as such, can contribute as much money as they want to electoral campaigns. It turns out that Massey had donated $100,000 to a campaign committee headed by McConnell. Not surprisingly, Spadaro got nowhere with his charges. Instead, someone changed the lock on his office door and he was placed on administrative leave.

(My friend Robert’s story)

Allen Johnson interview:
“We believe that God made this planet, that God loves the earth, God loves creation, God loves humanity, and that even though God gives us freedom to spin our destiny, God doesn't want it to be trashed. God can open hearts and change people's minds and attitudes. There's an element of hope, I guess.

We point to Psalm 24:1: "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. And everything in it." We say, this is God's property. He's saying, you can use it, and it will feed you and take care of your needs. But I'd like you to take care of it, because I have a covenant with future generations. I made these plants and animals, and they have their space too. You can carve out a space for yourself, but leave some room for the others.

Sending: Isaiah 58:1-10

Easter Sunday (the beginning of the season of Easter)

Sermon Title: "Practicing Resurrection"

Resurrection

Joy! What does this mean? So maybe we were right all along? That this is the big sign that tells us the Messiah will be here forever, that Israel will be restored?

Jesus to Mary: Don’t cling to me, for I have yet to return to my Father

Road to Emmaus: Disciples, “We had thought he would be the one to restore Israel”

The disciples in Acts 1: We know about all that stuff before, but IS THIS THE TIME you will restore the kingdom to Israel?

In our Good Friday worship gathering, I spent time trying to wade into the reasons why that fateful day when Jesus was executed like a common criminal, like so many thousand other Roman prisoners, how that day could be considered good, and I offered one perspective on that: that Good Friday was and is Good because it reveals that God’s purposes are bigger than the purposes we often settle for.

That Israel had gotten locked into a certain way of seeing the way things should and would go, and God knew that, and God needed to break them out of that.

That God had built into the foundation of his people very early on that they were to be a light of His salvation to the very ends of the Earth, not just sit on their blessings like a hen on her eggs; because sooner or later those little chicks hatch and their muscles never develop, and they wither away and die if they do not eventually leave the nest.

God said to Israel, “It is NOT ENOUGH for you to be my servant…I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth." This is what the LORD says—who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you."



The deepest meaning of the resurrection is not just that Jesus rose from that dead, as absurd as it sounds for me to say that. The prophet Elijah raised a young boy from the dead, Lazarus was raised from the dead, the apostle Paul raised a man from the dead who had fallen out of a window because he fell asleep while Paul was speaking, Peter raised a young girl from the dead. The deepest meaning of Jesus’ resurrection doesn’t reside in the reality that he didn’t die, because there are even two other persons who flat-out never died, Enoch and Elijah, with Elijah being taken up and away from Elisha in a chariot of fire.

No, the deepest meaning of the resurrection is not just in our remembering the event 2,000 years ago. The deepest meaning of the resurrection is that Jesus’ victory over death is to set an example for us; that it is to be a foretaste, a whetting of our appetites, for the promise that death is not the end for us all.
As the apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 15,

“For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. 6After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

12But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. 15More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. 16For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. 17And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. 18Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 19If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.
20But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. 22For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. 23But each in his own turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. 24Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. 25For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. 26The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

If you are a human being in this room today, you know that there is one thing that you and I will all face one day, whether that day is today or five or ten or eighty years in the future, and that is DEATH. Every single one of us will die, and we know this, so we obsess over ways to avoid death, to prolong life, to protect our desire to have a long life, we KILL others so that we can live more comfortably and live longer.

And yet the resurrection of Jesus tells us, forcefully, that if we are his people, We. Don’t. Have. To. Fear. Death, that death is not the end, that one day we will be resurrected together to enjoy God in the blazing light of his glory, that he will wipe every tear from our eyes, that there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain. But this promise is not for everyone. In our culture, we tend to think after we all die, somehow we all sprout wings and float up to heaven where we play harps and hang out with our loved ones all day. But hear the word of the Lord through Paul.

Philippians 3:7 But whatever was to my profit I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. 8What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ 9and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God and is by faith. 10I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11and so, somehow, to attain to the resurrection from the dead.

For Paul, this resurrection wasn’t guaranteed, but it wasn’t as if he was wringing his hands, wondering if he had done enough, he wasn’t obsessing over whether his feet were getting hot from the fires of hell licking at his soles, no, Paul knew that he had been saved from slavery to selfishness, slavery to lies, slavery to what he thought was true before and saved to slavery to Jesus, slavery to a lifestyle marked by obedience, a lifestyle of radical love and radical forgiveness, a lifestyle of seeking each day to…

But outside of all these things, Paul made something incredibly clear in his teaching; the resurrection of the dead will not take place for everyone, and that includes a good number of those who are confident, that know that they know that they have been “saved.”

The fact remains that some of us in this room today, myself included, will likely be massively surprised on judgment day when we stand before the throne confident that we have been “saved,” only to hear the words “Away from me, I never knew you.”

You see, Paul knew what God has always known and expected; this faithfulness bit is meant to flow from the core of who we are, to affect all that we think about, all that we act on, it affects where we work and how we handle ourselves when we work, it affects our relationships and who we spend time around, it drives us to give our money and energy and time for the poor, the broken, and our enemies, it messes with us, it frustrates us, it pushes us to shine brighter, to love deeper, to never be satisfied…and to be so committed that we don’t even see how much our lives are blessing the lives of others, healing relationships, turning around communities, restoring hope where before there was darkness…

And the most incredible thing about this is that along the way, if we pursue this kind of love, this kind of single-mindedness, we won’t spend time considering whether we’re “gonna get to heaven” or whether we’ve “done enough to avoid hell.” We won’t be naïve enough to believe any preacher or person that tells us that our lifestyle is irrelevant, that the only important thing is that we pray for forgiveness, and we’re going to heaven is a LIE, a LIE from the pit of hell.

God placed a spark inside of all of us when we were created to desire him, to be fulfilled and satisfied in obeying him, and to know that nothing else matters outside of this commitment. But so much obscures, muddies the waters, tells us something different, and we need to cling to the truth that we have been created for this, that we must desire this…because this path will bring suffering, it will bring persecution, it will bring persons labeling us as self-righteous, as a holy-roller, as unpatriotic, as certifiably insane.

But what they say and do doesn’t matter, because Jesus conquered death, scoffed at it, so that we might scoff at it, so that we would be released from fearing it. It is this kind of hope hundreds of millions of Christians have lived with; have known they have been set free to practice, to live out the resurrection in their daily lives.
Bishop Desmond Tutu, from 1985, in the midst of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. He said,

If it weren't for faith, I would have given up long ago. I am certain lots of us would have been hate-filled and bitter…. In the middle of our faith is the death and resurrection. Nothing could have been more hopeless than Good Friday—but then Easter happened, and forever we have become prisoners of hope.

Apartheid says that we are created for separation; the Scriptures say ‘Rubbish.’ We are created for unity, for fellowship, for communion. Apartheid says that people are fundamentally irreconcilable; the Scriptures know nothing of this. It is denying what we might call the central work of Christ: attaining reconciliation. God was concerned with reconciling the world to (God’s) self.

Apartheid goes on to inflict an unnecessary and unjust suffering and misery on God's children just because they are black. Therefore, we are calling on Christians to say that they oppose this not for political reasons, not even for economic reasons, not even for the fact that they are worried that human beings are made to suffer—but because the people supporting this are behaving in an un-Christian way.

We are not saying it in any self-righteous kind of way. We are saying we are trying to be as true to the imperatives of the gospel as we can. And almost always it will expose you to suffering, to ridicule, and to worse.

If after the horrible event of Good Friday, when even the physical nature seemed to mourn, and darkness covered the earth—if after that you see the glorious resurrection, what can ever be worse than that moment?

And what can ever again make you doubt that if God be for us, who can be against us? If that has happened, what can ever again separate us from the love of God? What chance does the South African government stand? There is just no hope for them. And they really ought to listen to us when we say, ‘We are asking you to join the winning side.’ When we say we are on the winning side, it isn't that God is on our side because we are good; it is because (God) is that kind of God. (“Prisoner of Hope. An interview with Desmond Tutu” by the editors of Sojourners. Sojourners Magazine, February 1985.)

Bishop Tutu demonstrated what it means to be joyful though you have considered all the facts. He and others like him refused to take up the sword but instead practiced resurrection in dismantling apartheid. It enabled him to overcome his fear even when confronted with enormous evil.

May we seek this lifestyle joyfully. We are not alone, we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses, our brothers and sisters over thousands of years who have walked this path, we are surrounded by our brothers and sisters around the globe serving Christ in the midst of intense suffering and pain.

For Christ is risen! This mysterious God who has remained faithful through our neglect, idolatry, and apathy has defeated death forever, and who can believe it's really true? Stacked against our faith is the reality of countless injustices in our communities and nations, horrifying examples of the ways we use the force of evil to destroy and degrade one another. They persist despite Christ's example, his life among us, and his death and resurrection. But Christ is risen, alleluia! The assurance of life's triumph over death is the only weapon we need for our constant struggle for justice in the world.

Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again!

What does it mean for us to not just say we believe in the resurrection that took place 2,000 years ago, but to truly practice resurrection today in our world?