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