Signposts of the Resurrection Life

Since church ran long and I had to shorten my sermon, here's the whole thing..

Acts 4 and John 20:19-31
Easter is a season, not just one day. Jesus stayed with the disciples and his followers for awhile after his resurrection, showing them what his resurrected, Spirit-animated, glorified new life was like. Because of that, we too are going to spend this Easter time with the Resurrected Christ and asking him to show us what our Easter lives should look like, both individually and as the church. Let me tell you why that is important. Maybe it isn’t something that I have fully articulated, something I haven’t made plain because I just assumed we were all on the same page.

Here it is: I believe the local church is the hope of the world. I believe the local church, this local church, Bath United Methodist Church and its’ sister churches around the globe are the hope of the world. Why? Because the only hope for our world is the salvation of Jesus Christ offered through the amazing grace of God through the real and active presence of the Holy Spirit. If I didn’t believe that I’d be an English Literature professor at Oxford or Cambridge. For the next 40 days, the season of Easter, let’s explore what Jesus’ resurrection body was like, how he interacted with his disciples AFTER the resurrection, how the reality of his resurrection not only changed him but also changed the disciples and how it continues to change us, even today.

This church is a direct descendent of those disciples that huddled in fear in that room. We point to the birth of the church as the Day of Pentecost when the Spirit fell and thousands were baptized. But I submit to you that the birth of the church was Easter Sunday evening when the disciples huddled afraid and ashamed in that room and Jesus sought them out, passing through the locked doors of that room and the fear-locked doors of their hearts and breathed peace to them. The physical marks and new abilities of Jesus’ glorified, Spirit-animated body are signposts of the resurrection life that we live as Jesus’ followers today. The parallels between Acts 4 and John 20 are highlights that we need to see and live into.

Jesus went looking for them and no physical barriers, or emotional ones for that matter got in his way. That’s point #1 about Jesus’ resurrection body. Normal walls and locks and physical barriers didn’t matter to him anymore. He moved across them, across physical space as if it wasn’t there. That ‘super-natural’ ability isn’t the point. The point is that Jesus sought them out. After they had been at the empty tomb, Peter and John ran to find the other disciples, but then what did they do? Did they shout from the rooftops that something new and wonderful and world-changing had occurred? Did they scour the streets and fields looking for the Risen Jesus? He had been their friend in life, their closest companion, the one they radically changed their lives for? So why didn’t they go out looking for him once they knew he was alive? They were afraid.

Even when he came to them in that room, Thomas voiced the suspicion of them all: It’s a ghost they are seeing, a vision brought on by over-wrought emotions, lack of sleep and incredible stress and suffering. Seeing the ghost of someone recently dead was unheard of in that ancient culture any more than it is unheard of in our modern world when someone is recently and tragically bereaved. But this was no ghost. This was Jesus himself, in a physical form that was very different, but very much the same. He talked with them, he ate with them, and he still bore the scars of his death. But he was somehow different, different so much so that even as they locked themselves away from fear, Jesus effortlessly crossed over the barriers of their walls and doors and their fearful hearts to seek them out, to assure them of his love and presence.

The ‘church’ word for it is ‘prevenient grace.’ Even now, this minute God is working in the lives of those who don’t know him or don’t want to. And that is where we can join him already at work in their lives; we can speak his name in places it isn’t usually heard to point out what God is up to and what he is like. Our human limitations of time, distance, knowledge and our physical inabilities are overcome in the fullness of Christ’s resurrection and the empowering of the Holy Spirit. I know that there is pain and suffering and evil in the world. I realize that all will be made new and perfect when the new heaven comes down to join the new earth and all crying and pain and death will have passed away. All that is assured in Revelation 22. But many of us going around acting like since the Kingdom hasn’t come in full, then it hasn’t come at all. We are denying the resurrection power offered us, promised us as Easter people. That power is the power to know what God is like, to have faith that he is acting in our lives and in our world and the power to have the assurance that we can join him in that work. We, too, in concert with Christ, through the motivation of the Holy Spirit can move through the locked doors and hearts of people to tell them the truth and reach them with the good news of Jesus Christ.

Point#1 is that Jesus’ resurrection ability to move through barriers to seek out those he loves means that we, too, with him can move through the barriers that our own hearts and the hearts of others raise up to separate us from the love of God. Remember what Paul tells us in Romans 8:38-39 38 For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Point #2 is about peace, the shalom that Jesus breathed when he had crossed those barriers. This is about a peace that is not just an absence of conflict but peace that is an active power. This is a peace that defines life in a whole new way. This new creation is pointed to by the use of the Hebrew rûªH’ the Greek pneuma, the breath of life that God breathed into Adam, the Spirit that hovered over the waters in Genesis 1. It is the qualities of the Acts 4 church that show the details of this new creation. Here you have to remember the things the Jews held dear, as signposts of their Exodus life: the importance of the land and how it was handed down from generation to generation, the importance of the Temple as the physical place where God lived on earth, the importance if the Torah as the revelation of God’s word, the story of the Jews as God’s people and the importance of the very blood that flowed through their veins, their Jewish ethnicity and circumcision were the physical marks of what it meant to be one of God’s chosen people, a Jew. They clung to their possessions, their church building, their version of God’s story and the specific kind of human beings they were.

And though we in the Easter church, the resurrected church are part of the new creation, the new covenant we have become complacent about those very same things. Jesus in his glorified resurrected body reminded them and us that they were now residents of a new land, so they gave up their land, sold it and shared the proceeds with all the believers. He calls us to do the same with the possessions we cling to so desperately. He reminded them that they were part of a new church, not defined by walls and buildings, a new Word with a capital ‘W’ not defined by scholars and paper and ink and a new family, not defined by blood or skin color or race or gender, they and we belong to the very family of God.

The hope of the world is not the United States government. The hope of the world isn’t the science department at MIT. The hope of the world is not the United Way, the Salvation Army or the Samaritans’ Purse, fine organizations though they all are. The hope of the world is the local church, patterned after the resurrected body of her Lord Jesus Christ; motivated, animated and empowered by the Holy Spirit of God; existing for the glory of God in the world both now and forever.

So we need to live our lives asking that one simple, basic question. Is what I am doing right now, this minute and with my life in general working in light of my belief in God and my commitment to His church? Or am I living my life to build barns and bigger barns, to get more toys, to keep the fear and anger at bay by filling up my life with mindless activities and a lot of stuff? Do you want to make a difference in the world? Do you want to matter in that eternal way and for eternity? Or are you content to sit in your little sandbox with your own little bucket of toys and convince yourself that is enough?

The local church as it reflects the power of God is the hope of the world, one person at a time, one church at a time. Brothers and sisters, receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, peace, shalom. It is not the absence of conflict but the peace of Christ is the power to make all things new.