Week 14: 1^st Sunday in April (John 19, 20 and Luke 22:7-23)

Which holiday do more people North America instantly recognize: Easter or April Fools Day? Making allowances for regional variations, my guess is that it is about 50/50 … and probably leaning toward April Fools Day. One wonders if there is certain poignancy to the fact that April Fools Day immediately follows Easter. Has God played a joke on us? Is the hope of the resurrection, the promise of abundant and eternal life, really a trick, a boondoggle, or a manipulation? Are Christians “fools for Christ” (as Paul once said), or as they merely “fools” (as Marx and many secularists have said)?

The stakes are a good deal higher than in previous years. If Christians are wrong, its not just that people will laugh at us. We will not shake our heads with a smile and say “Well gosh, that’s a good one on me!” Faith in Christ today (as it was in the first 3 centuries of the Christian Era) is risky business. You are staking your job, career, intimate relationships, family safety, and perhaps life itself on the outcome.

Give it a test. Tomorrow when you climb into the backseat of your carpool to work, announce to everybody that you have seen the Lord … alive … in the flesh … before your eyes … in your heart … leading you to drop everything and exclaim “My Lord and My God”. Now watch and see if your fellow commuters don’t scrunch over to put a little more vinyl between you. It’s a conversation stopper. Wait till they mention it to your boss (who happens to be considering you for a juicy promotion).

Team Meditation (Luke 22:7-23)

Beyond the immediate testimony of the apostles who claim to have actually seen and touched Jesus, what real evidence is there (a couple of millennia later) that it is all true? Well, there is the continuing witness of credible Christians who were mentored by the original apostles … but after a thousand generations and a whole lot of institutionalization, I wonder how many of us are willing to stake our career path on what the pastor says. There are also experiences of the Holy Spirit erupting  in social and personal transformation that give credence to the living presence of Christ … but frankly those experiences often seem to few, too transient, too unconnected, and too easily explainable by other means.

The earliest Christians believed Jesus himself anticipated this concern, and that this is why he instituted a ritual practice of communion. Whether or not you consider the ritual remembrance of the “Last Supper” as a sacrament or not, the ritual itself is intended to provide reasonable reassurance that Jesus really did rise from the dead.

“Luke 22:19-20  ¹⁹ And he took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them, saying, "This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me."  ²⁰ And likewise the cup after supper, saying, "This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.”

The ritual of communion is more than an act of remembrance. It is an act of faith … and recommitment to a covenant … a solemn declaration to tell the truth, the whole truth, so help you God. The seeking public asks credible spiritual leaders: “Is it really true?” And just as witnesses do in a courtroom, placing their hands on a Bible, so also Christians dip their fingers in blood, and declare “Yes it is true … so help me God.” It may be that we are still skeptical of such oath-taking, but there is little else that we can do. All we can do is swear that Jesus is really raised from the dead, that he is really alive and in the world, and that he is really sitting on the right hand of God to guarantee real justice and real compassion and real hope.

Of course, any good jury of our peers will want some reason to be confident that the oath-taker has the integrity that will support their sworn statement. In other words, they require character witnesses. It is not enough to celebrate Communion. You have to live a life that demonstrates a Christian character … so that when people see you eat the bread and drink the cup they will say “Yes, this oath carries the integrity of a life totally surrender to Christ.” When you eat the bread and drink the cup, Christians are staking everything they are and have … their reputation and their lifestyle … as proof that Christ is risen, alive and well, and manifest in their hearts.

Therefore, the real proof of the resurrection is you. It is your commitment, your surrender, your life, and your willingness to shape everything around Jesus, stake everything on Jesus, and do everything for Jesus. If you are not able to do this, Christ will still be risen of course. But it will be harder and harder for seeking pagans to believe it.

Worship Theme (John 19, 20)

Here is a tantalizing idea. Perhaps the books of the Bible we have today are not the only books. Perhaps there were other signs and teachings in addition to the ones recorded in scripture. Perhaps they were written down and lost. Perhaps they were never written down and forgotten. We know that the letters of attributed to Paul, Peter, and John in the New Testament were only a fraction of the correspondence and conversation about Jesus that happened at the time. A pity we don’t have it. If we did, perhaps we would be more likely to believe Jesus is the Christ … the Son of God … the Light of the World … the Good Shepherd … the Everlasting Word … the Prince of Peace … and so on.

Or would we? The truth is that skepticism knows no bounds. Every lock has a pick. Every affirmation has a refutation. Every witness has a counter-witness. Every convincing argument has a counter-argument. Every scrap of evidence has a critic. I am not convinced that a longer, larger record of signs and teachings will ever make the difference between faith and doubt. Somewhere along the line there is a leap. There is a risk. There is an affirmation. There is a decision. You either believe or you don’t. You either fish or cut bait.

The earliest Christians used to draw the diagram of a fish as a secret code that would identify themselves to fellow Christians … with little risk that the authorities would catch on and persecute them. There is a lot of speculation why the fish was the symbol they chose, but I like to think it was an indication of audacity … a readiness to risk. They could have drawn a picture of  a question mark, or a person thinking deeply, or just a cloud. They drew a fish. It was their way of saying they were ready to commit … ready to take a leap of faith … a declaration that they would fish and not just cut bait. The time to think about it was over. The time to surrender to Christ had come. What do you say?

John 20:29-31  ⁹ Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe."  ³⁰ Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book;  ³¹ but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in his name.

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2^nd Sunday in April (Luke 24:1-35 and Acts 13-14)

It seems that every holiday brings its own letdown. The weeks preceding the holiday are filled with anticipation. The evening before the holiday expectation reaches a fever pitch. The day of the holiday is extraordinarily fulfilling and satisfying. And the very next morning the letdown begins. The anticipation is gone; the satisfaction is gone; and the sense of completion is gone. We feel this at Christmas. We feel it again at Easter. Those of us who are yearning, straining, searching, and hoping for Christ to triumph over sin and death may invest ourselves in lent; those of us who are yearning for quality family life, traditional values, or and hope for life everlasting may skip lent and invest in Easter. But either way, people find Easter Monday a bit of a let down. We distract ourselves by spring … recreation, gardening, studying for exams, and so on. In our heart, we’re wondering if anything is really any different.

So Jesus came back. He could have risen and gone straight up to heaven … maybe sent back mystical messages of reassurance. But he didn’t. He knew the disciples would feel the letdown. So he came back, in the flesh, to embrace us once again, and then left. He was free, and loose, and “out there” in the world. The disciples just needed to catch up with him.

Team Meditation (Acts 13-14)

One hates to admit it, but Paul was a politician. He knew when to strategically lose his temper, and when to strategically speak honeyed words. We often think of him as confrontational and uncompromising, but the truth is that he was remarkably diplomatic. He could maneuver through the bureaucratic maze, and play the “citizenship” card if it would buy him a larger hearing.

Paul was unapologetically confrontational toward anyone who tried to block the proclamation of the Gospel. Nothing would stop him from talking about Christ crucified and risen, fully human and fully God, crucial for salvation. Nothing. On the other hand, Paul really believed that if he could only get a hearing, reasonably intelligent, healthy, spiritually interested people could not help but be impressed (if not convinced) with Christ. He was a master at dialogue. He could both listen and persuade; he could respect authority and appeal to integrity.

Our world increasingly wants us to believe that no reasonable, educated, healthy, successful human being would ever give any serious thought to Jesus Christ. That’s not true. In fact, the opposite is true. Christian faith is one of the most persuasive, reasonable, and pragmatically sensible postures a thinking person can have in life. I’m not saying that the mystery of Christ can be scientifically proven. I am saying that it makes sense. The story of Jesus’ death and resurrection can make sense. It gives life a coherence and hope that makes life worth living.

“Let’s talk.”

Worship Theme (Luke 24:1-35)

Luke 24:32   ³² They said to each other, "Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?"

Luke is the only Gospel writer to tell the story of the encounter with the incognito Jesus on the road to Emmaus. Luke knew the real extent of the skepticism of modern people. Modern people will go to extraordinary lengths to maintain their skepticism. They will clutch at straws; deny the credibility of witnesses; invent excuses; rationalize, psychologize, and hypothesize. The only absolute is that there are no absolutes, and they will absolutely cling to that conviction. Luke understood this modern … Roman … attitude toward life. That’s why the appearance of Jesus on the road to Emmaus is so important … and so encouraging to those of us “let down” after Easter.

Two disciples … skeptical to the end … are debating on their way home. If nothing were to intervene, they would probably still be debating theology 2000 years later and still reaching no concrete resolution about what they really believe. No doubt they were quoting to each other from scripture, from the newspaper, from whatever theologians were popular at the time, and from authoritative new releases. They had probably watched NBC, CBS, and CNN … read Newsweek and Time … and digested every bit of media coverage. They probably expected to start a book club, or teach a class in comparative religions, or respond to countless students and fellow villagers asking them for their learned opinion.

Jesus appears incognito in their midst. He explains everything. They invite him for theological conversation at the pub. He stays. His identity is revealed when serving the dinner resembles all to coincidentally the Last Supper. He disappears … leaving the disciples wondering where he went. They realize that all the time he was trying to head down the road to Emmaus. He must be on the road … if they hurry they might catch up.

Jesus cuts through their skepticism … leaps over all the theological debate … and reveals himself in the ordinariness of daily living. For Jesus, every day is Easter and ever meal is the Lord’s Supper. Suddenly the goal is not to start a theological debating society, but to catch up with Jesus in mission. The aftermath of Easter is not lunch. It’s a trek. It’s following Jesus down the road to Emmaus and beyond.

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3^rd Sunday in April (Ezekiel 34 and Luke 15:1-7)

The death of Pope John Paul II has been a great sorrow to many in the world (Christians and non-Christians alike). The impact of his passing is similar to the loss of beloved parents, long time pastors, or close friends. You can see people “looking lost”. For some it is sheer grief, but for many others it is as if the “trail guide” has just been removed from their midst and they feel “lost in the woods”. They wander aimlessly, place themselves in harms way, and sometimes attach themselves to the wrong leaders just to escape responsibility. It is not too hard to imagine the disciples feeling this way after the crucifixion.

The experience of the resurrection, however, taught them that their spiritual leader was still there … but in a better and even more accessible way. They no longer “looked lost”. They had a purpose, meaning, direction, identity, and confidence. More than this, they had a new sensitivity to everyone else that “looked lost” … and their mission to help them be “found”.

Team Meditation (Luke 15:1-7)

How do you describe people who do not share the Christian faith? Apostolically minded Christians have been trying to develop a “shorthand” with which to refer to the public … but it is interesting that every term invites objection. “Pagan” sounds judgmental; “unchurched” sounds institutional; “seekers” is too vague. I started using the phrase “strangers to grace”, but church leaders objected that this suggested God only blessed certain people. Jesus’ own term is to refer to the “lost”. He doesn’t define what it means to be “lost”, but uses parables like the lost sheep and the lost coin. His desire is less to define who is “lost”, and more to describe the passion and urgency with which God seeks to find the “lost”.

Two things amaze me about the debate to describe people who do not share the Christian faith.

First, the people who are most upset about the terminology to describe people beyond the Christian faith are not those people. They are church members. Some want to respect the minority of the public who belong to other world religions. That’s fine with me. The earliest Christians wanted to respect them, too. They called them “God-Fearers”, and they were glad to enter respectful dialogue with them as Paul did in Athens. But that is a minority. Most people out there are simply “lost”. In fact, if you engage them in serious conversation, they will readily admit to being “lost”. They may not know where “home” is … but they do know they are not there.

Why are church people so afraid to describe the majority of the public as “lost”? I think it is because many church people are “lost”, too. They feel in their hearts the hypocrisy of claiming to be “found”. One way to avoid facing up to their own “lostness” is to doubt that anybody is really “lost”. They prefer to reject any terminology about others that might reveal their own poverty of faith.

Second, the more we cloud the fact that so many people are “lost”, the more we obscure the fact that God is so urgent to “find” them. We can let God’s mission slide. “They’re not really lost … just sidetracked, wayward, temporarily selfish, willful, extremely busy, etc.” These are all excuses. If God does not need to be urgent, then we do not need to be urgent. But God IS urgent … and we remain on the sidelines as God desperately seeks the lost.

Why are church people (especially in North America, Australia, and Europe) so lackadaisical about seeking the “lost”? I think it is because church people don’t want to be “found”. They are afraid that if they really get busy looking for the “lost”, they might just find themselves. God might claim them as part of the flock in earnest. It might change their lives.

It seems to me there are really three kinds of sheep out there. There are sheep that are “found”; there are sheep that are “lost”; and there are sheep that are “hiding” and doing whatever they can not to be “found”. The question for every church leader is: which kind of sheep are you?

Worship Theme (Ezekiel 34)

The shepherd metaphor remains one of the most powerful symbols of God’s compassion and Christ’s mission. Even though urban folks have little or know familiarity with rural shepherding, it remains powerful. Urban Christian Romans, hiding from persecution, still drew the image of the shepherd and the sheep on the catacomb walls more often than any other picture. Jesus spoke of being the Good Shepherd, and of dividing the sheep from the goats. Jesus charged Peter and future disciples to “feed my sheep”. He borrowed that imagery from Ezekiel.

There are three levels of meaning in Ezekiel’s prophesy about the coming of the Good Shepherd.

First, the appointed shepherds have been partying by themselves, and the flock has been scattered. Some are crippled, others are weak, and all have strayed and gotten lost. Therefore God (the Christ) will go find them. When he does, he will heal them, strengthen them, and embrace them as his own. Although there may be a zillion definitions of what it means to be “lost”, most people out there today will confess to it. God is urgently seeking you.

Second, in verse 17 and following, God recognizes that there are two kinds of sheep. There are fat sheep and lean sheep. Fat sheep have all the membership privileges and enjoy all the benefits of grace, but exclude other lost sheep from the fold. They enjoy the entire pasture, but trample it so other lost sheep cannot eat. Church people who cannot practice radical hospitality to let other lost sheep enter and be fed (even if it challenges the comfort zones and privileges of the fat sheep) are to be judged. God is investigating your conduct.

Finally, in verse 23 and following, God promises that once he has reconciled the fat sheep and the lean sheep, God will make a covenant of peace that will banish all the ravenous beasts from the woods. God’s people will be protected. The sheep will be fed. There will be “showers of blessing”. God promises abundant life.

Look into your heart. Feel with your gut. Instinctively you know what you are. You may not know how to define being “lost”, but you know you are “lost”. Or, you may not know how to seek the “lost”, but you know you are called to make room for the “lost”. God is desperately searching for you. Just cry out! God will come. God is earnestly deploying you. Just go forth! God will lead you to find the “lost” and bring them “home again” for healing, strength, and abundant life.

This is what it means to be the church.

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4^th Sunday in April (1 Corinthians 15 and Luke 20:27-40)

Jesus once healed a paralyzed man, and as he rose and walked, he told them that his sins were forgiven (see Matthew 9:2-5). When religious leaders objected to his power to forgive sins, Jesus challenged them. Is it more difficult to tell someone their sins are forgiven, or to heal them so they can walk? The power to heal the body to walk again was a confirmation of the power to forgive sin.

Rarely in history has there been so much speculation about life after death than today. People are looking for proofs everywhere. Seers and prophets and movie stars are all trying to verify the existence of heaven, define the date of its arrival, and describe the nature of the afterlife. Yet however convincing their arguments and speculations might be, not one of them has healed a paralyzed man. Not one of them has raised Lazarus from the dead. Not one of them has actually risen from the grave to touch and be touched, embrace and be embraced, love and be adored.

Christ’s resurrection is unexplainable, and he spoke in such metaphors that we have no clear idea what life after death might look like, except this. We know that life after death is blessed by God, and the key to enter heaven is to experience forgiveness of sins. Christ must forgive our sins. The confirmation that he has the power to do so, and therefore is the way into eternal life, is that he himself was raised from the dead.

Team Meditation (Luke 20:27-40)

My consultations with churches have made me very aware of the radical change to families and households in the last 25 years. Today at least half, and in many places the vast majority, of families today are composed of fragmented pieces from other families. Men and women may each have been divorced several times. The children in the family unit are the step-children of others. Half the public is either looking for love, or recovering from broken marriage, at any given time.

Now that relational brokenness has become the norm of society, people have yet another reason to doubt the resurrection. How can they expect to be reunited with loved ones after death, if it is unclear who those “loved ones” really are? Indeed, the people we love may not love each other. It’s all very well to say I might be reunited with my wife … but which wife? I might see my father again … but do I really want to?

These questions may seem simplistic to veteran Christians and worship leaders, but they are the deep heartfelt questions may in the congregation are really asking when it comes to the afterlife.

Jesus makes it clear that heaven is “wholly other” than our experience on earth. It is not just our social system made perfect and established forever. It is a completely different experience. It will be blessed. It will be sinless. It will be a reunion of all God’s children. And somehow the brokenness of this life will be healed.

Can God overcome the brokenness that has become normative in our relationships? Yes, God will. It will begin with God’s forgiveness of all the blame, guilt, shame, and sorrow for the sad mess we have made of our families, our relationships, and our lives.

Worship Theme (1 Corinthians 15)

Contemporary people always seem to get it backwards. They say: “Salvation we can understand … but it’s the resurrection from the dead that seems doubtful.” They accept the former without a murmur, but their compulsion for scientific verification causes them to doubt whether Jesus actually rose from the grave. How many times has the Turin Shroud been photographed and debated? But after all … what does it matter really? As long as we are confident that we can be saved by God’s grace, we can reserve our opinion about the resurrection from the dead pending future observation.

What is amazing about this view is how glibly we speak of salvation. If there is anything we should murmur about and doubt, it is this. Why should we be saved? Frankly, we don’t deserve it. We’ve made a shambles of our private and public lives. Even the most saintly people don’t deserve it, and they will be the first to tell you so. The selfishness of our lives eats away at our intrinsic worth. We start out at birth one small bundle of pure, unadulterated self-centeredness, and we build on that foundation for the rest of our lives.

On the other hand, why should we be so obstinately skeptical of the resurrection? Life is full of unexplainable occurrences that we have accepted as true based on the testimony of credible witnesses. I recall a pastoral visit to the deathbed of a woman in the hospital. She gave her last breath, the monitors went to flat line, and the family held hands around the bed to pray the Lord’s Prayer. No sooner had we said “Thy will be done” than the monitors started blinking again, she breathed deeply, and asked us what we were doing. The doctor just walked out of the room. A few days later she went home. I asked the doctor about it later. She shrugged and said ‘Que Sera, Sera!”

Paul believed that the resurrection of Jesus was crucial to our conviction about salvation in Christ. “If Christ did not really rise from the dead,” he said, “then our preaching is in vain and our faith is in vain.” Our faith is no more certain than the speculations of any seer or movie star about life after death. Victory over death cannot be merely metaphorical, or philosophical, or spiritual. It must be real. If we cannot believe in a real victory over death, how can we believe in a real salvation from sin and evil?

Given the unique circumstances of Jesus’ life and death, it is difficult to imagine how his resurrection could ever be “proven”. But this does not mean it is unreasonable to believe it. There are credible witnesses. There are occurrences in our own lives that point toward it. There are many other blessings, both predictable and unimagined, that have resulted from the experience of Christ. And there is the hope that lies in every heart whenever a precious loved one dies that there will be a reunion sometime, somewhere, somehow. It could be a fortuitous coincidence of psychological need, sociological conditioning, and tall tales from ancient times. However, I think there is a more reasonable explanation. It’s true. God did it.

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