Sermons

March 23, 2008

“Easter In The Present Tense”

John 20:1-18

Rev. Phil Blackwell

He is risen! He is risen, indeed! Alleluia!

I suppose that we can blame it on Michelangelo and his Sistine Chapel ceiling. It is a stunning work of art, newly restored so that the colors drench you as you stand and look up at the panels which stretch from one end of the room to the other. And there on the wall behind you when you enter the chapel is his depiction of the Last Judgment. The risen Christ sits on the throne, and basically it is “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” on each person as she or he dies. The acceptable already look beatific as they float heavenward; the rejected are horror-struck as they begin their decent into Hell, especially the man who is having his skin flayed off of him for all of us to see.

The only problem with that enormously powerful work of art is that this is not what the Bible says. The biblical portrayal of what happens to us after death is much more complex and more finely nuanced. This is especially true in those parts of the New Testament that draw more directly on the Jewish tradition out of which Jesus comes than the Greek iconography upon which some of the early Christian writers and theologians depended.

Now, I have no intention of ruining your Easter, but I do want to have us consider a corrective that is extended to us by the Anglican Bishop of Durham in the northeast of England, N.T. Wright. Perhaps you have heard of him because, claims Time magazine in an article written by David Van Biema, “he is a hero to conservative Christians worldwide for his 2003 book The Resurrection of the Son of God, which argued forcefully for a literal interpretation of that event.” Given that identification, it might be surprising to know that the title of the magazine article is, “Christians Wrong about Heaven.” (Time, 2/7/08)

Bishop Wright is the one who blames it on Michelangelo, and on Dante for his Inferno, and I might add Milton for Paradise Lost, and all of these other stories that describe a three-story universe, with Heaven up there, and Hell down there, and we are in the middle, and then, when we die we are assigned either to “up there” or “down there,” depending on how we have behaved.

No, says Bishop Wright, “Never at any point do the gospels or Paul say Jesus has been raised, therefore we are all going to heaven. They all say, Jesus is raised, therefore the new creation has begun, and we have a job to do.”

Jesus is raised, says Wright. He is risen; he is risen, indeed, we say to one another to greet this glorious day. Easter in the present tense. It is not only, or even primarily, about the future but mainly about the present.

N.T. Wright one more time: “The idea of our participation in the new creation goes back to Genesis, when humans are supposed to be running the garden and looking after the animals. If you transpose that all the way through, it’s a picture like the one that you get at the end in Revelation. . . . What the New Testament really says is God wants you to be a renewed human being helping (God) to renew (the) creation, and (Christ’s) resurrection is the opening bell.”

Easter in the present tense: God’s call for us to renew the creation.

A New York Times writer called me Friday morning to see if I would be preaching about Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama this morning. “No,” I said. I will be talking about ‘Wright,’ but it will be Bishop N.T. Wright, not Jeremiah Wright. The wrong Wright. And as far as Obama, it is Easter, and I will be preaching about Jesus and the resurrection, not the Second Coming, as some would have us see it.”

But then, she asked if I would be talking about race at all. I said, “Look, this is Good Friday morning, and we have a three-hour vigil starting in two hours, and I’m not ready for that. And you are asking me what I am going to say on Sunday. But,” as I began to sort out the ideas that I had been rehearsing in my mind for weeks, “I will mention something about race. The public discussion over the past few weeks has put race on top of the table instead of under the table. In that sense, it has been healthy for our society because it gives us an occasion to talk about race, and even to talk about it in new ways.”

She and I ended up talking for a half an hour, and by the time we were done she had a lot more notes on my sermon plans than I did. And I understand that there is a brief reference to our conversation in the New York Times this morning. But, my thinking about race and the resurrection. If the resurrection is a call for us in this present moment to help God to renew the creation, then what might that new creation look like? Maybe a little like us here today? Look around. Africans, African-Americans, Asians, Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, Caucasians from all places and of all mixes, interracial families, multi-racial children.

We are fortunate here at the Chicago Temple not to be confined to a single neighborhood. Neighborhoods in Chicago, for the most part, are rigidly segregated. Not Rogers Park, or Wicker Park, or the South Loop. But we know the historic patterns in Chicago, and those divisions are not unique to this city. When we say that we have members from every zip code in the city and thirty or forty suburbs, we are not bragging. We simply are describing who we are as a church. And then every Sunday morning at least 25% of the congregation in worship are not official members of the church. We are more diverse than most churches.

And that diversity is a sacred trust. Our members know that, and many have chosen to be here because of that. This congregation is a self-selected group. If you want an all Spanish-speaking church, you don’t come here. If you want an Asian service in your home dialect and with the hymns you know and love, you don’t come here. If you want a worship style that is traditionally African-American, there are hundreds of better choices. If you want an all-white church where you sing “Amazing Grace” every Sunday and never hear the scripture read in Portuguese, you don’t come here. And certainly, if you are going to run for President some day, don’t come here because we don’t want you to have to repudiate everything we preach, even if you say that we are nice people.

But if you want to be part of God’s new creation, and you can live by the “75% Rule” (that you like at least 75% of what goes on in this church, and you assume that the 25% you don’t like belongs to someone else’s 75%), then maybe this is the place to be.

The newspaper reporter asked if we talk about race much in the congregation. I told her that mainly it comes up in practical ways: what hymns we sing, in what languages we read the scriptures, what the staff represents, and who provides leadership for the church. “But maybe,” I thought out loud over the phone, “this would be a good time for us to talk directly about racial issues, given that it now has been put on top of the table for everybody to see. And maybe we can find ways to talk about it that will help bring in the new creation.” Imagine a consideration of race that makes the resurrection real and present, not something abstract and in the future. Imagine the church as a context within which anger is honored, grievances respected, and hope made real.

Easter in the present tense. A new creation, starting now. Bishop Wright, one last time: “The great drama will end, not with ‘saved souls’ being snatched up into heaven, away from the wicked earth and the mortal bodies which have dragged them down into sin, but with the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth, so that ‘the dwelling of God is with humans.’” (Simply Christian, p.217)

That means that the “Left Behind” people are wrong. You know, the enormously successful series of books in which the world ends in disaster except for the blessed few who are whisked away by God just in time. That series made millions of dollars, but it made no biblical sense. Sure, you can find one or two verses suggesting such a scenario and build your life around it. I had a clergy colleague years ago who believed so strongly that this was the way that it would end and that he would be among the blessed few, that he wore a jumpsuit every day so that he would be ready to be sucked up into heaven. He had the jumpsuits in liturgical colors, one for each season – red, green, purple, white. He probably was buried in one of them.

But that is not the dominant theme in the New Testament. The resurrection is the sign that God is going to make new this creation which we have befouled new. And that means there is work for us to do, today. Doesn’t that sound more exciting than sitting around on a cloud forever listening to harp music? Frederick Buechner’s great line: “Billions of people yearn for immortality, but they don’t know what to do on a rainy afternoon.”

Well, there is plenty to do, starting this afternoon. Our Easter affirmation that “He is risen” gives us the courage to talk about race and believe that a new understanding can emerge.

“He is risen” gives us the strength to be peacemakers in a world so in the clutches of fear that the only answer to anything is to destroy everything and ask questions later.

“He is risen” gives us the generosity to see that we are stewards of an abundance of resources, not a scarcity, and that the future of all depends on our sharing, not our hoarding.

“He is risen” gives us the foresight to protect our environmental cocoon in which we live, at least being good scouts and leaving it cleaner than we found it, because God’s future for us, first and foremost, is down here, not up there.

The vision of the ideal future in the Book of Revelation imagines God’s Holy City coming down to earth. The resurrection tells us to take this life seriously, this day seriously, this place seriously, and even if downtown Chicago does not look like either the Garden of Eden or the Holy City, to take it seriously, too, as sacred space. We have work to do in God’s new creation inaugurated by Christ’s resurrection.

I hope that this sense of the resurrection offers an appreciation of the present and hope for the future. Bishop Wright’s corrective to our simple notion of heaven tells us that things are more complex than we first thought. That is a dangerous truth in a world so confusing to so many that most people are looking for easy answers, not hard ones. “Please give me a bumper sticker theology, a sound bite politics, and three easy steps to success.”

But we need an understanding of the central claim of the Christian faith, the resurrection of Jesus Christ (nothing else matters if we cannot find truth in this; not Baptism, not Communion, not Christmas, not the Church), that is complex enough to address our complex lives. We need an understanding that helps us to live today, in the present, directing us to what we can do to make the resurrection real for others. And what we have considered together this morning is part of that complexity. Thanks be to God that “He is risen; He is risen, indeed.” Amen.

Philip L. Blackwell
The Chicago Temple
March 23, 2008