letter to the church

Dear members and friends,

What do the baseball season and Easter have in common this year?  They both came early…. The season began on March 24th instead of the first week of April, with the Red Sox beating the Athletics in Tokyo.    And Easter was early also, coming on March 23rd.

Rabbi John Sherwood sent me an email containing the following:
The next time Easter will be this early (March 23) will be the year 2228 (220 years from now). The last time it was this early was 1913 (so if you’re 95 or older, you are the only ones that were around for that!).

The earliest Easter you will ever experience is over… or is it?  In the New Testament, Easter was a spectacular event; yet arguably even more spectacular is the continuing effect of Jesus’ resurrection on the world.

Without the resurrection, Jesus would have been a footnote in history, the New Testament and the church would not exist, billions would not know God through Christ, and all the tremendous works of compassion and education resulting from Christian mission would not have happened.

Even so, the resurrection of Christ is undervalued, both in society and in the church.  A couple of weeks ago, I wanted to put together an Easter hymn medley that went beyond the standard once-a-year hymns we sing on Easter.   So I looked over a couple of hymnals for compositions that speak to the resurrection in at least one stanza.   I only found one or two.

I was amazed to find the vast majority of hymns that trace the Christ-story go right from the cross to the second coming without even mentioning the risen Christ.   How Great Thou Art , one of my favorites, exemplifies this trends, moving from the cross in stanza three, to the return of Christ in stanza four, skipping over the resurrection entirely.  Most of our hymns are from a few decades when perhaps some theological truths were emphasized and others were not.

But resurrection is coming back into our music!  Several songs written in the past decade come to mind: Mighty to Save  “you rose and conquered the grave,” also You are My King “ I’m alive and well, your Spirit is within me, because You died and rose again,” and finally How Deep the Father’s Love for Us “I will boast in Jesus Christ, His death and resurrection.”   The church seems to be gradually rediscovering the power of the risen Christ, at least in our music.

Some of you may know that one of my favorite theologians is N.T. Wright.   Bishop Wright preached the following in his Easter sermon this past Sunday:

Easter is about real life, not escapist fantasy. Easter is about God’s judgment, calling the world to account and setting up his new, glorious creation of freedom and peace, and summoning all people everywhere to live in this new world. Easter is about God’s rich welcome to all humankind. We Easter people are called to celebrate all of that in practical ways, as well as in glad and uninhibited worship.

And it’s all because Easter is about Jesus: the Jesus who announced God’s saving, sovereign kingdom; the Jesus who died to exhaust the power of this world’s rulers; the Jesus who rose again to be crowned as king over all things in heaven and on earth.

Hear it again:  In the Risen Christ, we are called to glad and uninhibited worship.    I think we experienced a bit of that on Easter Sunday, as our skillful and prayerful musicians did more than perform, they led us to worship the risen Christ with voice, organ, guitar, trumpet and drums.

Hear it again:  Easter is about God in Christ setting up his new, glorious creation.  In another sermon, preached at a Christian hospital dedication, the bishop spoke of the hospital’s ministry in light of God’s new creation:

(The hospital) offers healing and hope, not just as a crumb of comfort before we leave this world and go somewhere else, but as a genuine anticipation, and advance foretaste, of the new creation in which all wrongs will be righted, all hurts will be healed, and God will wipe away all tears from all eyes.

I am delighted that our church is sponsoring two surgeries at the CURE International hospital in the Dominican Republic.  We look forward to hearing about how God’s new creation, with the power of resurrection healing, will change the lives of two children and their families.

Bishop Wright closed his Easter sermon with these words:

God give us grace, this day and from now on, to live as Easter people, celebrating Jesus’ love and joy at his table and making his kingdom and justice known in his world.

May our hearts and voices continue to resonate with the sounds of resurrection; may our hands extend God’s rich welcome to everyone; may our feet take us to places where new creation needs to happen the most.

Christ is risen indeed!

Pastor Ted

life, faith, and the shibboleth test

Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.

In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

Romans 6:8-11

Easter “eBay or bElieve” sermon part 1:

Easter “eBay or bElieve” sermon part 2:

 

 

I am an occasional customer of eBay, the online auction house. I’ve bought maybe 6 or 8 items there over the years, northing out of the ordinary.
Mostly spare parts for computers, cell phone accessories. Back in Zimbabwe, in Africa where we used to live, eBay was used by several people we knew as kind of a connection to the outside world, to the larger culture.
eBay has helped some people begin small businesses and others increase their sales. My cousin Donni started a small side business shopping for vintage clothing at thrift shops and when she found rare items she put them up for sale on eBay.

Donni’s sister, my cousin Barbara, designs whimsical jewelry which she sells on eBay.
But beyond the normal items for sale there have been more than a few really strange items for sale over eBay’s history -– my favorites come in the “iconic food” category:

First up is the Virgin Mary on a half eaten ten year old grilled cheese sandwich, which sold on eBay for $28,000.
Another strange food item auctioned off on the internet is Jesus on a fish stick
You have to be 200% Catholic to get this I think – it is a Nacho cheese flavored Dorito shaped like the Pope’s hat – and amazingly this single Dorito sold for $1035
Back to the grilled cheese – how about a Hello Kitty on a grilled cheese which sold for only $61.00 – nothing compared with the $28k cheesy Mary– still – you could make a living if you sold enough Hello Kitty sandwiches at $60 a pop

One particular eBay item caught my attention last week. An Australian man wrote the following on the web site alife4sale.com
“Hi there, my name is Ian Usher, and I have had enough of my life! I don’t want it any more! You can have it if you like!…. it’s all going up for sale in one big auction. Everything I have and everything I am. On the day it is all sold and settled I intend to walk out of my front door with my wallet in one pocket and my passport in the other, nothing else at all, and get on the train, with no idea where I am going or what the future holds for me.”

So in June – just over two months away – Ian plans to sell his house, car, everything – not piece by piece but all at once – – in fact he is claiming that – if you are the winning bidder his friends – will actually try and become your friends – and that his employer will give the winning bidder a two week trial in Ian’s job….

Now while the right person could possibly settle in quickly to Ian’s old life – the trouble for Ian is that – no matter where he goes and what kind of new life he begins – Ian will still be Ian.

And if what we know about human nature is true, Ian will probably gravitate once again into the relationships and behavior which caused him to grow so weary of his life that he wants to sell it.

And so unless Ian has some kind of inner change, it is unlikely that changing all the surrounding stuff and people on the outside is really going to have any lasting effect on Ian. Imagine that – you sell your whole life, and nothing really changes.

Romans 6:8 from today’s scripture reading points us towards a kind of change that is vastly different from the change Ian Usher will experience after his eBay auction.
The change Paul wrote about in Romans 6:8 is both real and lasting. It’s the kind of change that affects both our life here on earth, and also our life after we die.
The change Paul describes doesn’t involve auctioning a house or spouse or pets or cars – in fact there is no auction or sale involved at all

Let’s take a close look at what Paul is saying here about the change which a connection with Jesus Christ can bring in our lives:

Look at the first three words of Romans 6:8… Now if we – Paul includes each and every person who trusts in Christ in his statement.
So if everyone who believes is included in this statement, there is no one left out – no one left behind – except of course those who don’t believe.

Some variations of Christianity make it seem like the pastors or priests or elders or deacons have kind of an inside track but for Paul here in Romans 6 it is just “we who believe” – Everyone who trusts in Christ is included in the life change Paul is offering – we’re all on a level playing field.

Now the next part of the sentence
Now if we died with Christ - How it this possible for us have died with Christ? When Jesus died, he died alone. Even his closest friends abandoned him. Two criminals died on crosses alongside Jesus, but Paul’s not talking about them. He is talking about us.

Paul is talking here about our life as it is – especially the bad parts – the parts we’d like to forget, or hide, or do over. In saying that we who believe have died with Christ, Paul means this bad part, or sinful nature, of every human being died when Christ died.

Sounds great – but how is that possible? Where is the connection between the badness in us and the death of Christ Jesus nearly 2000 years ago. How could my life in 2008 possibly be connected with Jesus’ death in the year 30 AD?

This leads us to the next two words in Romans 6:8

we believe – another way of saying this would be we have faith or we trust

Faith – belief – trust - is what connects our life here and now with the death of Christ back then. The death of Christ is both true in history and also true now “for us”,
Baseball season is coming and so let me use a baseball analogy –It is as if Christ dying and rising back then pitched the ball, and now by faith we have caught it.

• By faith, by belief, by trusting what he did for us, we become a part of what his death on that cross
• Faith unites us with the death of Christ. We therefore can say that “we died with Him”.
• By faith we can say our sin went to the cross with Him.
• By faith we can say our selfish nature died with Jesus – and then by faith and by the power of God’s Spirit.

Karl Barth says that our faith need not be complete – it is normal, and acceptable to come to Christ “with question marks as well as with exclamation points”
This is great news! We don’t need to have it all figured out in order to follow Jesus.
There is a cult group which meets in Lake Hughes California. They think that in order to faithfully follow Christ you need to have every piece of the Bible – every belief about God – figured out correctly. Not surprisingly, this group believes that they and only they are the true church.

The next phrase after we believe speaks to the second half of the “in Christ” reality:

we will also live with him

Because Jesus Christ was raised from the dead – we trust God that a new person, a new you and the new me, will stand alive at the end of history.
Paul is talking about our resurrection being tied to Christ’s resurrection.
This is not heaven – floating around on clouds. Neither Jews nor early Christians believed in heaven the way most people do today.
When Paul says “we will also live with Him” he means that just as Jesus was bodily raised, and then met with his friends eating laughing teaching loving – so also shall you and I who believe be raised to that kind of new life at the end of history in a resurrection body.
When we die, our spirits go to Christ. When history ends and when Christ returns, all believers in Christ are raised just as Christ was raised on Easter.

So to sum up, faith connects us with Christ, in death and in life.
The “old me” is dead in Christ, by faith united with Him in his death.
The “new me” will be made alive in Christ at the future resurrection, when Christ shall return and “the dead shall be raised, incorruptible”

Faith in Christ is what distinguishes someone who is a Christian from someone who is not.
If you trust that Jesus God in human form, and that Jesus died and was raised for you, then you have become a Christian.
Faith is the test, – and a word for testing out who a person really is, is found the OT – the word is shibboleth.

In Judges chapter 12, the men from Gilead had taken control of the Jordan river crossing from the men of another tribe named Ephraim. The defeated men of Ephraim had to cross back over the Jordan to get home. To be allowed safe passage back over the river, they had to pretend to be Gileadites. And so the Gileadites had to devise a test to see who was truly one of their own, and who was not. So they asked the men crossing over to pronounce a word that only a man of their own tribe could pronounce, as a test. Are you one of us, or not?

Let’s read from Judges
The Gileadites took the fords of the Jordan against the Ephraimites. Whenever one of the fugitives of Ephraim said, “Let me go over,” the men of Gilead would say to him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” When he said, “No,” they said to him, “Then say Shibboleth,” but he said, “Sibboleth,” for he could not pronounce it right. Then they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Judges 12:5-6

I want to show you a brief video clip from the series, The West Wing. In this clip, President Bartlet receives in the Oval Office a Chinese refugee who is part of a group seeking asylum in the USA because they have been persecuted in China as Christians.
The President must determine if the man and his group are genuine Christians, or if they are just pretending in order to come into the USA.

Do you pass the shibboleth test? Do you know a few things about religion – which never seems to be enough –
Or today – maybe for the first time – do you realize that faith – and not a list of memorized facts – is what can change your life?

Do you believe that faith in the risen Christ can bring true and lasting change?

Do you have faith today to say yes I have died with Christ – yes I am alive with him… and yes – I want to join with other Christians to change the world one person at a time.

Your life may have lots of question marks as well as exclamation points, mine does also
but don’t give up and auction your life on eBay…
Don’t give up on your life -
Have faith;
See your life as a life worth saving – that’s how God sees you. Trust your life to Jesus today….

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

run to Sunday!