Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! This is the proclamation of the women who visited the tomb of Jesus that first Easter morning. This is the great Easter proclamation of the first century church, and the church of the twenty first century! It is a proclamation of a current reality and a future hope. No matter who we are, or the circumstances we face, the dead ends of life, the lost relationship, or the physical and figurative “death” we encounter, death does not have the final say. God is a God of resurrection. God makes all things new, re-creating, and calling us to be partners in God’s re-creation! The resurrection brings hope, today, tomorrow, and forever. A hope, Paul says, that “will not disappoint us.”
However, from the time of the Epicurean philosophers to the “age of enlightenment”, and continuing in the twenty first century, there are voices that would have us believe that God is not actively involved with God’s creation but has created and left us to our own devices; God is separated from the world, and remains uninvolved with the world. Therefore, if true, the resurrection of Jesus couldn’t possibly have anything to do with us today.
In his book, Surprised By Hope, Bishop N.T. Wright offers the following:
“”Who, after all, was it who didn’t want the dead to be raised? Not simply the intellectually timid or the rationalists. It was, and is, those in power, the social and intellectual tyrants and bullies; the Caesars who would be threatened by a Lord of the world who had defeated the tyrant’s last weapon, death itself; the Herods who would be horrified at the postmortem validation of the true King of the Jews. And this is the point where believing in the resurrection of Jesus suddenly ceases to be a matter of inquiring about an odd event in the first century and becomes a matter of rediscovering hope in the twenty-first century. Hope is what you get when you suddenly realize that different worldview is possible, a worldview in which the rich, the powerful, and the unscrupulous do not after all have the last word. The same worldview shift that is demanded by the resurrection of Jesus is the shift that will enable us to transform the world.” (P.75)
Through the resurrection of Jesus we possess the power of the resurrection today, and resurrection hope tomorrow. Resurrection hope transforms our worldview, and we become partners in God’s acts of new creation! Join us by Live Stream for our Easter Celebration. To God be the glory!
Through Christ,
Pastor Doug