March 27, 2016 Easter Sunday
Risen With Him
Isaiah 25:1-9, Psalm 93, Colossians 3:1-4, St. John 20:1-10
Some of you may have read “Dead Man Walking” a couple of years ago when it was the book selected for the Durango community reading program.
For those who are unfamiliar with the story, the author, Sister Helen Prejean, chronicles her relationship with Matthew Poncelet, who is under sentence of execution in Louisiana.
One fact never in dispute is that this jaded, cynical young man did commit the heinous crimes of rape and murder. The story proceeds along two tracks.
On one, Sister Helen becomes a crusader against the death penalty and puts up a valiant fight in the courts and before the governor to save Poncelet’s life and to reform the system.
On the other track, as his spiritual counselor she struggles just as resolutely on her many visits to death row to win him over to redeeming faith to the benefit of his immortal soul.
Her campaign to cheat the hangman and to abolish capital punishment fails utterly. On her second quest she has more success, and this is the matter that interests us today.
Another unassailable fact is that Sister Helen – regardless of whether we endorse either her theology or her politics – is acting out of deep Christian love. She wants desperately to pierce the young man’s shell, hard as armor plate, and to penetrate the layers of rage and fear and hatred within him.
She refuses to relinquish hope that, if she can drill down to his core, she will find a soft heart encased in the stone wall he has erected to shield himself from his feelings.
If she can hold up the gospel to the humanity she is certain is buried deep within him, God will guide him into humility, repentance and salvation.
Toward the end, she arrives for a visit – just after Easter, as it happens -- and her charge greets her with the news that he has been reading his Bible and has become convinced he’ll encounter Jesus on the other side. Some would rejoice at such a breakthrough . . . but not Sister Helen. She recoils.
“That’s not how it is, Matthew,” she scolds. “It’s not like a ticket you hand in. You have to participate in your own redemption.”
For a dyed-in-the-wool Protestant, alarm bells are clanging now: That’s a Catholic for you, teaching righteousness by works. A tormented soul has come to saving faith by God’s grace and now she tells him he must work his way into heaven.
Perhaps that’s what she means but I propose we give Sister Helen the benefit of the doubt. She may be troubled by an attitude that views faith as a present transaction with a future payoff:
O.K., Jesus, I’ll believe in your power to save and you bail me out on the eternal death sentence I deserve. It’s a way of beating the rap.
Sister Helen may want Poncelet to know that relationship with the Lord is not something we defer until the heart stops beating and the brainwave goes flat. She may have in mind a passage such as our epistle lesson for this Easter Sunday. It begins: “If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth.”
As we celebrate the resurrection of our Lord, beloved, we celebrate our resurrection with Him. Our tombs are empty as well. We celebrate it today, for it is as real today as it will be a million years from now.
It may not be as vivid but it is just as valid. This is the undeniable already/not yet dimension of the faith we inhabit. Some would empty the Bible of all mystery . . . but when they do it is no longer the Bible. The One who created nature operates on a supernatural plane.
Because of what Christ has done, we are fellow heirs with Him, received already into the everlasting kingdom and brothers and sisters of His.
Recall our epistle lesson for last week, which begins: “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus . . .” (Philippians 2:5). Now we’re told to set our minds on things above.
We are invited to share his thoughts, today. This is not a “Twilight Zone” connection as some may imagine, not a New Age ascent to a higher mental plane. Neither is it a command to disengage entirely from the material world around us, from work and play and the wisdom of the world.
If we read one verse beyond our passage for this morning we will find: “Therefore put to death your members which are on the earth: fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Colossians 3:5).
Setting our minds on things above begins with the eminently practical step of cleaning out the dark closets in our lives, of hauling those old suits woven of our sins to the dumpster.
When we crucify that old man with all his worldly lusts we are “raised with Christ”; we are new creations capable of training our minds on “those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God.”
This is a matter God hands over to us, but He does not abandon us to it. He gives us His Holy Spirit to direct, encourage and pardon us as we work our way through it. This is, I suspect, what Sister Helen had in mind. And it is no small chore.
Let me take you back to the pokey for a moment, this time to the La Plata County Jail. I’m counseling a young man there we’ll call “Joe.”
Joe went to jail on his 18th birthday and he’s due to be released next month on his 28th birthday. He has spent most of the intervening years in jail or prison. He will walk out in a few weeks a free man – as the world defines freedom.
He will have discharged his sentence and will not be on parole. He will be under no supervision.
And the thought terrifies him. He has lived a life fueled by alcohol, violence and marital infidelity – by both parties. He lives right now on a cell block in the noxious presence of a man with whom his wife has been involved.
He can return to his old life with his wife – and hold in his arms each day a cute-as-a-kitten 2-year-old reminder of another of her indiscretions.
He will pack out of the jail the guilt of his own infidelities, the pride that goads him on to revenge, the anger that has landed him in the lockup so many times. Joe wants desperately to live in a new and different way. He yearns not to be what he calls “a nothin’” any longer.
He understands that returning to the old story populated by the old people and doing the old things will earn him the same old sanctions and suffering he has brought down on his head for so long.
Yet because he has fallen so many times he cannot say with any conviction that he will crucify his old sin-soaked ways and train his mind on the things above. Only last week he told me ruefully, “You can lead the horse to water but you can’t make him drink.”
Why? Because the old familiar things may be toxic but they are known. He can slide back into them as unthinkingly as well-worn slippers. God offers a different way, a better way . . . but one that expects a change in thinking and demands a reformed mode of living.
One who is raised with Christ no longer belongs to himself. Christ paid too high a price to redeem him – to buy him back from sin and the wages of sin which is death -- for the redeemed man to continue in possession of himself.
The apostle is emphatic on this point. In Galatians Paul declares, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me” (2:20). In Philippians he writes, “For me to live is Christ” (1:21). And in our current text he refers to the Lord as “Christ who is our life.”
Does Paul get it right? Well, Jesus never called anyone to lukewarm discipleship. He makes exhaustive demands on those whose debts He paid. Joe gets this; he sees clearly that the Lord doesn’t want the moth, He wants the butterfly.
He sees something else as well. Joe knows he’s the kind of guy who takes his jail with him wherever he goes. Those old carnal appetites are his bars; those old sinful acts are his warm bed.
It’s just one small step from his metaphorical cage on the outside back into that physical cage in the red brick building at the end of the road in Bodo Park. Pray for Joe.
Joe’s story is a common one in our jails and prisons. We less notorious sinners have a variety pack of our own versions of it, too, of course. Our struggle is the price we pay for grace.
I’m working on a project that involves some study on law-based and grace-based religions and how they compare. I’ve been fascinated to see how intertwined are ethical conduct in this world and eschatology.
That’s a four-bit word that refers to the end-times. Judaism, having rejected Jesus of Nazareth as the promised Messiah 2,000 years ago, has only the murkiest of eschatologies. With no Redeemer, it can have no focused vision of a life beyond this one.
The predominate view seems to be that the nation herself has assumed the messianic role and perfects herself by keeping the law of Moses. What comes next is hard to say.
Islam is derived from Judaism and Christianity. It casts aside grace and reverts to law. The next life is a paradise in which the carnal delights of this world achieve ultimate fulfillment – for men, anyway.
The believer attains it by piling up more merits than demerits in this world according to a code revealed by the prophet Mohammad. He trades today’s virtue for tomorrow’s pleasures.
In the Christian eschatology, God overcomes the fall and man’s sin nature and restores the primeval state of innocence. The lion lies down with the lamb. In the eternal Sabbath, the redeemed lives in the perfect shalom of unimpeded worship of God and brotherhood with his fellow man.
The highway through life on this mortal coil is the way of grace, of admitting that we are powerless to redeem ourselves and accepting the sacrificial, saving work God has done on our behalf.
This age of grace in which we dwell today is a rehearsal for that glorious time to come and we inhabit it by abiding in the Holy Spirit of God, who abides in us. Keeping the law written on our hearts is a far more demanding pursuit than following a list of statutes, but an infinitely more rewarding one.
The things of the Spirit are spiritually discerned. We access them by setting our minds on things above, not on things on earth. Yet, like Joe, we yearn to cling to our comfortable, tawdry habits and frayed passions.
Our citizenship may be in heaven but we hold on tight to the visa that allows us to remain for a season in this far country. “I’ll give it up, Lord, but I want to squeeze my money’s worth from it first.”
Where shall we turn? We turn first to His tomb, which is our tomb. It stands open and empty . . . today. In His resurrection, which is our resurrection, we get our life back. We can proceed anew according to God’s eternal purpose for us. This is our preparation for our life in glory.
As we rejoice in our Lord’s ascent from humiliation to power, we graduate today from the shame of the cross to the glory of the empty tomb. He is not there. Where is He? To catch sight of Him we look upward, not outward . . . nor inward.
Looking outward, we will learn what the world wants to teach us, and the world is under the sway of our enemy. Looking inward, we will flit about on the shifting winds of doctrine, relying on our own understanding and not God’s infallible revelation.
But looking upward, where Christ sits at the right hand of God, we fasten our gaze on the Living Word. For us, the center of authority is above. We invest our faith not in a man-made religion but in a divinely ordered cosmos, ruled from on high.
The God who created it has the power to take it back from His enemy, douse it with the disinfecting blood of Christ and restore to it the pristine glow of long ago.
We can catch sight of our Lord up there because our life is hidden with Christ in God. Paul is using baptismal imagery here. This book of Colossians amounts to a baptismal catechesim, an instruction manual for the convert preparing for baptism.
The appointed day for the ceremony in the early church was Easter Vigil, the day before the celebration of the resurrection. The candidate went under the waters and died to the old man; he rose from the waters as a new creation joined to the One who rose from the tomb.
The church has used this passage from chapter 3 as the Easter epistle from time immemorial because it teaches the new Christian where to look for his new direction.
The Greeks spoke in common parlance of one who died and was buried as “hidden in the earth.” The new Christian experienced not a physical death but a spiritual death. He thus was “hidden with Christ in God.”
As long as we are wayfarers in this world which is not our home we exist in an invisible state, hidden from those who do not know Christ as Savior and Lord. In their eyes, we live and move and have our being in the shadows, obscured from the vibrant life of the Vanity Fair.
But this is a passing condition. “When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory.”
Having looked first into the empty tomb, we peer now into that soon-coming day when Christ returns and we rush out to meet Him in His glory. No shadows will overtake us then, no mortals will fail to see us celebrating in the radiance emanating from our Lord.
Beloved, we are raised with Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit of God to live for Him . . . today. This is the sense in which we participate in our salvation. It is possible only because of what God has done.
We are Matthew Poncelet, trapped by the steel teeth of our pride and pain and fear. We are Joe, yearning for a new and righteous life but enmeshed in the sticky strands of our comfy old sins.
Left to our own devices we would be forever lost. But we are not lost. We are sinners saved by God’s amazing grace. Because Jesus Christ is risen today we, too, are risen today. Hallelujah, hallelujah . . . and amen!
Risen With Him
Isaiah 25:1-9, Psalm 93, Colossians 3:1-4, St. John 20:1-10
Some of you may have read “Dead Man Walking” a couple of years ago when it was the book selected for the Durango community reading program.
For those who are unfamiliar with the story, the author, Sister Helen Prejean, chronicles her relationship with Matthew Poncelet, who is under sentence of execution in Louisiana.
One fact never in dispute is that this jaded, cynical young man did commit the heinous crimes of rape and murder. The story proceeds along two tracks.
On one, Sister Helen becomes a crusader against the death penalty and puts up a valiant fight in the courts and before the governor to save Poncelet’s life and to reform the system.
On the other track, as his spiritual counselor she struggles just as resolutely on her many visits to death row to win him over to redeeming faith to the benefit of his immortal soul.
Her campaign to cheat the hangman and to abolish capital punishment fails utterly. On her second quest she has more success, and this is the matter that interests us today.
Another unassailable fact is that Sister Helen – regardless of whether we endorse either her theology or her politics – is acting out of deep Christian love. She wants desperately to pierce the young man’s shell, hard as armor plate, and to penetrate the layers of rage and fear and hatred within him.
She refuses to relinquish hope that, if she can drill down to his core, she will find a soft heart encased in the stone wall he has erected to shield himself from his feelings.
If she can hold up the gospel to the humanity she is certain is buried deep within him, God will guide him into humility, repentance and salvation.
Toward the end, she arrives for a visit – just after Easter, as it happens -- and her charge greets her with the news that he has been reading his Bible and has become convinced he’ll encounter Jesus on the other side. Some would rejoice at such a breakthrough . . . but not Sister Helen. She recoils.
“That’s not how it is, Matthew,” she scolds. “It’s not like a ticket you hand in. You have to participate in your own redemption.”
For a dyed-in-the-wool Protestant, alarm bells are clanging now: That’s a Catholic for you, teaching righteousness by works. A tormented soul has come to saving faith by God’s grace and now she tells him he must work his way into heaven.
Perhaps that’s what she means but I propose we give Sister Helen the benefit of the doubt. She may be troubled by an attitude that views faith as a present transaction with a future payoff:
O.K., Jesus, I’ll believe in your power to save and you bail me out on the eternal death sentence I deserve. It’s a way of beating the rap.
Sister Helen may want Poncelet to know that relationship with the Lord is not something we defer until the heart stops beating and the brainwave goes flat. She may have in mind a passage such as our epistle lesson for this Easter Sunday. It begins: “If then you were raised with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things above, not on things on the earth.”
As we celebrate the resurrection of our Lord, beloved, we celebrate our resurrection with Him. Our tombs are empty as well. We celebrate it today, for it is as real today as it will be a million years from now.
It may not be as vivid but it is just as valid. This is the undeniable already/not yet dimension of the faith we inhabit. Some would empty the Bible of all mystery . . . but when they do it is no longer the Bible. The One who created nature operates on a supernatural plane.
Because of what Christ has done, we are fellow heirs with Him, received already into the everlasting kingdom and brothers and sisters of His.
Recall our epistle lesson for last week, which begins: “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus . . .” (Philippians 2:5). Now we’re told to set our minds on things above.
We are invited to share his thoughts, today. This is not a “Twilight Zone” connection as some may imagine, not a New Age ascent to a higher mental plane. Neither is it a command to disengage entirely from the material world around us, from work and play and the wisdom of the world.
If we read one verse beyond our passage for this morning we will find: “Therefore put to death your members which are on the earth: fornication, uncleanness, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry” (Colossians 3:5).
Setting our minds on things above begins with the eminently practical step of cleaning out the dark closets in our lives, of hauling those old suits woven of our sins to the dumpster.
When we crucify that old man with all his worldly lusts we are “raised with Christ”; we are new creations capable of training our minds on “those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God.”
This is a matter God hands over to us, but He does not abandon us to it. He gives us His Holy Spirit to direct, encourage and pardon us as we work our way through it. This is, I suspect, what Sister Helen had in mind. And it is no small chore.
Let me take you back to the pokey for a moment, this time to the La Plata County Jail. I’m counseling a young man there we’ll call “Joe.”
Joe went to jail on his 18th birthday and he’s due to be released next month on his 28th birthday. He has spent most of the intervening years in jail or prison. He will walk out in a few weeks a free man – as the world defines freedom.
He will have discharged his sentence and will not be on parole. He will be under no supervision.
And the thought terrifies him. He has lived a life fueled by alcohol, violence and marital infidelity – by both parties. He lives right now on a cell block in the noxious presence of a man with whom his wife has been involved.
He can return to his old life with his wife – and hold in his arms each day a cute-as-a-kitten 2-year-old reminder of another of her indiscretions.
He will pack out of the jail the guilt of his own infidelities, the pride that goads him on to revenge, the anger that has landed him in the lockup so many times. Joe wants desperately to live in a new and different way. He yearns not to be what he calls “a nothin’” any longer.
He understands that returning to the old story populated by the old people and doing the old things will earn him the same old sanctions and suffering he has brought down on his head for so long.
Yet because he has fallen so many times he cannot say with any conviction that he will crucify his old sin-soaked ways and train his mind on the things above. Only last week he told me ruefully, “You can lead the horse to water but you can’t make him drink.”
Why? Because the old familiar things may be toxic but they are known. He can slide back into them as unthinkingly as well-worn slippers. God offers a different way, a better way . . . but one that expects a change in thinking and demands a reformed mode of living.
One who is raised with Christ no longer belongs to himself. Christ paid too high a price to redeem him – to buy him back from sin and the wages of sin which is death -- for the redeemed man to continue in possession of himself.
The apostle is emphatic on this point. In Galatians Paul declares, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me” (2:20). In Philippians he writes, “For me to live is Christ” (1:21). And in our current text he refers to the Lord as “Christ who is our life.”
Does Paul get it right? Well, Jesus never called anyone to lukewarm discipleship. He makes exhaustive demands on those whose debts He paid. Joe gets this; he sees clearly that the Lord doesn’t want the moth, He wants the butterfly.
He sees something else as well. Joe knows he’s the kind of guy who takes his jail with him wherever he goes. Those old carnal appetites are his bars; those old sinful acts are his warm bed.
It’s just one small step from his metaphorical cage on the outside back into that physical cage in the red brick building at the end of the road in Bodo Park. Pray for Joe.
Joe’s story is a common one in our jails and prisons. We less notorious sinners have a variety pack of our own versions of it, too, of course. Our struggle is the price we pay for grace.
I’m working on a project that involves some study on law-based and grace-based religions and how they compare. I’ve been fascinated to see how intertwined are ethical conduct in this world and eschatology.
That’s a four-bit word that refers to the end-times. Judaism, having rejected Jesus of Nazareth as the promised Messiah 2,000 years ago, has only the murkiest of eschatologies. With no Redeemer, it can have no focused vision of a life beyond this one.
The predominate view seems to be that the nation herself has assumed the messianic role and perfects herself by keeping the law of Moses. What comes next is hard to say.
Islam is derived from Judaism and Christianity. It casts aside grace and reverts to law. The next life is a paradise in which the carnal delights of this world achieve ultimate fulfillment – for men, anyway.
The believer attains it by piling up more merits than demerits in this world according to a code revealed by the prophet Mohammad. He trades today’s virtue for tomorrow’s pleasures.
In the Christian eschatology, God overcomes the fall and man’s sin nature and restores the primeval state of innocence. The lion lies down with the lamb. In the eternal Sabbath, the redeemed lives in the perfect shalom of unimpeded worship of God and brotherhood with his fellow man.
The highway through life on this mortal coil is the way of grace, of admitting that we are powerless to redeem ourselves and accepting the sacrificial, saving work God has done on our behalf.
This age of grace in which we dwell today is a rehearsal for that glorious time to come and we inhabit it by abiding in the Holy Spirit of God, who abides in us. Keeping the law written on our hearts is a far more demanding pursuit than following a list of statutes, but an infinitely more rewarding one.
The things of the Spirit are spiritually discerned. We access them by setting our minds on things above, not on things on earth. Yet, like Joe, we yearn to cling to our comfortable, tawdry habits and frayed passions.
Our citizenship may be in heaven but we hold on tight to the visa that allows us to remain for a season in this far country. “I’ll give it up, Lord, but I want to squeeze my money’s worth from it first.”
Where shall we turn? We turn first to His tomb, which is our tomb. It stands open and empty . . . today. In His resurrection, which is our resurrection, we get our life back. We can proceed anew according to God’s eternal purpose for us. This is our preparation for our life in glory.
As we rejoice in our Lord’s ascent from humiliation to power, we graduate today from the shame of the cross to the glory of the empty tomb. He is not there. Where is He? To catch sight of Him we look upward, not outward . . . nor inward.
Looking outward, we will learn what the world wants to teach us, and the world is under the sway of our enemy. Looking inward, we will flit about on the shifting winds of doctrine, relying on our own understanding and not God’s infallible revelation.
But looking upward, where Christ sits at the right hand of God, we fasten our gaze on the Living Word. For us, the center of authority is above. We invest our faith not in a man-made religion but in a divinely ordered cosmos, ruled from on high.
The God who created it has the power to take it back from His enemy, douse it with the disinfecting blood of Christ and restore to it the pristine glow of long ago.
We can catch sight of our Lord up there because our life is hidden with Christ in God. Paul is using baptismal imagery here. This book of Colossians amounts to a baptismal catechesim, an instruction manual for the convert preparing for baptism.
The appointed day for the ceremony in the early church was Easter Vigil, the day before the celebration of the resurrection. The candidate went under the waters and died to the old man; he rose from the waters as a new creation joined to the One who rose from the tomb.
The church has used this passage from chapter 3 as the Easter epistle from time immemorial because it teaches the new Christian where to look for his new direction.
The Greeks spoke in common parlance of one who died and was buried as “hidden in the earth.” The new Christian experienced not a physical death but a spiritual death. He thus was “hidden with Christ in God.”
As long as we are wayfarers in this world which is not our home we exist in an invisible state, hidden from those who do not know Christ as Savior and Lord. In their eyes, we live and move and have our being in the shadows, obscured from the vibrant life of the Vanity Fair.
But this is a passing condition. “When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory.”
Having looked first into the empty tomb, we peer now into that soon-coming day when Christ returns and we rush out to meet Him in His glory. No shadows will overtake us then, no mortals will fail to see us celebrating in the radiance emanating from our Lord.
Beloved, we are raised with Christ and empowered by the Holy Spirit of God to live for Him . . . today. This is the sense in which we participate in our salvation. It is possible only because of what God has done.
We are Matthew Poncelet, trapped by the steel teeth of our pride and pain and fear. We are Joe, yearning for a new and righteous life but enmeshed in the sticky strands of our comfy old sins.
Left to our own devices we would be forever lost. But we are not lost. We are sinners saved by God’s amazing grace. Because Jesus Christ is risen today we, too, are risen today. Hallelujah, hallelujah . . . and amen!