We Are an Easter-ly People

3 Easter Sunday  b      April 22, 2012     

Acts 3:12-19  Psalm 4
1 John 3:1-7  Luke 24:36b-48

Lectionary Link

  If we are to take the resurrection appearances of Christ as literal historical events, does it not seem rather odd for Jesus to say to his disciples whom he was with on Thursday to say to them on Sunday, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you.”  And these words are supposedly said by Jesus to his disciples while he was eating fish with them.  How is Jesus eating fish with his disciples and speaking about being with them in the past tense?  Yes, we can smooth this over by saying that Jesus was with them in a different way 72 hours ago because he was not yet in his resurrected body.  And we can also note that from the Gospel accounts this resurrected Christ can be in Jerusalem and then 60 plus miles away in Galilee in the same day and make a 7 mile trip to Emmaus to meet with disciples on the road.  And be back in Jerusalem to meet the Doubting Thomas for a meeting with the disciples, and by the way, did you know that in the Gospel of Luke  after eating fish with his disciples Jesus ascended in to heaven presumably on the evening of Easter Sunday.  But then to agree with other Gospel writers Jesus has to return and re-stage his Ascension to lift off on the 40^th day, a Thursday for the liturgical calendar, 10 days before the feast of Pentecost.  You know that Jesus has to be ascended before the Holy Spirit can come to everyone, because presumably the Spirit and Jesus could not be with us at the same time? 

  The body of Jesus in his Easter appearances is some resurrected body!  This is a super body, a super being beyond our empirical imaginations.

  Now if we try to import modern reporting techniques back onto the Gospel as the sole criteria for determining whether something is “true” then we have a big problem.

  Why do we celebrate an annual feast day of Easter?  Do we do it to mark a limited set of appearances of Jesus to his followers after he had been crucified?  Or do we do it because the entire nature of the Church is Easter-ly?  What I want to suggest is that Easter and the resurrection appearances of Christ are every day.  There does not have to be logical consistency to the resurrection appearances of Christ because he can appear to anyone in any way and he can appear to different people at the same time.

  And isn’t that the really the good news of the resurrection?  The risen Christ is not a singular event but a way of experiencing a real presence of God in our lives at any potential time.  The historical Jesus transformed to the risen Christ is a breaking forth from the tomb of the merely physical and an incorporating of the interior reality through which most us experience what we call our exterior worlds.   We lives from our interior worlds and so in that sense our entire life is in some way visionary and even people who do not see still project from their interior lives.

  Those who are so attached to the resurrection of Jesus as being a coming to life again of his physical body seem to limit all of the activity of God’s grace within an event of two thousand years ago.  It seems to me that the resurrection of Christ was an unleashing of a plentitude of possible presences of Christ to people everywhere and in all times.  And these presences of Christ need not be limited to only people who have had the privilege of being born in a place that gave them Christian knowledge.  Why limit the resurrected Christ to but the Christian world?  Why not reconnect the resurrection of Christ with God as creator and the one who is always recreating an ever new world?

  I suspect that if each of us went public about the times about when we have sit down with Christ and eaten fish with him, we might all be wearing strait jackets by now in our modern and post-modern world.  But what about other God-experiences that you have had?  The ones that you don’t even want to talk about because they might be misunderstood by people who could not be in your skin to understand or experience them in the way that you did?  When and where did your experiences of the sublime occur?  Shh….don’t tell anyone.  They are uniquely your experience.  They came to you in the tapestry of your life experience as a unique child of God.

  We have a public and corporate church, liturgy, Scripture, doctrines and creeds, not to say that Christ presence has been exhausted and finished in past events; we have all of these to remind you and me that Easter is today, it is now and it has always been.  We do all of this in a public and corporate manner as a way to encourage each person to recognize and embrace the holy experiences of one’s own life.  I am here today to say that each and every one of you has already had such experiences.  And you can claim your own experience as being in continuity with experiences of the risen Christ that are recounted in the Gospel.  This is what St. Paul did and we too can claim the validity of the presence of the risen Christ to us.  And we don’t have to make the details of our experiences public but we can bear witness to the results of joy, love, friendship, hope, awe, ecstasy, faith, goodness, deliverance and redemption in our lives.  Each of us has had enough of life changing experiences to bear witness to the reality of the presence of the sublime in our lives.

  And we gather each Sunday as a corporate witness to the reality of the sublime and to confess that we are always ready for a new experience of the sublime which bears the reality of the spirit of the resurrection of Christ.

  Dear people, don’t get into fruitless arguments about the details of an event that happened 2000 years ago, just live in the reality of being Easter-ly people, and find the resurrection to be a daily reality. Amen.