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On Easter Sunday I anchored my message around a short quote by British scholar and bishop, N. T. Wright.  You may not remember the quote:  possibly all the fanfare, visiting guests, and having habitually absent church members in your favorite pew distracted you from hearing Wright’s words.  But I’ve pondered them since then, and I use them as our starting point today, when the church invites us to grow our faith by letting this Easter faith grow and bloom in our own lives.

Actually, Wright’s advice was to preachers: “Those of you who are going to preach on Easter Sunday, please note that the resurrection stories in the Gospels do not say [that] Jesus is raised, therefore we’re going to heaven or therefore we’re going to be raised.  They say [that] Jesus is raised, therefore God’s new creation has begun, and we’ve got a job to do.” (The Resurrection of Jesus:  John Dominic Crossan and N. T. Wright in Dialogue, page 21.) Hear that?    “…God’s new creation has begun, and we’ve got a job to do.” The Easter message, says Wright, is about God’s transformation of the world, a transformation in which God’s invites us to participate. We have a job, given us by the risen Christ, very much alive in our midst.  It is our job to accept, to announce, to affirm, to celebrate, to enjoy, to learn, and to share God’s resurrection news.  Living the Easter message begins in simple gratitude that in the risen Christ God is making new everything in our world.  And, because Jesus is raised, changed, restored; all of creation is also raised, changed, and restored. In Easter, we live in a world changed for good.

Our world is changed for good.  Of course, that affirmation is true in both senses of the phrase:  in Easter something has shifted irrevocably – the world is changed for good in the sense that there is no going back.  God has made the difference, and the though things may not appear that different to others, everything is new, forever.  And the world is changed for good in the other deep sense as well:  all is being made better, not just different. The change God begins at Easter is a change toward wholeness, toward healing, toward community, toward civility, toward forgiveness, and toward the incredible movement of our hearts and of our world toward love.

It is because the world was changed for good that the first followers of Jesus proclaimed him raised from the dead and messiah of the world.  And those who refused to see Jesus as messiah based their rejection of this claim on their own perception that, in fact, the world hadn’t changed at all.  As far as they could see, nothing in the world was different.

But the first followers of Jesus KNEW that things were different because of the resurrection.  Christ is alive, and that makes all the difference.  They lived in a world changed for good, and they embodied their belief in the way that they lived.  They cared for the poor.  They fed widows and orphans.  They brought the sick and dying into their homes rather than letting them perish, alone, on the streets.  Writing about the church’s beginnings in the first century, Methodist Bishop Will Willimon notes how the first Christians stood out from the culture of their day:  “Nothing any of the pagan gods preached ever motivated anyone to visit the prisoner, to feed the hungry, to care for the suffering and the dying, or to receive the unwanted child.  No pagan cult … ever built a hospital or orphanage.” (Willimon, “Falling in Love with Mercy,” in Journal for Preachers, Pentecost 2010, page 28.)  Instead, it was the church and the church alone that believe that, in the risen Christ, God had changed the world, and changed it for good.  They knew the change in their own hearts, and they lived the change in their own cities.  Willimon continues:  “To believe that the glory of God is revealed in the raising of a humiliated, crucified, suffering slave who proclaimed the Kingdom of God for the enslaved and forsaken of the earth is … to turn the world upside down.” (Ibid., page 29.) In Easter, the bishop says in effect, changes the world for good.

So in today’s lesson from Acts, Peter is called to headquarters and confronted by his peers.  They Charge him with coloring outside the lines of accepted behavior – as a good Jew.  Peter then makes his defense for sharing the gospel with the gentiles, and, what’s worse, in eating with these non-kosher non-Jews.  Rather than offering a theological argument, Peter tells the story of what happened in a dream while he slept on a rooftop in the city of Joppa.  God came to him in a vision, he said, and showed him that since Easter their community was operating under different rules than before. God had taken the world’s unclean creatures and he has made them clean.  So, he asks his accusers, “…who was I, that I could hinder God?”   (Acts 11:17, New Revised Standard Version.)

Peter says that in the Easter world God’s makes all things new.  We become, Peter declares, living witnesses to this change God is making in the world; and we participate in the change.  To paraphrase Gandhi only slightly, we are to be the change that we believe God wants for the world.  We are to live as if the truth is true, and that will make all the difference for us, and for our neighbors.

Friends, Easter, and the transformation of our world, is the reason we are here, and the reason we are to share our faith with others.  We are in mission to the world not to change the world to our standards, but because, in the risen Christ, God is already changing our world according to God’s standards.  Our mission is to share:  to share with our neighbors the life, the ministry, and the resources that God has put into our hands merely reflects the truth that God’s new world is already dawning in the person of the risen Christ and in the miracle of the his terrified followers transformed. 

Our presence as followers of Christ committed to God’s transforming presence in an Easter world is a powerful witness.  The power of our witness dawned on me in Nicaragua in 2008 when we took on ourselves to assist our neighbors in Carlos Fonseca by helping them build a school and community building.  We’ve now stood in that building, but two years ago, it was only a dream.  As I sat beside of the foundation, one of the workers asked me where I was from, and why I was there.  From the United States, I answered.  And we are here to help build this school.  “It will happen,” he said to me.  “Without your commitment, I would not believe it could be finished.  But because you and your church are here, I believe it will be built.” 

 As I think about it, we were there because we believe in the Easter message, as N. T. Wright describes it.  We believe that God’s new creation has begun, and we all have a job to do to embody that new creation in the world.

Today, I invite you to help embody Easter’s new creation in Zimbabwe, in the work of Dieudonne Karihano.  Though we haven’t met him, yet, we know that he is living the gospel with our friends in Africa.  He works in the name of the risen Christ, and he lives the change that our Lord’s resurrection began in our world.  We support him, with others, in this work, because we believe that God has changed us and our world for good, and we know that Easter’s message gives us a job to do in the world.  We do this job together with others of our brothers and sisters, and in doing it, we are changed with them.

With the rest of our world, we have been changed for good, and in gratitude we share that change with others.

I hope you will be generous, and place your special offering to support our missionary in the baskets provided for you as you leave worship today.

Amen.

Mamaroneck United Methodist, May 2, 2010.

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