A few weeks ago during Coffee Hour someone said to me, “You guys always make this stuff so easy to believe.  Whenever you preach it all makes sense, it’s inspiring and challenging at the same time.  It seems reasonable and right.  Then I go home and I realize that there’s more.  If I’m going to be Christian then don’t I have to believe in the Resurrection, the Virgin Birth, the miracles, and that Jesus is the only way?  How does anyone know if he’s the only way?  It’s at those moments when I’m not sure if I can do this Christianity thing.”

 

Which is a good place to start tonight.  For most us, the barrier to faith is not a belief in God.  Most of us, in some form or fashion, have a fundamental belief in God or some divine entity.  God is not the major stumbling block, Jesus is.  Jesus is the one that gives us the most problems, the most headaches.  He seems to be the one who embarrasses us because as educated, cultured, urbane people we find it difficult to stomach some of the claims he made about himself and that the Church has made about him.

 

Tonight, I’ve decided that I will speak very personally about Jesus.  If I’m going to be consistent with my talk on the first night of Alpha, then I must speak tonight about Jesus and his Resurrection, not as a doctrine; rather, I will want to say why I believe in him, in it and why it compels me to follow this way of life.  What this means is that I won’t speak of Resurrection in terms traditionally associated with it, theological words like sin, redemption, atonement, sacrifice, etc.  These are all important concepts, and necessary for a complete understanding of Jesus and his Resurrection, but they don’t capture the heart of the matter. 

 

Note that I have already said two things that are worth mentioning, but not necessarily worth dwelling on.  The first is that I will not speak of Jesus and his Resurrection as a doctrine or as dogma.  In saying this I am not implying that doctrine and dogma are unimportant.  There are times when the Church’s authority and tradition will be all we are able to say about aspects of our faith.  And I will confess that I trust the Church and it’s tradition, in spite of what The DaVinci Code and years of suspicion may tell us.  Secondly, I have said right up front that I believe in the Resurrection.  That will not surprise many of you, you expect me to believe in such things.  Actually, it would probably disturb even our most ardent skeptic if I said that I didn’t believe in it.  However, although you may expect me to believe in such things, now that you know that I do believe, some of you may be disturbed by that.  You may expect me to believe in such things, but you also want me to stay open-minded, to stay uncommitted, because if I do so it gives others permission to be openly skeptical.  What I hope will happen, however, is that my confession serves more as an opportunity to engage in deeper conversation, rather than being the cause for stifling it.  I can take your skepticism and you can take my confession.  We’re adults and we have much to learn from each other.

 

So why do I believe in Jesus and his Resurrection?  Frankly, because it makes sense.  I recognize that this may be an astonishing claim, for how can anyone say with integrity that something as unlikely, unprecedented and unbelievable as the Resurrection makes sense.  I say that it makes sense because it is consistent with my experience of God, and it is consistent with how God is revealed in sacred scripture.  And, as Jennifer pointed out last week when speaking about the Incarnation of Jesus, God is known by God’s acts, and the Resurrection is God’s supreme act.

 

If the Resurrection is God’s supreme act, then it follows that the Resurrection is God’s supreme self-revelation.  What, then, does the Resurrection reveal about God?  To speak of Jesus’ Resurrection one must first speak of his passion and death.  (When I say ‘passion’ I refer to the greek ‘passius’ which means suffering; different from the latin ‘passio’ that means an intense emotion)  The Resurrection doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it happens because someone has died, or shall we say that someone has been killed.  Thus, we must start here if the Resurrection of Jesus is going to make any sense, and if we are going to understand what it says about God.

 

The Passion of Jesus, or his suffering and agony, began late one night after dinner.  He was

in a garden praying when the immensity of his purpose hit him.  At that moment he cries out to God, “My soul is sick, even unto death...Please remove this cup from me.  But let it be as you would please, not as I would have it.”  Other translations render his words, “Let not my will but thine be done.”  When most people hear these words they assume that Jesus is having second thoughts; that he is afraid and wants God to let him off the hook.  He’s terrified and is torn between being faithful to his calling and wanting a normal life just like anyone else. 

 

However, if Jesus is who Jennifer said he was last week, and who the Church has always declared him to be, namely Emmanuel– God with us, then what we are witnessing in the garden is something different.  If Jesus is God with us, God in the flesh, then the events in the garden are nothing more than the internal conversation of God deciding whether or not to take the next monumental step.  If Jesus is God, the agony in the garden is about whether God will run the risk of offering his very self in an even more vulnerable, more exposed way, a way that would require his very life. 

 

What is the risk God is taking by choosing to suffer and die?  The risk God takes is to commit Godself to a particular way of life that necessarily rules out other options.  Ultimately, the choice to suffer and die is choosing the way of life that means love without limits, a love that is selfless and reckless.  This means that the options that are ruled out are the way of the sword, the way of manipulation, it excludes fear as motivator into the divine relationship, and rules out exacting revenge whenever that selfless love is rejected or misused.  To commit Godself to the way of love means that God will have to endure even more hardship on the other side of death, for anyone who has loved knows that hardship comes with the territory.  It means that God has chosen to take the road less traveled, the more difficult way, the way that will require patience and endurance in the eternal courtship he began at creation. 

 

That choice was not an easy choice.  It was actually agonizing, because for a jilted lover sometimes the easiest way to have the pain of rejection excised is to force the other into  submission, or into some form of accommodation and compromise so that the relationship can continue.  But we know all too well from our own human relationships that these kinds of compromises rarely last, and if they do the love is often diminished and un-fulfilling.  God would have none of that.  God’s choice to endure human pain and death was the choice to follow the way of love to its ultimate conclusion.  In other words, it is God saying, “I’m willing to endure your most severe rejection, your most atrocious treatment of my love, your most appalling behavior and on the other side I will still love you.”  God decided that this is the way it will be.  Imagine making such a choice.  However, to have not made that choice would mean settling for a diminished, less authentic, un-fulfilling relationship to the people God fashioned out of the most tender, well-intentioned love.

 

This tells us several things about God.  The first is that God risks vulnerability.  That was true in the creation, that was true in establishing a relationship with Israel, that was true as God continued a relationship with humankind throughout ages of constant rejection and dishonoring of love.  Yet God chose to persist, to be the vulnerable one for the sake of love, and the passion and death of Jesus was the ultimate expression of what had already been true.

 

The second thing it tells us about God is that God longs for relationship.  In the 1970's and 80's feminist theologians took issue with the notion of battered and wounded Christ as the symbol of perfect love because of a concern that this only helped perpetuate cycles of violence and oppression against women in abusive relationships.  If it was expected that perfect love must look like the love of the battered Christ hanging from the cross then women had little to hope for, some argued.  And this is a serious point that deserves addressing.  What’s important for us to remember here is that God endures our rejection so as to rule out the way of the sword, to rule out manipulation and fear as motivators in relationship, and has ruled out exacting revenge.  That is the path God chose not to take, and it is the path we too are expected not to take.

 

The relationship that God envisions and chooses to pursue is what Paul describes in his letter to the Corinthians, when he says of love (and we’ll substitute the word God for love) “God is patient and kind; God is never jealous; God is not boastful or conceited; God is never rude and never seeks God’s own advantage; God does not take offence nor stores up grievances.  God does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but finds joy in truth.  God is always ready to make allowances, to trust, to hope and to endure whatever comes.”  Don’t you hear these words differently now, when the are accompanied to the loving work of Jesus’ suffering and death?  Aren’t they more compelling?

 

Which brings us back to the Resurrection.  With this backdrop, the Resurrection is not simply a victory over death, but it is God’s ultimate expression of commitment to this way of life, to the way of love.  Jesus’ rising from the dead is the seal of God which declares that the former ways will no longer be traveled, will no longer be acceptable, and will no longer be a temptation.  God rises to a new life.  God rises to a new day, a new way of relating to God’s people, a new beginning in the history of the divine/human relationship. 

 

And this brings me back to where I began: Why do I believe in the Resurrection?  I believe in the Resurrection because it speaks of a universe I hardly dare to believe exists; a universe where the way of love is the way of God.  It speaks of the power of the One who made the universe in the first place, brought life to this planet, inflated our own lungs with breath.  Consider the miracle of your existence, that you think and feel and have awareness– that you breathe and eat, see and hear– that you can know love.  Our very existence gives tangible evidence of the One who can make things that are out the things that are not. 

 

Let’s state the obvious: the reality of resurrection is larger than our idea of it.  Our tendency is to make small that which is truly huge.  We feel safer that way.  Big truths have a way of undoing our comfortable perspective.  Death does this for sure.  But now something larger still?  Something larger than death?  We’re likely to try to tame it.1  Consider these summary Easter statements collected by Fleming Rutledge from several sermons she had heard over the years: