Easter Sermon

We began our service with the words with which Christians have marked the resurrection for two thousand years: “Christ is Risen!” “He is risen indeed!” We say these words, and we mean them; but this has been a hard week. Two funerals, and the echoes and ongoing loss of at least two other deaths. We have lived in the pain of Good Friday for more than just a day. Grief and loss are all around us, and the affirmation of Jesus’ resurrection takes energy that we barely have and faith that we only partly feel. The words are nevertheless true. Christ is risen! Jesus has conquered death! We are able to live with hope and joy because he died and rose from the dead.

Matthew 28

Our text tells the story. The disciples had lost everything. They had watched their Lord and friend killed on a Roman cross. They had buried him in a grave that Joseph of Arimathea had made, presumably intending to use it for himself or other members of his family. Jesus had to be buried somewhere, and Joseph offered his grave, cut out of a rock. Jesus was laid there on Friday evening, and then all observed the Sabbath. We assume that the disciples grieved silently on the Sabbath, hiding from the crowds. And then on Sunday morning, early – before others were up and about – some women went to the grave.

Matthew names Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” (27:56 – mother of James and Joseph, or mother of James and John), but Luke adds “and the other women”. So, a group of women led by Mary Magdalene and the mother of some of the disciples. These women went to the grave to grieve, to see where the body of the one they loved lay. How often have you or I gone to the grave of someone we love. My mother died in May 1991. This past week, my older sister sent me a picture of the plot and headstone where she and my father lie buried. We remember, and they were grieving and remembering.

Then something none of us has ever experienced happened. There was an earthquake. The stone blocking the grave was rolled away. An angel appeared and sat on the stone, frightening the guards who were supposed to keep people away so that they fled. The angels spoke to the women, “Be not afraid. Sing out for joy. Christ is risen, Alleluia!!” John 20 tells us that Jesus had a special word for Mary, but Matthew notes only that Jesus then appeared, that they worshipped him, and that he sent them to the disciples to tell them that he was alive.

History or Principle?

Some people suggest that this only a good story, meant to help us keep hoping in the face of dangers and troubles in this world. Are they right, or did it really happen? John Dickson is an Australian historian who has written a little book called Is Jesus History? He notes that there are rules for historical inquiry by which we can tell how likely a story is to be true. By the cannons of history, he suggest, the New Testament is histoprically accurate.

Dickson tells of an Australian judge, well respected for his ability to sift evidence in the courtroom, who spent the last years of his life evaluating the evidence of the New Testament to see if it would have made a trustworthy testimony in his courtroom. The judge himself was agnostic about the existence of God and expected to find that the story of the resurrection was a story designed to give hope, not the record of what actually happened. His conclusion was that by all the canons of history, the record of the resurrection is trustworthy. The gospel writers recorded truth faithfully. Jesus lived, and died, and rose from the dead.

If that is true, the passage we read this morning is not just a story meant to help us hope in the darkness. It is instead the reminder that death itself has been defeated on the cross. Jesus walked the path of life that every one of us walks. Jesus came up to the end of his life, knowing full well that his ministry would end on the cross. He died, and then God raised him from the dead.

The World We Live In

When we look around, we see great beauty and goodness, and we see all kinds of danger threatening to overwhelm us. When we look at the beauty, we can believe that God is Creator. We see love and delight in the way that people help each other and the enjoyment we have in a good friendship. But then a friend dies, or a family disintegrates, or a storm system destroys our home. We see the problems of our world, and we wonder what hope there is for the future.

What is reality? Is reality the friend who helped me out when I needed a friend? Or is reality the friend who stabbed me in the back and destroyed my hopes? Is reality the beauty of the Rocky Mountains or the Great Plains, or is reality the possibility that we have already passed the point of no return with climate change?

In short, which is stronger – good or evil? Who wins – God or Satan? Our head says that God and good are stronger, but sometimes we wake up in the night and we’re not so sure. Let me tell you something: There is no shame in doubting the goodness of our world. The problems we face are real, and we take them seriously. Let me tell you something else: Our fears and our doubts are not the last word. The women came to the tomb full of fear and doubt, and then the angel rolled away the stone and dispelled their fear, and they worshipped the risen Jesus.

We should perhaps not be too surprised at this resurrection story. Where does a tree growing in your yard come from? It came from another tree that dropped a seed – perhaps an acorn – as it got older. From that acorn another oak tree grew in its place. The analogy is imperfect, but it shows a pattern in which all of us participate. Where did I come from? My parents have died, but they gave me life and I am here. When I die, my sons and their wives take my place. Where did they come from? From me and Lois, just as we came from our parents. I trace this pattern of dying and continuing in one’s children back six generations in North America – I am the son of David, the son of John, the son of Peter, the son of David, the son of Martin, the son of Johann Heinrich Kleimenhagen, the first of our family to come to Canada from Germany 240 years ago.

There’s death and new life for you. Every one of us is a testimony to new life coming out of the death of our parents. This is a basic pattern in all of created nature. Jesus simply took this basic truth of reality to a new level and promised each of us that our own deaths likewise are the door to new life with him.

What Does This Mean for us Today?

I grew up in the Brethren in Christ Church in Zimbabwe. When I taught in Zimbabwe in the early 1970s, there were about 5,000 members of the BIC Church there. Then came the Liberation War, and the people suffered greatly. The mission schools were closed, and those who could moved from their rural homes into the cities. At the request of the church there, the BIC missionaries who remained were brought back to North America in 1977.

I remember my last General Conference there in August 1974. A missionary named Luke Keefer preached a sermon on the filling of the Holy Spirit. After the sermon, pastors and deacons, leaders of the church pressed to the front of the church building singing, “Woza Moya Oyingcwele” (“Come, Holy Spirit”). I was one of them, singing and praying for God’s Spirit to fill me. When we were all finished singing and praying and searching together, the man beside me asked, “Have you been filled with the Spirit?” I said, “Yes.” I asked, “Have you?” He said, “No.” I met him again two months later, and he told me with great excitement that he had now been filled with the Spirit. What he and so many others in the church received was the presence and power of God to endure the Liberation War. When the war ended and the churches reopened, the church that had been 5,000 members was now 20,000.

What did the resurrection mean for the church in Zimbabwe? It meant that the darkest days of the war were only the prelude to the light of the resurrection. Even today, when Zimbabwe still struggles with economic problems that make life increasingly difficult, the resurrection reminds us that the darkness lasts only for a night, and joy comes in the morning.

I have lived in four countries – Zambia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and Canada. Each one of them has its problems and failures. I wonder sometimes if we have any real future. Human sin and conflict make life look almost hopeless. But Jesus rose from the dead, and his resurrection reminds us that no problem, no conflict in this world is hopeless. The war in Ukraine? Fears of climate change? Duelling judges in the United States? Politicians who care more about lining their own pocket than doing public good? They are all here, and Christ died to redeem each one of them. The resurrection is our evidence that Jesus can and will heal the world.

A friend of mine, Patrick Franklin (former theologian at providence Seminary), wrote the following Easter meditation:

What difference does the Resurrection of Jesus make? Christian belief in the resurrection is misunderstood and misguided if taken to imply a kind of escapist pipedream optimism, which distracts us for a short time … from the troubles, challenges, and sufferings we face in the world. … But this is not what characterized the earliest Christians who were witnesses and devotees of the Risen Jesus and whose experience of the Resurrection radically altered their existence. For them, the Resurrection meant that death does not have the last word, and therefore its instruments and servants – fear, despair, lies or untruth, sickness, poverty, egoism, apathy, hatred, violence, and the preservation of self and tribe by any means possible – are exposed as deceivers and destroyers. …

The Resurrection led the early Christians not into escapism and disengagement, but to enter villages and towns ravaged by sickness and plague to care for the sick and dying. To share their own resources – “everything they had” – among them “so that there were no needy persons among them” (Acts 4:32-35). …

The Resurrections means . . .

- That we will have conflict, but we are not to make enemies or return evil for evil.

- That we will face suffering, sacrifice, and death, but we are not to give in to despair or escapism. …

- That we will face the ‘will to power’ in our politicians, leaders, institutions, traditions, histories, fellow human beings, and – if we’re honest – in ourselves! – but we can also embrace the Spirit’s power to will the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and to love our neighbours … as we love ourselves …

- That we will feel alone, disconnected, divided, alienated, misunderstood, and hated, but we are not to become jaded, resentful, and suspicious, but to fix our vision … on the reconciliation that Christ [has] achieved, that we have been made brothers and sisters in Christ (whether we like each other or not), we are the Body of Christ, the household of God – a family defined not by blood ties and ethnocentric and xenophobic tribal loyalties, but by the “new birth,” by baptism, by love, by faith, and ultimately by the saving, reconciliatory act of God, our common Creator …

This holy Easter weekend, I choose … to align (and re-align) my vision – my faith, hope, and love – to the Risen Lord in light of the Resurrection of the Son of God. May the new creation that is dawning in him – by the Spirit’s presence and power – dawn more fully and powerfully in me; may it dawn more fully and powerfully in the church …; and may it dawn more fully and powerfully in the world, that we in all our created, beautiful diversity and multiplicity might be one in Spirit and in Truth. … 

So Also for Us

We have experienced our own struggles and hardships these past weeks, and all this is true for us as well. We come to see Jesus, and we find him risen from the dead! We come with our fears and frustrations, and he gives us new life and strength to forge ahead.

Thirty-two years ago, my father-in-law died on Easter Sunday. I remember the phone call. We were visiting my parents from Easter Weekend, and my mother woke us up early in the morning to say that Lois’ Dad had just died of cardiac arrest brought on by his cancer. We got up and packed and drove immediately to her home to be with her mother and family.

We had the funeral service and imagined her father singing in the choir in heaven. After the service, we drove to the cemetery. After the words of committal, they lowered the casket into the grave. As it was being lowered, I saw our younger son start to sing. He was about four years old, and his favourite song was “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” I stepped over to stop him, since I thought that was really not appropriate, and then I heard what he was singing. A song from Sunday School, “One, two three, Jesus loves me. Number four, more and more. Five, six, seven, we’re all going to heaven. Eight, nine, ten, he’s coming back again.”

I stepped back and let him sing. He had it right. Because Jesus lived and died and rose from the dead, we also live and die – and rise with him. And Jesus says to all of us, as he did to the women that morning, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers and sisters to go back home; there they will see me.” Or, as we sang it this morning, “Be not afraid. Sing out for joy. Alleluia! Christ is risen!”

Resurrection Sunday 2023

Steinbach Mennonite Church

Beginning Thoughts

1. God wants all people to be reconciled with God and with each other. God wants this reconciliation so much that Jesus died – and rose from the dead – to accomplish it. We live in the reality of this cosmic shift from death and alienation to life forever with God.

2. Text: Matthew 28: 1 to 10.

The Resurrection of Jesus

28 After the Sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. ² And suddenly there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. ³ His appearance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow. ⁴ For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men. ⁵ But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. ⁶ He is not here, for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he^[a] lay. ⁷ Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead,^[b] and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.” ⁸ So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy and ran to tell his disciples. ⁹ Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. ¹⁰ Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers and sisters to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

3. Remembering the resurrection of Jesus can become routine with annual Easter celebrations. Can you see with your inner eye what really happened that first Resurrection Sunday? How does what happened re-orient our lives and help us to live in a world where death appears to be in charge?

A Re-Formed People

Today we celebrate Reformation Sunday, remembering the courage and integrity of Christians who, almost five hundred years ago, stood against the corruption and moral decay of the church around them and sought for God’s renewal. Yesterday I was part of a celebration of the 500^th anniversary of the Reformation, beginning with Martin Luther’s 95 Theses in 1517. The Presbyterian Church in Canada has sponsored this celebration, running from 2013 to 2017, focussing on one of the famous mottos of the Reformation: Sola gratia, Sola fide, Sola Scriptura, Solus Christus, Soli Deo Gloria. Yesterday we talked about the theme “Christ Alone”.

Today we look at two passages of Scripture to give shape to our thoughts: 2 Thessalonians 1:1-4 and 11-12, and Luke 19:1-10. After we look a bit more at these two texts we ask what they tell us about the continued need for reformation in the church today.

2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12

…

³ We ought always to thank God for you, brothers and sisters, and rightly so, because your faith is growing more and more, and the love all of you have for one another is increasing. ⁴ Therefore, among God’s churches we boast about your perseverance and faith in all the persecutions and trials you are enduring.

^…

¹¹ With this in mind, we constantly pray for you, that our God may make you worthy of his calling, and that by his power he may bring to fruition your every desire for goodness and your every deed prompted by faith. ¹² We pray this so that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you, and you in him, according to the grace of our God and the Lord Jesus Christ.

The introduction to Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians is interesting. He begins with thanks to God for their growing faith and increasing love. They are people he likes to hold up to others as examples of how to persevere in the face of trouble and persecution. So he prays for them that they will remain this kind of people.

There is in verses 11 and 12 a hint of concern that they might not follow through on the great promise they have shown so far.

•          We pray that God may make you worthy of his calling.
•          We pray that God may use his power to bring you to full maturity and faith.
•          We pray that Jesus may be glorified in the way that you live by God’s grace.

But did not Paul already thank God for doing these things in them? It sounds as though they are wonderful examples of Christian faith—who need to be careful lest their good example goes bad.

From this caution we can infer that we are always on the edge of reformation. Consider what the word means. To Re-Form: to form or take one’s proper shape again. The word implies a malformation, a disease of shape, a failure of vision. In the 1500s the existing Roman Catholic Church had lost something of its original strength and goodness. Corruption in the form of indulgences and corruption within the ecclesiastical process generally resulted in a misshapen church, different from the true church of Jesus Christ.

The Reformers did not usually seek to found another church, but to bring the Catholic Church back to its original vigour and strength. Official reaction, seeking to preserve official privilege, pushed the reformers out of the Catholic Church. This reaction was not a Catholic response only; the Anabaptists similarly were forced out of the Reformed Church in Zurich, under Ulrich Zwingli. There was in fact a movement along many parallel tracks, some within the Roman Catholic Church and some without, which led to the re-formation of corrupt structures and people. We also become malformed, misshapen, even when we seek to be faithful. We also live on the edge of needed re-formation.

Luke 19:1-10

19 Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. ² A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. ³ He wanted to see who Jesus was, but because he was short he could not see over the crowd. ⁴ So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way.

⁵ When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” ⁶ So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly. ⁷ All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.”

⁸ But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.” ⁹ Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. ¹⁰ For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

The story of Zacchaeus tells a similar story, but this time from the perspective of one individual. Zacchaeus was a tax collector, a man of means and official power, but also despised by the people and a social outcast. However much money he had made from collecting taxes corruptly, he clearly felt his “uncleanness” within his social context. So when he hears about the travelling rabbi, Jesus, who has healed so many people and can even cleanse the social outcast, he climbs a tree to see him. Jesus stops under the tree and calls Zacchaeus down to host him at his house. Jesus willingly accepts the status of unclean himself in order to re-form the socially diseased tax collector. The result is Zacchaeus’ complete repentance, so that Jesus pronounces his salvation.

The need for re-formation may exist at the institutional level. It exists also at the personal level. Institutions are made up of individuals who choose right or wrong, personal privilege over integrity, personal comfort over charity, personal benefit over the equity of a truly just society. Sometimes the church goes bad and needs to be re-formed. Sometimes people in the church go bad and need to be re-formed.

Re-Formation Today

The church today, and Christians today, are in need of re-formation. We have become misshapen, malformed, people who need God’s presence and God’s work in our lives. Sometimes the church is pressed into a mould dictated by our surrounding society. North America, for example, values personal fulfillment defined by maximizing personal pleasure. The North American church has followed suit, so that we rarely the call to duty of a past generation. Do you remember the hymn: “A call to keep I have” by Charles Wesley?

A charge to keep I have, A God to glorify,

A never dying soul to save, And fit it for the sky.

The last verse runs thus:

Help me to watch and pray, And on Thyself rely,

Assured if I my trust betray, I shall forever die.

This is not our language today. We sing about loving God, and being loved by God, more than we sing about doing our duty. In many ways we have become more North American than we are Christian. I could expand on this point, but leave it here for now. It is enough to say that we need re-formation. We need God’s Spirit to “melt us, mould us, fill us, use us.”

When I was young there was a preacher in our church named Luke Keefer, Sr. He preached often on being filled with the Holy Spirit—what we called “entire sanctification”. In the first years of his ministry he added to entire sanctification what he called “sinless perfection”. That is, when the Holy Spirit fills you fully, God can remove the root of sin from your person, so that you no longer have a desire to sin.

In the 1960s Keefer left the pastoral ministry in Pennsylvania and went to teach in our church in Zimbabwe. He spent about 10 years at Ekuphileni Bible Institute there, teaching and preaching about the work of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life. I believe that God used Keefer to prepare the Brethren in Christ Church in Zimbabwe for the difficult times of the liberation struggle, which led to an independent Zimbabwe in 1980. These years of teaching and preaching also changed Keefer.

When he returned to the United States, he announced that his ministry in Africa had convinced him that the doctrine of sinless perfection was not true. I don’t know why he changed his mind. I don’t know if he found sin in the lives of mature believers there, or if Africa revealed continuing failures in his own life. In either case, he went back to the churches of Pennsylvania and preached to them that he had been wrong: Even mature Christians can become misshapen and malformed and need the re-formation of God’s Holy Spirit to make them new and whole.

Or Can Someone Be “Perfect”?

As I was preparing this sermon, my mind went to another group of people—a very different situation than Keefer preaching in Africa or Pennsylvania. I have told you before about the community of Taizé, near the village of Macon in France, close to the Swiss border. Lois and I with our sons visited Taizé in December 2003. I have never been in a place so filled with peace. Peace permeated the very soil of the place to a degree I have not experienced elsewhere.

This peace comes from a daily re-formation of the soul, through regular prayers held three times a day. The rhythm of prayer forms the soul each day. At 8:15 a.m., 12:20 p.m., and 8:30 p.m. the Brother of Taizé are joined by some neighbouring Sisters and by travellers who are visiting for the week. There are perhaps 300 people in the regular weekly community and anywhere from 30 to 3,000 pilgrims who join in for the week. The prayer begins with repetitive chants in a simplified style, which help one to become silent within. Then comes a Scripture reading in French, German, and English, followed by some more singing. These chants lead to the heart of the prayer time, a 10-minute silence before God. The sound—or silence—of several thousand young people is indeed an amazing experience. The service closes with a chant designed to help one re-enter the world outside the prayer time.

Brother Roger founded the community in the early 1940s as a place of refuge for Jews. It became a place of refuge for Germans after the war. It continued as a place of peace and refuge for all travellers. One of those travellers was a mentally-disturbed woman, who, on August 16, 2005, jumped over the simple dividing wall between the worshippers and the brothers and stabbed Brother Roger to death. He was 90 years old.

Jason Brian Santos was a young man who had received permission from the Brothers to write a history of the Taizé community. The night Brother Roger was killed happened to be his first day at Taizé. Here is how he describes the aftermath:

… the day after Brother Roger’s death, during the adult Bible Introduction, a German brother addressed the feelings and struggles that many of us were facing. He graciously answered all the questions we had about Brother Roger’s murder, and though he was somber, he was noticeably void of hatred, malice, resentment and vengeance. … From the quality of his voice to his body language he emitted a sense of peace—extending it to all those who were present that day.

…

The German brother repeatedly emphasized the freedom we have been given in Christ. He said that we were “free to forgive,” “free to love” and “free to embrace others because Christ freely embraced us.” … I heard many discussions that week about the strange sense of peace that seemed to dwell with the brothers. I know I didn’t feel free or a sense of peace, but they did. They were free to accept us in the midst of their loss and they were free to embrace the Romanian pilgrims visiting that week with open arms. This freedom, however, extends beyond the daily structure and ethos of the community and actually penetrates the most sacred part of the community: the prayers. Many pilgrims linked their experience of peace with the prayers. (A Community Called Taize, 137-138)

I would go further and say that the peace came from the daily re-formation of their lives through prayer. The peace was God’s peace, mediated through close relationship with God, moulding and re-moulding their souls to the shape of God’s love active in the world. Jesus put it this way (John 14:26-27): “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

Excursus: I did not have time to use this example, but one could refer to the West Nickel Mines shootingin Pennsylvania 10 years ago. We have heard how the Amish Community enfolded the family of the shooter, who had killed five of their daughters and left three others injured before taking his own life. The community immediately extended grace and forgiveness to the shooter’s family—his wife and children, and his parents and parents-in-law, a practice rooted deeply in Amish faith and ethos. The practice reminds me of the example above from the Brothers of Taizé. I read one story in the New York Times on the 10^th anniversary of the shooting, describing the way that one survivor lives in a paraplegic condition. Her father stated that he finds he must forgive the shooter again each day, as he sees his daughter. At the same time the shooter’s mother has become one of the girl’s regular caregivers. Grace and forgiveness run deeper even than the greatest evil in our world.

An old hymn from the old BIC hymnbook puts it this way (“Hidden Peace”):

I cannot tell thee whence it came, This peace within my breast;

But this I know, there fills my soul A strange and tranquil rest.

Refrain

There’s a deep, settled peace in my soul, There’s a deep, settled peace in my soul,

Tho’ the billows of sin near me roll, He abides, Christ abides.

Actually, I can tell you where it comes from. It comes from God’s repeated re-formation of our innermost, as we focus our lives on God. We face the pressures of this world, battering and bruising our souls, and God’s heals and remakes us and gives us joy and love and peace beyond any human understanding, so that we become a truly Re-Formed People.

Grace Bible Church

30 October 2016

Reading the Church's Bible, 2

Why Should We Even Read the Bible?

Introduction: The Question

Last week we talked about why we read the Bible—“why” in the sense of “for what purpose”? I suggested (based on Jesus’ words in John 5) that the Scriptures are intended to bring us to God through the person of Jesus Christ. I added (based on Paul’s words in 2 Timothy 3) that they are also intended to teach us how to live as God’s people. We can see these two purposes for reading Scripture in the Great Commission (Matthew 28): Jesus told his followers to “make disciples of all nations”, baptizing those who come to faith in Christ and teaching them to obey all that Jesus has told us to do. The Scripture bring us to Jesus in conversion and then helps us to grow spiritually as followers of Jesus.

Many people around us, however, have a more basic objection. They wonder why we should read the Bible at all. The Bible was written over a period of about a thousand years, finishing about 1,900 years ago. What can such an old book have to say to us today? It was written by people in very different cultures from ours, in very different times from ours. Many people around us think the Bible is simply irrelevant. Why should we even read it at all, let alone make it our guide for faith and life?

Towards an Answer

To read the Bible with the eyes of faith requires an encounter with Christ. God saves us by grace through faith, and in faith we begin to read the Bible and find God there. This is not something that one can prove with human reason. We cannot say to people, “Here are the reasons,” and prove to them with human logic that this book is God’s Word for us today.

At the same time, our faith in God is a reasonable faith, and trusting the Bible is consistent with human reason. We would expect this to be true, since God made human reason. Here is a beginning step, then, towards believing in Christian faith by reading the Bible. In the passage that we read, Paul makes it clear that the centre of Christian faith is the person of Jesus Christ—Jesus lived in Palestine, Jesus died on the cross, Jesus rose from the dead. This is where our faith begins. Paul argues in the rest of the chapter that the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the founding truth of Christian faith. If the resurrection did not happen, he says, our faith is misplaced and “we are of all people most miserable” (vv 14, 17). But, Paul says, Jesus did rise from the dead, so that our faith is true (v 20).

This is the key point. Dead people do not rise to new life. We know that, and the early church knew that too. Sometimes people think that the first Christians were just naïve and did not really understand that resurrections don’t happen. But of course they knew well that this event was not normal. That is one reason that they found the appearance of a healthy, glowing Jesus, full of life before their eyes over a period of 40 days, to be so amazing.

So if it is true that Jesus rose from the dead, we have something quite unique in history, something that changes everything that we think we know from nature and human reason.

I often quote C.S. Lewis in my sermons. Lewis was one of the greatest Christian writers of the 20^th century. As you may know, however, he was an atheist before he was a Christian. Born in 1898 in Belfast in an Anglican family, he lost his mother to cancer when he was 10 years old. His father sent him off to boarding schools in England, where for a variety of reasons he became an atheist. He fought in World War One (which reinforced his atheism), and after the war attended Oxford University. After he graduated he found work at Oxford as a tutor in Philosophy, and then as a professor in Medieval English Literature in 1925.

His life at Oxford included friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien, who was a convinced Christian and Roman Catholic. Along with various other influences, their conversations and arguments opened Lewis up to the possibility that Christian faith is true. As began to read the Bible again, he realized that, if the resurrection of Jesus were true, then the Bible as a whole is true and God himself is real. He resisted accepting the resurrection because he saw where the logic of the resurrection would take him.

One day he was talking with a friend, an atheist (I think he was himself a professor of history at Oxford) who unintentionally helped Lewis move closer to Christian faith. Here is how Lewis describes it in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy:

Early in 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. “Rum thing,” he went on. “All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.” To understand the shattering impact of it, you would need to know the man (who has certainly never since shown any interest in Christianity). If he, the cynic of cynics, the toughest of the toughs, were not—as I would still have put it—“safe,” where could I turn? Was there then no escape?

There were other factors in Lewis’ conversion—especially his friendship with Christians and the discovery that the authors he liked best were all Christians. But this realization that historical evidence was on the side of the resurrection was an important piece. This is not of course hard proof that God exists, but once one accepts the reality of the resurrection of Jesus, then the door is open to faith in Jesus as God’s incarnate Son.

So How Do We Read?

Once we decide that we can and should read the Bible, we have the further question of how to read the Bible. This question requires a further series of sessions on its own, so I make only a few brief comments. I note two basic ways: critical reading and devotional reading. By critical reading I mean trying to understand what the original authors meant. By devotional reading I mean listening to Scripture seeking to hear God’s Spirit speak to us directly.

Critical Reading

Critical reading is necessary whenever we preach or teach from the Bible. If we want to apply what the biblical authors say to our own lives, we must know what they intended to say to their audience. We must know what the passage meant in its own literary and historical context before we can hear it speak clearly to our own time. Sometimes we want to derive rules for living directly from the Bible without paying attention to these critical questions, but of course we must study the original setting to know what was being said.

A good resource if you want to go into more depth for critical reading is a book by Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart titled How to Read the Bible for all Its Worth. Fee and Stuart give good insight into the various kinds of literature in the Bible. We have letters and poetry, stories and history, legal material and parables, gospels and apocalypses. We read each of these differently. For example, poetry and law are quite different, and we do not read poetry like law, or law like poetry. We learn to read the gospels in paragraphs, not verses, looking for each complete episode as the writer puts it together. We learn to read letters as what we call “occasional documents”—something written for a specific occasion. We don’t have time to explore these different kinds of literature this morning. It is enough to note that we should know what we are reading before we are sure we know what it says.

Sometimes we refer to the unchanging nature of God’s Word. As we read the Bible, we see many things that are different from our time, so we may wonder how we can talk about God’s word forever true. We recognize, then, that what does not change is the principles that are being expressed in different situations. For example, 1 Corinthians 11 tells us that women should cover their heads in church. If we read this as a simple instruction, we miss the principle that Paul is applying. In Corinth there was a lot of disorder when Christians met together. In chapters 11 to 14 Paul deals with communion meals, with head coverings, with tongues and interpretation in worship, with prophecies, and with spiritual gifts. He concludes these chapters by reminding his readers that God is a God of order (which we know from many other places in Scripture). His concern with the various instructions about speaking in tongues and covering one’s head and so on all have to do with this principle: That order in church life reflects and demonstrates the presence of God’s Shalom.

There is more in these chapters than just this principle, but you see the idea. The principles undergirding all of Scripture are principles that are true always. So critical reading helps us find these principles by helping us understand the passages in their original context.

Devotional Reading

Critical reading can also be devotional. That is, as we seek to hear God’s Word clearly in its own context, the experience draws us closer to God. But we can also read the Bible devotionally without always asking what the original language said or what the historical context was. For example, I have heard many people appeal to the verse from 2 Chronicles 7: “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

Now reading this verse critically we observe the context in Solomon’s dedication of the Temple, and the fact that the prayer refers to an extended drought within the Promised Land. It fits into a cycle of grace and disobedience as part of the Deuteronomic promises.

Reading devotionally, however, we hear it speak to our own fears for our own country at critical moments in our history. It is dangerous to build doctrine on devotional reading, because we may misread the verse in its original context. At the same time, God does speak directly to us through devotional reading, and God wants us to listen for his voice as we read our Bibles regularly. This kind of reading is an act of and aid to faith. In devotional reading we do not come to the Bible with questions of historicity or accuracy or anything else. We come rather as part of our relationship with God, desiring deeply to hear God’s voice.

I suspect that the kind of conflict we have been experiencing may either separate us from reading the Bible simply to hear God’s voice, or it may drive us back to the Bible because we realize that we are in crisis. I pray that it drives us back to the Bible and back to God.

Richard Foster tells a story that describes what I mean. It appears in his book, Finding the Heart’s True Home, in a chapter on what he calls “meditative prayer”. I have given this example before, but it shows what I am talking about more clearly than anything else I can think of.

Allow me to tell you the story of Jim Smith, a former student of mine. … Jim went on to do graduate work …. By the second year, however, he was struggling to maintain his spiritual life, and so he decided to take a private retreat. He arrived at the retreat house and was introduced to the brother who was to be his spiritual director ….

The brother gave Jim only one assignment: to meditate on the story of the Annunciation in the first chapter of Luke’s Gospel. That was it. …. For the first couple of hours he sliced and diced the passage as any good exegete would do, coming up with several useful insights that could fit into future sermons. The rest of the day was spent in thumb-twiddling silence.

The next day Jim met with the brother to discuss his spiritual life. … Jim shared his insights, hoping they would impress the monk. They didn’t. … “Well, there is more than just finding out what it says and what it means. There are also questions, like what did it say to you? Were you struck by anything? And most important, did you experience God in your reading?” The brother assigned Jim the same text for that entire day. All day Jim tried doing what his spiritual director had instructed, but he failed repeatedly … and still it was lifeless. Jim felt he would go deaf from the silence.

The next day they met again. In despair Jim told the brother that he simply could not do what was being asked of him. [The brother replied,] “You’re trying too hard, Jim. You’re trying to control God. Go back to this passage and this time be open to receive whatever God has for you. Don’t manipulate God; just receive. Communion with him isn’t something you institute. … All I want you to do is create the conditions: open your Bible, read it slowly, listen to it, and reflect on it.”

Jim went back to his room and began reading. …. By noon he shouted to the ceiling, “I give up! You win!” …. He slumped over the desk and began weeping. A short time later he picked up his Bible and glanced over the text once again. The words were familiar but somehow different. His mind and heart were supple. The opening words of Mary’s response became his words: “Let it be to me…let it be to me.” The words rang round and round in his head. Then God spoke. It was as if a window suddenly had been thrown open and God wanted to talk friend to friend. What followed was a dialogue about the story in Luke, about God, about Mary, about Jim. The Spirit took Jim down deep into Mary’s feelings, Mary’s doubts, Mary’s fears, Mary’s incredible faith-filled response. It was, of course, also a journey into Jim’s feelings and fears and doubts, as the Spirit in healing love and gentle compassion touched the broken memories of his past. Though Jim could barely believe it, the angel’s word to Mary seemed to be a word for him as well: “You have found favor with God.” Mary’s perplexed query was also Jim’s question: “How can this be?” And yet it was so, and Jim wept in the arms of a God of grace and mercy. …. They talked about this—God and Jim—what might be, what could be. Jim took a prayer walk with God, watching the sun play hide and seek behind the large oak trees to the west. By the time the sun had slipped below the horizon, he was able to utter the prayer of Mary as his own: “Let it be to me according to your word.” Jim had just lost control of his life, and in the same moment had found it!

Conclusion

We must read critically: The original meaning is essential to understanding how Jesus calls us to live today, and the principles that God’s people applied in their lives still live for us today. We build church doctrine on critical reading of the Scripture. This is a task that we engage in together as the community of faith. There is space at the table for experts and non-experts, people who have studied Greek and Hebrew and those who know only English (not even French or German!), people who have read the Bible many times and those who are just beginning. We all work together at the task of hearing God speak to use.

We must also read devotionally: God wants to speak to us deep within where no one else sees. This is a task we can do together and on our own. When you have many people in the church who grew up in Christian faith, the danger is that we may live on the memory of past encounters with God and lose sight of the Risen Christ within our own lives. Then the passage we read at the beginning speaks to us anew: Jesus lived; Jesus died; Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to the apostles and the disciples … and last of all has appeared also to us, even though we were born too late to see him on this earth. We see Jesus again, on our knees and in our homes, praying and reading and asking God to touch our hearts.

Different people have different passages that speak most clearly to them. For me it is verses about the cross, and especially about how Jesus bore the cross for us and how he calls us to bear the cross for him. For each of you there are other passages we can share with each other as we encourage each other to walk faithfully with Jesus. In our darkness and fear we turn again to God’s Word and ask God to bring us back to Jesus.

Steinbach Mennonite Church

25 September 2016

Text: 1 Corinthians 15: 1-11

The Resurrection of Christ

15 Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. ² By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

³ For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, ⁴ that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, ⁵ and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. ⁶ After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. ⁷ Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, ⁸ and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

⁹ For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. ¹⁰ But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. ¹¹ Whether, then, it is I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.