Do you accept that Jesus is Lord?

Acts 10:34-43
Colossians 3:1-4
Matthew 28:1-10
Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

The question about what happened to the body of Jesus in the early dawn of that Sunday morning is not the essential Easter question.  The most important thing about the resurrection isn’t that something happened to Jesus.  It is that something happened to us.  Strictly speaking, we can’t really know what that something is, because the resurrection is a process that is still ongoing.  The Letter to the Colossians is very clear on that point, when it says, “your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.” 

This is what Mary Magdalene and the other Mary found out when they went to the tomb that morning.  They went there full of grief, still reeling from the shock, trying to make sense of what had happened to Jesus.  They went to mourn and to cherish the memory of what had been lost, and they found something, something new, that now belonged to them.   They went to the tomb to say goodbye to the past and they came away as bearers of a message about the present and the future--a present and a future with Jesus.

Still, there is no getting around the fact that this message came to them at the tomb.  Resurrection gives new life and meaning to the story of Jesus, but it is still the same story that came to a head at the cross.  Easter does not reverse Good Friday.  But Good Friday and Easter together confirm what the story of Jesus is all about.  You could boil it down to a couple of points, and they were exactly the points that Jesus kept trying to make, and they were what got him into all that trouble.  The first one got him into trouble with his disciples, and I suppose it still does, and that was the point that his mission really wasn’t about him.  It wasn’t about his charisma, or his remarkable abilities, or his chances for success.  Jesus lived and died for us, for our repentance, our instruction and empowerment, our forgiveness, and healing, and liberation. 

The second point got Jesus into trouble with the religious leaders and political authorities, and it also still gives a lot of people problems.  And it was that the author of his life, the power behind his deeds, the source of his wisdom, and the driver of his mission was God.  It was God who sent Jesus on the road that led him to the cross, though it was not God who killed him.  And it was God who raised him from the dead—so there could be no doubt who was responsible for the sending, and who did the killing.

The church, then and now, is the community that gathers to experience the death and resurrection of Jesus as a present spiritual reality.  This Spirit tells us that Jesus did what he did by the anointing of God, and he did it to show us how to live together in peace and forgiveness and love.  And the very first Christian communities came up with a shorthand, a phrase that encapsulates all of this, which is simply, “Jesus is Lord.”  The essential question about the resurrection is not, what happened to the body in the tomb?  It is, “do you accept that Jesus is Lord?” 

Now before you go rushing to answer that question one way or another, let me state very clearly, just so nobody gets the wrong idea about me, or about this church, that any answer to that question is permitted here.  Seriously—I mean that.  And let me also say that I think that the acceptance that this question asks about is like the resurrection itself.  It’s not a box you check, and then move on to the line about your address and credit card number.  It’s a process.  We’ve only  begun to glimpse what it would mean to fully accept the Lordship of Jesus, which is to say, the total transformation of the world into the paradise of God.

But back to the story: the resurrection proves that Jesus was telling the truth about himself, even though nobody believed him.  Well, almost nobody.  Mary Magdalene and the other Mary believed, at least enough to risk sticking around to watch his crucifixion.  They believed enough to want to go to his tomb and pay their final respects.  I guess that is what made it possible for them to witness his resurrection, and to receive the message that the work that God is doing through Jesus is just getting started. 

But the male disciples, according to Mark and Matthew, aren’t ready yet.  Their hearts are still too clouded with guilt and fear; their heads are still too full of the splintered wreckage of the grandiose dreams that they brought with them to Jerusalem.  They will see Jesus.  They will experience his resurrection.  But not until they follow him back to Galilee.  They have to go back, back to the beginning, back to the place where he first came upon them, casting their nets into the lake.  Not to try to recapture the past.  Not to go on some kind of nostalgia trip, but to hear again in the present the voice of Jesus saying “follow me.”  They have to go back, carrying with them the memory of his death, and their part in it, and begin again to learn how to be his disciples.      

26 years ago I spent a couple of months in Nicaragua, building houses and seeing for myself what the counterrevolutionary war was doing to that country.  A lot of wonderful things happened to me there, and most of all I fell in love with the people.  And while I was there I met a young American, a mechanical engineer, who was machining parts and fixing up old 1930s windmills around the country to help the farmers pump water.  And maybe it was he who gave me this mild case of the romance of revolution, and I started to imagine learning about organic agriculture and going back to Nicaragua or some other down-trodden tropical country to help the people. 

But on my way back to the States I came through customs in the Houston airport.  And as I stood in line in the cavernous, dreary, understaffed, customs station, and I looked around at my own people—stressed-out, short-tempered, homesick Americans--it struck me as clear as a bell that the only difference between this place and Nicaragua was a few dollars, and they wouldn’t last forever.  In fact, that wave had already crested.  And I realized that if I wanted to help people, and develop and strengthen communities, and build the foundations of a just and sustainable society, the most important place in the world for me to do that work was right here in the good, old US of A.

In the 10^th Chapter of Acts, Peter tells Cornelius, the Roman Centurion, that Jesus is Lord of All, by which he means Lord of all peoples.  But he might as well have meant Lord of all times, all circumstances and situations.  As the exalted Son of God, Jesus is Lord of the Universe; and as the man who died on the cross, he is the servant of every particular thing in it.  He is Lord of Nicaragua and Lord of Petaluma.  He is Lord of your house, and your office, and your spouse and children.  He is Lord of your bank account, of your car, and the highway you drive on.  He is Lord of your bedroom, and bathroom, and the dishes in your kitchen sink.  He is Lord of your dreams and of your fears, of your proudest achievements, and your devastating losses.  And as many times as you forget him, or discount him, or betray him, he calls you back to begin again, a little humbler, maybe, a little wiser, to find his place in your life, and yours in his.

 When you leave here today, maybe humming one of those catchy Easter hymn tunes, and the flowers are blooming, and the hills are still green, and the color and the fragrance of spring are everywhere, everything you see will be a sign of his resurrection.  Everyone you meet will be his glorious image.  Nothing that happens to you, now or in the future, will be able to put him back in his grave, or remove his name from your lips or his word from your heart.  Or so I’ve been told.  And today I could almost believe it.            

The dream of the Spirit

Genesis 11:1-9
Psalm 104:25-35, 37
Acts 2:1-21
John 14:8-17

One evening in January, 1988 I was on a dilapidated barge chugging south just off the eastern shore of Lake Nicaragua.  It was a part of the country with no paved roads, where the vast lake served as the main artery of transportation.  Our volunteer construction team had hired the barge, a rusting hulk with a wheezing, reeking diesel motor, to help us gather materials for the houses we had gone there to build.  I’d spent much of the day in a dim, windowless warehouse, picking through piles of cement paper in sacks, pulling out the ones that hadn’t been turned into bricks by rain leaking through the roof, and loading them into wheelbarrows.  Nicaraguans then wheeled the cement down the street and out to the end of a rickety pier, where they lowered it into the canoe that ferried it out to the barge. 

When the cement was shipped, we rode on a flatbed truck to the outskirts of the village where some Swedes had set up a sawmill.  We loaded the truck with lumber and drove back to the pier, where we moved it, board-by-board, out to the barge, in the same laborious manner.  It was late afternoon by the time we had put out from San Miguelito, and we had gone less than half of the ten or twelve miles back to our work site in Morillo when a belt broke on the engine.  The pilot cut the motor and we drifted for a while in anxious silence, as he struggled to tie a length of rope tightly enough around the flywheel to serve as a temporary replacement.  Amazingly, it worked, and as the sun sank behind the twin volcanoes of the Isle of Omotepe, we got under way once again.

It seemed to be a rule of life in Nicaragua that any vehicle on land or water that had space on deck or in the cargo bed was required to take on passengers, and a spontaneous party broke out among them in celebration of the ingenuity of our captain and the beauty of the evening.  In the prow where I was sitting, a man in a floppy wide-brimmed hat of faded army green and matching shirt pulled a half-pint bottle of cheap white rum out of his bag and offered it to me with a smile.  I took a swig and handed it back.  He pointed to a golden pearl of light high above in the darkening sky.  Calling Spanish “basic” would have been doing it too much credit, but I’d had enough Latin that I understood “la diosa del amor”—the goddess of love.  So we drank again to Venus, and from there we made our best effort at carrying on a conversation.  As was often the case in my time in Nicaragua, the topic came around to the question of why my country was attacking his.  I did what I could to explain my understanding of Cold War geopolitics, and he looked me intently in the eye and said, “They say we are Communists, but we are not.  We are Christians.”

I think of that man and our conversation this morning because today is Pentecost.  Today is a celebration of the gift of the Holy Spirit that came to the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth on Pentecost Day.  What makes that gift the enduring life-force of the Church is not the memory of an ecstatic experience, a sound like a rush of wind and a vision of tongues of fire.    Neither is it the miraculous ability to speak to a crowd of people from every land in their native languages.  If you’re like me, these things have never happened to you, but this is still our story.  Because the sound is just the means to gather the crowd, and the flames are just the sign of the authority to speak, and the languages are just a means to deliver a message.  And it’s the message that is the real gift of Pentecost.

The Holy Spirit is what empowers us to speak and to hear a message, and the message is not very different from the one that man gave me on the barge in Nicaragua.  “Language is not a barrier, to us being able to understand each other.  Neither is nationality, or politics.  We live on the same Earth, under the same stars.  We ought to be able to trust each other and live in peace.”  And the second part of the man’s message is also the message of the Holy Spirit—“the means to this peace, the bond of this brotherhood, is Christ.”   

Sometimes when people talk about reuniting the human race, they seem to have a dream of getting everybody to speak the same language, or believe the same doctrine, and line up behind the same centralized plan.   But this is the project of the tower of Babel.  It is the dream of the empire and the totalitarian state.   At its heart is the fear of death and disorder, and a spirit of rivalry, even rivalry with God.  But the Holy Spirit at Pentecost has a different kind of dream.  The tongues of flame are distributed around the circle of the disciples, where each one receives his or her own anointing with the authority to teach.  The Spirit does not teach those Jews from all over the world to speak the same language; but it teaches the apostles to speak the variety of languages that make a multicultural community.  And Peter interprets the event to the crowd in terms of Joel’s dream of the Spirit poured out on all flesh, so that sons and daughters, young men and old, and even slaves, have the power to speak the truth about God. 

 

The Gospel of John says plainly that God will send us this Spirit of truth.  But it is not a philosophical truth.  It is not something esoteric or abstract or otherworldly, but it is a truth that is available to everyone, because it is revealed to all in the life of Jesus.  The message of the Gospel, the message that is kindled into flame at Pentecost, is that the truth about God is a human truth.  It is manifest in human words and human works.  They are words of forgiveness, and reconciliation, and peace.  They are works of healing, and feeding, and setting free, of seeking, and saving, and serving even unto death. 

To say the same kind of words, and do the same kind of works, requires no special knowledge, and no higher authority than the life and death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.  No matter who we are or where we come from we can understand this story.  We can grasp what kind of person Jesus is.  And if we love him, says the Gospel, and model our own actions upon his, and pray to become like him in our own peculiar way, we have the Spirit of truth.  The Spirit that was on him, that anointed him to speak good news to the poor, and recovery of sight to the blind, and release to the captive, to let the oppressed go free, and the coming of the year of God’s favor, is also with us and in us.  And as bearers of this message, we are all members of one body, no matter what language we speak, or what country we come from, no matter how the architects of Babel might try to keep us apart.   

Today we begin the story again at the beginning, with the water where Jesus was baptized with the Holy Spirit.  Today we welcome another companion into his way of freedom and truth, in the person of little Mackenzie Anne.  And we pray that the Holy Spirit will give her grace to recognize the power of the gift she has been given, that from this modest beginning, she may be able to go all the way, and lead others to the abode of heavenly peace.  Beginning again where the apostles began, gathering on Sunday to pray and to remember Jesus, may this congregation be empowered to hear and to speak the message of the Holy Spirit in the languages of our own day.  From this modest beginning, may the truth about God’s reconciling love for every human being lead us to become that royal priesthood of every family, language, people and nation that the Spirit intends us to be.