#4. the previous tenant was a filthy human being who has never picked up a duster or hoover in her life

[glitterslag]

bureaucracy...

[woodworkingpastor]

Resurrection! -- Luke 24:1-12 -- Easter -- April 4, 2021

Please pray with me:

O God, who for our redemption gave your only-begotten Son to the death of the cross, and by his glorious resurrection delivered us from the power of our enemy: Grant us so to die daily to sin, that we may evermore live with him in the joy of his resurrection; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

News that demands a response

In a recent article in The New Yorker, Kathryn Schulz tells the following story about good news:

One of the most amazing things I have ever witnessed involved an otherwise unprepossessing house cat named Billy. This was some years ago, shortly after I had moved into a little rental house in the Hudson Valley. Billy, a big, bad-tempered old tomcat, belonged to the previous tenant, a guy by the name of Phil. Phil adored that cat, and the cat—improbably, given his otherwise unenthusiastic feelings about humanity—returned the favor.

On the day Phil vacated the house, he wrestled an irate Billy into a cat carrier, loaded him into a moving van, and headed toward his new apartment in Brooklyn. Thirty minutes down the interstate, in the middle of a drenching rainstorm, the cat somehow clawed his way out of the carrier. Phil pulled over to the shoulder but found that, from the driver’s seat, he could neither coax nor drag the cat back into captivity. Moving carefully, he got out of the van, walked around to the other side, and opened the door a gingerly two inches—whereupon Billy shot out, streaked unscathed across two lanes of seventy-mile-per-hour traffic, and disappeared into the wide, overgrown median. After nearly an hour in the pouring rain trying to make his own way to the other side, Phil gave up and, heartbroken, continued onward to his newly diminished home.

Some weeks later, at a little before seven in the morning, I woke up to a banging at my door. Braced for an emergency, I rushed downstairs. The house had double-glass doors flanked by picture windows, which together gave out onto almost the entire yard, but I could see no one. I was standing there, sleep-addled and confused, when up onto his hind legs and into my line of vision popped an extremely scrawny and filthy gray cat.

I gaped. Then I opened the door and asked the cat, idiotically, “Are you Billy?” He paced, distraught, and meowed at the door. I retreated inside and returned with a bowl each of food and water, but he ignored them and banged again at the door. Flummoxed, I took a picture and texted it to my landlord with much the same question I had asked the cat: “Is this Billy?”

Ninety minutes later, Phil showed up at my door. The cat, who had been pacing continuously, took one look and leaped into Phil’s arms—literally hurled himself the several feet necessary to be bundled into his owner’s chest. Phil, a six-foot tall bartender of the rather tough variety, promptly started to cry. After a few minutes of mutual adoration, the purring cat hopped down, devoured the food I had put out two hours earlier, lay down in a sunny patch of grass by the door, and embarked on an elaborate bath.

Responding to the Gospel

The New Testament word gospel is like many other theologically important words we encounter in the Bible, in that it’s not inherently a religious term. As a verb, gospel simply means “to proclaim good news.” It’s the kind of thing that a messenger would relay from the battlefield to the king, bringing news of a favorable turn in battle, or even of victory itself. In this sense, the landlord in our story proclaimed a type of gospel to Phil when he called and said, “Billy has come home.”

But gospel is not just any news, it is the kind of news that demands a response. Hearing the gospel places a demand on our lives. How will we respond? What will we do differently—what changes will we make—now that we’ve heard this good news? Is “good news” really good if it doesn’t elicit a change from deep within us? How would you have felt about my story if Phil had just told Kathryn, “I’ve moved on; since Billy obviously wants to be there, just keep him”? It’s not a bad ending, but it is significantly less satisfying.

The report of the first Easter morning begins with a report of the longest sabbath ever:

On the sabbath they rested according to the commandment (Luke 23:56b).

Having been witnesses to Jesus’ death, all the women could do was rest and mourn. They were left to process their complicated thoughts and dashed hopes, and wrestle with the fact that their desire to be in a place where everything is in order and and everything is right—essentially to be in a place they could call home—was apparently not meant to be.

The Sabbath is intended as a day of remembering. And we would do well to remember that the people of Jesus’ day had expectations of what Jesus would do, expectations that his death seems to have ruined. The people who surrounded Jesus—his disciples, the women who travelled with him and financially supported his ministry, even his opponents—had an expectation of what God would do in their lives. We’re not all that different: in our day, we want God to bless our efforts, to help us in times of difficulty, to work in people and events for a particular outcome.

The expectations of those we read about in the Bible were a bit different from ours: they expected that God would return to his people, defeat their enemies (which meant the Roman government), renew His covenant with them and dwell with them in a restored temple. People had gotten their hopes up that Jesus was that person who would be king; some expected Jesus to lead an insurrection or command an army, and Jerusalem would once again be a place of importance and power. When Jesus talked about the Kingdom of God—even when he taught the disciples to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” this is the kind of thing they were expecting: the Kingdom of God would be revealed as a political kingdom on earth, with a real king in a real temple commanding real armies and fighting real battles against real enemies.

There was a reason why the people expected this; it’s because there had been a kingdom once before, a kingdom the people had lost. In the Old Testament—amidst all the stories of the Hebrew people and judges and prophets and kings, amidst all the stories we tell our children in Bible School and the stories whose violence and gore make us wonder why they’re in the Bible at all; even amidst all the rules and regulations and building plans for the things the people would need to properly worship God—amidst all of this are two stories that describe times when the people turned away from God in significant ways. And the problem the people of Jesus’ day had that led to their misunderstanding was that they’d picked the wrong problem for Jesus to fix.

In 1 Samuel 8 we read of the time when God’s people recognized they were facing a great difficulty. Samuel—the faithful prophet and judge of the people—was getting old and his sons were corrupt. The people rightly recognize that the path they are on is a dead end, so they ask Samuel to appoint a king to lead them. Samuel objects to this plan; God is to be their king. But God does something surprising: he tells Samuel to go ahead and appoint a king anyway. If they would rather be led by an earthly ruler and not God himself, then fine.

But in choosing a king the people had turned away from God; it proved to be their first step to exile in Babylon. Eventually Israel is defeated by a foreign nation, the temple and city wall are destroyed, and the nation’s leaders are taken into captivity to live in Babylon as punishment for their unfaithfulness. It is a great oversimplification to compare them to Billy the cat bolting out of Phil’s moving van to head out on their own, but that’s essentially what the people did. Life with Phil—even in the new place—would have worked out. But Billy had different ideas, and so do we. God’s people ended up in exile—separated from their home, the place God intended them to flourish—and their life was never the same.

It’s understandable why the people thought Jesus would fix this problem for them. But it was still the wrong problem. The ultimate issue wasn’t that the life they were living wasn’t working out like they had hoped. The problem was that they were in exile from their Creator. The real story they needed to remember is found in Genesis 3 where Adam and Eve turn away from God because they have come to believe they know better how to live their lives than God does. And lest we think that Adam and Eve is just an old relic of a story—a kind of fable that we can take or leave—this basic problem would be repeated by the Apostle Paul just a few years after Jesus’ death:

All have turned aside, together they have become worthless; there is no one who shows kindness, there is not even one (Romans 3:12).

The people of Jesus day looked out at the world around them and were saying, “what we see doesn’t make sense. We should have our own king and rule the world in the name of God.” But the reason Jesus left his Father’s side to be born and walk among us was because God was saying, “the reason your world doesn’t make sense is because your relationship with me is broken. If we fix that, then everything else can be put right.”

Jesus gave us all kinds of clues that his mission on earth was to put things to rights—to put the world back together in the way God intended. So we see Jesus travelling around healing the sick, raising the dead, challenging people to repent, and telling stories about the so-called wrong kind of people doing the right things and being validated by Jesus. Outsiders were becoming insiders in God’s family.

And so when Mary Magadalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women encounter the angel at Jesus’ tomb, their response to this good news—this Gospel—is to become the first preachers in the history of Christianity! They run back to the apostles and tell them good news: what we thought was the end of the story is really only the middle of the story. There is more to come because Jesus has defeated the ultimate enemy; Jesus has defeated death. Our broken relationship with God can now be restored. Sins can be forgiven. We can learn what it means to properly love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; from that we can learn to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Anglican scholar N.T. Wright describes the benefits of being put back in right relationship with God this way:

All those who believe in Jesus, rescued by his cross and resurrection and enlivened by his Spirit, are part of the new family. This was and is central, not peripheral. The church was the original multicultural project, with Jesus as its only point of identity. It was known…as a worship-based, spiritually renewed, multi-ethnic, polychrome, mutually supportive, outward-facing, culturally creative, chastity-celebrating, socially responsible fictive kinship group, gender-blind in leadership, generous to the poor and courageous in speaking up for the voiceless.

This is the meaning of Easter and what life in Christ points to: sins have been forgiven, relationships with God and one another can be restored, and we now can participate with God in putting the world to rights.

But the news still requires a response. Even with the challenges of our present times—quite obviously represented by the fact that we have gathered outdoors for worship instead of in our beautiful and comfortable sanctuary—we live in something of a paradise where we can get along quite well without God. Why do we need God when we have decent jobs that provide for our basic needs and so much more; where comforts are only a click on Amazon.com away; where we can be constantly entertained with the latest TV program, sporting event, or concert; and where by and large most of the challenges that make life dangerous rarely, if ever, touch us? Furthermore, there are so many who will reduce Christianity to the notion of “praying a prayer so you can go to Heaven when you die,” and pretty much do whatever else you want until that day comes.

Still, the story comes down to our expectations of Jesus. Is he the center of your life, the hub around which everything rotates? Is he somewhere on the periphery—something akin to an app on our smartphones that delivers something we need every so often? Might Jesus be out of sight and out of mind?

How will you respond to the good news? Does Jesus’ invitation to be made right with God and then join in with the rest of God’s family in cooperating with God to put the world to rights demand a response in you? Are you ready to find your way back home into the loving arms of your Creator?