Recruiting for the Kingdom of God

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!  The Lord is risen indeed.  Alleluia!

“Jesus lives; Jesus is Lord.”  This is the Easter story.  St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Colossians,  “Set you minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth… When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.”

How amazing.  Setting our minds on things that are above is an invitation to wonder, to imagine, and to ponder the mystery of God.  “Set your minds on things that are above,… [and] you shall be revealed with Christ in glory.”

This semester I am teaching a course in philosophy at Rhode Island College.  The course is titled the “Idea of God.”  In this course we begin with a discussion of the dawn of history and look at the many gods of the earliest humans.  Then we trace the development of cultures from hunting to agriculture to technology, and examine the understandings of God from polytheism to monotheism where there in one God.  The God who is One is the God of Abraham, the God of Jews, Christians and Muslims, the God of Creation and of all that is and is to come.

Students are sometimes speechless when we talk about the idea of God.  God is beyond our human knowledge and understanding, beyond what we can imagine.  God is so much more than we can ever know, but what we do know as Christians is that God is revealed in the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  It is the heart of our Christian faith, and it is what it means to “set our minds on things that are above.”  It is the story of God’s revelation to us in Christ, and it is our experience as Christians living in this 21^st century.

The New Testament scholar, Marcus Borg tells us, “Jesus lives and Jesus is Lord.”  These statements are “grounded in experience.  Some of Jesus' followers experienced him after his death as a figure of the present, not just of the past. And they experienced him as a divine reality, now ‘one with God’ and ‘at the right hand of God.’”

“Many of these experiences were visions. Paul's experience of the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, described in Acts, and referred to by Paul in Galatians was clearly a vision.  It happened a few years—three to five—after the death of Jesus.”

“Visions are about ‘seeing,’ as the word implies…. And there was something about these experiences that led to the second meaning of Easter in the gospels and the New Testament.  Not only that Jesus lives, that he is a figure of the present and not just of the past, but that he is "Lord"—a divine reality, one with God and having the qualities of God, at ‘the right hand of God.’"

“The central meaning of Easter is not about whether something happened to the corpse of Jesus.  Its central meanings are that Jesus continues to be known and that he is Lord.  The tomb couldn't hold him.  He's loose in the world.  He's still here.  He's still recruiting for the kingdom of God.”

Our Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori writes in her Easter letter, “The tomb is empty, and nobody knows where the body is.  Mary Magdalene tells the others about the mysterious disappearance, but they give up and go home.  Mary stays behind, weeping, and then fails to recognize the risen one before her.  As the days pass, each resurrected encounter begins in surprise or anonymity – the disciples fishing all night without catching, Jesus cooking breakfast on the beach, the two on their way to Emmaus.  Nobody recognizes him at first sight.”

The risen Body of Christ– what we often call the church… is rising today where it is growing less self-centered and inwardly focused, and living with its heart turned toward the cosmic and eternal, its attention focused intently on loving God and neighbor. … The Body is recognized when the hungry are fed – on the lakeshore with broiled fish, on the road to Emmaus, on street corners and city parks, in food pantries… and, as the Body gathers once again to remember its identity and origin – Christ is risen for the sake of all creation.”

How is the risen Body of Christ affecting your life today?  It is up to us to share the magnificent story of the Resurrection as an Easter people, transformed to heal the sick, feed the hungry, comfort the bereaved, and live in hope for our human future.  So let us on this Easter Day come together as the Church, the living Body of the risen Christ, and set our minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth….  [Because] when Christ who is our life is revealed, then we also will be revealed with him in glory.

Christ is risen, Alleluia!  The Lord is risen indeed.  Alleluia!  Happy Easter!  Amen.