I Corinthians 15:12-20, 53-58
Luke 24:13-35
One person saw my sermon title and asked me—probably only half joking: “Are you sure?”
Let’s see what I can do here.
Writing to the Christians in Corinth in the middle of the First Century, Paul said: “If for this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”
He wrote those words some 10-25 years before Luke’s Gospel told the story of Cleopas and his friend standing still and looking sad as they talked to that stranger who joined them on the road to Emmaus, saying of the crucified Jesus: “We had hoped,” they said of the crucified One, “We had hoped that he was the one redeem Israel.”
Standing there, they seemed indeed “of all people most to be pitied,” because in their eyes their hope was dead.
We know something of the despair and the bewilderment that these two people were experiencing on that Sunday after the crucifixion—for hope can elude us.
The violence and death across our nation;
The racism that no one wants to see, the racism that strips us of courage and leaves us appalled and astounded;
The voices of white supremacy more and more entering the mainstream of political conversation;
The daily lies that come from our President, in a political landscape that convinces us the poet was correct in saying: “The best lack all conviction and the worst are filled with a passionate intensity”—
All of this can all cause us to lose hope, to give up hope, to watch in sorrow as hope dies.
And yet, while in this world
tragic violence is real
incomprehensible accidents and disasters are real
political weakness is real
and death is very, very real—
We still gather on these Sunday and shout our words of defiance: “Christ is risen!”
What do we mean?
What is our hope in this world, in this life?
Hope is not—you know this—hope is not wishful thinking. Hope is not, as professor of engineering, David Wilder, often tells me, hope is not a strategy.
Hope is the energy that we find in ourselves and among ourselves to do the kind of things I exhort you to do each Sunday: to strengthen the weak, to support the fainthearted, to seek the good even in the face of evil.
Paul uses the image of first fruits.
And we’ve almost lost the sense of what he means. Blueberries, blackberries, strawberries—they are flown into Hy-Vee all winter long. We don’t have to wait. We don’t have the expectation.
Do you remember the time when the first strawberries started to show up after a long winter, only as spring really took hold? Those first strawberries had that wonderful strawberry smell that seems to be missing—a scent that spoke a promise of warm days, green grass, and shady trees.
First fruits.
One theologian says that first fruits awaken the appetite. They make us desire what is coming with more intensity. We can taste the goodness of that which is coming.
Jesus is the first, Paul tells us. The risen Christ is a messenger of what is to come—life abundant, life eternal—evocative images of our existence in the presence of the holy.
Spring is the beginning, not the culmination. Just as the green shoots outside the front door of the church tell us of more life to come, so the Resurrection of Jesus comes as the first fruits of a promised new creation.
Jesus is the first, Paul says—an important first to be sure, but only the first of many who will enter into a new life that God is even now bringing into being. With the resurrection of Jesus, it was no longer a matter of waiting for the resurrection at the end of this present age. God was already doing something new.
And God continues to do something new, even now, even with us—in us and among us and through us.
Jesus’ resurrection is the beginning, not the culmination of the Christian hope. The victory of Easter is not yet complete, but it is promised.
The answer to the question, “What do we mean when we say: “Christ is risen?” begins to surface.
We are given a future.
Easter is the beginning of God’s new creation.
Christians have always announced, in the words of the Apostles’ Creed, “the resurrection of the body.” The Christian belief in the resurrection of the body does not tell us that when we die our souls shall be released from the prison of our bodies and we shall go off to be with Jesus in some spiritual, Platonic heaven.
No, when we as Christians confess the resurrection of the body, we are affirming that the persons we are and the world that God created and called good are moving toward a future in which all will be affirmed and made new by God’s love.
Because Christ is risen we look forward to the future with hope and we will not be satisfied with what is.
This past week I came across a poem by the wonderfully mysterious Brazilian theologian, Rubem Alves. He says of hope:
It is a suspicion that reality is more complex
than realism wants us to believe
and that the frontiers of the possible are not determined
by the limits of the actual
and that in a miraculous and unexpected way
life is preparing the creative events
which will open the way to freedom and resurrection
Because Christ is risen, we have this present life in all its fullness, with all its difficulties.
Alves, again, says:
The two, suffering and hope, live from each other.
Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair,
hope without suffering creates illusions, naiveté, and drunkenness.
We have the cross—we know the cross, at times we even dare to follow the call of Jesus and take up our own cross—but the suffering of the cross is not the whole story.
We also have the hope of the resurrection—a faith that God is bringing about a new creation, even now, and we are part of it.
Out of the hope of resurrection, Paul tells the Corinthians, Paul tells us, “Be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”
To be immovable is not to be stiff and resistant. It is more like being a tree that is deeply rooted yet can sway with the wind. It is to be flexible and resilient, active and involved—abounding in the work of God.
You can give with abundance; you can love with abandon.
You can give yourself to those you love, to the causes that claim your heart.
You can walk in the way of peace in a world that celebrates violence.
You can work for justice in a world that favors power and wealth.
You can speak the truth in a world that prefers easy lies. You can laugh and sing and dance.
We can act in these ways because we know that in the resurrected Christ what we do in this life is not in vain. The good that we do does not end with our defeat or even with our death. By God’s power our works continue, still bearing fruit.
Yes, death is real. And death is an enemy. But we hear the good news—and at times we sense even in our own lives that death has been swallowed up in victory, that we can live fully because Christ is risen.
So watch once again as the Risen Christ takes bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it to those two companions who had run out of hope—their eyes are opened!
They catch a glimpse of God’s resurrection power—and it vanishes.
Astronomers help us when they talk of “averted vision.” If you want to see a very faint star, you should look a little to the side because your eye is more sensitive to faint light that way—and a soon as you look right at the star, it disappears.”[i]
You know how it is. We get some faint sense of God’s presence, some dim realization of meaning and purpose, some vision of the long arc of the universe bending toward justice in the distance—and it is gone like the morning mist burning off over Iowa fields.
Instead of looking directly, this is what we do: we take bread and remember a life broken that we and our world might be made whole. We take a cup and remember a life poured out that we and our world might be filled.
We hear again the good news: “This is for you—for your brokenness, for your emptiness, This is for your suffering, for your hope.
Our eyes are opened.
It happens at this table, but not only here.
It happens whenever we extend hospitality: feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, caring for the sick. It happens anytime we reach out in simple or difficult acts of friendship or compassion. It happens when we speak truth instead of lies, when we stand for what is right and call others to join us—and the opportunities for such acts right now are myriad.
Our eyes are opened. By the grace of God we recognize the risen Christ. And we are called out of darkness into light, out of bitterness into love, and out of death into life.
God’s new creation doesn’t happen all at once. And it won’t happen completely in our lifetime. Sometimes the signs of God’s new creation are very hard to see.
But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead. In Jesus Christ we have been given a foretaste. In faith we can see that all creation moves in the direction of life and of love.
We can respond to a world in pain neither with a quick optimism that things must be fine if Jesus is raised nor with a dejected pessimism that evil has been victorious.
The hope of the resurrection is the hope that Jesus is the first of many.
This is our hope: these days are filled with great significance. The work of God that we do—the work that God does through us—is a part of the future that God is making.
The future is life, not death.
Christ, the first fruits, goes ahead of us.
[i] Complexity, pg. 319