Easter 2013

OK.  There are Christian doctrines I find suspect, certain dogmas that don’t square with my karma, certain traditional interpretations of Scripture I think bear bad fruit.  Good teaching should never bear bad fruit.   I also find the behavior of many within the larger Christian community inexplicable and hard to understand --- or endure. Some days I feel alive, born anew, and other days I feel as dead as I’ve ever been.  Nor am I always exactly sure of what I believe or why I believe it.

  Am I a supralapsarian or an infralapsarian or have I just lapsed ---into doubt?  Am I more complementarian or egaliatarian in my understanding of gender roles?  Is the historical-grammatical method of studying the Bible always better than an existential hermeneutical approach?  Does anybody understand these twenty cent theological terms I’m throwing around? Do I?  And how tall and how long did that wall in 1 Kings that fell on 27, 000 thousand soldiers to presumably crush them have to be anyway --- preposterously tall and long enough to make me question biblical infallibility?   Bit by bit my faith frays at the seams, but there's something about the resurrection that never ceases to thrill my soul.

  Jesus’ tomb was never venerated the way other martyr’s tombs were venerated.  Those early Christ-followers naturally and organically began to worship on the first day of the week instead of the last.  Why?  I think something happened.  Something happened that soon begin to drive and define and explain everything else.

 In the final analysis, at least based on my twenty years of trying to come up with another Easter sermon, the theories used to re-explain or out and out deny the resurrection  prove harder to get your head around than the truth of the resurrection itself.

 

  And once again my faith centers upon a life-changing, history defining event.  I’m scared and I’m humbled and I’m hopeful --- again, yet again --- because Jesus is alive.  So, in the words of N. T. Wright, “We had better learn to take seriously the witness of the entire early church, that Jesus of Nazareth was raised bodily to a new sort of life, three days after his execution.  There wouldn’t be a church or a witness without the resurrection.  The New Testament proclaims that Jesus’ death wasn’t a messy accident, or the end of a beautiful dream, but rather the climatic act of Israel’s God, the one God of all the earth, and the focal point of a more glorious destiny.”   OK.  I'm buying . At least this week.