Resurrection Faith

An Easter sermon: Resurrection Faith

Resurrection Faith

A Sermon by Jeffrey K. Krehbiel
Easter 2002

Church of the Pilgrims
Presbyterian Church (USA)
Washington, DC

Text: Matthew 27:55-28:10

"And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it." (28:2)

The author of this sermon sent it with this note of appreciation for one of his sources:

"Sometimes you read something that is so wonderful, you just need to preach about it. That was the case for me with Barbara Brown Taylor's wonderful article in the recent Journal for Preachers, "Easter Preaching and the Lost Language of Salvation." On Easter we baptized three children, and her article was right on target."

Jeffrey K. Krehbiel, Pastor
Church of the Pilgrims
Washington, DC
www.churchofthepilgrims.org

It is unusual but entirely appropriate that we are celebrating both the sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist today. In the ancient church, Easter Sunday, often at the Easter Vigil held very early on Sunday morning, was the day on which most baptisms were performed. The candidates for baptism- usually adults, and not children- would prepare all year for the event, and then be baptized in a baptismal pool in an adjacent room set aside for baptisms, before being ushered in to the sanctuary to celebrate the Eucharist with the gathered community. And so we too will celebrate the Lord's Supper following the baptisms, thus bringing these two rituals together in their ancient order.

Perhaps in the process we can reclaim the ancient meaning of baptism as well. The church today badly suffers from a truncated and distorted view of baptism, and the accompanying meaning of salvation that goes with it. One of my hopes and dreams for these children that we baptize today is that they will begin through their baptisms a life-long journey toward the discovery of the lost meaning of salvation.

Somewhere in the early Middle Ages the notion arose that little children must be baptized as early as possible in order save them from an eternity in purgatory should they die in infancy. Thus baptism came to be seen by many as some sort of magic ritual that would protect us after we die. No church I know teaches that, yet the popular notion persists. And the great and expansive biblical understanding of salvation became truncated and limited in a similar way. The meaning of the Christian life is reduced to believing in Jesus so we can go to heaven when we die. So we baptized children at the beginning of their lives because we were worried about what would happen to them at the end of their lives?

What a sad and sorry way to think about what we are doing here today. No wonder baptism has lost its meaning for most people. No wonder we have come to focus on how cute the babies look instead of the significance of what is taking place.

One of the promises the parents and congregation will make today is to teach these children the stories of the faith. The more they learn these stories the more they will discover that God's primary concern in the Bible is not with what happens to them after the die, but with the quality of their life between now and grave. They will learn that this same God is not just concerned about them, but about the kind of world they live in, the kind of world they will help create.

They will learn the story of Abraham and Sarah, who set off on a dangerous journey toward a land of milk and honey to found a great people that would be a blessing to their children and a light to the nations.

They'll learn how God heard the cries of a band of Hebrew slaves laboring in Egypt, and how God brought them up out of bondage so they could live and worship as free people, and how this same God continues to hear the cries of those who are oppressed and wills their liberation.

They'll hear the struggles of the Israelites to form a nation enlivened by righteousness and dedicated to justice, and particularly the lengths to which they went to protect the most vulnerable among them- the widows, the orphans, the refugees, the poor.

They'll discover the voices of the prophets, like Micah, who called Israel to continually remember that they were once slaves in Egypt, and so should not enslave or exploit those around them, and like Isaiah, who dreamed of a new earth with lions eating grass, and children playing in safety, and people living to ripe old ages in houses they have built for themselves, eating the fruit from their own vines.

The Episcopalian writer Barbara Brown Taylor writes:

This was Isaiah's vision of salvation, which all kinds of people have turned into a vision of heaven. While Isaiah might have agreed that salvation comes from heaven, I doubt he would ever have agreed to leave it there. As far as the Hebrew Bible is concerned, heaven is only interesting insofar as it comes to earth. Salvation is not about earthlings going up but about heaven coming down, and any notion of salvation that does not include just rulers, honest judges, an equitable economy, and peace among the nations, would have made Isaiah scratch his head.⁽¹⁾

They'll also hear, of course, the stories of Jesus, whom Christians believe is the one Isaiah long promised to come and usher in this new earth. However much his followers have turned Jesus' vision into pie in sky in the by and by, they'll find a Jesus very much involved in the here and now. Jesus may have come to save us from our sins, but in the Gospels, as Taylor puts it,

[Jesus] saves people from blindness, from drowning, from demons, from hunger, from the judgment of the pious, and from death. Some of those he saves are followers of his and others are not, but that does not seem to be the basis on which he decides whom to help. He helps those who know that they need help, and those who are helped seem to believe that they can be.

Looking at these expansive images of salvation in the broad scope of the Biblical story, New Testament scholar Marcus Borg summarizes it in this way. The Bible teachers us that:

	God wills our liberation, our exodus from Egypt.
	God wills our reconciliation, our return from exile.
	God wills our enlightenment, our seeing.
	God wills our forgiveness, our release from sin and guilt.
	God wills that we see ourselves as God's beloved.
	God wills our resurrection, our passage from death to life.
	God wills for us food and drink that satisfies our hunger and thirst.
	God wills, comprehensively, our well-being- not just my well-being as an individual but the well-being of all of us and of the whole of creation.⁽²⁾

In short, God wills our salvation, our healing, here on earth. The Christian life is about participating in the salvation of God.

Finally, they'll learn perhaps the most important story of all, the story of Jesus' escape from the tomb, how God raised him up and vindicated his way in the world, how the power of God's love is stronger even than the power of death. They'll learn, as the disciples did when they encountered the risen Christ after experiencing first-hand the agonizing reality of the cross, (in Taylor's words), "that there is no wreckage so total that God cannot redeem it. There is no cause so lost that God cannot breathe new life into it."

This is what is meant by resurrection faith. This is what we hope and dream and pray for these children we baptize this day, as they enter in to a community marked by such odd practices as hospitality, nonviolence, welcome of the stranger, care of the sick, prayer for the dying, the struggle for justice, and the regular worship of the God who wills the healing and wholeness of the whole creation. Then they won't need to explain what salvation needs. They'll be able to look around them and say, as Taylor puts it, "This is how saved people live."

When Matthew tells his version of the resurrection story, it is filled with a host of apocalyptic images that the other gospel writes do not include: earth quakes, splitting of rocks, opening of tombs.(3) It is Matthew's way of signaling that the resurrection was not just something spectacular that happened to Jesus, but a decisive event in human history. Jesus' resurrection turned the world upside down, and so turns our lives upside down as well. So the women on that Easter morning, who according to their culture couldn't be witnesses, were called by God to be witnesses to the resurrection. All the disciples who had run away, and Peter who had denied Jesus, are called "my brothers" by the risen Christ. Women who couldn't hold positions of authority became agents of reconciliation. The last were first and the first were last, and just as Jesus had said, the last, the lost, the least and forgotten found a place at the table in God's kingdom.

So today as we gather around the font and pour out our hopes and dreams for these children, they are grounded in the very hopes and dreams of God: that they will know freedom from bondage; healing from brokenness; reconciliation with the neighbor; forgiveness of sins; light in the darkness; hope for the future; and confidence to face the struggles of every day life grounded in resurrection faith- that the power of God's love is stronger even than the power of death.

_______

1. "Easter Preaching and the Lost Language of Salvation" in Journal for Preachers, Vol. XXV, No. 3.

2. The God We Never Knew, 1997: HarperSanFrancisco.

3. Brian Stoffregen, "Gospel Notes for Next Sunday."