The God of our ancestors raised up Jesus, whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. 31God exalted him at his right hand as Leader and Savior that he might give repentance to Israel and forgiveness of sins. 32And we are witnesses to these things,\u2028John 19:30ff<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The Council has them flogged; but at the end, clearly it\u2019s the Council that\u2019s scared. The Council puts them out because one leader, Gamaliel, warns the council members they could end up opposing God, as indeed they have. The disciples don\u2019t just offer Jesus: they offer a view of him located in the tradition of Torah, of scripture.
\nThe third snapshot comes from the end of time. John has a vision of what the end of creation will look like and he describes it this way,<\/p>\n
Look! He is coming with the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail. So it is to be. Amen. 8\u201cI am the Alpha and the Omega,\u201d says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. [Revelation 1:7f]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The clouds are just scenery, like the mountains in a John Wayne movie or Manhattan in one of Woody Allen\u2019s. These people don\u2019t drive, let alone fly, and the clouds are there to make the hearers imagine someone more powerful, higher, than anything they have ever seen. The one who was raised is raised so high that we see him in the clouds. And the power of his coming overwhelms even those who thought to oppose him.
\nWhat have you seen? These are all snapshots, reports of what someone has seen. Jesus up and around, Jesus getting his disciples , simple men, to stand up to the powers of their city, Jesus coming in clouds of power. <\/p>\n
These are not ideas; none of the reporters offers a philosophy about Jesus. This is the family album and these are people showing the family pictures. When we look out at the world, when we look around, there is a great tendency to answer the question, \u201cWhat do Christians think?\u201d More and more, I am convinced Christian life has more to do with seeing than thinking\u2014and then telling people what you saw.<\/p>\n
Show Me Your Resurrection<\/h2>\n
We live in a culture that seems to have adopted Kurt Vonnegut\u2019s phrase as its response to evil. \u201cSo it goes\u201d. What else can we say? A Buddhist monk posed this question to Christians: \u201cShow me your resurrection.\u201d When I look for the power of irresistible, eternal life, when I search for Christ, I see people, people who touch his light and lift it. Written on the wall of a cellar in Cologne where Jews were hidden these words were written: \u201cI believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when I do not feel it. I believe in God even when God is silent.\u201d If God is silent, maybe the silence is there so we can speak up, so we can tell what we\u2019ve seen.<\/p>\n
Chris is risen<\/h2>\n
Like a lot of churches, we put an Easter banner on the front this year. It just takes a few minutes to order these things but you do have to proof read them. That\u2019s a lesson someone got powerfully wrong this year; John sent me a funny picture of a white Easter banner that said in big, bold, red letter CHRIS IS RISEN: not Christ, which was surely intended, but Chris. So I laughed about this, somewhat ruefully because over the years I\u2019ve made many proofreading mistakes. And then I thought about it and this was my question: who\u2019s Chris? Was I wrong, was I being short sighted? Did Chris rise just like the sign said? And what about us: surely Easter is meant to be more than a nice day with special music and pretty flowers; surely it is meant to remind us we are called to rise with Christ. What if we put your name where Chris is: Jim is risen, Eva is risen, Deb, Amy, Ken, and so on.<\/p>\n
The disciples didn\u2019t debate; they didn\u2019t write a systematic theology. They told what they\u2019d seen, they lived from the love of Christ and were raised by it to new lives, lives they told about and shared with such power that soon the little group of 11 or so was growing so fast it couldn\u2019t be contained any more than the tomb could contain Jesus. Like Jesus, they shared their wounds; like Jesus, they shared their faith in the ultimate power of God whether seen or not at that moment. Like Jesus, they lived the resurrection. <\/p>\n
Try it out: maybe the sign printer knew something important. Chris is risen: so are we. Show it, tell it, this week.<\/p>\n
Amen<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A Sermon for the First Congregational Church of Albany, NY by Rev. James Eaton, Pastor – Copyright 2016 All Rights Reserved Second Sunday in Easter \u2022 April 3, 2016 Chris Is Risen – Click Here to listen to this sermon Easter 2C – April 3, 2016 Anything Special? For years I\u2019ve been asking kids at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":180,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions\/180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.firstreflection.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}