Entangled States

Jesus’ resurrection and our atonement with God leads us to recognize that we are reconciled not just to God but to each other as well. And more than that — it isn’t simply a remaking of our personal relationships. The Easter event is the foundation for a new way of living in community. It begins a process, still ongoing, of moving us from a world ordered around the way of the Ruler of this World to one in which the Reign of God is made increasingly manifest.

You can sense this by hearing the words Jesus speaks to the disciples in the Upper Room, and to Thomas himself, in light of an earlier moment in the Gospel accounts: the sending of the seventy-two to proclaim that the Kingdom of God has come near.

What Jesus has those disciples do closely parallels the proclamations made regularly by Roman Emperors. But Jesus changes one crucial element, and that change points to an alternate reality that is slowly dawning.

You can watch the sermon by using this link.

When we have completely given up, God has not. God acts and out of the darkness, new light bursts forth. Easter is the proof that death and despair do not win in the end.

Here is something we easily forget about Easter morning: nobody was expecting it.

The women walking to the tomb in the dark were not going to witness a resurrection. They were going to finish a burial. They carried spices. They were already wondering aloud who would roll the stone away. Their category for what was about to happen did not exist. It wasn’t something that they could anticipate. None of Jesus’ followers did – even though he had told them.

The disciples hiding behind locked doors were not waiting for news of an empty tomb. They were waiting for the knock that would mean the authorities had come for them next.

Even those who had heard Jesus speak of rising on the third day had apparently filed that away as metaphor or misunderstood it entirely. Because when the news came, nobody said: yes, of course, just as he said. They said: this cannot be. Mary Magdalene’s first instinct was that someone had moved the body. The disciples on the road to Emmaus were walking away from Jerusalem — the direction of defeat and resignation.

What this means is that the resurrection was not wish-fulfillment. It was not the disciples’ grief generating a vision that matched their hopes. It shattered their categories rather than confirming them. Nobody was primed for it. Nobody produced it. Nobody even asked for it in quite that form.

God acted. Unilaterally. In history. In a way that required nothing from those first witnesses except that they be present to receive it, and even then, they barely could.

You can view the sermon here.

I’m going to be at San Jorge in Central Falls for Palm Sunday. It’s a congregation that worships in Spanish and my sermon for this Sunday reflects that – and it doesn’t make sense to post here.

My friend Andrew Gerns has offered his sermon for this week if you’re looking for something timely and in English:

Here’s a bit of what he’s written:

No one really knew what to expect. Some people thought that Jesus would lead a revolt. Others through he’d take over the Temple and call down angelic armies. Of course, none of it will go as planned—or so some thought. Jesus did not rally the people to throw off the chains of oppression. There is no revolution. And while Roman soldiers did not scoop up the people who greeted Jesus… this time!… the authorities exerted their power, just the same.

Before the week is out, Jesus will be arrested and the might of Rome and the power of the official Temple religion—which was at the heart of the religion and economy of Jerusalem— will fall on the head of Jesus. He dies a public, criminal, traitor’s death on a cross, outside the very gates of the city he rode through, not even a week later.

Normally, that would be the end of the story. We might have remembered Jesus’ entry into the city with the same sorrowful appreciation that we have for the Tank Man. Yes, it was stirring to see one man stand up against the tanks…but the tanks still won. And no one knows whatever became of the brave young man. It might have been stirring to see Jesus’ peasant parade in contrast to the Roman legions. But the legions, it appears, still won.

But the legions did not win, not in a final sense! And what was defeated was not an army or a government or a corrupt merging of power and religion. What was defeated was death. What was defeated is sin. What is defeated on the cross is every human attempt to make things serve in the place of God. What is put down is every complex structure, every kind of manipulation that both make us seem to be in control of our little universes, but which hide the fact that we are God’s creatures and responsible to God and each other.

If you’d prefer a video though, here’s my sermon on this text from three years ago:

The story we hear today from John’s Gospel is one of the great set pieces of the New Testament. It’s almost theatrical—you could stage it. There’s a man born blind, sitting where he has always sat. There are disciples asking the question religious people always ask when they encounter suffering: “Whose fault is this?” There are neighbors who can’t believe what they’re seeing, parents who are terrified of getting involved, religious authorities who are so certain they already know how God works that they cannot recognize God working right in front of them. And at the center of it all, there is Jesus—making mud, touching a stranger’s eyes, and doing something so odd, so physical, so deliberate, that we’d be wise to slow down and ask why.

Because what Jesus does here is not just a healing. It is, if we have eyes to see it, an act of creation.

The whole narrative turns on the question of recognition: who can see what God is doing, and who can’t?
The people who miss it in this story are not bad people. They are devout, careful, learned. But they have already decided what God’s work looks like, and so when God’s work shows up in a form they didn’t expect—in mud, in mess, in a man they’d written off—they can’t take it in.

The one who sees it is the one who was given new eyes, clay eyes, God-made eyes. Eyes that hadn’t yet learned what to filter out.

You can see the whole video by using this link.