"He breathed on them" (Second Sunday of Easter, Apr 27 2014)

Homily:  Yr A Easter 2, April 27 2014, St. Albans

Readings:  Acts 2:14a, 22-32; Ps 16; 1 Pet 1:3-9; Jn 20:19-31

Last week we celebrated the joy of Easter.  We journeyed with the disciples from the sorrow and fear of Good Friday, through the silence of Holy Saturday to the excitement and joy of meeting the risen Christ on Easter morning.  And it was a joyful occasion, wasn’t it?  Lots of people, lots of smiles, great music, great singing, awesome worship, wonderful family meals and gatherings, Easter egg hunts and all the rest of it.  It was a celebration of the resurrection, a celebration of the realization that in the resurrection we are given a tangible sign that life can overcome death, that love will prevail over hatred, that joy emerges out of fear and that the light that comes into our world cannot be put out by the darkness.  All of this is good news, all of it is worth celebrating.

And so this week we continue the celebration.  And we will continue to celebrate Easter in our liturgical calendar for a full 50 days, a week of weeks.

And as we celebrate, we will also seek to enter into a deeper understanding of what Easter is all about, not just by looking back at what happened, but also by looking forward.  What does Easter mean for you and me as individuals and for all of us as a community as we continue on our journey together?

Our gospel today is set on the evening of that first Easter Sunday.  The women who had seen Jesus early that morning have already found the rest of his disciples and told them what they had seen and heard.  Now, as evening falls, they are gathered together in a house in Jerusalem behind locked doors, still fearful, not knowing what to do, not knowing what would happen next.

And then out of nowhere Jesus comes and stands among them, and says to them “Peace be with you.”  He shows them his hands and sides so that they know it’s him.  Then, he commissions them saying “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”  And then, John tells us that Jesus breathed on them.

  

That’s a strange detail.  Jesus breathed on his disciples.  It seems like a curious thing for John the gospel writer to record.  After all, we don’t normally make a point of entering a room and breathing on people!  But John mentions it here because he wants to remind us of two other texts in the Hebrew Scriptures where it talks about God breathing on people.  One is found in the creation story of the book of Genesis.  The other is found in the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones, which we heard as one of our Sunday readings several weeks ago.

Genesis tells us that in the beginning, there was darkness, and chaos.  And then, God’s breath swept over the face of the waters, and God said ‘Let there be light’ and there was light.  A little later on, we’re told that God formed the first human from the dust of the ground.  But it was not until God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life that the human became a living being.  The earth-creature went from being a mere physical thing, made of the dust of the earth, to a living being.  When God breathed into that collection of molecules and atoms, it became a living human, an animated being, capable of eating and drinking, of loving, of experiencing both sadness and joy.  That is an amazing thing, an amazing act of creation, something which too often we take for granted.

With his symbolism and phrasing, John is proclaiming in our gospel today that something equally amazing is happening.  John is proclaiming that the resurrection of Jesus is an act of new creation every bit as awesome as the original act of creation in Genesis.  Just as God breathed life into the first human, Jesus is breathing life, new life, life in the Spirit, into his disciples.  Just as the breath of God swept over the waters in the beginning, on the first day, Jesus’ breath on the disciples on this first day of the week, the first day of the resurrection, is the start of a renewed creation.  In the Genesis creation story, God creates natural life and natural light.  In the resurrection, God gives us life which is eternal life and the light which is the true light of the world.

  

If John had been making a movie instead of writing a text, I’m quite convinced that today’s gospel would have started in virtual darkness, just as Genesis tells us that darkness covered the earth at the dawn of creation.  We are told that it is evening, and that the disciples are huddled indoors with the doors locked and presumably the windows shuttered because of their fear.  The scene begins in darkness, the disciples are lifeless.  Then suddenly Jesus appears among them.  Let there be light. The scene brightens, the disciples come into focus.  Jesus speaks, then he breathes on them and they are brought to life. 

You see, the purpose of the resurrection is not so much to bring Jesus back to life as it is to bring his disciples to life.  It is an act of creation which bestows new life on those who were in many ways lifeless.

Peter certainly saw things that way.  When he looks back on his life in the letter which we read in our second reading, he looks back to the resurrection as the pivotal moment.  It is through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, says Peter, that God has given us new birth.

There’s another place in the Hebrew scriptures where God breathes on humanity.  It’s found in the book of Ezekiel, in chapter 37, in Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones.  In this text, the prophet tells of being brought out by the spirit of God to the middle of a valley which was full of bones, and the bones were very dry.  God asks Ezekiel “can these bones live?”  Ezekiel wisely replies that only you know, God.  God tells Ezekiel to speak to the bones, and he does, saying that the Lord God will cause breath to enter you and you shall live, and sinews will come upon the bones, and flesh and skin and they shall be brought back to life.  And so there is a mighty rattling sound and the bones start to come together and sinews grow upon them and flesh and skin, and there is a mighty wind, and God breathes life into the bones, and people stand up and live.

Now the Jewish people five centuries before Jesus understood this picture of God breathing life back into the dry bones as an image of the return from exile.  Of a homecoming.  The Jewish people had been taken into captivity and exile in Babylon.  They were downcast, hopeless, cut off from home and from God.  They weren’t physically dead, but they were the dry bones longing to be restored to life.

John’s gospel, by evoking this vision of Ezekiel, is telling us that we too are like dry bones that need to be breathed back to life.  How often do we feel like exiles, how often do we despair, how often do we feel cut off from others or from God?  We are the ones who need to be re-created, who need to have hope restored, who need to be brought home, who need to learn to live life abundantly.  The purpose of the resurrection is not so much to bring Jesus back to life as it is to bring us to life.

Why did Jesus come?  Why did God raise him?  Why do we still tell the story of the resurrection?  John sums it up in the last line of the gospel which we heard today:  we tell the story “so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God and through believing you may have life in his name.”

Did you notice in John’s final summation that belief itself is not the objective?  Often we put our emphasis on belief.  But belief is just a means to the end, and the objective of all of this, the final word in the gospel story, is that you and I may have life, life in all its fullness, life lived abundantly, the new life that comes through God’s act of new creation, a life that sends us out with meaning and purpose.

Those who were paralysed by fear and huddled in the darkness, those who were dry bones, have had new life breathed into them and they were sent to proclaim the good news.  Because just as God the Father sent Jesus to bring new life to us, we in turn are sent to bring new life to others.

May the God of all creation breathe new life into each one of us.

Amen.

How Dare We? (Easter 2014)

Homily:  Easter Sunday April 20 2014. St. Albans

Readings:  1 Cor 15.1-11; Ps 118.1-2,14-24; Acts 10.34-43; John 20.1-18

How dare we?

On Wednesday afternoon I watched the state funeral for the Honourable Jim Flaherty which took place at St. James, the Anglican Cathedral, in Toronto.  There were 700 people inside the Cathedral, and many more outside, all gathered to mark the death of this man.  The funeral began, as many do, with eulogies, and as these were spoken, there were visible signs of grief.  There were tears and there were shaky voices. 

And when the eulogies had finished, the whole assembly stood as one and sang “Praise My Soul the King of Heaven”.  And I thought to myself as I watched, “How is it that we dare to sing ‘Praise My Soul the King of Heaven’ when we gather to mark a death?”

The lower level of this church is the home of Centre 454, a day program for those who are homeless or live in poverty.  Centre 454 is one of five Community Ministries of our Diocese.  I don’t know if you know it, but the tag-line, or motto if you like, of our Community Ministries, including Centre 454, is “Choose Hope”.  Every day, there are men, women and children who walk through the doors of Centre 454 and Cornerstone and The Well, and often these are people who have been beaten up by life.  People who suffer from mental illness and addiction.  People who are trying to escape abusive relationships and violence.  People who have been worn down by poverty and have been told over and over again that they’re no good.  People who know grief and despair.  And when one of these people walks through our doors, with the deck of life stacked against them, how is it that we dare to tell them to choose hope?

Earlier this year, we worked our way through Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, and we heard Jesus say that we should love our enemies and pray for those who hate us.  And we talked about that, and we acknowledged that it would be hard for us, and that we would probably never actually be able to do it.  But we took it seriously.  How is it that we dare to even take seriously let alone agree with someone who tells us to love those that hate us?

On another Sunday we heard about the time that Peter asks Jesus,” if a brother or sister sins against me, how often should I forgive?  Should I forgive as many as seven times?”  And Jesus responds, “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy times seven.”  And when we tell this story, how is it that we dare to think that Jesus is the one that’s making sense rather than Peter?

We dare to say and do these things because we are an Easter people.

We dare to say and do these things because we are a people that believe that life is stronger than death, that love will overcome hate, that hope is greater than fear, that forgiveness is better than judgment, and that the suffering and grief of this life is real but is not the ultimate reality.

We believe these things because we are an Easter people.  Easter changes everything.

It certainly did for Mary Magdalene.  As our gospel reading opens this morning, Mary is not yet an Easter person.  She is still living in the aftermath of Friday.  The events of the past week have unfolded for her with dizzying speed, the false hope of Palm Sunday and the triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the gathering storm as the enemies of Jesus plotted against him, the pain and grief of witnessing the gruesome death of the man she loved, the fear and uncertainty of what comes next.  It is still dark when Mary makes her way to Jesus’ tomb on that Sunday morning.  She goes to the tomb, I suppose, in an attempt to hang on to something of what she has lost.  But when she sees that the stone has been removed from the tomb, she’s confused, she panics, and she runs to get help.  The body has been stolen, it is perhaps the final indignity, that her enemies would even take away his dead body, the only reminder of him that she has left.  She runs, she gets help.  But when the Peter and the other disciple have come and gone, Mary is left alone once more, weeping.

Have we not, will we not all experience such things at some point in our lives?

And yet I believe that it is often in these moments that Jesus calls us and speaks our name. 

Calls us out of grief and fear and confusion and sadness.

Calls us into an encounter, into a relationship with the living God.

Mary hears that voice.  She hears her name, and that changes everything.

At the beginning of our liturgy this morning, we began by singing ‘Jesus Christ is risen today’, and in our opening words we proclaimed ‘Christ is risen, the Lord is risen indeed, alleluia!’ and I get why we as a community of faith we do that.

But Mary’s proclamation is much more personal.  “I have seen the Lord”.  She is proclaiming a personal encounter, a life-changing experience, a life-giving relationship.  She’s talking about something that matters for her in a very personal way. 

Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking that Easter is about something that happened to Jesus.  It’s not.  Easter is about something that happens to us, to you and to me.  Something that gives us the courage, the strength, the sheer audacity to declare that life is indeed stronger than death, that love will indeed overcome hate, that hope is indeed greater than fear, that forgiveness is indeed better than judgement, and that the suffering and grief that we experience are not the last word. 

None of this is self-evident nor obvious.  In fact, there are many who look at the evidence of history and of the world around us who think that we are fools for believing such things. There are those who think that only a fool would mark a death by singing hymns of praise to God.  That only one who is naïve would urge a broken person to choose hope.

But we are an Easter people.  We do these apparently foolish things because we are people of faith.  We believe in the power of life, love, hope and forgiveness because Christ was raised from the dead, and appeared to Mary, and then to Peter, and then to the twelve, and then to more than five hundred brothers and sisters.  We believe because these first witnesses risked their own lives to tell others about what they had experienced first-hand.  And we believe because we continue in a whole variety of surprising and exciting and confusing ways to experience Christ as real and alive in our own lives.  

I have seen the Lord. 

We are an Easter people.

Amen.

Love Is Not A Victory March (Good Friday 2014)

Homily:  Good Friday.  April 18 2014.  St. Albans

Isaiah 52.13-53.12; Ps 22; Heb 10.16-25; Jn 18.1-19.42

Love Is Not a Victory March

Pilate understands power.  It’s the air he breathes, the water he swims in.  He knows its structures, he knows its relationships.  It’s the first criteria he uses when he’s sizing someone up, it’s his map as he navigates his way through life.   So far he’s been doing pretty well.  He is the fifth Governor of the Roman province of Judea under the Emperor Tiberias.  He has Roman soldiers under his direct command.  Now, as Roman Governors go, he is a big fish in a small pond, and he knows that better than anyone else.  Just as his own ruthlessness and maneuvering has brought him to his current position of power, he knows that if he fails to keep the control of the province and collect enough tax for the empire, those who have more power than he can have him removed in an instant.  Pilate understands power.

And so when Pilate addresses Jesus, the first question he asks is a power question. “Are you the King of the Jews?”  But Jesus sidesteps the power question.  Pilate persists.  He needs to know the power dynamics.  “Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me.  Why, what have you done?”  Jesus once again refuses to engage in the contest of power.  And Pilate doesn’t understand.  He’s perplexed by Jesus’ refusal to play by his rules.  “Do you not know that I have the power to release you and the power to crucify you?”

But Jesus won’t be drawn in.  “You say I’m a king.”  You’re concerned about power.  But I’m here for a different reason.  “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.”

Truth vs Power.  It is, I suppose, the classic confrontation.  “What is truth?” scoffs Pilate. 

Pilate has a lot invested in power.  So do we, if you think about it.  We spend most of our lives trying to become more powerful.  We grow up.  We educate ourselves.  We compete for jobs.  We increase our earning power.  We network, we make connections, we acquire things, we have credit cards in our wallets.  We strive for control of our lives, for independence.  We like to be in control of our relationships too.  We may not go as far as Pilate does, but we have a lot invested in power.

  

Do we make the same investment in truth?  In response to a question of identity, Jesus responds that his whole purpose in life has been to reveal the truth.  And just what is this truth for which Jesus was born, to which his life and now his death will be a testimony?

I suppose that we could use many formulations and write many words to describe that truth.  John, the gospel writer uses just three:

“God is Love”

I believe that God is love.  But I’m not sure that it helps much to just say it.  I think that if Jesus had simply told people that God is love, most of us would want that love to look like unicorns and rainbows[i], like one of the poems on the inside of a Hallmark Greeting Card.

I believe that God loves us.  But I’m reminded of the advice that my wife once gave me, that whenever I say ‘God loves you’ in a sermon, what most people hear is “blah blah blah blah blah”.

So it makes sense to me that God sent Jesus to show us what love is.  Jesus is the word made flesh, God in human form, the one who makes God known, who reveals God to us.  And it is on the cross where God’s love is revealed most fully.  Love is hard.  Love struggles.  Love is sacrificial.  Love suffers.  Love is vulnerable.  Love weeps, love cries out, love forgives.

Or in the words of one of Leonard Cohen’s songs, “Love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.”

God’s love is a refusal to exercise power, a refusal that for Jesus, results in death.

It seems to me that every year as we gather on Good Friday, as we hear the passion gospel, as we meditate before the cross, it seems to me that one of the things that we’re trying to do is to draw meaning out of that death.  One of the meanings that we as the church have drawn out of Jesus’ death from the very beginning is that through it our sins are forgiven and we are reconciled with God.  And, as might be expected, we want to know how that works.  And sometimes we put that into a bit of a formula that says that a just God needed to punish humanity for its sinfulness, and that Jesus offered to be punished in our place and so the rest of us escaped punishment yet are forgiven.

The problem I have when we put too much emphasis on speaking of the cross in this way is that we’re actually using a logic that Pilate would have understood very well.  We’re using the language of power and the logic of exchange to propose a mechanism for how God forgives us.

I believe that the cross is at once much simpler and much more profound than a language of exchange can ever convey.

God forgives us because God loves us.  Simple, yes, but also profound.  Because love isn’t rainbows and unicorns.  Love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.

Because in order for forgiveness to really happen, something has to die.  We know that from our own relationships, if only in our own limited way.  Whenever there is forgiveness, there is a death:

·        A dying of expectations

·        A letting go of your power over another

·        The death of your reason for feeling better than someone else

·        A breach in your wall of security which leaves you exposed and vulnerable

·        An embracing of something that hurts when it could have been kept at arm’s distance

We all know, each in our imperfect way, what it means to love.  We all know, each in our imperfect way, what it means to forgive.  And that means we all know or can imagine, at least in some measure, how painful it is to be rejected by the ones we love, and how much we suffer when we see the suffering of those that we love.  We can’t love without being hurt, without being open to pain and sorrow.  And we know how much it costs to forgive those that hurt us and others, to remain in relationship with them and to continue to love them.

This morning I watched the video of Douglas de Grood, the father of the young man who has been charged with the 1^st degree murder of five people at a university year end party in Calgary.  Douglas de Grood is a man who is clearly in pain and deeply saddened as he struggles with what has happened, offers condolences to the families of the victims and yet still speaks words of unconditional love and positive regard for his son Matthew.

How much more then must God, who is love, and created us out of love, suffer and endure pain as a result of what happens in our world.  In the course of human history, with its war and violence and genocides, in the course of our own personal histories, imagine how much pain and suffering a God who loves has had to endure.

God loves us.  God forgives us.  And every day God is dying.  Every day, God hears the cry of his people, and suffers with them.  Every day, God endures the pain and anguish that comes when the people you love turn against you, abandon you and reject you.  Every day, something in God dies so that God can forgive us and love us.

Now, we don’t get to see that every day.  God is, for the most part, invisible to us, a mystery to us.  So we don’t get to see it.  But perhaps God in his wisdom thought that we should see it at least once.  No one has ever seen God.  But it is God’s only Son who has made God known.  And Jesus, the Word who was God, the Word made flesh, he has made God known must fully on the cross.

Jesus died on the cross to testify to the truth that God loves us.  Because we needed to see that love with our own eyes, we needed to see what love looks like, and what it costs.  And once we’ve seen it, we’ll never be the same again.

“Love is not a victory march.  It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.” 

Amen. 

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[i][i] Brene Brown, http://www.davidlose.net/2014/04/brene-brown-on-church-as-midwife/

Resurrection. (Lent 5, April 6 2014)

Homily:  Year A Lent 5, April 6 2014, St. Albans

Readings:  Ezek 37.1-14; Ps 130; Rom 8.6-11; John 11.1-45

Resurrection.

Last month at one of our St. Al’s @5 services, we talked about “Hell”.  We talked about our images of hell, and where they come from.  We talked about how when Jesus refers to hell, he uses the word Gehenna, which is the name of a real place.  Gehenna is a valley on the southwest side of Jerusalem which serves as the city dump, the place where garbage is burned.  Now when we talk about hell, we usually think of it as the opposite of heaven, don’t we.  If you’re good or saved or whatever, you go to heaven when you die, but if you’re not, you go to hell.  That tends to be the way we talk about it.  But we found it interesting at our St. Al’s @5 service to note that when Jesus talks about hell, the opposite of hell isn’t heaven, it’s life.  It’s better to enter life, Jesus says, than to go to hell.

So after we’d talked about this a bit, someone asked the following question:  If the image that Jesus uses for hell is the city garbage dump, and the opposite of hell for Jesus is life, then what does Jesus have to say about heaven?

And I thought for a moment, and then I answered, “Not much.” 

It’s not that Jesus never uses the word ‘heaven’.  He does sometimes, he uses it to contrast God’s place and context with ours, such as when we pray “Our Father in heaven”.  But when Jesus, and many of the Biblical writers, want to talk about what we usually refer to as the “after-life”, the main image used isn’t that of ‘heaven’, but rather, ‘resurrection’.

As a priest, I’m often asked about heaven, or whether I believe in life after death.  A few years ago I was the spiritual care person at West Carleton Secondary School.  I used to spend an hour every week at the school, hanging out and talking to staff and students, sometimes about spiritual questions, more often about whatever was going on in their lives.  Sadly, during my time there, one of the students, a well-known, popular, 18 year old was killed in a car crash.  I spent a lot of time at the school that week.  Students would come up and speak to me, many of them dealing with death in such an in-the-face way for the first time, and by far the number one question they asked was about what happens when you die.  Is there life after death?

And I would usually answer them by telling them that yes, I believe that there is life after death, and that even though I don’t know what that looks like or how it works exactly, I believe, as St. Paul did, that nothing, neither death nor life, nor height nor depth nor anything else in all of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God.

But this week as I was reading the scripture texts that we just heard together, it occurred to me that I could have said more.  That I do know more than I thought about what life after death looks like.  Because the primary way that the Bible talks about the life that endures beyond death is by using resurrection language, and today’s texts are full of images of what resurrection looks like.

Our culture speculates about heaven, and it asks about life after death and when it does so, most of the images used don’t actually come from the Bible.  Images are drawn various sources, whether it’s images from Greek or Norse mythology, or the Christian literature of the Middle Ages such as the image of St. Peter asking questions at the pearly Gates.

But Jesus doesn’t talk about “life after death”.  He talks about new life, or life in the kingdom of God, or ‘zoen aeonion’, literally, the “life of the ages” which we usually translate as eternal life.  And the way he talks about this new life that endures beyond the grave always has present as well as a future component, an aspect that is knowable and can be grasped now.

And when Jesus talks about this new life that endures beyond the grave, he doesn’t talk about heaven.  Instead he talks about resurrection.   And again, perhaps surprisingly, he does so in both the future and the present tense.  Resurrection has immediate implications, it is not just a future hope.

“Lord, if you had not been here, my brother would not have died,” Martha says to Jesus.  “But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.”

Jesus says to her, “Your brother will rise again.”

Martha replies, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.”

Martha’s belief, her understanding is that resurrection is something that takes place in the future, something after death, something that will happen on the last day, beyond the confines of the time and space of the age we live in.

But what Jesus says next is emphatically in the present tense.  “I am the resurrection and the life.  Those who believe in me, even though they die will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

And then Jesus performs the first of two acts of resurrection in our gospel today.  He calls for Mary, and when Mary hears that Jesus is calling, she is raised.  We translate it “she got up quickly”, but the word is actually egeiretei, the same word used for Jesus’ resurrection on Easter.  Mary’s despair is transformed into hope in Jesus’ presence and she rises, the first image in today’s gospel text of the power of resurrection.

The vision of Ezekiel in today’s Old Testament reading provides us with another powerful image of resurrection.

“The hand of the Lord came upon me, and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones, and they were very dry.”

What do you see when you imagine this valley of dry bones?

I recall three years ago when I read these words it was same week as the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, and my thoughts immediately went to the scenes of devastation I had witnessed on TV. Homes, buildings, entire communities flattened.  Dead bodies washing up on shore.  An interview with a 70 year old man whose home and business had been destroyed, who laments that it’s too late for him to rebuild.  People whose life had been sucked out of them, whose despair and sorrow had reduced them to bones, very dry bones.

Of course, you don’t have to go to Japan in the wake of a tsunami to find dry bones.  All around us are people whose lives have run dry.  So many things in this world can suck the life out of us.  Mental illness.  Grinding poverty.  Broken relationships.  Loss of jobs, loss of loved ones.  Disease, and disasters.  Loneliness.  Despair.

I’ve seen it.  You’ve seen it.  Most of us have experienced it, if not in our own lives then in the lives of those we love.  Dry bones.

Ezekiel knew exactly what he was looking at when he was taken to the valley of dry bones. Ezekiel had been forcibly removed from his home and taken into exile.  He had lost his prominent position as a priest of the Temple in Jerusalem.  His wife had died.  He and his people had endured siege warfare in Jerusalem and suffered through two years of famine and disease.  The Babylonian army had finally breached the city walls, destroyed the Temple, massacred thousands and destroyed the city.  A surviving remnant had been marched off through the desert to a foreign land, Ezekiel among them.  They were a traumatized, despairing people.  They were the walking dead, completely cut off, a people in exile.  They were dry bones.

And God says to Ezekiel, “I have a message, a prophecy that I want you to give to these dry bones.  Tell these bones, tell the exiled people of Israel, tell those who have suffered devastation in Japan, tell the depressed and the lonely and the broken and the suffering, tell those who are without hope and all those who have had the life sucked out of them, tell them this:

“O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord.  Thus says the Lord God to these bones:  I will cause my spirit to enter you, and you shall live.”

And there was a noise, a rattling noise and the bones came together, bone to bone, and flesh came upon them and skin covered them.  And God’s ruach, his breath, his spirit came into them and they lived and stood on their feet.

This too is an image of resurrection.  Resurrection is when a people in exile return home.  Resurrection is when people who are cut off are reconnected.  Resurrection is when God’s spirit enters you and you live.

That’s what Paul says too in the reading from Romans.  You need to know that there is a new reality says Paul, and that new reality is that the Spirit of God dwells in you.  And if the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you then you have life.  New life.  Resurrection life, life that can never be taken away, not even by death.

And just in case we still haven’t gotten the message about resurrection, Jesus says to them, where have you laid him?  He goes to the tomb, commands them to remove the stone, and cries with a loud voice “Lazarus, come out!”  And the dead man comes out, raised to new life.

I don’t know what heaven looks like and I don’t know much about life after death.  But there is a power in our midst and I’ve had a glimpse of what it looks like.  It is a power that can transform despair into hope, that can bring home a people in exile, that can raise a dead man, that can breathe life into dry bones.  That power is the power of resurrection, and it is not something that we can only anticipate in some distant future.  It is with us, here in the present, with immediate implications.  It is our new reality and our new life.  

Amen.