Draft of Sunday's Message:

A New Heaven and a New Earth 2013 03 31 Easter: Isaiah 65:17-25; Luke 24:1-12

A former United Church Moderator was visiting a congregation close to Easter, and went down to Sunday School with the children.  The moderator asked the children what they knew about Good Friday and Easter, and most of the children didn't want to answer.  One little boy volunteered.  He said that on Good Friday Jesus was killed on the cross and put in a tomb.  On Easter Sunday he comes out of the tomb, and, if he sees his shadow, we have 6 more weeks of winter.

What is the point of the Holy Week story anyway?  The answer to that question is one that each of us must create for our own selves.  Part of doing that is understanding our story, another part is knowing our traditions, and finally it is connecting that story to our own stories.

Good Friday and Easter Sunday were such extreme events that people created many stories and explanations about what happened, why, and what they mean to us.  Our knowledge of those events includes many problems. First is that the story tellers then used story differently than we do.  Often a story would be told that deliberately paralleled a previous story.  This linked the first story to the second story.  The Elijah story about Elijah striking the Jordan with his staff to cause it to divide may have been a way to connect Elijah to the Moses tradition, and claim him as a spiritual descendant of Moses.

Next is that the stories in the Bible were written down one to two generations after the event from the oral traditions of the communities in the early church.  The writers of those stories had their own particular agendas that influenced which stories they used, and how they edited them.

The last challenge is the nature of the events themselves.  The disciples thought they were following a winner, the one who was going to get rid of the Romans with God's help.  In their minds he was supposed to win, not lose, and the events of Good Friday were emotionally catastrophic.  How can anyone properly describe an event such as that?  Even tougher is the resurrection.  How do you describe something that no one you know has ever experienced, especially in the midst of all of the emotions that would have been raging through them.

With these challenges, we are left with one core point.  The murder of Jesus did not end his mission.  We do not pay homage to his dead body -- we celebrate his capacity to conquer death and subvert the powers of this world.  He lives on, and continues to change the world through us and others.  What is the point of his work?   Each of us needs to answer that question for ourselves.

Before answering that question, we need a brief overview of our tradition and its intertwined contradictions.  Most traditions agree that Jesus succeeded at bringing us to oneness with God, a state called atonement or at-one-ment.  How he did that is one source of division: in his incarnation, in his life and teachings, in his death, in his resurrection, or in some combination of these four acts.  Jesus spoke against the use of sacrifice to buy God's forgiveness, yet the dominant belief in our tradition is that Jesus did just that through his death.  The resurrection tradition is confronted by stories that make his resurrected body different from his original body and identical to his original body, material and not material, able to move through walls and totally physical.

Then we need to connect our shared story to our individual experiences, finding the point for ourselves.

I take my cue from Isaiah 65 and the passage about a new heaven and a new earth, a world in which no one will cause harm on God's holy mountain.  In his life and teachings, Jesus consistently gave himself to challenging self-centeredness, materialism, and grasping for power.  He offered healing of bodies, minds spirits, and relationships.  He valued people who were ignored or rejected by most of society: fishermen, tax-collectors, prostitutes, lepers, crippled people, and the mentally ill. 

Who do we think he would help today?  How would he help them?  First on my list are homeless people: I suspect Jesus would take time to eat and visit with them. As for us, this congregation is supporting Acadia Place and the Drop-In Centre, and I suspect some individuals support the Mustard Seed, the Salvation Army, and other agencies.  We can also help Habitat for Humanity and Inn from the Cold.  Most of these programs deal with the symptom of homelessness.  Some people are working on the root causes:  low wages for many working people; faults in the operation of the marketplace; inadequate supports for people with problems with addictions or mental illness; and a casual approach to the hazards of alcohol, drugs and gambling.

Next on my list are people in other countries that are hurt by the sins in the global economy, disease, war, and natural disasters.

Last for my list today, and most important are the issues for aboriginal peoples.  Thomas King's book, The Inconvenient Indian, describes many of the edges. 

The core sin is the continuous devaluing of aboriginal people by dominant cultures, and especially by those who stand to profit by marginalizing them.  We forget that Calgary exists because an agreement was made over a hundred years ago that gave our predecessors permission to occupy this place.  Unfortunately, the agreements were not fairly negotiated in the first place, and successive governments have consistently did the least they could in honouring those agreements, and consistently treating Indians as being somehow less than human, and not deserving of the same respect as white people.  The reality is that, whatever was believed about Indians, the experience of people in power in the US and in Canada is that the Indians were and are simply inconvenient.  Non-aboriginal mining and forestry are inconvenienced by their claims to the land where these resources are.  Road builders and dam builders are inconvenienced by their reserves being in the wrong places.  Their failure to just die off or let go of their culture is a lingering reminder of promises made that were not intended to be kept. Here again these words from Isaiah...

The legacy of aboriginal issues is one symptom of a core imperialist attitude that persists to poison our society, an attitude seen in our treatment of refugees from India, Jewish refugees before World War 2, Japanese, Italian and German Canadians, farmers affected by resource development, environmentalists concerned about the possibility of long term loss for the many in order to make short-term profit for a few.

The resurrection changed everything, and changed nothing.  Death, and the ways that lead to death are not the end.  God has something better to offer to us, and the power to make it happen.

What is the point of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus for you?  How will you respond to his invitation to you?

What part will you play in the unfolding of the new heaven and the new earth God has promised?

May the God of Hope and love be known by you and through you.  Amen.