Those of you who follow this blog know I usually take Sunday, the Sabbath, off from posting.
But TODAY is my favorite day of the year, the day Christians say to one another: “Jesus Christ is risen today,” waiting for the answer “The Lord is risen indeed!” These truths form the basis of our joy and hope; they guide us in our daily lives. It is too good to pass up.
Today I’ll share with you just a bit more from N.T. Wright’s book, Christians at the Cross, a wonderful small collection of Holy Week sermons that again I encourage you to buy and read. (And no, it’s not too late; in fact, now might be a good time to read it, because part of his point is that today is the BEGINNING of a new story, not the end.)
“…[now] we really should do is have a forty-day party, or maybe even a fifty-one day one, all the way through to Pentecost. If we’ve given up something for Lent, or even if we haven’t, we should take something up for Easter. But how you do that is up to you. My job now is to help you celebrate the first day of God’s new creation.”
“Easter Day is the eighth day, the first day of the new week. This isn’t the end; it’s the beginning.
And that is why Easter is the start of the church’s mission. Let’s be quite clear. The church’s mission isn’t about telling more and more people that if they accept Jesus they will go to heaven. That is true as far as it goes (though we ought to be telling them about the new heavens and the new earth rather than just ‘heaven’), but it’s not the point of our mission. The point is that if God’s new creation has already begun, those of us who have wakened up in the middle of the night are put to work to make more bits of new creation happen in the world as it still is. And that is why we need to leave behind, on the cross, all the bits and pieces of the old creation that have made us sad, that have depressed us and our communities, and start to pray for vision and wisdom to know where God can and will make new creation happen in our lives, in our hearts, in our homes, and not least in our communities. That is what ‘regeneration’ is all about.”
“[We’ve come…]” on a journey through bereavement and grief to the foot of the cross, and to have planted some seeds have hope. And, as you remember from earlier chapters, the point about planting seeds is that you have no idea what they will do when they come up. What we do know is that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead, that God’s new creation has begun, and that we have to do two things: first, to be true to our own baptismal vows to die with him and to share his new life, and, second, to allow his Spirit to work through us to make new creation happen in this world.”
Jesus Christ is risen today!
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