Under New Management--April 17, 2020

Under New Management--April 17, 2020

"[Peter said:] ‘You that are Israelites, listen to what I have to say: Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you, as you yourselves know—this man, handed over to you according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law. But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power....'" [Acts 2:22-24]
I was once a part of a conversation at a coffee shop about the Apostles' Creed, and the question came up why so little of Jesus' actual life was included in that statement of the faith. We skip from "...born of the virgin Mary" and move right to "he suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried," before catapulting into "on the third day he rose again." No mention of the people he healed, the new way of life he embodied and taught, nor the signs and miracles that made so many of our flannel-board lessons in Sunday School. The words of the Creed—which go back pretty early, to maybe the 2nd century AD—center on the death and resurrection of Jesus. It does seem curious, at least.

I think the same kind of thoughts when I hear these speeches and sermons in Acts. Whether Luke has a little-known tape recording of what Peter said, or whether Luke is doing his best to represent the spirit of the central message of Peter and the early disciples, there is a similar push toward the resurrection. As Luke tells it, Peter gives this surprisingly brief summary of Jesus' actions, mentions nothing of what he taught or said (which is interesting for Luke, since his gospel has so many powerful parables, stories, and sayings of Jesus that don't appear in any other gospel), and then makes an oratorical bee-line for the death and resurrection of Jesus.  And even if you keep reading the rest of Pete's sermon in this passage from Acts, you'll see he really spends the most time talking about the resurrection of Jesus.

So what's behind all this—and what does any of it matter? Well, the long and the short of it is this: the resurrection of Jesus is both the message the first followers of Jesus brought and the power that drove into the world to bring it. Plenty of people had heard rabbis teach before, and plenty of people had heard interesting parables illustrating what any given teacher thought about God or the Torah or the right way to live. Beyond that, plenty of people had seen local healers do impressive "stuff" to cast out demons or cure the sick. And any self-respecting Jew even half-familiar with the stories of God's people in the Torah knew that Pharaoh's top magicians could show off a few impressive parlor tricks to copy Moses', like turning water red and turning their walking sticks into snakes. To be able to pull off a stunt like those was not necessarily cause to tell the world—maybe just enough cause to tell the people hungry for entertainment there's a new show in town, but not the kind of big speech Peter makes here. 

The difference is the news of the resurrection. For the kind of faithful Jewish travelers who came back to celebrate the festival of Pentecost, the notion of resurrection is not just the curious report of one person who had been resuscitated in a medical anomaly, but the announcement that the universe was under new management. Resurrection was the hoped for sign of the breaking-in of God's final and beautiful reign over things—when the broken would be mended, relationships put back in balance, and death finally defeated. Resurrection is what made the difference between hearing Jesus' teaching as one more do-it-yourself scheme for how to make the world a better place (and schemes like that were, and are, a dime a dozen) on the one hand, and hearing Jesus' words as pictures of the way things are when and where God fully reigns on the other. 

Resurrection—as in God's act of breaking the usual rules of things to raise the dead—was worth Peter risking making a fool of himself by trying to defend his band of preaching former fishermen who, to any outside observer were liquored up and mouthy at 9:00 in the morning. Resurrection was the reason it was worth it for all of the first disciples to risk their lives passing the word along and getting arrested and moving to new places and turning the world upside down. And resurrection is still the reason it is worth it for anyone else to listen and join the new community of Jesus' followers—after all, the world has already heard plenty of sales pitches before about self-improvement and how to 'be a better you.' And from there, having heard the news that with Jesus' resurrection the Reign of God really has begun in a new and definitive way, the new followers of Jesus then come to hear about what this Jesus had to say and what it looks like to live in the Kingdom.

Resurrection is the news that says things really are different, even when it doesn't look or feel different.  Resurrection is what assures us that Caesar isn't calling the shots, and neither are any of his successors through history.  Resurrection is what tells us there is more to hope for than piling up bigger profits in this life.  Resurrection is what tells us that the powers of death have been expelled from office; they no longer have final authority over us.

So back to us, and our witness to the world. There will be all kinds of opportunities in this day to be witnesses to our faith, and there are all kinds of schemes for "selling" and promoting our churches, our congregations, or our programs. But people have seen so many of them before and found them to be just one more tired marketing scheme, one more program, one more self-help plan to 'become a better you.' And frankly, so many of those sales pitches come across and needy and self-serving, like all the would-be messiahs who came before Jesus who really were recruiting their armies to prepare to rise up against Rome. But this Jesus is different, because his story is one of resurrection, not just as God's impressive parlor trick, but as God's way of overturning the old rules. Death is no longer given last word among us. Violence is no longer a given assumption about how we get things done. The hoarding of "stuff" is no longer what defines us—a new regime has begun, and we see it with the resurrection of Jesus. 

That's not to say that we are uninterested in what Jesus has to say. It's just that only with the word of resurrection—of God raising the dead and bringing about new possibilities—can Jesus' teaching be anything other than one more bestselling self-help scheme or self-interested marketing campaign. That poses some interesting questions for us—what is the news we are sharing with people when we invite them (if we can dare to invite them) into worship or church life with us? Are we settling for talk about how nice the music is or how proud we feel of our numbers? Because people have heard all of that before—and none of it is news. But if we are willing to talk about how resurrection has changed things among us—how the raising of Jesus is creating a community that is willing to risk like Peter and the gang, how the raising of Jesus is daring us to risk new kinds of serving, and how the raising of Jesus takes the pressure off of us to fix the world and lets God be the one to bear the responsibility for mending the world, even as it comes through us—all of that changes our message to be both good and news. And it tells those we invite, those we work with, those we meet on the street, that we are not passing along the news of Jesus because of what we get out of the deal for ourselves, but simply because this is the way things are when and where God reigns.

Resurrection is where we begin and end. How will people know that by our words and actions today?

Living God, help us today to peel away the layers of "stuff" that we think makes a better sell than the impossibly good news that Jesus is alive again and the universe is under new management. Help us today to let that news soak into us good and deep, and help us to witness to your new order of things in the ways we love, welcome, advocate, and listen today.