Happy Easter!

WHAT A CELEBRATION! Each one of the 300 people who came to worship this morning brought an essential willingness to receive and respond to the message message of Easter JOY! There's a physical energy that comes from our singing together. There's a spirit that makes the message all the more real. We couldn't have done it without you. And of course the music and dance and other Easter "specials" moved many of us to tears. It was an unforgettable day.

Continue sharing what you have seen and heard. Join us for "Holy Humor Sunday" next week.

Christ is risen!

Here's the sermon script (click HERE to listen to the sermon as delivered)
:

"I Have Seen"

Time Magazine this week asks "What if there's no hell?" The cover article features the news that mega-church pastor Rob Bell of Mars Hill Church in Michigan has become a Universalist. He doesn't think we need to live in fear of hell. Already one church has fired its young pastor for recommending Bell's book. I wonder if Rob Bell consulted Carlton Pearson who began preaching "the Gospel of Inclusion" in Tulsa a decade ago, and went from mega-pastor to mainline minister.

Could our world be shifting? The question that energized Rob Bell is whether you have to be Christian to go to heaven. Most believers in our country today would answer "No." But some pastors and seminary professors, especially more conservative ones, aren't there yet. God be with you, Rob!

This is my 38th Easter sermon. I guess I've said it all. And none of it got me fired. And I guess I've seen it all. So I understand that questions like "What if there's no hell?" can be sincere. We need to listen to our hearts, and trust the leadings.

This is my first Easter sermon here at PCMK. I've probably got some Easter jokes that you haven't heard. But I'm saving them for next week's Holy Humor Sunday. If I can't use the fear of hell, maybe "stay tuned for next week…" is OK as a motivator?

My prayer is that this sermon will add to the joyous sense of worship that we've already experienced today. May my perspective lift someone's spirit today. Perhaps there's help for someone who's struggling with questions of how and what and whether. I can tell you that if we speak our truth as we know it, together we'll discover the Good News that Jesus is here, alive, among us today.

Easter begins with experience, not theology. Despite what Chrsitianity's critics say, the Church did not invent Easter. It happened to them. If we were making it up, we have agreed to get the story straight. As it is each Easter story in the Bible is different. The contradictions are an important clue to the resurrection, and encourage us to trust our own experience. Sometimes Jesus appears as a ghost (materializing inside locked rooms). Sometimes Jesus is very fleshy (eating a fish breakfast with the disciples to prove the resurrection). And sometimes Jesus appears in a person who is manifestly NOT Jesus, but who conveys the presence of Christ, as on the Road to Emmaus.

Mary Magdalene was the first follower of Jesus to encounter the risen Christ and to go and tell others: "I have SEEN the Lord." Apostola Apostolorum. It got her into all kinds of trouble… But without her courage, and her willingness to speak of what she saw, we wouldn't have Easter.

Both Agnolo Bronzino and Hildegarde of Bingen were true to their visions. They spoke of and painted what they had seen. What have you seen? What is your Easter message? We need many points of view to get the full picture. We need your perspective to experience the message God wants to give us.

We belong to a denomination that is consumed by the fear of death. If the PC(USA) is going to be what God intends, we have to stop trying not to die. PCMK can teach our denomination a thing or two about Easter. This is a church of Easter People. We are survivors. Like the phoenix, we've been through fire without being destroyed. We've ridden out the earthquake. We've learned that it's safe to be authentically ourselves and know that we'll be welcomed. So we are set free to live, to try another way, to risk all for the sake of something greater than ourselves.

My own faith experience of Easter is that Jesus is alive in our midst whenever we wake up to what Paul called “the great secret” – (Colossians 1:27 CEV): “the mystery is that Christ lives in you, and he is your hope of sharing in God's glory. The problem is that we are usually blind to the Presence, and deaf to the Voice. So we close ourselves off from the joy of Easter.

Jesus' disciples said to him, "When will the rest for the dead take place,
and when will the new world come?"
Jesus said to them, "What you are looking forward to has come, but don't know it."

--Thomas 51 (Scholars Version)

Imagine what a difference if we fully opened ourselves to the Easter experience. When we come into church, when we pray our prayers, sing our hymns, listen to the word or the special music, make our offering—imagine if we were fully present!

We have a commission from the risen Christ, just like Mary Magdalene. Our Easter mission is to give ourselves fully to every moment of our life with all the energy, intelligence, imagination and love that God has placed in us. That mission includes both an inner and an outer journey. We are called to work on our inner being, to grow up in every way into Christ, so that more and more we shine the light of Christ upon the world. And the outer quest requires that we learn to discern Christ in every person we meet—literally, EVERY PERSON. We will have to devote our powers of discernment to find Christ and our powers of compassion to embrace the Christ in every person.

Let us join the community of the Beloved Disciple. John 3:11 puts the words in Jesus' mouth, but it sounds like Mary Magdalene: "I speak only of what I know by experience; I give witness only to what I have seen with my own eyes." If we are truly a church with a vision to grow and to serve, we will have to learn how to see and to be Christ in the world. That, and nothing less, is our mission this Easter and always. Amen.

--Jack Lohr, Interim Pastor

PS: Thanks to Angie Kung for the images.