Easter 2023 - Keep Christianity weird

Hello everyone,

It’s good to see ya and Happy Resurrection Sunday. He is Risen!

Today is the most important day on the church calendar. It’s so important, that even those that don’t use the church calendar still choose to celebrate the Risen Christ on this day. Charise and I have been in Houston now for about 10 years and it was shocking and pleasantly surprising to see here that all the schools, Christian and secular alike take off for Good Friday.

None of the other places we’ve lived allow students off for a religious holiday. I absolutely love that!

We’ve been tracking Jesus now in the form of weekly installments of the liturgical calendar. We’ve seen the prophecy of his birth. His birth, and then the visitors from afar brought him gifts.

We saw John the Baptist speak about Jesus and too him. He baptized him as a model for the rest of us. We saw Jesus assemble the disciples and start a revolution that was unlike anything the world has ever seen.

He specifically chose, for the most part, to go around the leadership class. He was non-confrontational with the Roman Occupiers. He was gruff and blunt with the religious class that ultimately culminated into an absolutely prosecutorial demeanor. Jesus built his church in the earthly realm of the “have nots”.

He pulled the prophecies of old apart in a manner never before seen. All to tell that He alone was both the Christ and the human embodiment of God on earth. He was accused of everything from heresy to witchcraft and ultimately his life was ended.

If you’ve been with us this week, we’ve celebrated Jesus final living command to his followers. “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

Today we think of this as common place, but in Jesus day it was literally revolutionary. It was a command for people to break away from their worldly understanding of the order of things.

And Good Friday. Where we contemplated our personal and corporate contribution to Jesus necessary death on the Cross. Julie gave us an excellent icon that showed Jesus with a ladder climbing the cross. We are reminded that, ultimately, it was Jesus personal divine choice to allow himself to be crucified for us. No one made him die; he took up his cross freely. Jesus was not a victim; he was a King.

Today marks the day his tomb was found empty. The stone was rolled away, and Jesus was not there. He is Risen!

There’s an author I think I’ve made reference to before. You may or may not remember him. His name is Tom Holland. He’s a historian. His particular area of expertise is the Christian influence on the Roman World. He’s written a number of books. But his most recent and probably most popular is called Dominion: How the Christian Revolution reimagined the Western World.

It’s fascinating and I highly recommend it if this kind of thing appeals to you. We live in an era where Western Civilization is constantly on trial for its past offenses. Some of which are absolutely valid, many of which are the product of generations of universal wealth, growth, and prosperity combined with boredom, and too much self-focus.

This book, and the study of areas of history like it, show exactly how strange and revolutionary Christianity was and continues to be.

At a lecture of his I heard an attender ask Tom “What’s the mission for our time?” Tom thought about it for a minute, and he replied with all seriousness “Let Christianity stay weird!”. It was profound and left the audience speechless.

In all of Christian belief there’s nothing more weird than Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. This is what we celebrate today.

See before Christians showed up on the seen things like Justice and care for the sick and poor, they weren’t really issues in the world. No one tried to tackle them. There’s not much evidence that anyone actually gave them any thought. In fact there world was full of deities that professed “You reap what you sow.” You get what you deserve. You are where you belong; free, slave, rich, poor, sick, well, under siege, in the army. The human world continued like this for many thousands of years and there’s no sign that anything was ever really headed for a change.

But we need to look back a Jesus. Right where it all started. I sit here today wearing a cross. I even have one tattooed on my arm. It’s become common place in our day for things like this. We tend to think of it as a nice simple thing that represents our faith.

But I want you to think back. In Jesus day, no one would ever have done such a thing. No one would wear around a cross. No religious leader would dare wear something so insidious. It’s the symbol of death and torture. It stands for crucifixion. The crucifix became a symbol of the fate waiting for anyone who dared defy the mighty Roman Empire.

It’s thought that crucifixion was invented by the Persians. But the Romans sure perfected it. They would take the victim and strip them naked. Humiliation was part of the fate. Then force them to carry their cross to a designated area where they would be roped, or in some extreme cases nailed to this cross. The death was slow and agonizing, with the subject being left to slowly bleed to death or more often suffocate. In the non-Jewish world, the victim would then be left there to rot in the sun and be eaten by the birds and other creatures.

To wear this symbol would be the modern equivalent of walking around with an electric chair around your neck, or a gas chamber.It was the very symbol of death and subjugation to the earthly powers.

Christianity is weird. We took that symbol of death and oppression and made it the symbol of revolution and resistance. For us it represents the extraction of earthly powers. You cannot threaten me with death. My God has triumphed over this thing. Death holds no power here. That’s how we know Christ was raised from the dead!

And this was an immediate recognition. Look at this passage in the book of Act 10: 35-43

That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

Since its inception, Christianity has proudly proclaimed the death of our LORD. In fact, its so integral to our beliefs that without this understanding of a crucified LORD, and his resurrection, our faith falls apart.

1 Cor 15:12-19

Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

See, we see right from the beginning that The Evil One began to undermine the mighty accomplishments of the LORD. He immediately attacked the truth of Jesus words and more particularly his actions. Paul is responding here to attacks leveled against the fledgling Christian community about its beliefs.

The Dark One is still using his control of the earthly powers to deliver his message that Jesus was not LORD. Tell me if any of these arguments sound familiar to you?

Jesus was a good moral teacher we should follow his example. But he was not the son of God. Morality has nothing to do with this. Jesus was so counter cultural, so anti-establishment, that his morality led to his death on the cross for our broken and corrupted nature. What is it Paul says in Romans 5:6-8?

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.

How about this one? Jesus was crucified, but he didn’t die on the cross. He merely passed out, or SWOONED and later woke up in the tomb. There broken and battered he rolled away a Herculean size stone and fled, all while guarded by Roman Centurions under cover of night. We heard that?

Let me explain something you may or may not have heard about this. First off, as we’ve established, the Romans were experts at crucifying people. They all died, unless they were meant to survive the experience. Which was extremely rare. Scripture tells us this was not the case for Jesus. He was meant to die.

Secondly, failure to carry out an order correctly was rewarded with the soldier taking the place of the criminal (or in this case Jesus). This is something that continued down into the modern military uninterrupted. If you were guarding a prisoner and they escaped on your watch, even if you had no fault in the escape, you took over their sentence. Now, I don’t believe that rule is still enforce. But it was in my lifetime. That’s why you almost never heard about military prison breaks. They shoot first because they’re gonna do your time if your escape is successful.

If the Roman soldiers were ordered to crucify Jesus and they did and failed to kill him, guess who’s next on the cross? They didn’t fail at this activity. They were highly skilled killers.

Another argument has been that the Apostles did all their earthly work because they merely felt forgiven. Jesus really did die on the cross, he was not resurrected, but his followers felt forgiven. The whole thing was a metaphor. This too is a ridiculous argument. The NT is their crafted testimony. In the testimony from Peter in Acts that we read a moment ago, he points out the area of the country that Jesus and his followers traveled. At the time, this would have been easily verifiable information.

If I said to you, “We were in Houston, then Pearland, and went on to Galveston.” You would know that I’m talking about real places. My travel would have been verifiable in our time. These are not the arguments of someone that was crafting a narrative that was not literally true.

The Gospel of John records:

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes.

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ ” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.

This is too highly specific. This is not the testimony of a person or persons that merely felt forgiven. They believed that Jesus raised up from the dead. Now there’s one part in particular I want to look at here. The author makes mention of Jesus’ head cloth being separate from the rest of the burial clothes. Again, highly specific. But I have a theory on this. When someone has a bag placed over their head it is their natural response to take it off.

One of the things they teach you in self defense is to overcome your natural inclination to try and rip off a bag placed over your head. It’s much easier to tear a hole in the bag. If Jesus shot up from his death and had a bag over his head, he likely ripped it off and through it to the side. This shows the element of truth with something that was not highly studied at the time.

We also have only to look at the lives of the disciples, both in and out of scripture. These boys reordered their lives. They literally walked to the ends of the known world to share the message of Jesus resurrection with everyone they could. This is not the message of people touting a philosophy of feeling forgiven or good moral character. This is the actions of a small group of people that were radically and weirdly changed by an encounter with The LORD and Savior, the resurrected God, Jesus!

Jesus was a weird guy! Christianity is weird! We worship the only God who died of his own choice (the Message of Good Friday) for the sins of humanity. With Jesus and the help of the Holy Spirit which he left us, reordered the nature of the human world to care for those that until this point in history, no one had ever cared for. Why? Because Jesus told us too. That’s the message of the Maundy Thursday service. Today marks the resurrection of Jesus. The proof that he was and is both human and God. Proof his words are true. That he was, in fact, raised from the dead. Proof that Christianity could not work if we choose to operate like the rest of the world.

The evil one is still at work in the world. God tells us that, for now, it’s his domain. He has always tried to pervert the message of the Gospel. And right now, more so than any point in history, much of the world is fat, sassy, and content. We are in a position that no civilization has ever been in before. We don’t really worry about where our next meal will come from. We don’t worry about where we will sleep tonight. We don’t really worry if we’re safe at home or walking around town. (Again, generalizations, but largely true). This is almost exclusively the by-product of a society being crafted after the values of Christ. Christian or not, we take his values and have committed to them.

Only now has the evil one been able to use the excess time on our hands to start a campaign of infighting between the people groups in civilization. Often over things that no one is arguing against.

When someone asks what we are to do in light of the modern era and all of our issues, the answer is simple, keep Christianity weird.We have a very specific calling left to us by Jesus, and when we can’t figure out how to accomplish his will, he left us the Holy Spirit to guide our way.

Starting next week, we’re going to explore somewhat in depth the Holy Spirit for several weeks as Cheryl leads us on a path towards Pentecost. I hope you’ll be able to join us. We want to continue to explore the journey that we’re all on. We want to explore the help Jesus left to us. We want to figure out how to keep Jesus weird!

Let’s close out today in prayer.