Rise Up!

Psalm 68.  (Resurrection Sunrise.)

I.

            When my son was a few months old he spoke his first word.  And the word he said is really a succinct and complete expression of the human spirit.  It is a summary of our longing and hope.  It is the fullest affirmation of trust and the most perfect prayer of someone who follows Jesus Christ.  It is an affirmation that the Lord Jesus implicitly teaches his disciples to call out with full and expectant hearts.  He stood in his crib, lifted his arms, and called out the word, “Up!”

            Our faith is nothing if it is not a hope and conviction that we will be lifted up, we will ascend, we will be raised, we will experience resurrection.  This expectation is based on the event we celebrate this morning, the event that changes everything: the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. 

            The resurrection is a revelation of the basic truth at the heart of the whole universe.  It discloses the meaning embedded in everything.  It informs us of the purpose of life, including each individual life.  And that meaning, purpose, and direction are resurrection.  Our whole life is to be a participation in God’s uprising, the ultimate triumph of life and God.              

            Even the crucifixion is described in John’s gospel as Jesus being “lifted up” on the cross, part of a single movement that culminates in his resurrection and ascension.  The resurrection is more than merely an afterthought, ratifying and validating Jesus death; without the resurrection the disciples scatter and Jesus is just another forgotten victim of Roman brutality.  The resurrection is the good news: that not even death can separate us from God’s love.  Human violence and injustice are impotent to derail even for a moment the love, blessing, justice, and peace of the living God.

            That is what we celebrate on this day.  It is literally an uprising!  It is a movement from darkness into light, from misery to joy, from despair to hope, and from death to life.  God’s coming is not an invasion from outside or above so much as it is an insurrection from below.  God wells up or emerges as from below, from within, from among us.

            Is it our earthly existence that trends down, declines, unravels, dissolves, and descends back into the dust from which we were made.  Our mortal path declines and  slides towards disorder, it loses energy and integration, it dissipates in entropy.  It falls into injustice and violence, hatred, fear, anger, greed, and shame.  It plummets inexorably into death. 

            But God’s life moves in the opposite direction.  God’s life is an ascent, a moving upward, an uprising.  In God, things are more integrated and connected and dependent and knitted together.  As separate, isolated individuals we perish, but Jesus Christ calls us into a community, a collective, a gathering, a body, in which we are raised up with him.

II.

            The great social reversal that Jesus preaches about during his whole ministry, even beginning with his mother’s hymn before he is born, is about how God leads the poor and the dispossessed, the sick and the suffering, the weak and the gentle, the outcast and the rejected, up, out of their suffering.  This is what Jesus devotes his ministry to doing.  As a healer, an exorcist, a preacher, and a community organizer, Jesus brings people up out of all kinds of bondage, brokenness, blindness and benightedness.    

            Remember what this day meant in Jesus’ time.  The resurrection happens at Passover.  This is not an accident or coincidence.  For when God raises the children of Israel up out of slavery in Egypt, it foreshadows Jesus’ resurrection, which anticipates when everyone is raised up in him from all kinds of bondage and slavery, even from death itself.  Whether it is personal slavery to addiction, despair, or ignorance, or social bondage to systems that inflict injustices, inequalities, and violence, Jesus Christ comes to raise people out of them all.

            He does this by raising up and gathering the new resurrection community, where the values and practices of the Kingdom of God are realized.  The church is supposed to be this place where the miracle and mystery of resurrection happens in the lives of people, where healing and liberation are practiced, where the downtrodden are lifted up.  And Christ breathes his own breath, the Holy Spirit of God, into this community, and he sends it into the world with the good news of God’s uprising, and he extends an invitation to all to participate in it.

            We become the community that ever sings in hope and love, “Let God arise!”  Let God’s enemies scatter and flee!  God raises up the vulnerable and the weak; God brings the desolate home and makes prisoners prosperous.  God has lifted up the lowly and filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.  God blesses the poor and the gentle, the peacemakers and the grieving and the merciful.

            And Jesus gives his church the same mission when he tells them to make disciples and teach people to obey his commandments.  Jesus says that his new community, gathered together and sent into the world, is to be like leaven mixed into a lump of dough.  The effect of the leaven on the dough is to make it… rise up!  It is to fill it with the Spirit!  It is to let the liberating power of God’s breath raise up every relationship and institution.

III.

            For the resurrection means that peace always overcomes violence, justice always overwhelms injustice, light always banishes darkness, blessing drowns out curses, forgiveness removes condemnation, and life always, always, always conquers death.  Always.

            In spite of how spectacularly the church in its history has failed at fulfilling Jesus’ example and command, in spite of how it is often most proficient at proclaiming condemnation, exclusion, despair, ignorance, and death, in spite of how the church has been used to keep people down… that history may discourage us, but, hey, Jesus’ disciples weren’t necessarily the sharpest tacks in the box either!  And it just makes the cry more urgent: “Let God arise!”  “Up!” 

            God’s uprising isn’t something that happens by our work anyway.  It is purely the activity of the Holy Spirit, with, within, and among us.  Neither is God’s uprising something that will be finished any time before the resurrection at the last day when Christ returns in glory.

            And yet in the meantime there is this anticipatory movement of God’s people who look for and share together in the good news of God’s uprising revealed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

            One ancient proclamation of the church is: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and bestowing life on those in the tomb.”   That is God’s work that we need to see happening among us.  That is God’s work in which we are called to participate by bringing people up from all kinds of degradation and bondage.  Let God arise!  Let justice and peace be done!  Let hope and goodness flourish!  Let life and love triumph!  Christ is risen!  Let God arise!