Keys to New Life

Keys to New Life (Easter Sunday - March 23, 2008)

“Now if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is….” Colossians 3:1

Christian Faith is indubitably about new life – new life in the world to come and new life in the present.

When someone is particularly devoted to something we often say it is his or her life.  “Chess is his life,” we’ll say, “or volleyball is her life,” We sometimes say someone’s work is their life.  Of course, today we’ll say about practically every kid, video games are their life.  The number of drivers I see on the road talking in their cell phones leads me to think the phones are their life.

For St. Paul, Christ was life, pure and simple.  “For me to live is Christ,” he wrote, “and to die is gain.” To the Galatians he wrote, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.”

And it is about the power and love which are that new life. “That I might know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, and be conformed more and more to his likeness…” he wrote to the Philippians.

To focus on Jesus Christ, his atoning death for our sake and glorious resurrection, communicates to us our worth —each one of us – in God’s sight, the redemption we know in Christ from our sins and the forgiveness offered in the Cross, and the ever present possibilities of newness in the resurrection, as well as the wonderful promise of life eternal for us and for those we love, and our eventual full communion with Christ in glory.

The great psychologist Carl Jung said “About one third of my cases are not suffering from any analytically definable neurosis, but from the aimlessness of their lives.” 

There is nothing that can turn that aimlessness around more than the message of Easter.

There are three keys especially relevant today in our readings this morning to unlock the new life.

The first key is from Acts. Peter, following a vision, is speaking to Cornelius, who also had a vision. In his vision Peter had been told that the food laws he had observed no longer mattered and the ethnic distinctions he had grown up with also no longer matter. Now, by the grace of God and led by the spirit of the Risen Christ, he is in a place he never in a million years thought he would be, the household of a Roman. And he is telling him the gospel message, with its climax in the Resurrection. “I truly understand that God shows no partiality.” It is impossible to overstate how revolutionary this whole scene is. But it is common stuff in the book of Acts where Christians alive with the spirit of the Risen Christ are spreading the good news far beyond the racial and ethnic confines in which they  had been raised, and learning also how to navigate a new world dealing with food laws.

This week I had a phone call from someone who was an active member here and is now in another state. She said she still thinks of Forest Hills as her church home, even though she is a member of a church in her new place as she should be, because she feels this is a true Christian community where people care about one another across all the usual barriers of race and class. She loved our diversity. Sometimes we do not realize how unusual this is. This past week Senator Obama quoted Dr. King’s well known statement that 11 o’clock on Sunday is the most segregated hour in America. Fortunately, that is less true than it was when Dr. King said it, and we give thanks to God for that, but it is still true, and we do indeed still have, as Mr. Obama said,  a lot of work to do on race in our country.

In one of the benedictions used in the church there is this crucial phrase “honor all people”. I believe that just as it was for Peter the new life with the Risen Christ must be a life in which race and class play no part whatsoever. In our day we can only unlock the power of that new life when we see all the implications of Peter’s statement when he stood in Cornelius’ house and told him about Christ and began his speech by saying: “God shows no partiality.”

A second key has to do with what we spend time thinking about. It is found in the reading from Colossians: “If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is….”
St. Paul  didn’t mean by that to practice otherworldliness. We still have to pay our bills, raise our children, go to work, and take care of the many daily duties we have. But if this is all we are thinking about then we are going to miss the new life the resurrection makes possible. Elsewhere he says, “whatsoever things are noble, whatsoever are of good report, think on these things, and the God of peace will be with you.”

These past two weeks have been horrendous ones in New York state government. We need not go into the details here, but there has been an awful lot of talk about sex lately. If it isn’t about the former governor it’s about the present governor and if it isn’t about the present governor it’s about the former governor of New Jersey, and on and on it goes. We have literally  been inundated. How many office cooler conversations have been on these topics, how many extra newspapers have been sold, how many work hours have been lost as sex as preoccupied practically everything? And  it’s no use blaming it on “the media”. They are only giving the public what it wants.

To unlock the power of the Risen Christ and the new life we always have to ask where our head is. Are we interested in what titillates us, or are we interested in the things that make for peace, the love of God, the fellowship with God’s people in the faith, and the gifts of the Spirit?

In the early church when people were baptized into Christ they took off an old garment and put on a new one. “Clothe yourselves with Christ,” St. Paul had written. That was to lead to thinking more the way Christ thought, talking as he talked, living as he lived, caring as he cared. That was the “new life” of the Risen Christ. “God be in my head and in my understanding,” was St. Patrick’s prayer.

Seek the things that are above, said St. Paul to the Colossians, and he meant that in more ways than one.

And a final key is found in our reading from John. Mary Magdalene returns to the disciples, who were gathered together, and she told them what had happened and what she had seen. Jesus rose from the dead and he began to appear in different ways, but primarily to people who were already disciples.  Jesus didn’t leave behind any books, he left no monument people should visit or say prayers in, he left no legal writings and no laws, except his new commandment to love one another. The only thing he left behind was a community. John Wesley said the New Testament knows nothing about a solitary Christianity.

It took them a long time to get their act together, and for a while they just hung around feeling sorry for themselves, but it was in the community that the Spirit came and it was in the community that they found new life.

In the community we gather around the Table and remember his atoning sacrificial death and his glorious resurrection. In the community we baptize children and adults in the faith of the Risen Lord. In the community we hear the stories of Jesus and teach them to our children and try our best to live them. In the community we pray for one another and support one another and lift up one another, and this is all part of the new life which Christ offers us, taking  us out of ourselves, and leading us out into the world to serve him in whatever way we can and witness to the new life he offers all people. 
Today with church attendance and membership plummeting, we need to remember that a vital key for the early Christians to unlocking the power of the Risen Christ was the Christian fellowship itself.

These are three keys to new life suggested by our readings today.

Remember that God shows no partiality, and neither should we.

Watch where your head is – seek the things that are above.

Be a vital part of the Christian community, for it is in the community of believers that the Risen Christ reveals himself for who he is: Lord and Savior of all.