Raised Up & Awakened to Live the Jesus Legacy
Indianapolis First Friends Quaker Meeting
Pastor Bob Henry
April 9, 2023
Happy Easter and welcome to Light Reflections from First Friends. Our scriptures for this Easter morning are from Ephesians 2:4-7 from The Voice version.
But God, with the unfathomable richness of His love and mercy focused on us, united us with the Anointed One and infused our lifeless souls with life—even though we were buried under mountains of sin—and saved us by His grace. He raised us up with Him and seated us in the heavenly realms with our beloved Jesus the Anointed, the Liberating King. He did this for a reason: so that for all eternity we will stand as a living testimony to the incredible riches of His grace and kindness that He freely gives to us by uniting us with Jesus the Anointed.
As most of you know, the last couple of weeks, Sue and I have been helping our oldest child, Alex, prepare to move to Austin, TX. We found it ironic that Alex would move to Texas at the age of 25, which was the same age Sue and I were when we moved to serve a Christian Camp in Pottsborro, Texas. It was also while in Texas that we found out we were pregnant with Alex, our first child.
On Good Friday we returned from moving Alex into their new apartment. It has been an emotional several weeks and we have not had time to fully realize that they now live over 1000 miles away. Thankfully, these days technology allows us to stay in easy contact from this far of a distance.
During these last several weeks together, we have been preparing Alex for this big move. Sue and I have stepped up the parenting and have tried hard to instill in Alex some of the wisdom we have gained over our years of life. Obviously, some wisdom will stick, and other wisdom will be forgotten - needing reminders or reeducation, but all of this is part of us passing on a legacy to our children.
I guess turning 50 amidst all this transition has had me really thinking about giving our children something that will be valued and treasured after we are gone and to ensure that the things that have meaning to Sue and I will also have meaning to our children. That is what a legacy truly is.
There is nothing like seeing your child take the wisdom you have learned and living it out in the present moment. On many occasions over the last several weeks, I have watched as Alex has taken our advice, or simply lived out the wisdom that we have taught through living our lives with them. It has made us proud. We have shed some tears. But all-in-all we have realized that Alex and their creative spirit give us hope for our frustrating world.
It almost seems a bit ironic that what we have been going through is also very similar to what I want to share with you this morning as we celebrate Easter. As you know, a couple weeks ago, I ended my sermon series on the Bible, but this morning, I want to return one more time to look at what I will call Jesus’ legacy.
To do that, I need to go back and help us get a fuller picture of what “resurrection” meant to the people of Jesus’ day. It may surprise you, frustrate you, even confuse you, but I hope in the end it will inspire you as it did the people who came after Jesus, who lived out his legacy.
To help understand this, I am going to share some wisdom of James Adams from his book “From Literal to Literary.”
So, let’s go back to when Jesus came on the scene in Nazareth. At that time, Jews had adopted a vision of the future that dealt with a nagging query they were wrestling with,
“How could a just God allow his people to suffer endlessly at the hands of their enemies and to be scattered over the face of the earth?” (A question many of us still ponder today.)
Well, the Jews of Jesus day found an exciting and hopeful answer in a vision attributed to the prophet of Ezekiel which reads,
Then he said to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole of the house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely. Therefore prophesy, and say to them, thus says the Lord God: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. (That was Ezekiel 37:11-12.)
The Religious Leaders of the day were kind of split on this idea of resurrection or resuscitation. It was not a doctrine of the Jewish faith. The Priestly Party, the Sadducees, did not find it particularly popular, but it was beginning to appeal more strongly to some Pharisees in Jesus’ day.
Obviously, Jesus and his followers favored this resurrection imagery, because in three of the gospels we have stories of the Sadducees trying to trap Jesus with questions about the resurrection, specifically.
Now, before we go any deeper, we need to have a short Greek lesson. Some Greek lessons are rather boring, but not so much when looking at the word “resurrection.” Here we find that there are two Greek nouns translated “resurrection” within the scriptures.
Each evolved from a verb rendered in English as “raise.” The first noun, anastasis, comes from the verb anistemi, which meant to stand up from a reclining or crouching position.
The other noun, egersis, is from the verb egeiro, which originally had to do with collecting or gathering one’s faculties, especially in the act of rousing oneself from rest or sleep.
It is pretty clear that some may have embraced resurrection imagery to help them with their fear of physical death. I think many of us still today do the same. This allows us to die in peace with the confidence that we would someday get another life.
Yet, what we need to take into consideration here is the Greek notion of immortality at the time. James Adams points out that Immortality for the Greeks was not an arbitrary act of God, rather life on the other side of the grave was assured by the persistence of personality, that is, the indestructibility of the soul.
That is slightly different from what many Christians today ascribe to.
As well, on several occasions we see the resurrection metaphor used to identify a present reality. Take for instance James 5:15:
The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up. (in Greek that is the word for resurrection.)
Even Paul (who is historically considered the founder of the Christian faith) in his letters or epistles is often using the metaphor of resurrection to mean a variety of things. Which honestly complicates things even more.
In Romans Paul uses the metaphor to talk about living up to the best that is within each person.
In another letter, Paul talks about Jesus’ followers being “raised to new life in the here and now,” a life free from the death-dealing tendency to avoid responsibility and accountability.
These different definitions seem to complicate things for the early followers of Christ. At different times and in different places we get a variety of understandings of what was meant by “Christ being raised from death.”
· Some thought it was a fact of history – a resuscitation of Jesus’ corpse.
· Others thought God had intervened in history by giving the dead Jesus a new body, that looked something like the old one but was not easily recognized even to his closest friends.
· Still others who read the final chapters of the gospels (once they were written down) with a critical eye, came to the conclusion that these stories about the risen Christ were originally understood as hymns of praise, poetic expressions of the faithful whose lives had been transformed by their encounter with the Jesus story.
It seems this last view may have been supported by Paul. I find it interesting that Paul never mentions an empty tomb, but insists that his encounter with the risen Lord was no different than the first disciples. Just listen to his words from 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 carefully.
For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.
James Adams points out that in using the word “appeared,” Paul has employed the language of vision and subjective experience rather than the language of objective reporting and facts.
So, it is clear there were multiple understandings of the word “resurrection” in the early church, but it is also clear that the early followers embraced this metaphor as part of their vocabulary in describing their experience.
As I studied this further, I could not but be reminded of the early Quakers utilizing the Bible and Biblical metaphors to describe their present experiences.
I have quoted Michael Birkel before saying that early Friends “did not simply read the scriptures.” They lived them. For them, reading the Bible was not just an exercise in information. It was an invitation to transformation (like I talked about in my sermon two Sundays ago). Birkel goes on to say,
“To read scripture is to realize that we are participants in the great ongoing story of God’s people. This suggests a great richness of the inward life and a profound sense of connectedness. The lives of our forebears continue in us, offering us wisdom.”
And that goes for Jesus as well. If we look at the gospels with the original meaning of the raised-resurrection metaphors in mind, who was it that was lifted up from a crouching or cowering position and who boldly proclaimed what they had learned from Jesus?
Who was it that finally got themselves together and got on with the business begun by Jesus?
Just think of how the first followers of Jesus talked about themselves,
Romans 12:5 says – We who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members of one another.
Or how about 1 Corinthians 12:27 – Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.
What may be happening here is a merging of these two powerful metaphors – “raised up” and “body of Christ.”
Just maybe the early Christians and even the early Quakers were proclaiming that death did not have the last word in the Jesus story BECAUSE his followers were raised up to be his new body.
That is definitely something interesting to think about.
Or as John Shelby Spong put it,
“He [Jesus] was alive. He gave life to others. His life was expansive. It was not bound by traditional limits. Thus, those who were touched by his spirit also came alive and began the expanding process of entering the limitless dimensions of their own lives.”
For us today, the call of resurrection is again resounding. And the queries must be asked:
Will we arise? Will we rouse ourselves from this rest or sleep and truly be transformed?
Do we believe that death did not have the last word, and that we are being raised to be Christ’s new body in this world?
Or as Meister Eckard once said,
"The important question is not whether Jesus was born in Jerusalem two thousand years ago, but whether Jesus is born in my heart today."
That is also the most important question about Easter. What does it matter if Jesus was resurrected two thousand years ago if we are not resurrected today?
May you and I this Easter embrace this resurrection imagery and allow Christ’s spirit to touch our lives and prompt us to live out Christ’s legacy in our world.
Happy Easter, Friends!