Isaiah 65: 17-25; John 20: 1-18

The Resurrection Outlook

Are you a glass half full or a glass half empty kind of person?  In other words when life is not perfect but also not terrible, which is the case most of the time for most of us, do you tend to look at the positive side of what’s happening in your life or the negative?  This is what we are talking about today, our attitude toward life.  This is what we have just discussed:  what was the outlook, attitude of the disciples after Jesus was crucified and what should be our attitude, our outlook after the resurrection? Now we can talk of the glass being half empty or being half full, but we can’t speak of Jesus’ tomb being  half empty, or Jesus’ tomb being half full.  That sounds silly.  Either the tomb where Jesus was laid was full, in other words his body was there, or it was empty, in other words it wasn’t there.  There is no in between.  We can’t say it was a little bit there.  The German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg in the seventies claimed that based on the culture of the days of Jesus, the word of Jesus’ resurrection could not have spread if nothing had happened, if it was all made up.   The Jewish culture of that day when there were so many charlatans and wanna-be and would-be Messiahs would have forgotten about this Jesus of Nazareth if he had been another fly by night healer and big talker.   Also in the seventies one of the major Dutch theologians by the name of Kuitert who taught at the university where I was a student in Amsterdam, wrote a book declaring that he did not think the resurrection was an actual event.  In Holland where society was becoming secular much more rapidly than it is here in the US, this was an enormous blow to faithful church people.  Pretty soon after that I left the Netherlands and except for a six month training program I took in the early eighties I have been absent pretty much the entire period since then, so I am not totally sure what people are thinking.   This was all before the post-modern movement in theology and the new advances in science.  Now let’s see if we can remember our science talk from last year for a second.  Let me do that by giving a simple example.  A few weeks ago I fixed a bicycle tire on Carolyn’s bike which I have been riding.  It was the rear tire. It seemed to have a straightforward leak and it was an easy matter.  After a few days I noticed that it was slowly leaking.  I kept having to pump it up, more every time I wrote.  I knew I had to take the inner tube out again.  Then for some reason the tire stopped leaking air and I had to add just a little every time with the pump.  The tire seemed to be fixing itself!  Now you will agree that this is not a likely event, but also not an impossible event. The odds of the tire leaking more air rather than less were, you would agree, much higher.  Now at the risk of sounding less than reverent, there are similarities with the resurrection.  Jesus rising from the dead after two days is a highly unlikely event, but not, as people in the seventies would have claimed, an impossible event.  The science of small things, which includes quantum mechanics, is teaching us things about energy and how it can be applied that would make Jesus joining the disciples once more in physical form, unexpected but not impossible.  This means that the resurrection has become much less of an unlikely event than we would have claimed in the seventies.  Resurrection is not the intellectual problem it was.

Friends, now let’s talk about what this means for our lives. Earlier we talked about the different philosophies we can use to view our life: we can believe that all has been decided anyway so no matter what we do we cannot change life.  We can decide not to take it seriously because life is all one big joke.  We can decide to believe that people are out to get us and that we always lose out.  We can decide just to live for the moment and accept the impermanence of things.  We can decide that we must exert our power over the world to get what we want.  And then there is resurrection thinking.  Then there is the resurrection outlook.  Resurrection thinking, the resurrection outlook tells us that there are many things in life that aren’t likely to get better any time soon:  that relationship with a sibling or a spouse, that pain in your lower back, that civil war in Syria, politics in the Sudan, North and South Korea’s war of words and rockets,  the world’s poverty rate, global climate change,  job prospects, the approval rating of Congress etc.  Resurrection thinking tells us, however, that there we have God’s grace,  God’s energy is at work in the world.  It may not be coercive, it may subtle, but it seeps and trickles through our lives.  We talked about God’s timing last week, so let’s connect that dot also.  If we keep believing that goodness can be resurrected or resurrect itself, if we believe there is hope, if we can just keep trying to spread love and kindness persistently in our relationships, in our little world and in the larger world, if we can keep at it, then I believe the most wonderful, unlikely things are going to happen.  At those moments when God’s grace meets our efforts, there will be resurrection.  He is Risen. Thanks be to God.