Like Lightning (Easter Sunday)

Scripture: Matthew 28.1-10; Colossians 3.1-4


My boys were sitting with a friend in our kitchen the other day, lounging in the quiet ecstasy that is a day off from school, and one of them remarked that he couldn’t wait until Easter. Not one to miss an opportunity, I asked the boys, “Why do we celebrate Easter?”

Michael’s answer of something to do with candy was cut off by the neighbor boy who answered, “OH I KNOW! IT’S THE DAY WHEN JESUS WAS REELECTED!”

He got points for trying. I explained to them that Easter is the Day of Resurrection. This day belongs to Jesus who is alive. I also explained that every Sunday is a mini-Easter celebration. Every Sunday is resurrection day. And I suppose, how we respond to resurrection will, in part, determine how we respond to Sundays through the year.

Do we believe in the Resurrection? Or do we just mildly approve of religion and good morals? Or are we here simply to keep peace in the family, to please someone who feels more strongly about this than we do? Are we here because we’ve decided to reelect Jesus for another year as chief religious figure in our lives?

It seems that he wants more than that. It seems, moreover, that Jesus is offering more than that. He is offering us a new life. And boy, do we need it!

I continue to be amazed, confounded, and depressed by the number of times I hear people questioning the sincerity and veracity of change in other people. It seems there are people in this world who make claims that they have changed for the better. God bless them. Don’t they know how angry and cynical that makes some people? Don’t they know that people don’t change? Don’t they know that in their naivete they are bucking up against one of the truisms of conventional wisdom in our time?

It makes me sad and depressed to hear someone say, “Oh, they’ll never change.” I want to say to them it’s bad enough that it might be true without you wishing it to be. The novelist Walker Percy talks about the profession of psychiatry as being one of the few professions that still believe and operate on the principle that people can change. I read that and thought to myself, we believe that too. Pastors believe that people can change. I believe that people can change. And the day I stop believing that is the day that I hang up my robe and stole and . . .I don’t know, find something else to do.

A few weeks ago I talked about resurrection stories and we read the Ezekiel passage on the valley of dry bones. God asked his prophet, “Son of Man, can these dry bones live?”
What say you to that question? Can you change? Can the new life happen in your life? If you have trouble even entertaining the possibility then maybe you are making the same mistake the cynics make – maybe you are forgetting who it is that brings the change. You’re forgetting the Son of Man. You’re forgetting Mr. Resurrection.

When the women looked on the sight of the tomb, they and the cowardly guards saw a sight. They saw an angel. Not a cute cuddly, big-eyes precious moments angel, but a huge, white thunder and lightning angel in all their holy wrath and glory. And this angel said what virtually every angel in the biblical stories first say to human beings at their revealing: Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid of me and don’t be afraid that you can’t find the body of Jesus. There’s a good reason why you can’t. He’s not here. He decided to not be here. He left. He has gone on ahead of you to Galilee. There you will see him.

John’s account of the empty tomb has a few more details than the other gospels. In this account, the two Mary’s actually witness the earthquake and the angel descend and roll away the tomb. John also mentions the guards there as other eyewitnesses to the miracle. John presents these details as facts, as if it say, here it is, do you yet refuse to believe? Getting the facts right matters.

The story is told of a novice skydiver who makes his jump and pulls his ripcord but nothing happens. He pulls the backup cord. Still, nothing. As he is hurling toward the ground, he sees a man flying upward toward him from below.

“Do you know anything about parachutes?” he asks, as the man flew by.

“No,” the man answers. “Do you know anything about gas stoves?”

Getting the details right is vital. Arthur Miller wrote, “God is in the details.” Here’s a fact: God knows the details of your life. And here is the good news: Jesus knows your need and can do something about it. If you doubt it’s only because you don’t know the power and the love that he has for you. You and I are better people than we have yet shown ourselves to be. Jesus perhaps, is the only one who really knows what we can be. And perhaps, Jesus is the only one who really believes in us. Doesn’t matter what other people think. Just worry about what God thinks!

Are you ready for Resurrection in your life? I asked you earlier if you believe in the Resurrection of Jesus? Do you? If you say yes, then why can’t you believe in your own resurrection? If Jesus, who died, can walk out of the tomb, then why can’t he give you new life? Is is so hard for God to do this for you? The Apostle Paul believed that he could. Paul said, “The power that raised Jesus Christ from the dead, I want to know that power in my life.” Paul wanted to catch some of that lightning for himself. Maybe you can too.

Jesus has gone ahead of us. He always does. He wades into that most scary of places, the Future, and he prepares the way for us. He says, “Don’t be afraid. I am with you. I will never leave you nor forsake you.” Jesus, alone, sees who we can be, what can happen to us and what can happen through us. It doesn’t mean that we’ll never have anymore problems or nothing else bad will ever happen to us. We will have problems and bad things will happen to us. But the difference will be the difference between a valley of dry bones and a green valley through which runs a river, the river of life.
The difference can be told this way:
A boy goes to work with his father to the office on a Saturday so his dad can catch up on some work. The boy has brought his toys and games but eventually he tires of them and asks his father for something else to do.

The father grabs a magazine and finds a large fold-out map of the world. Dad gets some scissors and cuts the map into pieces and spreads the pieces on a table.

“See if you can put all these pieces together, and when you get finished, it’ll be time to go.”

The boy settled down and started matching pieces and the father, thinking he had at least a half-hour before another interruption, went back into his office.

A few minutes later, the boy was back, “I put all the pieces together,” he announced.

Amazed, the father went to look and sure enough, there was the world, every continent and country in place. “How did you do that so quickly?” he asked his son.

“It was simple,” the boy replied. “On the back of the world was a picture of a man. When I put the man together, the whole world fell into place!”


Get to know the Man. Get to trust Him. Start hoping in Him and living by Him. Let Him become more visible and real in your life, and the world, well, He’ll take care of the rest.

Powerless Power

Scripture: Isaiah 50.4-9; Matthew 21.1-11

There’s a scene in the move The Gladiator in which the young, newly ascendant emperor, Commodus, rides into Rome on a chariot at the head of a majestic parade. The people have lined the thoroughfares to welcome the new emperor. They come out of curiousity, out of the hope that free bread will be given. They don’t love Commodus. He is known to them only as a spoiled son of royalty and privilege. To those who really know him, Commodusis, well. . . his own father describes him thus, “Commodus is not a moral man.”

Nonetheless he is Emperor and the leaders of the Roman Senate watch him parade in. They say to one another, “Look at him. He comes riding into Rome like a conquering hero. But what, I wonder, has he conquered?”

There was another parade, in another city, many years before in the capital city of a small province in a corner of the Roman Empire. The city was Jerusalem. The head of this parade was not a new emperor, but some said he was a king. A donkey was his chariot and the people lined the streets and waved palm branches and cried out his praise with genuine enthusiasm, affection, and hope. Yet there must have been cynics in those crowds too, who wondered, what this king had conquered and where indeed was his kingdom.

Jesus entry into Jerusalem is a picture of contradictions. He came with authority. He spoke with authority (Tell them the Lord has need of it) and yet within days, nay hours, he seemed to lay his power and authority aside and not once lift a finger to defend himself and help his cause. In perhaps the most vital way Jesus displayed who God is, He showed us the way of powerless power, of love that conquers by being led to slaughter.

Jesus was always this way. He was the son of a carpenter. He was an apprentice. He knew what it was to learn, to listen, to follow directions and the will of another. In Eugene Peterson’s The Message, Philippians 2, in part, reads:

Think of yourselves the way Christ Jesus thought of himself. He had equal status with God but didn’t think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what. Not at all. When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave, became human! Having become human, he stayed human. It was an incredibly humbling process. He didn’t claim special privileges. Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life and then died a selfless, obedient death – and the worst kind of death at that: a crucifixion.

This section of scripture is called the Kerygma, the great summation of who Jesus is and what he has done. The words are believed to be a hymn from the early Christian church. If it is a song, it’s a song that is in another key than the leitmotif of today’s culture. Today the song is “I Did It My Way.” Much of our culture is an ode to the unholy trinity of Me, Myself, and I. If I can do it, I will do it. Or, nobody can tell me what to do.

Listen to what Jesus says about himself in Isaiah: The Sovereign Lord has given me an instructed tongue to know the word that sustains the weary. He wakens my ear to listen like one being taught. . .I offered my back to those who beat me. I did not hide my face from mocking and spitting. It is the Sovereign Lord who helps me. Who is he that will condemn me?

We watched Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ at Youth the past couple weeks. I was reminded of the scene where Jesus is brought back before Pilate a second time. This time he comes back after being beaten almost to death. He is not a man covered with bloody scars. He is one bloody scar. Pilate himself is shocked at how savagely Jesus has been beaten by his soldiers. Pilate shows Jesus to the mob that has gathered outside the palace. Isn’t this enough, Pilate shouts to the crowd. “Crucify him,” they answer. Pilate begs Jesus, “Speak to me.” “I have the power to give you death or to give you life,” the Roman governor tells the bloody king.

“You have no power over me,” Jesus says to Pilate, “except that which is given you from above.”

Jesus will not lift a finger to defend himself, nor will he deny who and what he is. He is the God who will die for his people.

The question I am left with is, “How in this world can we at all be like the Savior whom we pledge to emulate and follow?”

I am given this example from a friend. Most of you probably followed the tragic killings in Atlanta last weekend. You may have also heard how the accused gunman, Brian Nichols, fled the courthouse after shooting several people and somehow eluded pursuit for some time. He ended up that night in northeast Atlanta at the apartment of a young single mother named Ashley Smith. Nichols abducted Smith while she was walking to her door late that night. What happened after that is quite remarkable.

Smith recognized Nichols as the suspect all over the news. Nichols made sure she knew. Smith feared for her life and for the life of her 5-year old girl. Nichols tied her up at first and took a shower. Then Ashley Smith and her abductor began to talk.

I told him I was supposed to go see my little girl the next morning. And I asked him if I could go see her and he said no. My husband died four years ago. And I told him if he hurt me my little girl wouldn’t have a mommy or daddy. And she was expecting to see me the next morning.

He still told me no. But I could feel that he started to know who I was. He said maybe. Maybe I’ll let you go. We’ll see.

We went to my room and I asked him if I could read. He said, “What do you want to read?”

I said, “Well, I have a book in my room.” And I went and got my Bible. And I got a book called The Purpose-Driven Life. I turned it to the chapter that I was on that day. It was chapter 33. I started to read it to him, and he asked me to stop and read it again. It mentioned something about what you thought your purpose in life was. What talents were you given? And I asked him what he thought and he said, “I think it was to talk to people and tell them about you.”

Ashley Smith continued to talk to her abductor about God and God’s purpose for him, a killer on the run. He asked her what he should do and she told him to turn himself in before more people got hurt. She suggested to him that maybe God’s purpose was for him to pay for his crimes and talk to other men in prison about God.

Brian Nichols surrendered to police a few hours later.


Brian Nichols was a man of violence who had a gun and who had the ability to give Ashley Smith life or death. But I wonder, after hearing this story, who really had the power here?

Jesus never held a gun, a sword, or a spear. He never struck a person in violence or defense, though he was known to overturn some tables. He lived in the back water of the most powerful empire in the world. That empire is long gone. But Jesus followers stretch across the globe, and they wait for the fullness of His coming kingdom. How did he do it? Jesus conquered the world with nothing more than his words and the stripes on his back.

As his followers we may not be given as dramatic the opportunities to witness to him as Ashley Smith was given, but I am convinced that opportunities to show the powerless power of Jesus word abound in all our lives. Are we strong enough to follow his way?

Resurrection Stories

Scripture: Ezekiel 37.1-14; John 11.1-45

I have always loved resurrection stories. I love the Joseph story in the Old Testament. Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery and leave him for dead. When he reveals himself to them as the second most powerful person in all of the Egyptian empire, Joseph’s brothers look like they’ve seen a ghost. Resurrection!

I love the story of the Prodigal Son. The younger son takes his father’s inheritance and blows it. He loses all his friends and has to slop hogs and sleep in a barn just to get by. He finally comes home and his father welcomes him back with open arms: “My son who was lost is now found. My son was dead. He is now alive!” Resurrection.

I love modern stories of real and fictional characters. I love the movie Braveheart and the story of William Wallace, who sacrificed himself for his people and because he believed in life after death and the cloud of saints who watched over him. “Freedom!’ Wallace cried in his dying breath. Resurrection! I love the story of Owen Meany, who sacrificed himself in the sure and certain hope that “whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” Resurrection.

Now imagine a valley full of bones; piles and piles of nothing but dryness and dust and bones as far as your eyes can see. This is the scene stretches before Ezekiel, the prophet of Israel. Roy Clements notes that “for anybody in the Middle Eastern culture, and especially for a Jew, such a site would have been full of superstition and dread and ritual defilement.” Yet God seems to force the prophet into close contact with this place of death and despair. Ezekiel says, “He led me back and forth among them.”

Why did God bring Ezekiel to this place of decay and death? The answer can be found in verse 11: “Son of Man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our gones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’”

Israel has become hopeless. The things they had trusted in and relied upon were gone. They thought Jerusalem and the Temple would never be taken by an enemy. They thought God would never allow that to happen. But it did happen. They are hopeless. They are like piles of dried up bones, a cemetery of memories of what once was. Bones have no future. The people of Israel have no future.

In the middle of this outlook, God asks Ezekiel this question, “Son of Man, can these bones live?”

It’s become almost a cliché in certain circles, like AA and NA and other recovery programs that you can’t really change until you realize that all your old ways of coping aren’t working. You need to hit bottom before you can begin to climb back up. I don’t know if that’s true or not but I do know this. . .some hopeless people find hope again. Some people, who are as good as dead, find life again. Resurrection happens.

Someone described to me very recently their sense that God is alive and working in their life, “I’m feeling it. I’m excited and amazed that God is speaking to me.” How is it that some people can hear the voice of God and see amazing transformation in their attitudes and in the situations where others hear only silence and see only more of the same depressing view?

It begins with personal confession and regeneration. In Ezekiel 36.25 the Lord says, “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols.” Did you hear that last word? Idols. All the things that you have relied upon for false security must go. Pack them up, pour them out, sweep them away. As Rick Warren says in The Purpose-Driven Life, “You’ll never know that God is all you need until God is all you’ve got.”

And then God makes this promise in 36.26, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
This remarkable verse is echoed in the New Testament Gospel of John, when Jesus says to Nicodemus, “I tell you the truth, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.” Resurrection requires a heart transplant.

So we’re saying we need to confess our sins and receive forgiveness. We’re saying we need regeneration that comes from a new heart’s passion. How does this happen? How do dry, dessicated, hopeless bones move themselves to this? “Son of Man, can these bones live?” Ezekiel answers, “Lord, you know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy to the bones and say to them, “Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord!”

Does this strike you as a pretty ridiculous thing for God to say? Dead bones are a pretty lifeless audience. Dead bones are the deafest thing I can imagine to preach to. . .Although I recall several times at youth group. . .

I’m telling them about Jesus’ love for them. I’m calling them to say no to some
Of the things in the culture so they can say yes to Jesus. I’m exhorting them to
Step up and commit to an everyday, every moment walk with Jesus. I’m calling
Them to be disciples and love the Lord with all their heart, soul, mind, and
Strength. I’m using wit, story, video and Bible verse. I’m using personal stories
And experience from my 14 years in ministry and my 26 years as a Christian. I’m using every resource at my command. I’m laying it on the line, holding nothing
Back as I ask them, “Is there anyone that hears God speaking to them? Is there
Anyone here that is ready to make that kind of commitment?” And a girl raises
Her hand and looks me in the eye, and I think, yes, of course, her! She is ready.
She is a disciple! And she says to me, “Rich, can I go to the bathroom?”

Preach to the bones. Why? Because when it seems that apathy and hostility are at their
Peak and all hope has long said goodbye and gone to the bathroom, still, there is no situation so hopeless that the Word of God cannot evoke a response. It is the Word of God. He can bring even dry bones to life.
Ezekiel did just that. He preached to the bones. And immediately there was a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to bone, and there were sinews and flesh and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them. They lacked Spirit. There are some people in the church like this. We listen to the word taught and preached and we even obey it in our way. We get our lives ordered and moral and proper. But beyond the nice façade, in the center of our lives there is still the same deadness. God hasn’t really changed us. There’s no passion. There’s no life. There’s no heart.

Then the Lord said to me, “Prophesy to the breath.” The Hebrew word used here is ruah, which has the double meaning of breath and spirit. The double meaning is a clear meaning – there is no life without the breath and spirit of God in us. Prophesying to the breath is another way of saying, “Pray to the One who gives us His Spirit.” Regeneration and revival never come without the serious and intent prayers of those who would be changed. Resurrection happens to people who listen to God, who speak to God, and who trusts that there is always hope; there is always life in the One who makes all things new.
Resurrection happens here and it can happen to you.

To See What Others Don’t

Scripture: John 9.1-41; 1 Samuel 16.1-13


Why do some people see opportunities others miss? In the book Did You Spot the Gorilla? Psychologist Richard Wiseman describes an experiment that provides a clue:

Volunteers watched a 30-second video of two teams playing basketball. They were asked to count the number of times one of the teams passed the ball. What they weren’t told was that halfway through the video, a man dressed in a gorilla suit would run onto the court, stand in front of the camera, and beat his chest. Amazingly, only a few of the volunteers spotted the man in the gorilla suit. Most were so intent on counting passes that they completely missed the gorilla.

Wiseman concluded that most people go through life so focused on the task at hand they completely miss “gorilla” opportunities.

He gives the example of a team of 3M researchers who were trying to develop a high-strength adhesive. One of their attempts produced a product that was actually the opposite – a very low-strength adhesive. Most of the team thought the result was a failure, but one saw it as an opportunity. That failure became the glue on 3M Post-It Notes. We should all fail so well!

If we aren’t careful, we can be so fixated on the mundane, that we miss God-given opportunities of significance.

This really, is how Jesus explains this young man’s blindness in our Gospel reading. The disciples subscribed to the common explanation of misfortune in life, which was somebody sinned and God punished them for it. The disciples asked Jesus, “Who sinned, this young man or his parents, that he was born blind?” The disciples were trapped in the mundane. They looked, but they didn’t see.

Jesus said, “You’re looking at this all wrong. Don’t you see, this happened, not as a curse, but as an opportunity for God to display his goodness in this young man’s life.”

Then Jesus spit. There’s a good memory verse for the kids. They won’t have trouble remembering this one. Jesus spit into the mud and rubbed it on the young man’s eyes. I wonder if the guy had been deaf, was he worried that Jesus would spit in his ears. He’s thinking maybe he should have said it was his elbow. Regardless of the mechanics of the healing, Jesus sent the young man to wash up. When he did, he came home seeing. Wow.

We’re reading one of my favorite books of all time in our Good Books Discussion Group. The book is A Prayer for Owen Meany. It is a story of a diminutive young man with giant faith. Owen Meany doesn’t believe in coincidences. There are no coincidences. There is FATE. There is opportunity and missed opportunity. Owen Meany believes he is GOD’S INSTRUMENT. One of his favorite sayings is, “FAITH AND PRAYER. FAITH AND PRAYER. THEY WORK. THEY REALLY DO.”

How do you see your life? Is it day after day strung together in meaningless and unrelated events and duties? Or is your life a daily adventure, pregnant with possibilities and opportunities. Sometimes I get locked into the mundane. Sometimes I’ll hear a friend say to me, O we went to this concert on Saturday and it was amazing. Or I’ll hear someone say, “We took a drive to this state park and the snow on the trees was beautiful.” And I say to myself, Why didn’t I think of that? That’s better than what I did. There was a gorilla of an opportunity and I stayed home and counted floor tile.

You almost can’t overestimate the importance of a faith-filled approach to your life. Faith gives us eyes to see opportunity. Faith gives us God’s eyes. According to Kirbyjohn Caldwell, a spiritual entrepreneur is one “who uncovers that which is masquerading as truth in the world in order to reveal truth.” For many of us, the “truth” of our daily lives is monotony and dull routine. But it’s not! Monotony is simply what we have settled for; dull routine is what has masqueraded as life and truth.

We are like some hunters I know. They spend their time walking through the woods in ways that give them little chance to see what it is they wish to see – game. What I mean is, they walk too fast and too loud. And what’s worse, they spend much of their time staring at their feet because they are afraid they will fall down if they don’t watch their steps. When they are very lucky, they hear a noise above the noise of their own huffing and puffing, and they wonder if that flash was a deer. You have to walk and look at the same time. It takes practice and skill. It’s takes faith. As Owen Meany says, “FAITH TAKES PRACTICE.”

In the Old Testament story of Samuel looking for the next king, we read that Samuel sees the eldest son of Jesse and Samuel thinks his search for a new king is over. He thinks this because Eliab is tall, strong, good-looking, authoritative. God says, “No.” Keep looking. Underline this part in your scripture: “The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” Samuel kept looking and found David,
"a man after God's own heart."

Faith gives us eyes to see as God sees. Faith gives us eyes to see opportunity. When Jesus put mud on that young man’s eyes, God gave the man his eyes to replace the ones that did not work. If it was up to the disciples, the young man would have been left blind, futilely asking God what sin he had committed to deserve his fate. God wants to replace our blindness with sight for opportunities of goodness. Here’s another scripture to underline, in John 9.39: “Jesus said, “For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” The disciples are not the only ones stuck in the blindness of the mundane. The Pharisees, who thought they could see, were more blind. They strain out the gnat but they swallow the camel. Jesus called them “blind guides.”

As we grow up, one of the things we discover is that sin that once was so titillating becomes mundane. Badness becomes boring. When we realize we don’t have the answers to happiness in life, then perhaps we are ready to see what God wants us to see. Sometimes the answer to sinful living is simply, faithful eyes. Open your eyes and see what God is doing around you!