A Resurrection Story for 2018

“We Christians say glibly that we are "saved by the death and resurrection of Jesus" but seem to understand this as some kind of heavenly transaction on his part, instead of an earthly transformation … We need to deeply trust and allow both our own dyings and our own certain resurrections, just as Jesus did! This is the full pattern of transformation.” Richard Rohr

I have a ‘Resurrection Story’ for this morning … well sort of!

A computer had refused to turn on and so it was taken to the computer doctor. After a number of days the message was received that the computer had died and please come and pick up the ‘body’ for burial. However once it was safely home again, the owner decided that the computer could be resurrected with the help of running the ‘restore’ disc and some loving care. Now I would like to be able to say this story had a happy ending, but alas the next day found the owner in a store buying a new hard drive to replace the one that had died! So why do I call this a Resurrection Story? Because even with the new hard drive installed and the old one gone, those things that had been ‘learned’ with the old will continue to be part of the new.

The core of the ‘Resurrection story that we will hear read from the Gospel and preached in the sermon on Easter Sunday talks of the bodily resurrection after 3 days of a man who had been crucified by the Roman Empire as [pardon the term] a shit-disturber. Many people to this day believe literally what the Gospel writers were saying. However once you leave that childlike belief in the magical for a more mature faith, you see the story in a different way that is just as true.

I believe in the resurrection of Jesus: not a physical resurrection, but just the same a resurrection. After his death his followers were so inspired by what Jesus had taught them, that instead of forgetting what he had taught, they began to live their lives by those precepts.

“[We need] a new understanding of Christ, a new way of doing theology, and a renewed sense of Christian life. The vernacular theology of the mystics is the most viable way that Christ can be raised from the dead and become “God for us”—through participation, dialogue, and engagement with the world.” Ilia Delio

Like the computer hoped to be, like you and like me, Jesus, too, was resurrected.

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