On Easter in 1965 a well known radio newscaster was covering the story of Easter at a large church. In his comments he noted how many thousands of people attended church that day to celebrate the “alleged resurrection of Jesus Christ.”

The phrase “the alleged resurrection” used by the newscaster in this story got him fired from his prominent radio broadcasting job. Today such language would barely be noticed. Good Friday processions through many towns are often met with traffic that will not yield and even outright hostility. One person told me she used to be upset that cars and pedestrians would not stop to at least show some sign of respect for a solemn religious observance. On further reflection she realized that at the time Jesus was crucified the same thing happened on the streets of Jerusalem. In Roman occupied Jerusalem, crucifixion of criminals was so common that the crucifixion of a Galilean peasant teacher would hardly be newsworthy whether in 32 AD or 2010 AD.

What separated the death of one Jesus of Nazareth from the hundreds of other crucifixions the Romans carried out in Palestine was that this particular person was executed on the cross, buried in a brand new tomb, slipped out of his burial wrappings leaving them in place in the tomb, rolled the heavy entry stone away and appeared many times to the disciples and others. This Jesus fulfilled what scripture had predicted for a thousand years and rose from the dead.

This week a local radio station invited Grace Church and others to deliver a one minute message on the “1 Meaning of Easter.” When I arrived at the station I read some of the scripts delivered by other local clergy. Nearly all of them focused on the notion that Jesus’ death was a sacrifice for our sins. The older I get, the more uncomfortable I am with this explanation. It is too simple and it says more about the nature of humans than it does about the nature of God. What kind of an all powerful God would willfully desire God’s own child to die a violent death?

From the Easter story and from my pastoral work with people in all sorts of conditions there are only three things that I can really depend on: First, when human violence and tragedy occur, it is not God willing that to happen. In fact God suffers with us the same way God suffered with Jesus on the cross. Secondly, Jesus did not come to die or even to die for our sins. Jesus came to give life and give life abundantly. Jesus came to give life. Even his death on the cross could not stop his life-giving mission. Finally, the life Jesus gives he give freely to everyone.

As hard as it is to accept, this means that God wants ALL of humanity to have life and to come home: ALL of humanity ranging from Hitler to Mother Teresa; from crooks to saints; from the richest to the poorest. God wipes our slate clean and welcomes us home like the father welcomes his son home in the story of the prodigal son.

Jesus came to give life abundantly. This was only possible from exposing the brutality of the cross and the infinite potential of the empty tomb. For a moment, let’s consider the world without resurrection. The world without the empty tomb becomes a world with puppet Gods fashioned and manipulated by the will of human beings. The world without an all-forgiving God means that what is real is limited by what we can see and grasp. Without unbounded forgiveness, people fear scarcity and they fight over the limited things they can possess.

People without a God greater than death itself have no guide star. They have nothing truly ultimate above everything else. Without God, ethics degenerates into shallow legalisms. In a world without resurrection, relationships are simply cut off and never reconciled. Without the empty tomb, the authority structures in society such as teachers, police, judges and clergy all crumble since the only thing important in life is the individual.

Grace Church is richly blessed by believers in the promise of the empty tomb. God is present and working in this congregation. Generation after generation has grown up here in the faith and hope of the resurrection. Lives are changed. Families are celebrated. We are forgiven, made whole and sent out again to bless others because of our faith.

The life Jesus gives is not biological it is eternal. When we take communion we join the communion of saints including our loved ones in the past as well as people who have not even been born. In one sacred moment at the altar rail, all of those people who have touched our lives and made us who we are today are present with us. And whenever two or three are gathered in His name Jesus Christ is truly present in the breaking of the bread. In one glorious instant we are forgiven. We are made whole. We are present in the light of pure love itself. That is the Good News on Easter. We celebrate it every Sunday. Alleluia Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!!

I would like to explain one of the most important and overlooked aspects of Christian (and Jewish) faith to you. It has to do with God’s purpose for us in life. I am going to give you some of the Biblical underpinnings for it. Then I will give you a scientific perspective from my own musings as well as from Einstein. Finally we are going to talk about today’s Gospel in the context of God’s purpose for us. It’s a tall order. Let’s get started.

Last week was our first Sunday in the seven week season between Easter and Pentecost. During this time we hear about the appearances of Jesus following the resurrection and before his ascension. The psalm appointed for last week was 150. It was one of about a dozen of a type scholars refer to as “psalms of praise.” It is the final psalm in the entire collection of psalms and its location there indicates its importance.

How are we to live? How are we to worship? The answer is with praise. Halleluiah! The Hebrew Scriptures use seven different words that are translated as the word “Praise” in English. In Hebrew Psalm 150 begins every line with the word “Halleluiah,” literally “praise God” or better “Praise God’s holy name.” In contrast to the other six words for praise, “hallel” indicates joyous, raucous, even boastful (but not prideful) praise. Some dictionaries have distinguished “hallel” from its other praise words by calling it “clamorously foolish;” a phrase that recalls Paul’s “fools for Christ.”

How are we to live? The answer is clamorously foolish. How are we to worship? Clamorously foolish. Last week I had the choir chant the Latin words for psalm 150 while the psalm was read with the congregation. The ancient Latin words “Laudate dominum” (praise the Lord) “omnes gentes” (all the people), “alleluia” (praise God) were sung to a moving modern form of chant. I was trying to underscore the idea of praise because we need to let it work through our heads and into our hearts. Clamorously foolish.

When I went to the pool the other day to work out a man in the locker room saw my clergy collar and asked if I was “some kind of minister.” I replied that I was the new priest at Grace Church. As soon as I finished he jumped in uncomfortably to explain that he “should have the word ‘atheist’ tattooed across his forehead.” Life must be hard for atheists in the Midwest.

As I started doing my laps I reflected on the atheist position about human life. Since there is no creator, all of life and all of the universe is nothing but one gigantic, cosmic accident. We are a winning ticket in the cosmic lottery. Galaxies, planets in their courses, oceans, DNA, human life and your life are all one big accident according to the godless theory.

But if you start to really think about the odds it gets funny pretty fast. Even in the vast time and space of the universe the odds of one planet orbiting a medium sun with large oceans and an orbital position neither too far nor too close – like Goldilocks neither too hot nor too cold. The odds are pretty slim. Then you have to multiply that times the human race surviving killer volcanoes long enough for us to get out of the caves and create cities. Then you have to multiply that times the odds of avoiding an extinction level killer asteroid collision.

About one sizable object whizzes by in between the earth and the moon every hour. If one of these hit the earth it would wipe out a metropolitan area say from Tulsa to Muskogee. Every few years an asteroid whizzes inside the lunar orbit that would be capable of eliminating all life on the planet. Geologists have located two such craters on the Earth from 30 & 60 M years ago. Truly there but for the grace of God goes humankind. If you think this is all a cosmic accident, I suggest you go purchase a bunch of lottery tickets because they have much better odds of winning.

Or you can take the position of Albert Einstein, “There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” We are living miracles and we are to live and worship God in a way that is clamorously foolish. Whatever life we have however fleeting or long, however much suffering or joy is a miracle. And we should give thanks and praise to God for whatever life we have been given. Halleluiah!

In today’s Gospel Peter and the other disciples are still discouraged in spite of having seen the risen Christ twice. In an act of utter frustration Peter decides to return to his former occupation. He returns to what he was doing the day Jesus called him. He returns to that boundary between his old life and his new life. The setting for this story takes place on two such boundaries one is on the beach between sea and land, the other is at daybreak between night and day. The point is that God enters our world at those boundaries where our dreams are also big and clamorously foolish.

Notice that this fishing expedition has labored all night without success. At daybreak a stranger calls out to them from shore telling them to do the opposite of what they had been doing. No self respecting fisherman would follow this kind of advice but it comes to them in this boundary between despair and hope, between night and day, between sea and land. The advice is foolish but their dreams are big and they follow the stranger’s advice.

Without Christ in our work we can do nothing. When we enter this big foolish dream that Christ invites us to, our work becomes miraculous. We haul a catch of fish like never before. But also notice that the fish did not just jump into the boat. Landing the fish required that Peter and others jump in the water and work together to bring the fish ashore.

What does this mean for Grace Church? 1. We must follow Christ’s invitation not our own desires. Christ’s invitation may come first to us as a big, bold, foolish, clamorous, audacious dream. [I think the single biggest shortcoming of the Episcopal Church is thinking and acting too small.] 2. Responding to Christ’s invitation may at first seem foolish. Think of Noah building the ark, or the dream of a defeated country lawyer named Lincoln who said “I think I will run for president” or the simple desire of a diminutive Sister Theresa who said “I want to touch a poor child in Calcutta.” Christ calls us to dreams that are often bigger than we think we are. 3. And finally, once we respond to Christ’s call, it is going to take a lot of coordinated effort.

You called me here to help coordinate that effort. Christ calls you to get in the water and haul the nets. Nets filled with 153 fish. Hallelujah!

Episcopal parishes are famous for living in the past. You know the joke about how many Episcopalians it takes to change a light bulb? You can’t change that light bulb; my great grandmother gave that light bulb. A friend donated her architectural services to her big Episcopal parish in New Haven Connecticut. She designed a beautiful columbarium located inside the church nave. When she showed us the recently completed project a few months ago, she began her tour of the columbarium with the words: “In 1931, the vestry of Trinity parish voted to install a columbarium in the nave.”

Now I sincerely hope that our parish building project has a faster completion time than my friend’s parish.

But relying on the past and venerable traditions can blind us both to the future and the present. The world has changed more rapidly in the past fifty years than anyone could ever imagine. Our churches have been painfully slow to embrace change. And because most church teaching focuses on events that happened long ago, people do not learn how to connect their faith to current events. We tend to compartmentalize things so that environmental issues belong to scientists and engineers. Today the world tells us that churches should stick to their musty old creeds and doctrines while leaving technical problems to the engineers.

This process is how the church slips out of relevance and out of the public view. Bit by bit the church has nothing to contribute to modern life. But as Bob Dylan famously sung “You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone for the times they are a changin’” ALL Christians are called to apply our hearts and minds by connecting the Bible to the challenges we find in the newspaper and daily life. One author tells us that we should “pray [for events we find in] the daily newspaper.”

Destruction of our environment harms people for generations and it harms God’s good creation. Because of this the church should take a leading role on the environment. And if we do, people will come here because they will see the church getting involved in matters that are important to everyone.

Jesus tells us to “consider the lilies of the field.” A better word for “consider” would be “think deeply about” or put in a different way, “think theologically.” So how can we think deeply about the lilies of the field and all the other blessings of life on this beautiful planet without getting depressed and even anxious about the situation? Let’s consider the impact of mankind on the lilies of the field:

1. Somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii is a giant garbage patch of discarded plastic floating on the Pacific Ocean. It is twice the size of Texas. One scientist noted that cleaning up the 7 billion pound mess is not an option. The only way forward is to reduce our reliance upon plastics. An easy thing to do is use canvas bags when grocery shopping.

2. Over 400 marine environments around the world covering an area about the size of Oklahoma have no life in them at all. They are called dead zones. The principal cause is runoff of fertilizer from agricultural lands. An easy thing to do for this is to eat less meat and more vegetables.

3. In order to supply our nation’s appetite for cheap energy, in the past ten years over 1,200 miles of Appalachian streams has been totally destroyed. The former streams and their valleys are now filled with the debris from mountaintop coal mining. The simplest response to this is to use less energy. Install energy saving light bulbs and turn off all those little transformers plugged into the outlets around your house.

These are just a few examples. They harm peoples’ health now and will continue to do so for generations. Are we not called as Christians to care for the widow, the orphan, the prisoner, the sick, the elderly and the poor? These happen to be the very people who are often the most severely stressed by environmental damage. In short, improving the environment IS caring for the people that Jesus commends to our care.

Caring for the environment is not some political cause or ideology. It is conserving our planet for future generations. God calls us to be good stewards of the planet entrusted to us. When we take on this role as caretakers of God’s good creation, we need to make every decision from the perspective of our role as caretakers and not as owners.

One very practical example of this kind of decision has to do with the heating and air conditioning system for the new parish hall and offices. If we go for the lowest initial cost, we will be saddled with high energy bills. By spending more initially we can install a geothermal system that will reduce our energy usage and our utility bills forever. In this case the payback period of 6-7 years makes this decision good economic sense as well as the right thing to do as Christians.

Consider the lilies of the field. I hope that we can put environmental or “green” considerations into our new building, our parking lots, our Sunday school and adult education and even into our evangelism.

The future belongs to our children and grandchildren. Let’s make sure they have a green world too. Amen.

Right away as I began to learn about the community of Grace I discovered some differences emerging here and there. Healthy communities always strike a balance between the needs of their members. So for starters I want you to turn to your nearest neighbors and say good morning to each one of them. You do not need to go beyond the people within an arm’s length. If you do not know someone, introduce yourselves. [pause] Now AFTER the service I want all of you to join me in the parish hall for coffee. There we can actually chat and get to know one another. The best communities come together socially on a regular basis just to share love and affection with one another. That’s what coffee hour is for.

Five years, seven years perhaps even ten years from now, I will give a sermon based upon John (3:30) where John says “He [Jesus] must increase and I must decrease.” It is my constant theme in ministry and a constant reminder to me. Real, authentic Christian ministry whether one is ordained or not builds up the presence of Christ in other people. It builds up the community and it NEVER builds up the minister.

We must keep this in mind because new beginnings are full of both promise and peril. If we keep our hearts and minds focused on building up Christ in one another and in the community around us then we cannot go wrong. For us to be successful Jesus Christ must increase here and I must decrease. As Paul tells his community in Philippi, “whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.” And for me the converse is also 1: whatever I have lost in this world has become gains for Christ.

Our psalm starts out with a wonderful notion as perfect for us today as for those who had waited 70 years in Babylon to return to their home in Zion. “When the Lord restored our fortunes in Zion, then were we like those who dream.” Later the psalmist implores God to “Restore our fortunes like the watercourses of the Negev.” These verses were written about the same time Isaiah made his bold proclamation.

Nearly six hundred years before Christ, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar attacked Jerusalem and marched 40,000 of the leaders and elite of Jerusalem 600 miles across the desert to Babylon where they remained under house arrest for several generations. The prophet in what we call “Second Isaiah” announces to these Israelite captives an unthinkable future. He tells them

Do not remember the former things,
or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?

Very soon God will use Cyrus and his Persian army to defeat Babylon and release captive Israel. Cyrus will see that they return safely to their homeland and he will see to it that the ruins of Jerusalem will be rebuilt. Second Isaiah speaks on behalf of God, “I am about to do a new thing; … do you not perceive it?” In just a few years God accomplished what they had been dreaming about for 70 years. What have the people of Grace Church been dreaming about for so long? What holds us back?

Let’s stay with Isaiah a bit longer. While the period of exile for the Jews sounds like a terrible experience the Bible says otherwise. Mostly the leaders and educated Jews were deported to Babylon. They were well organized, allowed to own land, continue in worship, participate in trade, enjoy the benefits of Babylonian life and even serve on royal projects with the military. They were safe, had many freedoms and many enjoyed wealth. In short, they were flourishing in a foreign land.

Meanwhile back in Jerusalem things were quite a bit worse. The city had been sacked and was occupied by people from surrounding countries. Jerusalem was quickly returning to the state of the barren rocky Judean desert. The challenge presented to Isaiah was how do you get a group of people to move who are comfortable, settled, whose children are born in the new country, to move back to a bleak shell of a city occupied by foreigners and with no immediate prospects for income? Isaiah’s task was to convince these well off comfortable people to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the city.

The leaders in exile had learned one thing that would be key to their return. They realized that it was only through God’s grace that they were able to flourish and enjoy the life they had in Babylon. All Isaiah had to do was to remind them that whatever they had done, God forgives them. Next he recounts for them all the mighty acts God had done for them.

Fortunately they were allowed to worship in exile. They realized that what they accomplished in Babylon was not done on their own but only by God’s grace. With that kind of faith these people left a very comfortable life. They went back to the desert for a difficult 600 mile journey home.

During those months traveling across a dangerous, dry desert they must have asked themselves about their future. Everything was uncertain. But they pressed on in faith and utter confidence in the same sense of Paul where he “forgets what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on.”

And we will press on together you and me. We will strain forward in faith and hopefully with a good dose of humor and forbearance. We can have fun and there will be much work to do. We will laugh and we will cry together. With God through our faith in the work of Jesus Christ we will return and rebuild the city. Only when we build up our faith; only when we build up each other will God be able to do a new thing. “Now it springs forth. Do you not perceive it?”