Acts 11:1-18, Psalm 148, Revelation 21:1-6, John 13:31-35
The Easter Season is seven weeks long, till Pentecost. All season we repeat that Jesus rose from the dead, in the flesh, spiritually and bodily, no less physical for being more spiritual, more truly human, the Adam of the new humanity, the Adam of the new, improved humanity, the model of what we shall be and the sample of the world to come. In him our familiar fallen human nature has been raised to a glory and power that we wonder at.
He is a wonder and he is a sign. His new physical humanity is a sign of the future physical reality. He is the first-fruit of a new creation, a very-much this-worldly creation. He is the Eve of the new life of the world. It is hard to imagine. We are so used to a fallen world, we are used to reality as corrupted, we are used to nature as bent and life as broken. But try to imagine a real world, a this-world, made holy and righteous, I invite you to believe it and to hope for it and also represent it in your life.
The Easter season counters the conventional take on Christianity that eternal life will leave this world behind in order to be up in heaven with the angels. Because the vision in our reading from the Revelation goes the other way. The New Jerusalem comes down, and the dwelling of God is here with humankind, forever.
This vision from the Revelation confirms the message of the season of Easter that the resurrection of Jesus in the flesh is the sign that points to the ultimate reconciliation of heaven and earth and the transformation of heaven and earth, which means not the obliteration of the earth nor of natural reality but the reclamation and rehabilitation and sanctification of this real world.
Which some people do not prefer. When I was in seminary our most popular professor said that he hoped to spend eternity as a disembodied orb of conscious light. Well, okay, but I can’t see how that is Biblical. Children get closer to the Bible when they ask if there will be dogs in heaven. Well, if the vision is the reclamation of the real world, why not dogs, but not in heaven, rather in the renovated earth, the world transformed, as Jesus’s flesh was transformed in his resurrection.
He is a wonder and a sign, he is the sign that the power of the resurrection is for our transformation. From what to what? From dumb to smart? From flabby to buff? From poor to rich? These aspects may be secondary effects of resurrection transformation, but so also may be persecution, and martyrdom, and exclusion, like for Christians today in some parts of the world.
The secondary effects will differ with where you live, but no matter where you live the transformation is always moral. It is called by such words as righteousness, and holiness, and goodness, so if you are not afraid of such words in your life as goodness and holiness and righteousness, then this transformation is for you.
I confess that there’s lots in my life that I don’t really want transformed. I like my envy and my vanity and my selfishness and lust. You have your own complex of what you don’t want transformed. But the good news about this problem is that the resurrection transformation is also in your confession. It’s not only in your possession of the good but also your confession of the not-good. It’s not an absence of sin but the reconciliation of sin. It’s the reality of your new in the reconciliation of your old.
Your transformation is not in the absence of your old nature but the power of your new nature to manage the old nature still in you, the daily conversion of your old nature into your new nature. Your new nature needs your old nature to be loving of, just as God loves you while you are yet a sinner. Your new nature is distinguished not by innocence, nor by perfection, but by the love which you have for yourself, your vain self, your weak self, even your worst self, and if you can love such a self as yourself then you can love your neighbor as yourself, who really is no worse.
Two weeks ago I said that the power of the resurrection is the power to love, and to convert your love. Today I am identifying that as the power of transformation—when your love loves even what is fallen. If you are nervous about such words as goodness and holiness and righteousness, then think of them as attributes of love, of God’s love, God’s love for the world, God’s love embodied by us, by you. It is a loving kind of righteousness, a loving kind of goodness, a loving kind of holiness.
In our gospel lesson, Jesus commanded his disciples to love. This was on the night before he died. And after his resurrection his disciples had gradually to discover what he meant by this new intensity of love, with its new patterns and expectations.
Which Peter is learning in our first lesson. In his dream he was challenged three times to take the unclean food and eat. Three times to deny his deep convictions, three times to deny, so not an easy dream for Peter, the denier. Should he not hold fast? Imagine how he felt in his gut each time he woke up, his stomach still feeling the dream, and all that disgusting food. Well, it’s in your body where you finally have to face the issues of love, even of spiritual love, Christian love.
What did it mean for Peter to love those Roman soldiers whose job was to oppress the Jews? To eat their unclean food with them? Unclean not just ritually, but morally, because it’s meat and vegetables that the soldiers have taken from his people. Such love will not feel natural, it has to come from the new nature of humanity as in the resurrection. To build a whole way of life on this kind of love is to imagine what life is like in the New Jerusalem.
What stops us? What did Peter have to reconcile? The disgust, and also disdain: They may be on top of us but we’re better than them. We may have less than them but we’re smarter. We don’t need them. Why should we love them? Also the feeling of fear: Look, I gag on rhubarb, I gag on turkey bacon, so I can imagine the fear in Peter’s body, smelling the food the centurions ate, and sitting among such violent men the first time in his life.
The fear in your body can hinder your love. You have constantly to reconcile that. Or the memory of pain, like when the Roman soldier beat you down to take the catch of fish that you were bringing to your family. And now you eat his food with him? Your suffering can keep you from love. Or your bitterness that these outsiders have taken over your land, that they have more success than you do. That they look down on you. And they make you feel ashamed. And you are poor compared to them, from the oppressed economy in Galilee, so how can you love them in your resentment and anger and shame?
What keeps you from love? What shame, what fear, what loss? What sin, what guilt? The point is not to deny these things about yourself but to recognize them, admit them to yourself, confess them to God and to someone you can trust, and then love them, love these aspects of yourself.
Because this resurrection love is not wasted on what is already lovable, but is practiced and proven precisely on the unlovely, on the fearful, on the guilty, and the losers. Just as God loves you, with you still in your old nature, so you can love others just as fallen as yourself, and that is the love that is transforming, the love which transforms them who receive it and transforms you who do it and transforms the world, this world, according to the model of the new Jerusalem.
This transformation is not magical and it is not supernatural, but it is spiritual and ethical. You don’t have to do much to get it but submit to it, because God wants it for you, and as certainly as you come every week, and offer yourself to the words of Jesus, so certainly does this transformation take place in you, constantly, repeatedly, seasonally, in and out, with variations. It is as varied among you as your varied personalities and histories. Yours will not be the same as mine, except in this, that no matter what particular form the transformation of the resurrection takes in your life, it will be in a form of love. Not love as the world defines it, but love as Jesus defines it. Believe it on the basis of God’s love for you.
It is our mission to model this for the world and to welcome people into it. This sanctuary is an expression of love in architecture and decoration. This sanctuary is an intimation of the great halls in the New Jerusalem. It’s a vision of the Kingdom of Heaven in plaster and stone, the Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. We practice our worship and service to offer images of life within that city. We practice the love and the hospitality of God, the welcome home of God, who promises “that the home of God is among human beings, and God will dwell with them, and they will be God’s people, and God’s own self will be with them.”
Copyright © 2019, by Daniel James Meeter, all rights reserved.
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