Here we are in the midst of the most holy of weeks, which will consummate with the celebration of the Resurrection of Our Lord. Easter grounds everything that we have to say about hope and life. It speaks about God's stubborn will and astonishing promises for this world. The challenge we face as the church is that the vast majority of North Americans really do not know the great news of Easter and its implications.

If we believe the National Study on Youth and Religion - a study funded by Lilly Endowment and led by great minds from Notre Dame, Emory, and Duke - 92% of all young people think that belief in God has something to do with "being nice" and then being rewarded for being nice by "going to heaven" after one dies. When trying to dig deep and discover where our youth got their belief system, the study claims that they caught it from the adults in their lives, mainly their parents. This is why Kendra Creasy Dean in her book, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the North American Church (Oxford University Press, 2010), asserts that we have been invaded by some sort of foreign entity that has taken up space in our life together. What our teenagers have caught from their parents and other adults is what she calls "moralistic, therapeutic deism," which is a hodgepodge of "banal, self-serving, feel-good beliefs that have nothing to do with traditional Christianity."

We, as the church, need to recognize that the idea of our souls going to "heaven," as our culture understands it, is from the Greeks and not Jesus. That there is some sort of utopia out there in another dimension where the souls of nice people go after they die has more in common with Star Trek than with Jesus and the empty tomb. Yet frequently we hear things like, "Well, she is in a better place now," meaning that the pain and suffering are gone and she is no longer bound by this hurtful world and is in "heaven" now.

When Jesus speaks about heaven - and he doesn't speak about it much - it is always about God and wherever it is that God reigns and God rules. The "kingdom of God" and "kingdom of heaven" are interchangeable concepts. It has nothing to do with a "place" out there somewhere. It has to do with being "in on" and "with God." What Jesus speaks about frequently is resurrection, specifically his resurrection after the world will kill him. What grounds the New Testament is not the promise of heaven but the redemption of the entire world. This is what we mean when we confess that we believe in the "resurrection of the body." Resurrection is not going off to some place. It is being transformed from death to everlasting life in a redeemed body, for a redeemed world, inhabited by redeemed people, and where sin, death, and suffering are all swallowed up and love, peace, and joy are without end.

Easter then should compel us to look at everything with Resurrection eyes - new eyes given to us because of Easter. When we see hurt, hunger, injustice, betrayal, hate, and despair, our Easter eyes tell us that what we see will be transformed into healing, fullness, justice, loyalty, love, and hope. Our eyes not only help us see a future that transcends the present reality, it compels us to work for what we see, and to dream what Jesus dreams.

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.

⁷And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death forever. ⁸Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the Lord has spoken. ⁹It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.
 - Isaiah 25:6-9

Now that's a lot better than heaven!

I'll see y'all in worship!

Pastor Rick