Well, good morning. As some of you know, I’ve had the privilege of preaching here now for a number of years. And over the course of those years, I realize there’s been a number of occasions when I’ve been invited to preach on this Sunday – the Sunday after Easter.

And as I was thinking about preparing for this Sunday, I realized that this is in some ways one of the hardest Sundays of the year for me to preach because – whether or not I’m preaching – I often come to this Sunday with a little bit of what I think of as a spiritual hangover.

I don’t know if you were here last week, but we had such a glorious Easter service. Dan preached a powerful sermon, and the choir, the organ, the music was inspirational, and we were filled with sort of robust singing as a congregation. You could sense that Christ was very much alive and very much in our midst.

But this Sunday, you know, it kind of seems back to normal. There’s no choir. There’s no long line of people in the narthex ready to knock us over trying to get the pews for the next service. So this is a kind of sense of back to normal stuff. And frankly, a number of times on this Sunday, I come in with a little bit of a kind of tinny aftertaste. Or, if I were to put it in words, it would be something like – So now what? Now what? We’ve had this wonderful Easter, but so now what?

Well, that’s actually exactly the question (it seems to me) that Jesus is trying to speak to with his disciples in this passage that I want us to read together. We’ve had Easter, so now what?

I’m going to read from the very end of the Gospel of Luke. This is the evening. It’s night time on Easter day. The disciples are gathered in the Upper Room. They are trying to process all of the different reports that have come in over the course of that day. And I’m going to read from Luke 24, starting with the 36 th verse.

Reading: Luke 24:36-53

Well, it seems to me that we could think iof this text that we just read here as Jesus trying to help his disciples come to grips with the fact of the resurrection and really giving them 3 different (sort of) frames of reference. Three time frames from which to look at it. In some senses, he helps them to position the resurrection in the present. And then he helps them to position it in the past. And then he helps them position it in the future.

And so, let’s take a look at that for a moment. He has to start really with the present, because he has to deal with their present reaction to the resurrection. He comes into their midst and he says to them, “Peace be with you” – probably knowing that that is about the least likely emotion that they’re going to experience. And indeed, immediately, they are startled and terrified, and you can sense that they are casting about for some mental category that can fit what they are experiencing.

This is their friend – their teacher – that they saw or heard was killed, hanging on a cross just three days ago. He was taken down dead, he was wrapped in burial cloths, he was put in a tomb, a big stone was put in front of him…and now, they seem to see him standing there in their midst and talking to them. And they don’t know how – they have no constructs – to hold this. And you can sense their searching until they land on one…ah, ghosts. This is a ghost.

For the next 4 or 5 verses, really the whole point of the text is Jesus seeking to persuade his disciples that when he was raised from the dead, he was not raised as some disembodied spirit, but indeed was raised as a physical, material body. He says, “Look! Look at my feet!” (We know from the gospel of John that those still bore the marks of the crucifixion.) He says, “Touch me! You can touch. See there’s flesh. There’s bone. Ghosts don’t have that.” It says, while they were still disbelieving, he said, “Do you have anything to eat? How about fish and chips?” he said, well here. Here’s a piece of fish. And he eats the fish right in front of them in a way – of course – that a ghost could not.

It’s interesting to me that the very first thing that Jesus wants to make sure his disciples hear and know after the resurrection is that he was raised in bodily form. He gives it his first attention. And Luke seems to think it is awfully important because he gives the lion’s share of this passage over to this thought.

And so it seems to me that we ought to at least – if we’re going to take this passage seriously – at least pause for a moment and try to think about what the characteristics of this resurrection body might have been…what it was like.

Now we know a little bit from the Gospels, though there’s a lot we don’t know. We know some things. We know, for example, that the resurrected Jesus must have looked a good deal like the pre-resurrected Jesus. After all, he shows up in the midst of these disciples, and nobody says, “Hey, who is that guy?” They all know right away that that’s Jesus. So there is some continuity between the Jesus that they knew before and the way this Jesus now looks in his resurrected body.

As we’ve already said, his resurrected body has some of the same physical characteristics that it did before, in the sense that it has material. It can be touched. It can eat. We know from the gospel of John that it can cook fish over an open fire. Probably could hit a baseball if he wanted to. In many ways, the resurrected body of Jesus seems similar to and is in a sense continuous with the pre-resurrected Jesus.

But of course, there are some also seemingly radically different things. For example, the physical resurrected Jesus can seemingly appear and disappear. Can mask whether or not he can be recognized. Can show up in different locations, almost kind of transported around. And perhaps, and most significantly, just before the resurrection, the pre-resurrected body of Jesus was dead. And the new resurrected body of Jesus is now infused with life.

And in fact it’s a different kind of life. You know Jesus when he was walking around with his disciples in Galilee was alive. But he was alive like you and I are alive – with living lives that were still subject to disease, to decay, to death. But now it’s filled with resurrection life. It’s different. It’s more robust. It’s brighter. It’s stronger. In some senses – indeed in all senses – it is immortal. It is no longer going to ever decay, get sick, or die.

Just as an aside, this is what distinguishes the resurrection of Jesus from the resurrection of Lazarus. You remember in the gospel of John, Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. Lazarus was dead. And then he truly came back to life. But the life that he came back to was the kind of life you and I are living. It was a life that is susceptible to decay, and eventually Lazarus died again. Jesus comes back to resurrection life, a different kind of life. This body will never die again.

And so, in that sense, there is this kind of radical break with the pre-resurrection Jesus. There’s this radical discontinuity. In some senses, the body is continuous with the pre-resurrection. And in other senses, it’s radically discontinuous. In fact, probably the best we can say about the character of his resurrected body is that it was some mysterious mix of things carried forward from the past and things that were radically new.

But that’s how Jesus begins. That’s how he addresses/deals with his disciples and their concern. He says, basically, “I’m not a ghost.”

And then he turns and tries to help them position the resurrection in the past. And if you’ll permit me let me use an analogy from business. In business, what often makes companies successful is innovation. You can innovate in a variety of ways. But if you innovate, say with a product, you come up with a new product or a twist on an old product that makes your product better than your competitor’s. You get a so called competitive advantage, and it helps drive your business forward. And so businesses, you might guess, are always very interested in innovation.

Now there are multiple types of innovation. Most innovation is what we think of as incremental innovation. You have kind of a trajectory of a product. But someone thinks of kind of the next thing on that trajectory.

So think, for example. You have a cell phone that’s got a key pad on it and somebody says, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if we could have a little slide out that would have a little bigger keypad, and they invent that, that’s an innovation – kind of an incremental innovation. But what companies really want, what they hunger for and very few find, are so called ‘disruptive innovations’ – these that seem to come out of the blue and change everything. They turn the whole industry upside-down because they were totally unanticipated.

You could debate this, but arguably the iPod was a disruptive innovation. Before the iPod was brought on, there were a couple of companies that had tried to experiment with downloadable music for sale, and weren’t very successful. In fact, almost all of the downloadable music that was being transferred was done illegally through Napster. The music industry was adamantly trying to stop that and make us all buy CD’s.

And Apple came along and said, “Look. If you have a kind of stylish product and an easy to use portal and the right pricing model, we think you could make money selling music digitally." And sure enough they were right. And sure enough they made a lot of money. But they turned the industry upside-down. And now, indeed, more music is sold in digital format than it is sold through CD’s. There were in a sense, a game changer, this product.

Now, for the disciples, Jesus’ resurrection at least set in the context of their experience and their understanding of history would look like one of these disruptive innovations. It was something that seemed to turn everything upside-down. They had thought that they understood that death meant when you died, you were done. That if you wanted to change things, you did it through power. And that God’s purpose in the world was to go and rescue the nation of Israel.

And then along comes Jesus, who died, but wasn’t done. Who is making change not through the exercise of power, but through giving up his life and going to the cross. And who begins to say that the true purpose of God is not just to save the nation Israel, but somehow mysteriously through the death and resurrection of the Messiah, to find a way to proclaim forgiveness and repentance to all the nations, starting with Jerusalem.

It turns everything upside-down. And surely these disciples are right when they say that God is doing a new thing. This is a brand new activity unlike anything before. Never before in human history has a truly resurrected body walked around, talked, lived, on this planet earth. First time ever. A radical break with the past.

But then Jesus seems to want to show them that while there is a radical break, it is also continuous with the work of God in the past. And he goes back and he begins to open up scripture.

One of these things in business about these disruptive technologies is that they often seem at first glance to come out of nowhere. But then when you look back from actually having seen them invented, you can see that these didn’t come out of nowhere. They just took that idea, and that idea, and that idea and they combined them in a way that no one had ever thought to combine them before.

And in some sense that is what Jesus is doing here. He’s saying, “The fact of my resurrection – my crucifixion and resurrection – now that we can see through that lens back to the scriptures, you can see how it was anticipated from the beginning.” And he says, “Let me take you through the Law, the Prophets, the Psalms” – what would have been for them the whole of their scriptures. And he says, “Everything in them is pointing to this. Everything is anticipating this. And indeed, everything here is being fulfilled in the death and resurrection of the Messiah.” This is what the whole Old Testament is pointing to.

Now, I think what Jesus is wanting to say underneath that is that fundamentally God has not changed His mind. That God hasn’t given up on his initial plan for humanity. From the beginning, God created a wonderful, good earth. A world that was to abound and flourish in shalom. He put human beings in it with the expectation that they would enjoy it and add to it in their creativity. And that in this wonderful, flourishing shalom, God and humans would have this ongoing, transparent, intimate, loving relationship forever. That was God’s original plan.

And I believe that what Jesus is trying to say to his disciples is, “God hasn’t changed His mind.” That’s still exactly what God wants. And the crucifixion and resurrection, while in one sense radically different from anything that has come before, is nonetheless still a continuation and insistence that God wants His plan. And indeed, in the crucifixion and resurrection has opened the door that it might be possible.

So he speaks to the present. “I am not a ghost.” He speaks to the past, “God has not changed His mind.” And now he turns to the future. This is really where we get to the “so now, what?”.

And when he talks to his disciples about what is to come next, it’s very simple, really. In effect what he says is: empowered by the Holy Spirit, you are to go and bear witness to these things. That’s what this means for you. To bear witness to these things. To testify to the truth of the resurrection. And it’s a strong word, so it’s not just testify in terms of giving oral testimony, but so that your whole lives give testimony to the truth of the fact that Jesus was raised from the dead. That’s the “so what.”

And you might say, if that’s what he was calling the first century disciples to, isn’t that truly what he’s calling the 21 st century disciples to…to bear witness in our whole lives to the resurrection of Jesus.

Now what does that look like? What might that mean?

Well it seems to me that Jesus has kind of modeled it in the sense that he has said that it has something to say about the past, it has something to say about the present, and it has something to say about the future.

So what does it mean for you and me to testify about the truth of the resurrection in the past?

Well, it seems to me that we would say this. We would say that there was historically, truthfully a time when there was a person whose name was Jesus who was also God, who lived and walked in a real space, real time on this planet, who was arrested, who was tortured, and who was killed. And when who was dead, was buried. But that this same person also rose from the dead, not metaphorically, not philosophically, but physically, historically. That he was again a real person in real space in real time. And if we are to testify to the truth of the resurrection, I think we must insist on that peace.

But beyond that, it seems to me, that to testify to the truth of the resurrection I think we must insist on that piece. But beyond that, it seems to me to testify to the truth of the resurrection is to live lives that reflect the fact that we are worshipping a God who has not given up on his desire for humanity. Who has not given up on his people. Who has never given up on his plan to live in loving, ongoing, perpetual relationship with humanity.

So that’s, I think, what it means to testify to it in the past. What might it mean to testify to the truth of the resurrection in the present?

For me, one of the most powerful moments I’ve ever had in a worship service came here about a month ago, when Gary and Maxine shared their testimony. Many of you know Maxine is a long-standing and much beloved member of our community. But unless God intervenes mightily – for which we continue to pray mightily – she’s going to die, and probably die soon from cancer. And she was sharing that from the lectern here. She shared lots of things. Gary shared lots of things.

But at one point she talked about going back to her primary caregiver whom she hadn’t seen for a little while. And after they had talked for a bit, the caregiver said to her, “How is it, Maxine, given what you’re facing, that you could have such a positive outlook?” And Maxine said, “Well, for one thing I don’t believe that death is the end. I believe that I’m going to eternal life.”

Then she said what I will never forget. She said, “You know, all of our lives bear testimony to something. In my current situation I could testify to fear, or I could testify to joy. And I choose joy.”

You and I may not be dying of cancer, but just as it’s true for Maxine our lives always testify to something. There are lots of competing stories in the present. The present is kind of an ambiguous time. We live post-resurrection and yet we are still awaiting its final consummation.

And so there are lots of stories. There are stories of brokenness and death all around us. There are stories of our creation over-polluted, overheated, overpopulated, fraying. There are stories of broken societies with war and ravages, hunger and disease. And there’s stories of individuals whose bodies are broken, and who are dying. There are these stories, and there’s a sense of truth about those stories. And some people choose to live their lives testifying to those stories. And they often end up in cynicism, or fatalism, or annihilism.

But there’s another story. Sometimes it’s a quieter story. It’s a harder to see story. But it’s a story of resurrection life breaking into this world. Every time you see an act of kindness. Every time you see an act of mercy. Every time you see an act of hospitality, of justice. Every time you see one of these things, what you are seeing is the resurrection life breaking in to the world.

And we get to choose which of the stories we will let our lives testify to. Will we testify to the brokenness and darkness? It’s true. We could stay with that story. We’re not Pollyanna-ish. But as deeply true as that story is, the story of resurrection life is deeper. And we can choose to let our lives testify to that.

What does that mean? It means when we see these little things, we can call them out. We can say, “That’s God’s life coming in.” You can point it out to others. You can give God thanks.

But beyond that it means you and I can live lives that participate in that. We can be agents of reconciliation and of justice and of mercy and of beauty. We can bring God’s kingdom, God’s resurrection life into this world, or at least live out signs of it that points to its coming. And that, it seems to me, is what it means for us to testify to the truth of the resurrection in the present.

What does it mean to testify to the truth of the resurrection in the future? Well this would be a wonderful, very long talk. And I don’t have nearly enough time to tell you about it…and it’s frankly that which most excites me. But let me tell you just a couple of things that I think it means to testify to the truth. I think it means to live in light of the truth of the following.

That there will come a day when I will get to go, and with my own eyes, see Jesus. And with my own ears, hear Jesus. And with my own hands, touch his resurrected body. I believe there will come a day when I will have myself a resurrected body. It says in scripture that Jesus is the first fruits. That is, he’s the pioneer. He’s the first, but not the last of the resurrected bodies. He has gone before us. But the first fruits is just a hint at the harvest that is to come. I am going to have a resurrected body. And my resurrected body, like Jesus, is going to be this weird and mysterious mixture of continuity and discontinuity.

In one mysterious way (I don’t know what this looks like), but the Jeff that you know, I know here in this world, is still going to be Jeff in the resurrected body. Somehow the uniqueness, the giftedness, the something of me…you’ll still be able to walk around eternity and say, “There’s Jeff.” There will be that sense that I will be still there.

Now here I am going to go out onto an edge that is admittedly getting close to the edge of what you can say is true. Some might disagree with this. But I have come to believe that not only will I continue in some fashion, but at least in some ways and some of the works that I do here will also follow me into eternity. When I engage in an act of justice, when I open my office in hospitality, when I reach out to a student in mercy, when I do some of the works that I do…and what I’m about to say isn’t exactly right, but I can’t come up with better words…I am in some fashion creation creating raw material that God is going to adopt and use in the building of His kingdom.

I don’t know what that looks like. I don’t know how that continuity is going to carry across. But what that tells me is that my work here and now matters. I’m not just spinning around the hamster wheel waiting for that final day. I am participating in some weird way in the building of what God is doing in all eternity.

When we were talking about this as a faculty in our School of Business, Paul Stevens came down. He’s a theologian from Regent. And he came and spoke to our faculty. And on this point he said, “I have a hobby. I like to carve wooden ducks. And every now and then when I carve a wooden duck that is really a cool one I say, ‘Oh, maybe you will be with me in heaven.’”

Now I don’t think we have anywhere near enough information to make that kind of translation. But there is some sense of continuity that means that my work matters. And more than that, the fact that Jeff in some fashion continues means that I matter. That the unique and special way that God has made me is important to God. And that I am not saved and taken to heaven as just sort of part of an undifferentiated mass of all of humanity that Jesus died for. That something unique and special about me is worth preserving. That God likes it, and God wants to live with it and relate with it forever and ever and ever. And the same is true for you. There is a remarkable continuity.

On the other hand, just as was true of Jesus’ body, there is also going to be a remarkable discontinuity. Everything is going to be changed. Everything will be turned upside down. My body will be completely transformed. All of the weird sort of peculiarities will be redone and made right. I think in heaven I will be able to carry a tune, and I actually ohpe that this little nervous laugh that I have sometimes will go away. But more than that, my life will be infused with this resurrection life. No longer susceptible to decay and fatigue and weariness. My life will be raised in Christ’s life, filled with immortality.

You know we talk about how, when we die, we’re going to have eternal life. And we talk about that as somehow meaning more of this. It’s not. It’s eternal life well beyond the kind of life that we have the privilege of enjoying here. That’s what we testify to. We live in light of those realities when we point to the future.

Now from my own experience, different people are wired differently. For some of us it is easier to give testimony in the historical, factual sense. I can prove, I can show you from various pieces of evidence that it’s more likely than not that the real person of Jesus was died...was crucified...was raised. And that’s an important piece. Some people, it seems to me do best testifying just out of their personal experience. Let me just tell you how I feel that Christ is alive in my life right now, and speak into the present. And some people are so caught up and so animated by the hope for the future that that's what they find easiest to share about.

It seems to me that God is inviting all of us to bear witness in all of these realms, in all of these ways. And so I would invite you today to ask God, "Where is it that you are calling me to bear witness? Where is it easy for me to witness to the truth of Your resurrection? And where might You be stretching me?" Because truly, truly Jesus Christ is raised from the dead. He has a resurrection body. It happened in history. It's inbreaking the present. And it's fulfilled in the future. And that's why we celebrate. That's why this is Easter.

Let's pray.

Lord, I thank You for Your presence with us now. I thank You for what You have done for us in the past. And I thank You for the invitation and hope that You hold out for us in the future. I pray that You would make us people who are worthy of the name Christian. That we will be true disciples, and as disciples we will pick up this call to give testimony - to bear witness - in word and in deed in all our lives. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.