Easter 14 Resurrection, Let It Hit Home

[HKHaugan]

Easter 14 Resurrection, Let It Hit Home

In this time when we have just celebrated the Resurrection of Jesus we really need to get down to the business of communicating our faith. Why is the Resurrection so important? What does it mean for the world? What does it mean for me? It’s a lot more personal than we think and has a lot less to do with religion. It’s got everything to do with who we are as images of God, how we think about Him, one another and the world around us. why we are here and what living is all about.

In order to really answer the ‘why’ and ‘what’ questions we have to look at our individual human condition. We really have to look in the mirror, deep in the mirror and what lies behind it. Three things stand out about our human condition. The first is our personal aloneness. The second, based on the first, are the needs our aloneness presents us. Third, we have to face the differences in needs. We have to differentiate our real needs from perceived needs.

The human condition is one of being born into a growing awareness of self-conscious aloneness, the needs arising from that aloneness, and facing the fact that the only answers to our visible dilemma are invisible. Action, a teenage hood spoiling for a fight over gang territory in the musical tragedy West Side Story, is confronted by a local candy store owner who looks at him disgustedly and says, “When I was your age…” Action interrupts him shouting angrily, “When you was my age, when my father was my age, when my mother was my age…you ain’t never been my age.”

Action is screaming something that is taking place in all of us. None of us has ever really been like anyone else. Right now is when I am alive. No one has ever been alive like me. It doesn’t matter what other people are like, old, young, adults, kids, men, women, fathers, mothers---I’m the center of my experience and no one really knows me, has been like me or ever will be. What do I do with me? What am I all about? Action believed his only hope was to be part of a gang, a gang that’s tough, a gang that’s number one.

We are all born in a body, alone inside, never understanding or really grasping what is on anyone else’s mind. We all may have been young once but no one is ever the same in that youth or at any other stage of life. We are all born uniquely, live individually and relate personally the best we can. As we view one another it is all guesswork and assumption. People are ultimately mysteries to one another.

While we all speak a verbal language there is another language that is expressed on another level, a heart level. That language is a language of aloneness that has dialects of emotion like struggling for acceptance, fearing rejection, hoping for something better, nagging dissatisfaction and the need to find completion, purpose. Then there are dialects of economics, the social and physical sciences, poetry, philosophy and in the study of language itself we find shifting dialects of our basic language of aloneness. That’s what makes our human word languages so frustrating. They never seem to adequately express the deeper inner being’s sense of the need to communicate who and what we really are.

Ask parents why their kids seem like strangers to them from time to time. Ask kids why they believe their parents don’t understand them. Extend this into communities and nations and the problem of understanding and being understood is magnified beyond anyone’s ability to relieve it. Art, drama, literature, movies are all attempts to cross the aloneness barrier that besets every human attempt at interchange.

Ben, the older brother of Eugene, the main character in the play adaptation of Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel,” tells his searching younger brother, “Eugene, the world is not outside, the world is you.” In the same book Eugene ponders what he must have experienced as an infant,”…and left alone to sleep in a shuttered room…unfathomable loneliness crept though him…caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, his life must always walk down lonely passages. Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one really comes to know anyone…and caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never , no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never.”

Wolfe’s book pleads for an answer and for the last two thousand years He has been right there in front of us, the One who shared our aloneness and rescued us from it dying as its victim but rising from its death and defeating its emptiness.

Paul, in Philippians 2:5-11 captures Jesus’ embrace of our aloneness, “…being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped but made Himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And, being in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to death---even death on a cross!”

In other words He took the experience of our frustrating aloneness, lived in it, introduced a whole new spiritual way of seeing self, others and God, accepted death in order to reach our hearts and give us not only hope but a whole different way of looking at and living life. We are no longer at the mercy of aloneness because when He rose from the dead He proved that no one is ever alone or that they ever have to feel alone again. He introduced the reality of faith as a capacity in everyone that, when centered in Him, is aloneness canceled and real relationship restored. He recovered faith for us. He restored faith for us. By faith in Him we now know He is always there with us. The phone commercial that says ‘Reach out and touch someone’ is really a call to overcome aloneness. That is what God did. He sent His Son to reach out and touch us. For those of us who let Him touch us we know we are no longer alone.

Given a struggling economy, growing world unrest, the tenuous job market and creeping fear within, aloneness is screaming from within for an answer. Broken relationships, divorce, increasing physical problems and the horizon of uncertainty facing us every sunrise. Aloneness is real. Why are there so many songs about being alone, so called self-help books written, clubs formed, TV dating services emerging? People are not able to deal with the one thing that threatens the interior of all human beings, aloneness. So when Jesus answers Thomas’ question about where Jesus is headed He replies, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Here Jesus gives us the orientation for patterning our daily life, for reasoning and decision-making and for spiritual grounding----an ongoing personal relationship with Him. We want to present to present Him to others who don't know Him. Can we bring someone to that point where we can ask them, “Will you let Him, allow Him, ask Him to touch you?” And if someone asks “Why Jesus?” perhaps we can ask gently, “Why not Jesus?”