Kneel Before God. Stand Before the World. End of Easter Season musings

"Fear vs. Joy.  Which is evident in your life?"

Easter is a time of Joy.  Yet how soon til we go back to living in fear?  Fear of the every day ordinary events that so often consume our thoughts - worries of job, family, marriage, income, housing, civil unrest, global issues, war, and so on. We do not have to look far to understand that our world is NOT a fine place, and it has become rotten to the core because we have made it that way.  OUR sin, OUR greed, OUR self-focus and preservation have left this world a pretty undesirable place, and a place where fear often abounds.
All four Gospels tell us of the fear AND joy surrounding the events we remember and celebrate on Easter, each in their own way.  Although Mark records that the women initially said nothing to anyone out of fear, we obviously know that eventually they must have, or else there would be no such thing as a Christ-follower today.  Fear cripples us.  Fear does NOT lead us to understanding that Jesus destroys the powers of sin, death, and the devil for us.  Fear keeps us in that state of self-preservation, in service to Satan, not God, and leads us to self destruction.
It is the joy of knowing who Jesus is and what God has done that needs to rule in our lives. It is the joy of knowing they were wrong - that Jesus was right all along - that led to overcoming their fears, ending the hiding in locked rooms, boldly going and proclaiming to the world what God has done for humanity, often with the world rejecting their claims and putting them to death, and all the while NEVER diminishing the pure joy that accompanies the knowledge that Jesus is alive!  That Jesus destroys those unholy powers of sin, death, and Satan because death couldn’t hold him forever!  It led to the disciples growing in number, and it led to them truly kneeling before God, and so in their joy, no matter what the world held for them, they could stand and face it boldly, knowing that it was their Lord and Master Jesus who held the final word for them!  St. Paul says “For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship.” (Ro 8:15) This creates joy.  Faith leads us to acknowledge the absolute sovereignty of God, and there is only one response in that joy of knowing the great things God has done for us, and that is to acknowledge the mighty power of God!  And as he also says, “if God is for us, who can be against us?”  No powers can ever truly prevail against that, and so we can stand before the world’s onslaught with nothing to fear - whether it is in the face of persecution for our beliefs or simply the worries of life that weigh us down daily and cause us to fear for the future!
So why are you afraid?  Are you like the women who fled from the tomb with fear AND joy? Their reaction is to be expected, I suppose.  After all, how would you react if someone you watched die reappeared three days later?  BUT, does joy win out over fear?  Or do we remain in fear, stifling the joy of knowing that God has the final word for us because God had the final word with Satan when death took hold of humanity?  There is plenty to fear as our first video reminds us.  However, we also have a stark reminder today that fear is not to be our master, but the joy of knowing Jesus as our master!  So celebrate today, and be joyful, and let the joy of today spill into each day.  Let every day be Easter for us - seeing the empty tomb and the risen Jesus and ALL that it entails for us -  that indeed, as Jesus tells all his disciples, his “joy may be in us, and our joy be made complete.”  (John 15:11) Do not be slaves to fear any longer, for he is risen.  He is not here, just as he said.  With news like that, no one can be against us!  Amen.

Does anyone really care what I think?

The key is in the title:  what I think.  As if it really matters what I think.  What makes my thoughts better or worse than anyone else's?  How does my version of the truth matter more than someone else's?

Therein lies the fundamental problem today.  We have collectively reduced truth to a relative thing.  It unfortunately all came to a head a few years back when then presiding bishop of the ELCA Mark Hanson commented that there were two opposite yet equally valid hermeneutics at work in the ELCA (with regard to views on human sexuality).  There is a fundamental and fatal flaw in that statement.  Opposite things cannot be equally valid in our lives.  It is tantamount to stating that "anything goes," which certainly does not promote the public good, nor is it consistent with what God intends.

Some of you may have just tuned out because you don't believe in God.  I'm sorry you believe that way.  Look around you.  If you want to know more about God, simply look at the universe around you.  If you cannot see the hand of the creator there, you will never find it.  Even the renowned Atheist and humanist Dr. Carl Sagan, near his own death, seemed to be questioning it all in one of his last books - a novel:  "Contact."

For our society to survive, there HAVE to be certain absolutes.  Otherwise, we reduce ourselves to chaos and anarchy.  It is not at all what God intends, and when we stray from God's absolute truth, it gets us into trouble.  It isnt' a matter that God will always punish us for doing so, though that is certainly the case with Israel of the Old Testament.  Rather, it is that to do so brings about certain consequences simply because it goes against what God intends.

So its not a matter at all of what I think.  Rather, its a matter of what God thinks.  There is an absolute truth, but it is set, maintained, and perpuated ONLY by God.  Will we ever truly know or understand the mind of God?  Of course not in this lifetime.  Yet James says "come near to God, and he will come near to you."  So as R.C. Sproul has said, and others have repeated, when the Word of God seems troublesome, the problem is with me and not with it.

So in the end, what I think is that I'm unable to think completely about God, life, and the universe.  The absolutes lie with God, and it is there that we must find ourselves.