In March 2011 a tsunami with towering 30-foot-high waves battered the coast of Japan and caused the meltdown of a nuclear reactor. More than 19,000 people died on that day —six times more people than died in the terrorist attacks on the United Stated on 9/11.
In a small village called Otsuchi, one farmer reacted to the loss of his friends and loved ones by installing a phone booth on a windy hill on his land overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It’s called the “wind telephone.”
It’s said that a person can speak into this telephone and somehow their words will be heard by their dead loved ones. 1000’s of people have come to this lonely phone booth on a windy hillside to talk to people they lost in the tsunami.
Inside is a rusted old rotary dial phone—no wiring, no connection to anything outside the phone booth, just sitting there. People pick up the telephone receiver and start talking to their loved ones.
NPR did a story which included the recorded voices of some people who came to use the telephone. First you hear the voices of some young grandkids talking to a grandparent, then you hear the voice of a grieving widow: both pick up this telephone, trying to connect with those now lost to them forever.
Rarely have I been as emotionally moved about the finality of death as I was when listening to these voices on that radio program. What if a wind telephone was all your family could look forward to beyond your own death? Can you imagine your loved one speaking sad words of greeting into the empty air, because they had no hope of seeing you again?
The hope Christianity offers rests solely in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Everything hangs on the resurrection, not as simply an inspiring metaphor of new life but as an historical, physical reality. Jesus was raised from the dead after three days in the grave and all who put their trust in him will be resurrected exactly as he was
So you see, just as death came into the world through a man, now the resurrection from the dead has begun through another man. Just as everyone dies because we all belong to Adam, everyone who belongs to Christ will be given new life. But there is an order to this resurrection: Christ was raised as the first of the harvest; then all who belong to Christ will be raised when he comes back.
After that the end will come, when he will turn the Kingdom over to God the Father, having destroyed every ruler and authority and power. For Christ must reign until he humbles all his enemies beneath his feet. And the last enemy to be destroyed is death. (I Corinthians 15:21-26
But here’s what the Bible teaches: Jesus’ resurrection is NOT just about our personal victory over death.
Rather, Jesus’ resurrection sets into motion something infinitely larger than personal salvation, namely God’s plan to fix all that is wrong with our world—leading eventually to a brand-new creation!
And here’s the amazing thing! This new existence called the Kingdom of God which Jesus promises us isn’t only in the future! It is NOW!
When we trust our lives to Jesus Christ not only is our personal victory over death assured, but we get to be partners with God—right now—in God’s ever-expanding renewal of all Creation!
Probably the most renowned NT scholar alive today, NT Wright, describes the foretaste of God’s new creation in his book Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church this way
“What you do in the Lord is not in vain.
You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that’s about to roll off a cliff.
You are not restoring a great painting that’s shortly going to be thrown on the fire.
You are not planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site.
You are–strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself–accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world.
Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness;every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation;
every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk;
every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures;
and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honored in the world– all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make.
That is the logic of the mission of God.
God’s recreation of his wonderful world, which began with the resurrection of Jesus and continues mysteriously as God’s people live in the risen Christ and the power of his Spirit, means that what we do in Christ and by the Spirit in the present is not wasted.
It will last all the way into God’s new world.
The Bible is not just another self-help book offering incremental change. It is God’s manifesto for how God will transform the entire creation, beginning with you and me! And it all hinges on the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
These weeks of Lent offer us yet another opportunity to slow down, step back and ponder what we as Christians are really all about.
And what we Christians are about is something big and grand and awesome!
Yesterday on Ash Wednesday, I reflected on how much I miss the privilege I had for many years of making the sign of the cross with ashes on the foreheads of many people who joined our annual Ash Wednesday services. It was one of the most spiritually poignant services I led every year!
The ashes are a sign of repentance, an outward gesture of taking Jesus’ cross and resurrection seriously, and using these weeks before Easter to take our faith seriously as well.
I hope focus on Jesus’ cross and resurrection each of these coming weeks until Easter, and invite you along on the journey.
And I especially hope you will find your own ways–daily reading Scripture, a new focus on prayer, reconnecting with a Christian community, even perhaps reading NT Wright’s book Surprised by Hope–to keep moving forward on that journey yourself in these weeks until Easter.
