ABC Messenger

Christ Is Risen – He Is Risen, Indeed…
So what’s new?
by Tim Eby-McKenzie

(Tim Eby-McKenzie has just completed a three-year term on the ABC Deacon Board, during which he has been Chair of the Finance Department. On April 1 he began as the church’s elected Moderator. In these leadership roles he has his finger on ABC’s pulse. In the next two Messenger articles he will share his insights into the financial challenge the church is facing.) – Pastor George Van Alstine

Easter’s message of the Risen Lord is astounding. Jesus’ resurrection is in fact the most incredible, spectacular and unusual story imaginable. In this one event, Jesus utterly changed the trajectory of history; death has been killed! When people say it’s unbelievable, I get it! Yet, I do believe the unbelievable.

I believe in the gospel of life from death. I believe in the resurrection of the living Christ. Therefore, I want us to consider this notion – life emerging where once there was only death – as more like, well… normal. Yes, normal. I know this is a challenge. On a daily basis, my heart leans toward the conviction that turning death into life, creating everything from nothing, is simply “too good to be true”. So when I hear the message of the gospel, that God’s abundance has come to dwell in flesh, and to die, and then three days later rise again putting death in its grave, so to speak, it all seems utterly astounding. I’m inclined to meet this Easter message with amazement. But why should I be amazed? This message has been around from the beginning. “B’reyshit bara elohim…” (“In the beginning God created…” – Gen. 1:1). The term “bara” is widely thought to mean “to create without material”. It is literally something from nothing; quite an unusual concept, actually. When I taught world religions in India, the students there were struck by the fact that the God of Judaism (and later of Christianity) created from nothing. The self-sufficiency implied is astounding, but for the God of Genesis, it is just “normal”.

As the passage moves beyond these first words, just prior to God’s creative action, “the earth was formless and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep.” This image is important. I remember a time snorkeling in the Philippines. Happily floating and staring at the gorgeous tropical scene behind me, I suddenly felt a strange chill and turned to look ahead, finding nothing but blackness, and below me an even greater void. I had lazily drifted over the shelf, and I was now in one of the deepest ocean areas in the world. Disorientation. Dizziness. Terror. Visions of Leviathan filled my mind and almost instinctively, I swam as fast as I could to the shore. That terror is something like the way the early Hebrews imagined the formless, void and dark deep before creation. So when God hovers over the face of the waters, he brings comfort and a peace that passes all understanding to a terrible and hopeless place in the Hebrew mind. God speaks shalom – peace, abundance and life – into being.

All this is more than a theological exercise. The images of God’s immensity and abundance fill me with hope, right to my core. So when I pray, I know I am in the presence of the God of limitless resources, who sees my deepest desolating fear as powerless amidst his motherly brooding and comforting presence. Power, abundance and love – all focused in my direction, because I am the pinnacle of his creation, his beloved child. And God certainly doesn’t need anything from me to make this happen. Psalm 50:11 says, “If I were hungry, I would not tell you; for the world and all that is in it is mine.”

So with this in mind, I would like to offer a few thoughts and encouragements about our finances at ABC. As the outgoing Finance Chair, I have watched our congregation struggle with the financial reports each quarter. As giving remains lower than anticipated, the refrains have begun to rise from Barinaga Hall: We should look at where we can cut our spending! We have to increase our giving! We really need to… <insert your solution here>. Great ideas, no doubt! Yet, there’s a danger in having our initial thoughts focused on our own resources. That is not the heart of the message of Genesis. The good news of Genesis is that God is (always) the God of abundance. In him, there is no lacking, and he is with us. His Holy Spirit is in us. Meditating on and reminding each other of God’s abundance is what brings us peace in troubled times. It is from that place of peace, confident in Him, that we expect to hear his assurance and direction as we consider our financial choices.

Ours is the God who brought a creation out of nothing, who dismissed death through the resurrection of Jesus. Why would we not trust in his abundance for our families, our communities and our church? Let’s commit together to start every thought, every idea and every strategy by marking and remembering that God has provided wonderfully for us and with the assurance that God will continue to provide lavishly. He is the giver of the feast and he has invited us to sit down with him and receive, and celebrate.

MP3 File

ABC Sunday morning worship, March 25, 2012. The Fifth Sunday in Lent. Sermon by Pastor George Van Alstine: "WHY ACT WHEN YOU CAN WAIT?". Lead Worshipper: Glenn Molina.

MP3 File

Finished!
by Pastor George Van Alstine

One of the traditional “Seven Last Words” of Jesus from the cross is the profound, yet enigmatic, “It is finished!” Actually, in the original Greek of John’s Gospel (19:30), this exclamation is not three words, but one – “Tetelestai!” It would probably be better translated “Finished!”

What was in Jesus’ mind when he spoke this word? To an unbeliever this might seem obvious: Jesus’ dreams of influence and leadership were over; he had failed in his mission – he was finished.

From a human point of view, it would be natural to think that Jesus was referring to his suffering. During the past hours, he had been arrested, questioned in two courts, ridiculed, abused, repeatedly whipped and forced to carry his cross. At the place where condemned prisoners were executed, he was brutally nailed to the cross. Then he had hung there in excruciating agony for three hours. Now all this suffering was finally over – finished.

But three days later, his followers witnessed an empty tomb and a risen, triumphant Jesus, and they were sure that his word “Finished” had a much greater meaning. As they lived out their faith and recorded their spiritual insights in the New Testament, they interpreted his word, not in terms of failure and despair, but in terms of fulfillment and victory.

Finished! In that climactic moment on the cross, his mission was completed. What he came into the world to do, as a baby that first Christmas morning, he had now accomplished. The years of identifying with human need and lostness, his ministry of loving and healing, his teaching about the new order God was bringing into human experience – all of this climaxed, was finished, completed, fulfilled on the cross.

Finished! He came to save us, and it was on the cross that his work of redemption was fully accomplished. All of his wonderful teachings, his great examples of how to love each other, his affirmation of godly values, such as integrity and loyalty and forgiveness – these were not enough to deliver us from our sins. It was his sacrificial death for us that finished his work of salvation.

Finished! God’s work of creation was fully realized in Jesus’ death on the cross. God made humans in his image, the highest point of his creative activity. It seemed as if his purposes were thwarted by the intrusion of sin and death into the world. But Jesus from his crucifixion vantage point could see that sin and death were being decisively defeated, obliterated. God’s creative purposes were back on course toward their glorious destiny. It was a sure thing, finished on the cross.

Some of us may feel finished today, in the negative sense of the word. We should take comfort from the fact that on the cross Jesus turned this word upside down, making it an exclamation of triumph. Visualize Jesus on the cross, thinking about you and saying with approval, confidence and hope, Finished!

The Easter Message: From Death to Life
by Pastor George Van Alstine

The climactic events of the last week of Jesus’ life have their setting in Jerusalem, during the great festival of Passover, the celebration of God’s deliverance of Israel from slavery in Egypt to their renewed identity as God’s people. As a result, familiar themes of the Old Testament covenant God made with his people fill the atmosphere around Jesus’ crucifixion, his burial, and the Easter morning empty tomb. The Christ Drama could easily be seen as a reenactment of the Exodus Drama; both depicted death and resurrection to life on a higher plane.

But the rhythm of death-giving-way-to-life is much more far-reaching than that. As the Gospel moved out from Jerusalem to the many cultures of the world, there were always death-to-life analogies already in people’s awareness.

A poem by nineteenth century cleric, scholar and novelist Charles Kingsley shows how the Christ story had natural connections for Englishmen of his day both in the rhythm of nature (first stanza) and in the pattern of everyday work (second stanza):

Easter Week

See the land, her Easter keeping,
Rises as her Maker rose.
Seeds, so long in darkness sleeping,
Burst at last from winter snows.
Earth with heaven above rejoices;
Fields and gardens hail the spring;
Shaughs and woodlands ring with voices,
While the wild birds build and sing.

You, to whom your Maker granted
Powers to those sweet birds unknown,
Use the craft by God implanted;
Use the reason not your own.
Here, while heaven and earth rejoices,
Each his Easter tribute bring-Work of fingers, chant of voices,
Like the birds who build and sing.

Of course, sometimes the analogy can totally eclipse the truth of the Gospel, as in America’s secularized (commercialized?) Easter of rabbits and eggs and bonnets. But we should not lose sight of the fact that every human being is involved in a constant life and death struggle, and that the message of the Gospel speaks directly to each one’s crying need for a word of hope. Through his death, Christ is immersing himself in an individual person’s inescapable sense of mortality, and through his resurrection, he is drawing upward with him the one who hangs on for dear life.

Holy Week Opportunities