Practicing Resurrection

Following the victory of Jesus’ resurrection, the natural impulse would be to think ‘practicing resurrection’ is to move from mountain top to mountain top; from spectacle to spectacle. However, anyone who has followed Jesus for a significant amount of time knows that most of our life is lived between mountain tops, in the mundane and ordinary. Jesus’ invitation is to become aware of His presence in every moment of life.

In a society where friendship is networking, a strategy for career moves, a transaction, where you can be lonely in a room full of people, Jesus-followers can demonstrate a friendship that reflects Christ's wholly undeserved and self-sacrificial death. To live as Jesus did, to practice resurrection, we must be in community. We have to have friends. You cannot preach the Gospel alone. You cannot love alone. You cannot follow Jesus alone.

In the West, we are experiencing a monumental shift in which the culture at large is increasingly post-Christian. It's not that culture has abandoned Christianity altogether, it is that culture is reacting against Christianity. In this moment, how do we proclaim the good news when so many have already decided that it is not good news? We believe that there is a practice of Jesus that subverts the ideological defenses of our neighbors and sets a table for an encounter with the Kingdom.

What do we do about our never-ending pressure to have more, to work more, and to be defined by our work? In the Christian tradition, our response is Sabbath, a practice that frees us.

The Resurrection of Jesus is the defeat of death and the beginning of a new creation. It stands as an invitation into a new story; a story that replaces our disenchantment with wonder.