The Intersection Of Heaven And Earth

The Intersection of Heaven and Earth

Easter Sunday, April 17, 2022 – Brad Bailey

Earlier in service… video (Easter Morning: Mary at the Tomb (2015)) followed by reading

of narrative text John 20:1, 16-22 (NLT) ?

Intro

I want to express a wide welcome today.

My hope is that we may dare to consider that it is God who welcomes us. He is the One who ultimately invites us here.

He invites us to join those who recognize that in the risen Christ… we are encountering the very intersection of heaven and earth.

And that may begin with shaking off the cultural nature of what we call “Easter.”

For those of us gathering today… this timeless moment that divides human history… became a holy day …which becomes a holiday… and like all holidays… it becomes a part of our cultural lives… our cultural traditions ...traditions that become …by nature…familiar … and sentimental.

Christmas becomes a …time associated with family… anticipation of gifts… the magic of lights….and God coming into the world… becomes part of the backdrop.

I suppose the same can happen with Easter… it may become associated with special Spring-break… with flowers blooming… with a special brunch… with chocolate bunnies… and eggs.

We need these holidays… and all the sentiments that create special seasons in life.

> But what we gather around… it’s more than sentimental… it’s shocking.

What we engage today… is rooted in the farthest thing from a tradition… it was transforming.

As we heard in one of the accounts read earlier… and across the various testimonies…

They didn’t see blooming flowers or bunnies …. They saw Jesus…who had died and was buried…3 days earlier.

They didn’t walk… they ran. 

They didn’t sing… they shook. 

This didn’t fit in their understanding..

For those who first engaged that Christ…had risen…they were faced with something that changed everything. The found themselves at the intersection of heaven and earth

It shook them to the core of their very being… and then it changed the very nature of their whole being.

And not just those who were the first witnesses.

Jesus was now risen and ascended to heaven…but sends the Holy Spirit to bear his living presence.

Among the great voices that speak out is that of the Apostle Paul. He had … but then is… he realizes that he had missed what God was doing… in the name of religion… he had been a part of using religion to contain God in a way that would serve his own ends.

He was fighting God. And now he is faced with the reality of God. And it transforms him.

As he describes in the Biblical Scriptures ….

1 Corinthians 15:1,2, 3-10

Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel … By this gospel you are saved…

What I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

9 For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. 10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect.

Into our lives overloaded with endless information… Paul declares that... this news is ‘of first importance.’

Many things in life may seem important…but there is that which is of first importance.

He is saying that amidst everything that we can choose to give our attention to… there is something that is of first importance… something that matters most.

Every one of us living in these days of information overload needs will do well to pause and consider that.

We have nearly endless messages that come at us… which we can give importance to.

At the end of 1992… just 30 years ago… there were ten websites online… today… 30 years later…there are over 1.9 billion websites

There are 252,000 new websites launched every day… 10,500 in the next hour. [1]

And there’s no limit to the social media platforms we can follow… from WhatsApp to Instagram to Facebook to WeChat to TikTok…and of course Twitter…

500 million Tweets per day 2021… Broken down even further, that equals 6,000 Tweets per second

The problem we face isn’t the platforms… it’s perspective.

When everything matters… nothing matters.

The most important question is to ask ourselves… is: