In a few short years, Dan Brown’s 2003 novel, The Da Vinci Code, became one of the most widely read books of all time. The 2006 Ron Howard Hollywood movie starring Tom Hanks only made the novel all the more popular.
Why such a blockbuster for a novel about Jesus?
Because it was well-written? Because it was well-researched?
No, the real reason The Da Vinci Code caught fire was because it served up a juicy heretical tidbit as its main course: the suggestion that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and that they produced children. Not only did Brown’s story suggest Jesus had a normal married relationship with a woman, the driving force behind the book’s plot-line is that the bloodline of Jesus and Mary still continues.
In other words, the “scandal” of the Jesus story is that there are direct descendants of Jesus the Christ walking the earth today.
I told you The Da Vinci Code was right.
Most of you know something about your biological heritage — although as a country of immigrants we typically have fairly short historical memories. We think there are only a few elite families that can trace ancestors back to the Mayflower; but, the reality is that millions of Mayflower descendants are alive today, and most don’t even know it. Some of you here this morning are probably descendants of those Pilgrims on board the Mayflower if you only traced your ancestry back far enough.
And the Mormon church (LDS) as well as the registries of organizations like the Daughters of the Revolution or even websites like Ancestry.com make it easy for you to do your genealogical research. Most of us are content with going back a couple generations with some old photos, wedding announcements, and birth certificates cluttering up a drawer or trunk somewhere.
Ironically it is those who do NOT know their heritage, their family stories, who often seek it out most ardently. Just his past week Good Morning America broke the story of a forty-two year old man who had been put up for adoption as a baby by his teen-aged mother, who knew she did not have the ability to raise a baby.
Although adopted by a wonderful people, and raised in a loving home, the man finally decided he needed to seek out his biological roots and connect with the bloodline that he shared. Not only did he locate his mother. He discovered that he had a family of unknown siblings. One of those siblings, a brother, was gravely ill, suffering from progressive kidney failure and facing certain death without a transplant. But no one in the family was a match. Guess what? The son who had been given away, the son who had conducted his own search for his family, was found to be the perfect biological match for the ailing brother. The bloodline that neither knew they shared became a life line, as the son who had been raised by others offered his healthy kidney to his newly found brother.
Bloodlines are important. Dan Brown’s “The DaVinci Code” knew that. But what Brown did not know was that he came late to writing a story about Jesus’ offspring. The gospel writers beat him to it by almost two thousand years.
In today’s gospel text John wrote about the very moment that the conception took place. The risen Jesus appears in that closed up, fear-filled room, where his disciples have all but entombed themselves. Not unreasonably Jesus’ followers were expecting that the Jewish authorities would be looking for them, hoping to dispatch them in some unpleasant way.
Suddenly, Jesus is with them. No locked doors can keep Jesus out. To his frightened flock Jesus first issues a comforting word of “peace.” To his doubting disciples Jesus then offers the sight of the wounds on his hands and side. To those who stand huddled in that upper room, who hold the future of the good news in their fainting hearts, Jesus then conceives for them a new life: “he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (v.22).
The breath of new life Jesus breathed into that darkened room was a moment of conception. That breath of life marked the failure of the religious establishment to “get rid” of Jesus and his pack of troublesome followers. That breath of life transformed downtrodden, dispirited, dejected fear-mongerers into Spirit-filled, mission-driven, Jesus-obsessed disciples.
When Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit into that room the community of faith, the ekklesia, was conceived.
Look around you this morning. What do you see? Who do you see?
You see Jesus’ bloodline.
We are Christ’s offspring. We are Christ’s bloodline. We are brothers and sisters together, sharing the same water pedigree and bound by blood. All birthing takes blood-letting, and our birth came about through the greatest blood-letting of all time, Jesus’ death on the cross. The risen Christ did not sugar-coat the reality or enormity of that sacrifice. His resurrected body bore the marks of his humanity — he showed the wounds on his hands and his side to his disciples as “proof” that he was himself.
In some traditions it is only the “princes” of the Church, the aptly named “cardinals,” that wear red. The truth is all Christ’s offspring, all members of the body of Christ, are born red. We are all red-blooded disciples of Jesus.
In the human body it is the process of oxygenation that turns our life-blood a healthy red. In the human soul it is the breath of the Holy Spirit that turns our lives into red-letters.
We are used to “red letter” editions of the New Testament, editions that put all of the words spoken by Jesus into bold red type. What we aren’t used to is seeing that each and every one of us are Jesus’ red letters for THIS day. Tom Davis’ marvelous book called Red Letters: Living a Faith That Bleeds (Cook, 2007) doesn’t ask us merely to love and live the propositions of Jesus found in the red-letters, but to become those red-letters, to “Think Red” and to “Be Red” in everything we do. Davis is the President of Children’s HopeChest, a global orphan care ministry working in Russia, Eastern Europe and Africa. Maybe Bono’s desire to paint the planet “Red” and to see “Red” has more to do with the way we live than the products we buy.
Each new generation of followers is a new child of faith. We are blood-born and blood-bought. We are red-blooded animations of Jesus’ life by the breath of the Holy Spirit. When the doubtful, disclaiming “St. Thomas Didymus” saw the risen Christ before him, he felt his soul swell with the intake of the Spirit. His re-birth cry escaped like a newborn’s wail: “My Lord and my God!
If each new generation are truly “red letter” children of God, we need to color RED everything: everyone we touch, everywhere we go. The color of sacrificial love, poured out for our sake, is the color with which we paint the world. Jesus did not die and rise again to “change” the world. That’s too puny a dream, too pint-sized an ambition for the son of God. Jesus didn’t die on the cross to somehow “improve” or make the world “better.” Jesus’ died and rose again, not to “change” the world but to “save” the world . . . to redeem it, and to restore it to God’s original dream for a new humanity, at one with a new creation. A new humanity is what was conceived with that first breath of the Spirit.
Red-blooded, red-letter disciples of Jesus do not seek to “make a difference” in the world. We seek to make a different world.
So on this “Low Sunday” of the liturgical calendar, how can we be red letter disciples? There is only one way. By living as part of the bloodline of Jesus. By living and acting as one who is part of the direct bloodline we have been re-birthed into — “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
I repeat: Jesus’ disciples are not sent out to make this world a better place. We are sent out to make this world a different place. Not to make a difference in the world, but to make a different world.
When the space shuttle is orbiting planet Earth, the landscape of this beautiful planet is plainly visible. The oceans swirl blue, mountain ranges rear up brown and white, rain forests create great green swaths. But there is one human construction that is visible with the naked eye from an orbiting altitude. Only one. Can you guess which one?
The Great Wall of China.
The only human-made artifact visible from outer space.
A “low” thought for a “low” Sunday. Can you think of anything sadder, more godforsaken than this? The biggest thing we project to the universe is a barrier . . . . a barrier created as much to keep one group of people in as to keep another group of people out. Our most visible “achievement” from afar is a rippling keloid scar across the landscape, a wall that screams to the stars, “There is an Us, there is a Them.”
That is not a red letter/bloodline way of living. That is a “black and white,” or a “Code Blue” emergency, way of thinking.
One more thing before I let you go: the bloodline Jesus created when he breathed upon the disciples is not an exclusive club. As Bishop Stephen Cottrell writes, “On the cross Jesus does away with all the rule-keeping, debt-collecting, point-scoring, merit-awarding rigmarole of religious systems that try to control God and limit heaven to people like us.” (Stephen Cottrell, Do Nothing to Change Your Life: Discovering What Happens When You Stop [London: church House Publishing, 2007], 36).
To be a part of Jesus’ bloodline means we are not called to build walls, but to form circles, circles that don’t look inward but outward. We cannot build a wall around those who are “in” the church, and those who are “outside” the church. We cannot build a wall around Sunday morning and be disciples only in that time and place (that’s called “redlining” not “redlettering” our lives). We cannot build a wall around our lives with the false security of money. We cannot build a wall around our time, keeping most for “us,” giving some to “them.”
This morning we celebrate how Jesus’ commissions every one of us to continue his ministry and mission on earth. We have been red-lettered by the breath of the Holy Spirit to go out into all the world and “Live Red” by releasing and unleashing the resurrection energies for all who are locked away in fear, in despair, in panic, in uncertainty, in rage, in doubt, in disbelief.
You have been red-lettered to invite everyone to become what The Da Vinci Code got right, but didn’t know it: each one of us was conceived to be part of the Jesus blood-line. You too can have a red-blooded relationship with God, and trace your bloodline all the way back to Jesus.
[You can end the sermon here, or can use the following by poet Godfrey Rust, who wrote this poem in the aftermath of 11 September 2001. You can find it at www.wordsout.co.uk. It is entitled simply “September 11, 2001.” It is one of my favorite poems written so far in the 21st century].
Who is our enemy
and what can we fight him with?
Where are our allies? Where was God
on September the Eleventh? He was begging
in old clothes in the subway
beneath the World Trade Center.
He was homeless in Gaza,
imprisoned in Afghanistan,
starving in Somalia,
dying of Aids in an Angolan slum,
suffering everywhere in this fast-shrinking world:
and boarding a plane unwittingly in Boston,
heading for a meeting on the 110th floor.
When the time came he stretched his arms out once again
to take the dreadful impact that would pierce his side.
His last message on his fading cell phone
once more to ask forgiveness for them all, before
his body fell under the weight of so much evil.
We bring our cameras to his massive tomb
for any chance of resurrection, now we know
the kind of story that it really is,
united by this common enemy,
sin’s terrorism----that we never dreamed
could bring such devastation. This is war:
We line our weapons up: faith, hope, obedience,
prayer, forgiveness, justice;
the explosive power of love.
Illustrations, Illuminations, Animations, Ruminations, Applications
In doing further research, there is an early Polish legend that has Mary Magdalene taking a basket of eggs with her to the sepulcher on Easter morning. The idea was that while she was anointing the body of Jesus, she would need a snack. When she arrived at the tomb and uncovered the eggs, the pure white shells had turned to red.
This is part of the reason why Orthodox Christians exchange red eggs at Easter. The other being an even earlier legend in which Mary Magdalene managed to procure an appointment with Caesar after Jesus’ resurrection. When she picked up a hen’s egg from the dinner table to illustrate her point about resurrection, Caesar was cynical, and said that there was as much chance of a Jesus returning to life as there was for that egg to turn red. Immediately the egg turned red.
Leonard Sweet
O. Wesley Allen, Jr., Preaching Resurrection (St. Louis, Missouri: Chalice Press, 2001), 6: “This fuller context of the meaning of the resurrection can be expressed in the following broad definition of resurrection for today’s pulpit:
The proclamation that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead is the central means by which the Christian faith claims that our participation in the meaning of the Christ Event is of Ultimate Significance and thus stretches beyond the finite limits of human existence while wholly participation in that finitude.
“The core of the good news of Jesus Christ as being the claim that Christ IS risen, not the claim that Christ WAS risen . . .”
The Miracle of Christianity
“Why are you looking in the place of the dead for someone who is alive? Jesus isn’t here! He has been raised from death.” –Luke 24:5-6
Back in February of 1993, I visited Jesus’ tomb in the old city of Jerusalem. There was a nun and a priest guarding the door to its entrance. The tomb was like a small cave. Inside, was a big slab of rock on which Jesus body was put after he died.
My father and I were standing in line. Ahead of us were a few young boys with backpacks. When it was their turn to go into the tomb, they seemed to be taking awhile. The nun guarding the door got suspicious and looked in to discover that the young boys were stealing oil lamps and icons off the wall of Jesus’ tomb and stuffing them into their backpacks. They were reaching right across the slab on which Jesus’ body had been laid.
I saw the nun grab one boy and slap him! And then she grabbed his backpack as he fled. The priest grabbed the other two boys as they tried to escape out the door of Jesus’ tomb. I remember the priest and the nun shaking their heads and putting the oil lamps back on the wall. Looking back, I should have taken pictures. I could have sold them to the Enquirer. “Pastor Witnesses Thieves Ransack Christ’ Tomb; Nun Strikes Back.” Instead, I just stood like an American tourist in my jeans and Nike’s, hardly believing what I saw. Who would do such a thing?
That empty tomb is the miracle of Christianity. The tomb didn’t mean much to those young boys. They could just as well have been shoplifting at Wal-Mart! But is that so odd? The empty tomb doesn’t mean much to lots of people. To the young boys, it was a just an old historical site. For lost of people, their experience of Jesus Christ is historical as well.. Attending church as a child, plus the occasional peak inside the doors of a church on the High Holy Days. Maybe an occasional deal with God when life seems to be treating them unfairly. Christianity promises so much more than that!
The young boys in Jesus’ tomb tried to escape from the Nun and save themselves by charging out the entrance of the empty tomb. There was no other way out! It was kind of funny, except for this: The same is true for you and for me. Ultimately, the only way out of everything you face in life is through the power of God, shown most vividly in the empty tomb of Jesus Christ.
The Easter gospel says, “The other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in , and he saw and believed...” Jesus’ tomb was as empty then as it is today. Jesus said, “He who believes in me will live, even though he dies.” That is the good news of Easter. Jesus Christ is risen today. The power of that same God can be at work in your life today. God wishes for that to be the case! God can still work miracles today.
God is capable of anything and everything. What miracle could God work through me?
Prayer
Dear Lord, your miracles are all around us. Help us to experience your power and your Spirit. Amen.
We have limitations on our physical choices; so too on our spiritual choices.
“A person may have the spiritual ability to hear and enjoy music, but not the spiritual ability to compose or perform it. In that sense, that person is spiritually handicapped in that realm.”
“If I am capable of soaring to heaven but I crawl on the floor, then I am confined.” And living a “wasted” life.
“In the same way, we allow ourselves to live in a confined place” spiritually.
Adin Steinsaltz, Simple Words: Thinking About What Really Matters in Life (NY: Touchstone, 2001), 66.
Here is a children’s Easter song from Austria that rhymes “red” with “dead,” just like some used to do with the slogan “Better Red Than Dead:”
We sing, we sing the Easter song:
God keep you healthy, sane and strong.
Sickness and storms and all other harm
Be far from folks and beast and farm.
Now give us eggs, green, blue and red;
If not, your chicks will all drop dead.
--Austrian “pace-egging” children’s song
“Easter Symbols and Food,” <http://www.intermirifica.org/easter/eastsymbol.htm>. Accessed 21 September 2007.
“I am a philosopher because I am a Christian. To many intellectuals, this probably sounds like saying that I am a dog because I am a cat. Dogs hate cats, and otherwise polite philosophers have said to my face, with vigor, that ‘Christian philosopher’ is a contradiction in terms. Cats are not fond of dogs, either. Christian friends have often reminded me that Luther called reason a whore. Well, reason is a whore. It will serve any master who can pay its price. But a whore was first to the empty tomb on the day of the Resurrection. Reason will serve God if given the chance; philosophy can be a work of Christian service. And Christian belief (I want to suggest) is far more a help than a hindrance to serious intellectual work.
Brian Leftow, “From Jerusalem to Athens,” in Thomas V. Morris, God and the Philosophers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 189.
Are you “Saturday’s Children” or “Sunday’s Child?”
“Ray Stedman used to talk about the fact that there are more people living today in the despair and darkness of dark Saturday “than have ever lived in the drama of Friday or the victory of Easter.’ He referred to ‘Saturday’s children,’ people living in a kind of empty ritual dance toward death with a despair that grips their hearts in an increasingly godless world. He talked about hopelessness, meaninglessness, alienation.”
John A. Huffman, Jr., “Enabled By His Resurrection,” St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Newport Beach, CA, 31 March 2002.
“The Christian answer to the question of the origin of the universe is that the big bang with which the universe again----the tiniest hazelnut of matter expanding rapidly and creatively into all that is----was the simple consequence of creative loving. . . . .
Scientists have sent probes deep into space to collect dust from the exhaust fumes of comets in order to observe the first moments of creation. Here is an extraordinary thought: you have done the same thing by sitting still and contemplating the full depths of a single moment. It is possible, within the eye of the imagination, to behold the creation of the universe.
You can do this by thinking about the false things you place at the centre and the great desire you have for rest and play, creativity and love. You can do this by considering the love that is inside you. Even if its shadow has overtaken you, and even if it has never had the opportunity to be expressed, you know it is there. And this is where you end up—alone with your thoughts, but totally upheld and surrounded by a myriad of hands and voices, joining you to a universe that is itself alive and whose very particle sings for joy.”
Stephen Cottrell, Do Nothing To Change Your Life (2007), 28-29.