A lot of you out there have no idea what Christians are talking about when there's buzz around something in the news.
"Christ is King"? What does that mean?
Entering into debates with thousands of years of context across cultures, languages, and traditions is not easy. It's why, at all those churches that popped up in empty shopping malls, the 40-year-old pastor trying really hard to look fashionable will water the message down for people, hoping to win them over with kindness and community.
But I'm not going to do that. I want to get straight to the point.
Christians believe people can come back from the dead.
This idea didn't start with Christians, mind you. Every culture has had debates on spirituality and life after death.
But Christians believe that God chose the time and place for you to live - your life isn't an accident, in other words. He proved his engineering and design by creating an unbelievably fine-tuned world filled with coral reefs and mitochondria and Pi and landscapes of every color and shape (along with billions of galaxies in the skies above). He also proved it by guiding our traditions, designing us to be captivated by eternity and destiny, and speaking directly to people.
And if this was not enough, He spelled out his care and plans by sending his Son to die for the wrong things we have done.
In the ancient world, where there were pantheons of gods with kids, it was easy to understand the concept of God sending his Son, but today we often miss it. Jesus isn't like Zeus and Hercules or Odin and Thor. He is God Himself. The One who formed the nuclei of a billion stars became a small human baby living in a poor Middle Eastern family to save us.
And why? Because Christians believe death and disease are not natural. This predatory world? It works, but dog-eat-dog is not how it was meant to be. Death is not merely a part of life: It is a haunting, empty, horrid thing that all of us becomes more familiar with as we age.
Tech gurus promise they will overcome death one day, promising we'll live practically forever, but every new innovation merely prolongs our suffering, giving us more time to think about our aging bodies before we inevitably take our last breath.
We all feel it. Some people say they aren't scared of death. It's more accurate to say that they're simply more scared of the miseries of living.
Death stalks us all, and to make things worse, our lives are a mess.
- Do you have something you are addicted to?
- Have you messed up relationships?
- Do you feel anxious and angry and worried?
- Do you sometimes take advantage of other people?
- Do you sometimes enjoy it?
My pets are blissfully unaware of death. My dogs care for nothing beyond their daily walk and a belly rub. My cat is content to sleep. My fish swim in circles without thinking of it. When the end comes for them, it just comes.
But people? We're doomed to think about it our whole lives. It's always there, this horrible knowledge that we are getting older and the few things we hoped to accomplish in life seem more and more impossible by the day.
Even if the majority of us could have our cake and eat it too, we'd still feel like chains are dragging us down. The richest man with all the freedom and wealth in the world still has to contend with the darkness of his own mind and his own vices.
And the rest of us? Well, we're not free. We try and we try, but everything around us seems like it's falling apart.
I declared that the dead who had already died are happier than the living who are still alive.
But better than both is the one who has never been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.
The hope that the Christian has is not in 12 rules for life that will help you clean up your act, as valuable as that discipline might be.
The hope that the Christian has is that God has made a path where there was no path to save us from the weight of despair and death and give us new life.
The hope is that the God who created DNA is not a mere clock-worker who set the world into motion and forgot about it to see how all the miserable little creatures would react, but loves us.
Societies once understood that this type of redemption and power requires blood. It's why so much of ancient life was oriented around sacrifice to the gods, as it still is when people offer food, incense, or gifts to gods and spirits in many countries of the world today.
If we lie, cheat, steal, gossip, injure, and kill, how can we be on the spiritual side of good? How could the spirits or the gods accept us? If they are beings of light, how could we possibly clean our hands of all the daily bad thoughts and actions that each of us have?
We have to do something to make it right. A sacrifice. In an ancient society, prized livestock or expensive perfume. In modern America, donating another $600 million of your divorce money to social justice causes.
When a crime has been committed, there must be a fine or a punishment. When it comes to spirituality the whole world over, people are trying to find someone who can offer them access to the spiritual world and its blessings by teaching them how to attune themselves to spiritual things.
But the hope of Jesus Christ is that God has already done all of this for you.
You don't need to offer a sacrifice of possessions and good deeds. Jesus Christ, who never sinned, was killed in the most horrific fashion so that every bad thing you have ever said, thought, or done is paid for.
Not in part, but the whole.
But according to the many witnesses who saw Jesus rise from the dead, the news is even better than payment in full. Death came into the world because of our wrongdoing. If that is true, then one who has done no wrong cannot be held by death.
Those then that believe in the one who broke the power of death cannot stay dead themselves.
This is an absolutely crazy claim.
"I am saying nothing beyond what the prophets and Moses said would happen — that the Messiah would suffer and, as the first to rise from the dead, would bring the message of light to his own people and to the Gentiles."
At this point Festus interrupted Paul's defense. "You are out of your mind, Paul!" he shouted. "Your great learning is driving you insane."
The idea that someone can come back from the dead - not just as some parlor trick, but actual sinew-on-bone resurrection - is the craziest religious claim in all of history.
An afterlife? Sure, perhaps.
Reincarnation? That might fit.
But coming back from the dead to never die again? Ludicrous.
"He has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead."
When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, "We want to hear you again on this subject."
Christianity has always been foolish.
The Bible says God chose foolish-looking, lowly things to shame the intelligent, rich, and wise.
To believe that a man rose from the dead and you are supposed to follow him with the promise that you will live forever ... but you'll only find out if you were right after you die?
What a pitiful, sorry lot we Christians are!
But then, what other hope do you have?
- You can be an "ally" and "do the work," but it won't solve your problems.
- You can try to be a good person and balance your karma, but it won't solve your problems.
- You can bury yourself in addiction and fun times, but it won't solve your problems.
The only choice is a meaningless world where nothing matters and a world where everything matters because God has made it so. And if God has made it, then living by His designs is the only way to happiness.
If His designs and plans were sometimes mean and cruel, it would be a tragedy for us. And yet, the world over, the gods and spirits do seem cruel. People cry out in prayer and give up all they have, but they still suffer.
Is only way to happiness to follow an abuser in heaven?
But Christ meets us in our suffering. He came to us to be in the dirt with us. He says we will still suffer in this life as the whole world is being remade and reclaimed from evil, but that after death, there is new life without pain and hopelessness and sorrow.
And in the meantime, amazingly, he asks us to partner with Him in remaking the world - this is why so many Christians have dedicated their lives to medicine, science, education, civil rights, and international aid. And what an adventure of a lifetime that is!
Look: I don't know where you're at spiritually today, or what spirituality even means to you.
