The room was electric with anticipation. Every eye was glued to the stage. Everything but the speaker was a waste of time. We were about to hear one of the greatest liberal theologians of all time. Finally, he arose. I couldn’t believe how old he was. The pictures made him look so young. I guess that’s a trick of publishing. Keep recycling an old picture to make the writer appear relevant. When he started speaking, I wasn’t surprised to hear a bunch of church jokes. I was surprised that they took so long. I was ready for the meat. Then it hit. For multiple hours, I listened to John Shelby Spong ravenously deconstruct everything he could think of. By the time he was finished, everything was figured out and there was nothing left to believe in. Jesus was dead and that was it. No hope. Just death.
I didn’t know what to believe. The stars made me dizzy. The fundamentalist had sown the evil of certainty into my soul. I cried out to God. Immediately, I was taken to another place. I saw. I…saw. Rev. Jim Jones stood up to slowly deconstruct all ideas of God until God was no more. Ultimately, Jones was the only God left standing. All mystery and magic was gone. Death and tragedy came quickly. Then, I saw a great litany of liberal theologians destroying the magic and mystery of the resurrection. I begged God to not make it so. Then I heard words thunder out of the sky, “I am.” My eyes were opened. To believe in the personhood of every individual…to believe in the “I am” of every person…is to believe that life never ends. Einstein was one of the scientists who revealed to us, “Life (matter) (energy) is never created nor destroyed.” Science proves the resurrection of us all. I believe in the magic of the resurrection of Jesus Christ because in it I find the magic of the resurrection of us all. I will not let fundamentalism destroy the resurrection. I will not let fundamentalism destroy our hope. Jesus is alive. We are alive. Jesus was the death of death. We are the death of death. The resurrection never stops.
Jesus is risen.
I am.
Amen.
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