May the words of my mouth . . .

I first met T. Roger Chang during his tenth year as a PhD student in the Mechanics department at Virginia Tech. Now, for most people and universities, spending a decade as a graduate student would be cause for alarm, but in Roger's case it was a relationship that had been more than mutually beneficial. This is because Roger loved to teach and the department loved to have him teach. And more than that, he was very good at it. Pretty much everybody knew that if you took one of Roger's courses, you were going to learn the material well.

Having such a long tenure as a teacher, and teaching basically the same course every semester, meant that Roger's lesson plans and his overall teaching methods were pretty much set in stone. Each of his 75-minute classes began with 15 minutes of review. Then came 30 minutes of lecture, followed by 30 minutes of example problems. You could almost set your watch by what he was talking about in class.

Now, for most people, this was a wonderful balance of new and old and almost all of the students in his class mastered the rather difficult material with little more effort than showing up to class and taking copious notes. I, however, was not one of those students. Sure, I did pretty well in Roger's class, and was thoroughly proficient in the Mechanics of Deformable Bodies after completing the course, but this was not without a fight. Because, you see, I am not a big fan of reviewing material.

Perhaps it is the cocky-ness of youth, something genetically or culturally programmed into me, or simply a trumped-up sense of the honor or the academic endeavor, but I am not a very good reviewer. I would much prefer taking the material from the lecture, doing problems on my own and having the teacher point out to me where the mistakes are to going over old lecture notes and watching as the teacher works through problems that are essentially the same as those that will be on the homework and the tests. And this bias has leaked over into other pursuits as well. When it comes to learning new languages, I do very well at understanding the way a language works, but do very poorly at vocabulary and speaking, both of which require a fair amount of repetition and rote memorization. So given my predispositions against review work, imagine my dismay when I opened this week's lectionary texts to find them filled with a review, rather than continuing forward in the path of post-resurrection stories.

Ever since Easter Vigil, we have been reading of the many and various ways in which Jesus made himself known as alive to his disciples. In each story has been a nugget of truth, or a brief vision of the nature of the resurrected life which is both our inheritance and our hope as the body of Christ. We have seen Jesus, touched his wounds, heard his voice and even eaten his cooking. We have been experiencing the risen Christ in all of his fullness and basking in the glory of the fulfillment of his promises to us during Lent. The Son of Man has been raised after his three days in the tomb. Love has come again, like wheat that springeth green.

That is, until today, when we hit the rewind button and go back a few chapters in John's Gospel, to a time before the resurrection, before the crucifixion, actually before Jesus' ministry even got into full swing. In this morning's text, Jesus is still sparing with Pharisee's and temple authorities, still speaking in vagaries and outlining the rhetoric of his program. What we see in this reading is not the resurrected Christ, the King of Glory, but the teaching Christ - still most obviously human and more than a little misunderstood.

And, likewise, the reading from Acts, while still, temporally in the realm of post-resurrection, is completely focused on reviewing the history of Israel for those who should be most familiar with it. Paul stands-up in the middle of a synagogue, on the Sabbath, and (with a gesture) begins to recount the salvation history of the Jewish people. The lectionary editors have spared us much of the bulk of Paul's speech, but the point remains clear from the fragment that we have. Paul says to the Jews gathered in Antioch of Pisida, "Ok, let's go over this again, because obviously you all didn't understand it the first hundred times you heard it. God gave you the law but you didn't understand it. He sent you the prophets, but you didn't listen. So he sent Jesus as the fulfillment of both Law and prophecy, and you didn't get that either. So everyone open up their texts and let's start reading from the beginning. Can someone tell me what God said to Abraham? Anyone? Anyone? Beuhler? Beuhler?"

But why do we have to sit in on this remedial class? Aren't we the ones that get it? Haven't we shown our understanding by the simple fact that we have shown up this morning? Why do we need to sit in on Paul's History class, or turn back in our bibles to the 10th chapter of John? Seems pretty boring to me. Enough to make me want to lean my head back and take a little nap, just like I used to do in Roger's class. Just sleep and wait for the next resurrection appearance, or maybe even the second coming, if that is more your style.

Well, some might suggest that this kind of repetition is good for us. Like football drills, or vocabulary lists, it makes us stronger and more confident in our actions. Going over the stories again will ensure that we have a good command of them, that they become second nature to us and that we can draw upon their wisdom at any time. So maybe today's readings serve as something of a pop-quiz for our Christian formation. In the middle of the new material, revisit the old - decontextualized - and a means of sure-ing-up our sense of the overall flow of the story.

Or, perhaps we have done something in the past few weeks to show that we, like the Jews in the story from Acts, have forgotten a key facet in the Jesus narrative. And maybe not all of us, maybe just one of us was a bone-head and forgot that Jesus is the good shepherd, or that he and the Father are one. And now we all pay the price. OK, fess-up! Which one of you was it?

No, deep down I don't believe that either of these is the case. While Paul says, in his letter to Timothy, that all scriptures are useful for instruction, I don't think that the folks who put together the lectionary had quite this kind of pedagogy in mind. Quite to the contrary, I think that these seemingly review readings are meant to highlight something new and extremely important to the resurrection life that we are celebrating in this season of Easter.

When Jesus rose from the grave on the Easter Morning, he did more than simply cheat death. He changed human nature and redefined human ability by gathering the entirety of the human experience into God. In our baptism we are joined to this new reality as we are joined to Christ in his death and resurrections. Therefore, we are a new creation with new faculties and unlimited potential for eternal life. With these changes comes a new outlook on life - Resurrection eyes you might call it. We, as the body of Christ see the world differently. The past few weeks of readings have been trying to show us that. Through resurrection eyes, Jesus is not bound in space or time, he comes among us whenever we gather, and he shows up unannounced to feed us and to give us guidance. Through resurrection eyes, believing becomes a more powerful tool than even seeing as we discern the presence of God in all things. Through resurrection eyes, we can peel back the veil which divides the realm of God from the realm of this world and, with John the Seer catch a glimpse of things Heavenly in the mist of our earthly challenges.

But resurrection eyes are not useful simply in gazing upon things present and things future. Such inspired sight changes the way we see the past, too. Both our individual and corporate pasts take on different meanings when viewed through the lens of Jesus' resurrection and our baptism.

Thus, these seemingly odd review lessons are not about reminding us of anything, they are about giving us an opportunity to use our resurrection eyes to look again at familiar themes and make sense of them anew. We, like Paul's group of devout Jews are well versed in our common history, we have the law and the prophets and to a certain extent we have largely mis-understood them - but how could we have avoided that, apart from the resurrection. We can't. So Paul takes us back, but he prefaces his statements by reminding us that Christ is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. Look again upon this story he says, knowing that the law is fulfilled and that the prophecies have come true. How do they look to you now?

And this story of Jesus, how does it change for you as you think about it again through the lens of the resurrection? Jesus' statement about he and the Father being one changes now that we have been witness to the resurrection. No longer are these the words of an upstart Rabbi, the philosophical jargon of one out to challenge the theological staus-quo. Now we have seen them to be the truth. No one has come back from the dead except the one that God calls Son, the one that he raised from the grave. Jesus and the father are one. How wonderful does that make Jesus' promise that no one will snatch us from his hand?

But these stories are simply exercises - example problems, if you will - on how to use your resurrection eyes. The real work begins where this sermon ends. Our challenge is to come to a greater appreciation of how the resurrection changes the way we understand our personal past and the things that we do every day. We can begin with some easy things. What does the reality of the resurrection and our participation in it tell us about what we do here each week? About the Eucharist? About the prayers? About the Peace?

And then we can carry our understanding out the door, into our daily lives. How does the resurrection change the way we understand our past? Our relationships with one another? Our actions in the world?

My brothers and sisters in Christ, my beloved students, my fellow classmates, take out a pencil and write this down. Your homework assignment is as follows. Use your resurrection eyes. Look around you and appreciate the difference that God has made in your life. Bask in the glory of the resurrection and give thanks to God for his goodness and mercy. And then share your answers with one another and especially with those who have yet to know Christ. I'll see you all next week.

Amen.