"This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!"
"Why seek ye the living among the dead?" This is the question the angel asked Mary when she came to the tomb where Jesus was laid on Easter Sunday. It's also the question I ask myself every single time I wander into a gay bar, and most every time I walk into a church.
Yesterday, my contention was that sin is no longer an issue - for anyone, anywhere. Today, as Christ is risen, I want to talk about what we really are. Because Christ died and took sin (and its cohorts: guilt, shame, condemnation, distance and disconnection from God) out of the equation, we have a new standard, a new covenant with God. A covenant based on God's grace in sending Christ to do what He did, and faith in His success at accomplishing what He came to do through the Cross and His resurrection. A covenant whose objective is to incorporate us into God's own family, and make us His children.
Life, then, is no longer about eating, drinking, making money, having fun or any other simply physical, mortal thing. Life is about experiencing and growing up to a new world on the level of and in the context of the God who created us. This is a new life with a higher calling and deeper meaning than we could ever experience in a three dimensional, mortal existence. And everyone on the planet is called to this new life on this higher level. Nobody is excluded, left out or rejected. All are included.
What does this new life look like? That is what a Christian worldview is all about. Answering that question, living in that quest IS the new life in Christ Jesus. What do we look like when it's finished? Evidently something so different and so much better than physical life that we can't quite see it fully. We only get hints, glimpses and foretastes, But we know that it is what we are created to become. It is why we exist and take up space. It is the meaning of life.
We enter this new life through the concepts expressed by baptism and the Eucharist. Like a tadpole becomes a frog, or a worm becomes a butterfly, we become a new creature - a new creation as part of a new world - something that never existed before, and something that will never taste death. And the old life is gone. And the rest of our days on earth are spent transitioning and growing and becoming something which we were not.
In effect, we are born again to a new life in a new world with a new purpose and a new destiny. Jesus' tomb becomes our womb, and His sacrifice becomes our first breath.
That's what Easter is.