Community is a choice that we make, a choice to serve, to love, a choice to put up with one another. Easter is a reminder that the Christian community, the church, is a choice that the risen Christ has made to come back to us.
I go to churches where they have a "Seeker Service" on Sunday mornings. Sometimes they have a "Seeker Service" on Saturday night. What's a Seeker Service? It's worship trimmed to the limitations of those who don't know much about church, where the music is all singable, and the ideas are understandable. It's designed for people who are "seeking" something better in their lives.
Well, that's fine. The church should reach out to people who are seeking something better in their lives. Trouble is, that's not the way the Bible depicts us. Scripture is not a story about how we kept seeking God. It's a story about how God keeps -- despite us -- seeking us!
On Easter, and in the days afterward, when the risen Christ showed up among us while we were at work out in Galilee -- when He "appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, then to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all . . . he appeared also" to the great persecutor and murderer of the church named Paul -- the risen Christ was only doing what the crucified Jesus always did: He came back to us.
"Show us what God looks like," we demanded of Jesus. God? God is the shepherd who doesn't just sit back and wait for the lost sheep to head back home. God goes out, risks everything, beats the bushes night and day, and finds that lost sheep!
God is the father who does not simply fold his hands and sit back and wait for the wayward son to come home; God is the heavenly father who leaves heaven and reaches down in the mire and pulls out the prodigal son that he may be at home with the father forever!
We thought, what with the blood and the betrayal of Friday, this was the end. We thought it was over between us and God. At last, we had gone too far away, had stooped to the torture to death of God's own Son.
Then on Easter, He came back. Back to the very ones who had forsaken, betrayed, and crucified Him. He came back to us.
Christians are the people who don't simply know something the world does not yet know, or believe something that non-Christians don't yet believe. We are the people who have had something happen to us that the world appears not to have yet experienced. The risen Christ has come back to us. Therefore we live not alone.
Implications? When we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, time and again we look up and realize that we're not walking by ourselves. When we come to some dead end in life, we look over the brink, into the dark abyss and, to our surprise and delight, there He is, awaiting us. We give up, give in, come to despair and to find Him near to us.
A student, asked to summarize all the gospel in a few words, responded: In the Bible, it gets dark, then it gets very, very dark, then Jesus shows up.
I was visiting a man as he lay dying -- as it turned out, he was only a couple of days away from his death. I asked him, there at the end, what he was feeling. Was he fearful?
"Fear? No," he responded, "I'm not fearful because of my faith in Jesus."
"We all have hope that our future is in God's hands," I said, somewhat piously.
"Well, I'm not hopeful because of what I believe about the future," he corrected me. "I'm hopeful because of what I've experienced in the past." I asked him to say more.
"I look back over my life, all the mistakes I've made, all the times I've turned away from Jesus, gone my own way, strayed, gotten lost. And time and again, He came back for me. He found a way to get to me, showed up and got me, looked for me when I wasn't looking for Him. I don't think He'll let something like my dying get in the way of His love for me."
I think he had it just about right. To the poor, struggling Corinthians, failing bad at being the church, backsliding, wandering, split apart, faithless, Paul preaches Easter. He reminds them that they are here this morning because the risen Christ chose to come to them, appear before them, find them, reach out to them. That's what a risen Savior does. He comes back -- again and again -- to the very ones (I'm talking about us!) who so betray and disappoint Him. He appears to us, seeks us, finds, grabs us, embraces, holds.
In life, in death, in life beyond death, this is our hope. The risen Christ came back to us.
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William H. Willimon is Bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. He is a Contributing Editor to Preaching.
