In a Scrolling World, Are We Numb to the Resurrection’s Shock?
Easter is an annual remembrance of a historical event that’s still being celebrated, arguably on a greater scale than ever, nearly 2,000 years later. That’s because it’s the biggest news story of your life, or any life—even of those who shrug it off or scroll right past it.
Can you remember any top world news headlines from April 9, 2023? What about headlines from April 17, 2022, or April 4, 2021? Probably 2020 was the only Easter in recent memory when you might reme`mber what was happening in the world—but even that will fade from memory sooner than we expect.
What we can remember about Easter last year, and every year going back nearly two millennia, is that scores of Christians across the world confessed, sang about, and celebrated their belief in the deity of a human who actually walked and talked on this earth for a time.
This man is named Jesus. On Easter Sunday every year, people from nearly every nation and language, every class and ethnicity, worship him as Lord. They confess he suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead, and buried in first-century Jerusalem; and supernaturally rose from the dead three days later.
Consider how absurd this sounds. Consider how shocking it’d be as a headline if it were reported by some time-traveling newswire service to people in any BC kingdom or culture. We’re talking about the most outrageous headline of the year, and it happens every year: On Easter, a third of the planet’s population honors the day in history when Jesus Christ rose from the dead.
It’s an insane headline because it speaks to the fact that, even today—in our modern scientific age—more people than ever believe in a supernatural event that science says cannot happen. The headline’s enduring repetition, year after year for centuries, proves the legitimacy of the event at its center (the resurrection) or highlights a mass delusion of unprecedented scale. Either way, it’s utterly newsworthy.
And yet on this year’s Easter Sunday, any number of soon-to-be-forgotten occurrences will claim “lead story” status in newspapers and newscasts worldwide. Instead of what 2.4 billion Christians claim and celebrate, “Breaking News!” alerts will compel millions to click on infinitely less newsworthy items. More people will probably click on articles about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce on Easter Sunday than will read a Gospel account of Jesus’s resurrection. For American college basketball fans, the big news of the day will be which teams made the Final Four.
Why are we numb to the resurrection’s shock and seemingly bored by history’s biggest event? Why does the headline “Billions worship a man who rose from the dead and ascended to heaven” seem like old news that barely registers as a trending topic? Here are a few theories.
1. It’s old in a world obsessed with new.
Part of why the resurrection feels like “old news” is that it is old news, especially in a culture of increasingly short-term memory. Few of us can remember what was newsworthy a week ago, let alone a year or a century or two millennia ago. The digital age has eroded cultural memory and our capacity to think beyond the “now.”
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The Gospel of Jesus on Sexual Binaries
Written by Robert A. J. Gagnon |
Tuesday, August 30, 2022
Jesus reached out to sexual sinners because they, like the exploitative tax collectors, were most in need of being called to repentance, so that they might yet inherit the very Kingdom of God that Jesus proclaimed. Jesus both intensified God’s ethical demand and reached out in love to the biggest violators of that demand.Rachel Held Evans is once again arguing against “The False Gospel of Gender Binaries.” Regrettably, she does little more than provide us with a reminder of a textbook example of eisegesis (reading “into” the biblical text one’s own ideology) rather than exegesis (reading “out of” Scripture with attentiveness to historical and literary context, even if it conflicts with one’s own personal views). To suggest that Jesus cared little for gender binaries is to distort badly the portrait of Jesus that we find in the Gospels, or for that matter any credible reconstruction of the “historical Jesus” in his first-century Palestinian Jewish context.
Some background: Rachel Held Evans has made a career out of undermining fidelity to the teachings of Scripture by ridiculing simplistic or non-existent notions of biblical interpretation (hermeneutics), while practicing a flawed hermeneutic of her own that often seems to be little more than an extension of her own ideology. After starting in the evangelical tradition, she abandoned that tradition to embrace a non-orthodox sexual ethic and is now a member of the Episcopal Church.
She believes that all who do not agree with her promotion of homosexuality and transgenderism—an overwhelming “cloud of witnesses” from the beginnings of God’s people to the present day—have been proclaiming a “false gospel.” That depends on whether the Gospel is determined by her or by Christ.
In Mark 10 (par. Matt 19) Jesus predicated a duality of number for sexual unions (what we call monogamy; a strict monogamy I might add) on the deliberate divine design of the duality of complementary sexes. Binary sexuality for Jesus, the singular fact that God created us (as part of an intentional Divine Design) as “male and female,” was the foundation for rejecting both polygamy and a revolving door of divorce-and-remarriage for any cause.
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Surfside Presbyterian Church Struck By Lightning, Catches Fire
As many of you have seen our church was struck by lightning this afternoon and a fire ensued. The fire department was there very quickly and many put themselves in danger during the storm to put the fire out. The damage seems to be contained to the middle third of the building. However, Pastor Holcomb’s office was badly damaged, the sanctuary was significantly flooded and the fire knocked out the power.
SURFSIDE, S.C. (WPDE) — The Surfside Presbyterian Church caught fire Monday afternoon [July 4].
Senior Pastor Brian Peterson, at Surfside Presbyterian, told ABC15 News most of the damage sustained is to the bell tower, the second-floor offices and a few other areas surrounding the center of the church.
Peterson said on Monday afternoon, his teenage son was the one who first asked him about the fire.
He said it was just a few minutes after that that he began receiving calls and texts about the flames.
Horry County Fire Rescue said lightning appears to have hit the church’s bell tower.
Crews said the fire is under control with no reported injuries.
Peterson added there’s not much smoke damage, but there is extensive fire and water damage inside.
“It’s a mess. What used to be up is now down; on the floor,” he said. “Water has created damage up and down the hallways, so we’re trying to preserve whatever we can from those offices. The sanctuary seems to be in relatively good shape compared to the rest of the building.”
Peterson said they’re not letting this stop the church from moving forward.
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One of the elders commented on a Facebook page: “As many of you have seen our church was struck by lightning this afternoon and a fire ensued. The fire department was there very quickly and many put themselves in danger during the storm to put the fire out. The damage seems to be contained to the middle third of the building. However, Pastor Holcomb’s office was badly damaged, the sanctuary was significantly flooded and the fire knocked out the power. It is uncertain when we can return. Watch this page and your email about this coming Sunday. Praise the Lord that no one was there and pray that, if needed, we will be able to find a location for our Sunday services!”Related Posts:
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Men, The Church Needs You
Men, we need you to serve Christ and his church. We need you build buildings and playgrounds. But, we also need you build yourself through Spiritual disciplines and build others through the investment of your time and energy. The church needs men who will heed David’s instructions. Be strong. Show yourself a man. Obey God’s word. Serve faithfully.
It has become chic to attack and criticize men. Even in the church, much attention is being paid in recent years to patriarchy and its supposed role in creating and sustaining both evangelicalism and purity culture. Increasingly, I fear that the attention paid to attacking and criticizing men and boys in the church and larger culture is going to have detrimental effects on boys, girls, men, women, the church, and society. I also see that the more we demonize men and boys for being men, the more we alienate them from serving faithfully within the church.
Men, the church needs you. The church needs you to serve her well–as men. The church needs you to serve her as pastors and deacons, as trustees and mission leaders. But the church also needs you to serve in the nursery, as children’s Sunday School teachers, and as role models and mentors for teenagers and young adults.
The church needs men to show young boys that being a Christian is not a female role and that serving in the church is not a job only for moms and grandmas. When men step up and serve, they show young boys what a Christian man should be, and they give young girls role models for the kinds of men they can look for in relationships in the future.
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