One chilly Saturday in
Boston, a forty-one-year-old mailman and NAACP board member from
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, rests with his eyes closed in the offices
of Dr. Benjamin Simon, psychiatrist. It's three months to the day
after the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. But that isn't
why the patient, Barney Hill, is there. His anxieties seem to go
back to something else, something he suspects happened on a night
twenty-nine months ago. And so, softly, Dr. Simon hypnotizes Barney,
prods him to narrate his full story for the first time.
As the story went, Barney
and his wife Betty, a social worker, had been driving home from
vacation in Montreal – traveling down U.S. Route 3 over the White
Mountains in New Hampshire, with their dachshund Delsey in the back
seat. It had been a long day, and now it was night – the night of
September 19, 1961. And as the story went, they see a bright light
moving erratically in the sky. As it approaches, Betty hands Barney
the binoculars to take a closer look – and what he sees terrifies
him. He sees the light now as a spinning pancake-shaped object, and
through its blue-lit windows, he thinks he sees figures in black
uniforms walking around. And it gets closer, and closer.... Barney,
hysterical, gets back into the car, yelling about being captured, and
begins the drive to escape. But he hears beeping sounds striking the
trunk of their car.
Such was his tale even
before he reached Dr. Simon's office. But the rest of the story, he
presents only once under hypnosis. Approached by a team of figures,
who bid them close their eyes and follow. Being dragged up a ramp at
the heart of the orange glow where the pancake has landed. Inside,
medical tests in a sky-blue hospital room. Barney says, “If I keep
real quiet and real still, I won't be harmed. And it will be over.
And I will just stay here and pretend that I am anywhere and think of
God and think of Jesus and think that I am not afraid.” And with
closed eyes, he's guided down the ramp, walks back to his car, waits
for Betty's return from the same place, and they drive away. Such is
the story Barney told Dr. Simon. And toward the end of their session
that day, Barney remarks: “I believed that we had seen and been a
part of something different than anything I had ever seen before.”
Such was the story of Barney and Betty Hill.
Now, before any of you
start getting worried at where this message is going: I do not
believe that the events the Hills recounted in Dr. Simon's office, or
at their many speaking appearances before and afterwards, are what
actually happened that night. I believe there are better and quite
ordinary explanations available. But the story they told was
turned into a book in 1966. That book became the first mass-marketed
account of an alleged alien abduction. And as such, their story has
been the template for countless stories of so-called 'close
encounters' ever since. It says something about our culture: we're
desperate to think that we're not alone in the universe.
So some people in our
culture are obsessed with these fantastical stories: UFO sightings,
Area 51 conspiracies, extraterrestrial influence in human history.
One man who got swept up in some of that cultural interest was a man
I knew well: my stepdad. Some of you here this morning worked with
Randy at CNH. When he wasn't with you on the job, he was at home
reading book after book claiming evidence for ancient alien visitors
to the earth. And he devoted our family computer's downtime to
helping process data from a project called the Search for
Extraterrestrial Intelligence. That was just a common thing in my
house, growing up in those years.
But while claims of
actual contact remain somewhat fringe, the whole world is still abuzz
any time the slightest hint of even the mere possibility of life on
other planets comes up. Back in 1977, the news cycle was filled with
sensation when some scientists concluded that a radio signal they
picked up from space could be an intentional transmission from the
direction of the constellation Sagittarius. And even just last July,
the world was rocked by news that an underground lake still exists on
Mars, and with it the potential for microscopic life. NASA still
maintains an Exoplanet Exploration program. American culture is
searching, hopeful, for the shocking news of life on other planets –
the story told by the Hills is one trendsetting example of that
broader trend.
And yet, if the headlines
tomorrow morning were filled with reports like “Life on Other
Worlds Proven,” “News from the Stars,” “First Contact
Established,” – if all of that were confirmed tomorrow, that
would, in fact, be positively dull
'news' next to an established fact we already
know. For you see,
one morning long ago, the first close encounter took place with a
living being, a living body, not merely from a planet beyond our
solar system, not merely from a star beyond our galaxy, but from a
universe beyond the universe that surrounds us, a universe beyond the
one we know. And that living body was the body of Jesus Christ,
risen from the dead.
We
know the story, or we tell ourselves we do. A couple days earlier,
Jesus of Nazareth, Messiah, had died on the cross. It was a public
death. It was a gruesome death. It was a shameful death. It was a
death of which no one could conceivably be in doubt who was in the
area at the time. And before it had taken place, Jesus had predicted
he would be arrested and executed. But although no one understood
him at the time, he'd announced that his execution, his crucifixion,
would be the key to removing dark powers called 'sin' and 'death'
from this world, piece by piece. And not only would his death do
that, but his death would open up the possibility of a new kind of
world, the kind of world that this was always meant to become but
never had.
And
then, in the black early hours of the next Sunday morning, soldiers
trembled, a stone rolled away, and Jesus emerged from that rock-cut
tomb in which his cadaver had been placed. Death had only gotten the
barest taste of him before it lost him. Death did not have the final
word over Jesus. Because death is a property belonging to this
cosmos we know – but Jesus no longer did, no longer does, belong to
that same cosmos. “Jesus
who was
crucified,”
as the angel said, becomes Jesus who “has
risen”
(Matthew 28:5-6).
And
when that happened, Jesus did not rise as a mere unwinding of the
tape, throwing death into reverse and backpedaling out of the grave.
Jesus did not rise as a simple resuscitation, the result of divine
CPR. Jesus did not rise as a return after a long pause, resuming the
earthbound and thisworldly life that had been his for a prior three
decades. That would be too low an estimation of what happened. No,
Jesus rose from the dead as a living body, a living soul, drastically
foreign to anything that the study of any chemistry, any biology, any
physics from earth to the farthest nebula could identify. Jesus rose
from the dead as a living being from a realm beyond the universe we
know, a realm we'll call the “new creation,” a realm with its own
physics and a determination to invade our present cosmos and take it
over and rewrite everything.
And
so, on that Easter morning, there transpired a string of close
encounters of the biblical kind. In these close encounters, we see
Jesus as tangible, yet he appears suddenly in locked rooms. He bears
open wounds, yet they have no blood flow. He's able to metabolize
our broiled fish, but he doesn't require it to sustain the cells of
his body in chemical reactions. We cannot begin to imagine what a
medical team, what a biochemist, what a physicist would say on
examining the living body of the risen Christ. But that body seen on
Easter morning was clearly not playing by the rules of our physics,
the rules of our chemistry, the rules of our known biology. Jesus
had risen from the dead as a new and otherworldly kind of human,
alien but familiar, certainly more celestial than terrestrial. And
in fact, Paul explained the phenomenon of resurrection by saying that
“star differs
from star in glory”
(1 Corinthians 15:41).
And
what we learn from such teaching, and what we learn from reading the
accounts of eyewitnesses to the body of the risen Jesus, is that so
much of what plagues and antagonizes us in the days of our existence
is bound to the forms of the universe around us. But there is
another universe, the new creation, of the matter of which Jesus'
risen body is the first example ever encountered, the first ever
instantiated. And this new creation's physics function without
allowance for death, without allowance for pain, without allowance
for grief and harm. This is the Jesus we meet on Easter morning.
And we meet him as the “firstfruits”
of a new universe being born (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:20). And so “we
know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again;
death no longer has dominion over him”
(Romans 6:9). The physical processes that make us susceptible to
death, that make us so vulnerable and fragile and bend us toward
decay into our basic constituent components again – those simply
are not a part of the new-creation physics according to which the
risen Jesus lives.
And
that is an absolutely astonishing fact. Not just another planet, but
life from another reality has been found! Not only found, but first
contact has been established! That alone would be enough to merit
all the headlines, and would relegate anything merely interplanetary
to small print. The implications are utterly staggering. But here's
the real kicker: Jesus aims to assimilate us to what he has become.
When we through faith are linked to him, united to him, when we
assimilate and absorb his new-creation life through that faith-union,
he begins to actually transform us
into beings of this other universe, too – beings of the new
creation, beings of another world. “We
shall all be changed”
(1 Corinthians 15:51).
One
day, “in
a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,”
the physical fruit of that will be made obvious – our bodies will
function by new-creation physics, completely powered by divine
Spirit, with properties beyond our imagination. But even now,
beneath the surface that scientific instruments can probe, beneath
that, “our
inner self is being renewed day by day”
(2 Corinthians 4:16), being transformed into a “new
creation”
kind of being (2 Corinthians 5:17). And so, even in advance of the
final take-over, we are authorized to represent the new universe. We
are suddenly rendered “strangers
… on the earth”
– that's what Hebrews 11:13 calls us.
To
borrow Barney Hill's words, we have become “a part of something
different than anything [this universe] has ever seen before.” And
if we belong to the risen Jesus, what happens to us here every Sunday
should be more shocking, more jarring, more jaw-dropping, more
awe-inspiring than what the Hill family came to believe had happened
to them. And just so, what we go forth and do
should be just as shocking, just as incredible. Because we have been
commissioned to draw others
into something not native to our earth below or our skies above.
See,
stories like the Hills' do point to a truth... but the truth is that
the invading otherworldly presence on earth is now us.
There is something beyond-earthly happening – and we are it.
Didn't Jesus tell us? Didn't Jesus say to us, “Follow
me, and I will make you fishers
of men?”
(Matthew 4:19). Isn't that a phrase the Hills could well have used
in their taller tale? And so, rising from the dead and giving us his
Spirit, Jesus sends us out as just that: an otherworldly invasion
force, fishing for human beings, capturing people with nets from
another world, abducting people from the realm of death to the realm
of life, from the universe we see to the new one that's got an Easter
birthdate. For that's precisely what we're doing when we baptize
those gathered out of every earthly tribe and teach them all that
Jesus taught us. Because, in doing that, we capture and disciple
people into ways alien to all this world has to offer (Matthew
28:19).
Have
you ever given thought to that? How alien the method, how alien the
message, how alien the truth? Do you realize what you yourself have
been swept up in, snatched up in, caught up in? To nothing less, to
nothing mundane, to nothing thisworldly have you been called. In
Christ, you are becoming something non-native to the world you once
knew. You are receiving otherworldly gifts from an otherworldly
power for an otherworldly mission. And that power is the risen Jesus
Christ. What you are now a part of, if you've been united by faith
to him, is something that makes black holes and galactic
superclusters look small and provincial, like dust in the air, like
droplets in a puddle. We come bearing good news of another kingdom
(cf. Matthew 4:23), we come embodying good news of the invasion of a
new universe, an invasion that landed decisively one Sunday morn
almost two thousand earth orbits ago with the body of the risen
Christ – a body, a man, utterly “different than anything [this
universe] had ever seen before.”
The
invasion from another world is now underway, not in unidentified
flying objects, but in Spirit-identified discipling churches, crafted
in the ever-growing likeness of the King-Beyond-the-Heavens who is
Resurrection and Life. And our churches may not flit from star to
star, but we still “shine
like the brightness of the sky above..., like the stars forever and
ever”
(Daniel 12:3). What we now are is far less mundane, far less
typical, far less pedestrian, far less explicable than anything the
stars and planets of all the galaxies around us could ever have to
offer. And what fuels this life of ours is no less transcendent.
If
spacecraft really did zip between the stars, I shudder to think what
manner of rations would be consumed by life from other planets. But
for we beings belonging now to a far more exalted cosmos, the kind of
food that fuels us is nothing other than the new-creation meal of
Christ himself, given for us, given to us, to speed us on our way.
And he is set before us this very morning, raising our table above
the heavens, and giving himself to us here and now as
more-than-heavenly food, under the guise of elements the world knows.
So now let us eat, and now let us drink, and let us assimilate and
absorb his new-creation life. And then may we fly forth with nets
from another world, and 'fish' for humans in the Risen Lord's name.
Amen.
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