Easter - Phoenix Paper

1 Corinthians 15:12 – 19
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets – pages 206 and 207

Today is a day of Easter celebration. It is a day that we celebrate a Phoenix rising. It is a day of celebrating – paper.

Yes, today I bring you the new paper that we made out of the old paper that held the etchings of our pain and sorrow and fractures and whatever else was on them. Today, rising from the shreds, is this phoenix paper. Rising from the tomb of the blender is this Easter paper.

We know that Easter is the celebration of Jesus being resurrected after his death. The Phoenix was a symbol early on in our Christian story. It was used by early Christian theologians about 150 years after Christ. It was a symbol used in early Christian art and literature – it represented the resurrection, immortality, and the life-after-death of Jesus the Christ.

Our faith as Christians is centered on the Easter event – the resurrection. The way that we believe in the resurrection of Jesus may differ from denomination to denomination and from person to person, but resurrection in some form is central to the Christian faith.

In our reading today, in 1st Corinthians, Paul is talking specifically about the physical resurrection of Jesus. He is teaching those in the church who believe that Jesus was raised from the dead, but who for some reason don’t believe that everyone else who dies will be raised from the dead too.

Whatever each of our beliefs is about resurrection from physical death, I believe that we experience death throughout our lives in many different ways. It is the resurrection from those deaths that I want to celebrate today. Specifically, I want us to celebration the resurrection of this paper that represents the death of many of us. While these pieces of paper don’t look like a bird or a holy risen messiah, they look like hope to me.

Look at them – take a good look at them. They are the same pieces of paper that we wrote on and that we shredded, but they are completely different. They are beautiful, aren’t they? They are transformed – resurrected – reborn. These are pieces of Phoenix Paper. They are new and fresh, ready to be used – and yet, they hold within them the past. Like the Phoenix that bursts into flames, turns into ash, and rises from the ash new born, these sheets of paper are fresh and new.

They represent us and the way I believe we are to live this Christian faith. We take who we are, what we’ve been given … all the components of our lives … and we renew ourselves year by year, month by month, week by week, day by day, hour by hour, moment by moment. Verse 19 says, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” If for this life…. If for the life of the past, the life of the moment that we thought made the most sense … if that’s the life that we are going to cling to in our hope in Christ, then we are not fully celebrating the resurrection power of our faith.

I don’t much talk about faith in Jesus. I talk about following his teachings and living our lives using his as an example, but I don’t talk much about faith in him. Faith in Jesus as the Christ is very important to me. His audacious teachings about God and social justice, which led to his torture and execution, which resulted in his resurrection – all of those components combined with the Holy Spirit – are the core reasons that I call myself a Christian.

Jesus as a Christ, one who leads us and who cannot be defeated. Jesus as a Phoenix, one whose life cycles from birth to death to rebirth, who overcomes and overcomes and overcomes. This Jesus, who I celebrate as resurrected every day because I call myself a Christian, this Jesus has demonstrated to us that we too have resurrection power. Because Christ died and rose from the dead, therefore we see what resurrection power looks like and we reach out for it and find ourselves lifted up from the burning ashes of our periodic deaths.

It is a real death, not a supposed one. I think it’s a mistake to talk as if the death wasn’t really a death because there was resurrection. No, it was a real death – often quite painful. But it doesn’t end there. Life begins again. We begin again.

There’s another parallel that I see between the Phoenix and Jesus the Christ – it is the healing powers of both. As we live into our destiny of resurrection, which includes us living our lives in the same power which made Jesus a Christ, we will also flow more powerfully in our destiny as healers. I’m not saying what form this healing will take. There is a lot that need healing and lots of ways to heal. We each have our gifts. But it is, I believe, the power of the resurrection that gives us the hope and the audacity to live into our gifts – these gifts of every type of healing.

Will you celebrate with me and together this specific resurrection – this specific rebirth. We know that there is more to follow, more to think about, more to do … but today, in this moment, it is a time to be joyous and be filled with awe that what was once dead is now reborn, transformed, and filled with the power of hope.