Word came this week that archaeologists working beneath Jerusalem have opened a burial cave from the first century — stone shelves cut by hand, oil lamps, the small ordinary leavings of families who lived and worked and raised children in that city while Jesus of Nazareth was walking its streets.
I read that and sat with it a minute. Not because it proves anything I did not already believe, but because it puts a smell and a temperature on something we sometimes handle like a nice idea. Somebody carved those shelves. Somebody carried in that lamp, set it down, and let it burn while they worked. Those were neighbors. Some of them very likely stood in a crowd and heard a carpenter's son teach on a hillside and went home arguing about it over supper.
Our faith has dirt under its fingernails
There are religions built on ideas. Ours is built on a report. Listen to how Paul says it — no poetry, no soaring language, just the facts laid down like a man giving a statement:
"For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: and that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: after that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once" (1 Corinthians 15:3-6).
Notice what Paul refuses to leave out. He was buried. That line does no theological heavy lifting on its own. It is there because it happened, and because burial is the most stubbornly physical thing there is. A body. A cave. A stone. Hands that did the carrying. The kind of cave, in fact, that men with brushes and trowels are dusting off under Jerusalem right now.
Whoever assembled that early creed could have skipped it. They did not, because the gospel is not a beautiful thought about the human spirit. It is a claim about something that took place at an address, on a Friday, outside a specific city gate — and then, on Sunday, refused to stay put.
God works in places you can find on a map
This matters more than it sounds like it does, because most of us have a bad habit of keeping God general. He is loving in a broad sort of way. He is at work somewhere out there. He helps people, plural.
But the God of Scripture keeps showing up at coordinates. A garden. A burning bush in a particular patch of desert. A stable in Bethlehem, which was a real town with real mud in the street. A tomb belonging to a man named Joseph, from a town called Arimathea.
Which means He is entirely capable of showing up in Ravenna. At a kitchen table on a Tuesday night with the bills spread out. In a waiting room in Muskegon. In a truck cab at 5:40 in the morning when you have not said much to Him in a while and you start talking anyway.
The same Spirit, still moving
Here is where I get quietly excited. Paul writes elsewhere that "if the Spirit of him that raised up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, he that raised up Christ from the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by his Spirit that dwelleth in you" (Romans 8:11). The power that emptied one first-century cave is not archived. It is resident. It lives in ordinary people who love Jesus.
I see evidence of it. Prayers answered in ways that are hard to file under coincidence. People walking free of things that had them by the throat for years. A word spoken over somebody by a person who had no way of knowing. God is not finished being active, and I want us to be a church that expects Him rather than merely remembers Him.
And I know some of you have prayed hard and are still waiting. You are not a lesser Christian. Waiting is not the same as being forgotten. The disciples had a Saturday between the burial and the rising, and it was the longest day of their lives, and God had not gone anywhere.
Stones do not make faith, but they steady it
No excavation will ever hand you belief. Faith is still a matter of trusting a Person. But there is real comfort in knowing that when your mind is tired and your feelings have gone flat, what you are leaning on is not a mood. It is a record. Something happened.
They will keep finding caves under Jerusalem. Every one of them will have someone in it. There is one they will never fill, because the man it held got up and walked out, and He is alive, and He is worth every ounce of your trust today.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.