John 14.18-26 (CEB) “I won’t leave you as orphans. I will come to you. Soon the world will no longer see me, but you will see me. Because I live, you will live too. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, you are in me, and I am in you. Whoever has my commandments and keeps them loves me. Whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”
Judas (not Judas Iscariot) asked, “Lord, why are you about to reveal yourself to us and not to the world?” Jesus answered, “Whoever loves me will keep my word. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Whoever doesn’t love me doesn’t keep my words. The word that you hear isn’t mine. It is the word of the Father who sent me.
“I have spoken these things to you while I am with you. The Companion, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and will remind you of everything I told you.”
Ram Dass “You and I are the force for transformation in the world. We are the consciousness that will define the nature of the reality we are moving into.”
Eastertide, the 50 days between Easter Sunday and Pentecost, is rooted in ancient harvest festivals meant for us to celebrate resurrection and renewal. For Jesus’ earliest followers, his resurrection represented more than merely another—or even the last—blood sacrifice. The resurrection was God’s universal reset.
Gamers understand the power of a reset.
I grew up in the 1970s and ‘80s when video games were just taking off in American culture. I remember my parents dropping me off at Prien Lake Mall in Lake Charles so my friends and I could spend the afternoon at the arcade. We’d try to best not only each other but especially the notorious KJN, whose initials topped everything from Pac-Man to Donkey Kong.
When the Atari 2600 console was released, we could play games in our living rooms instead of the mall. Home games didn’t look as good as arcade games—this was early days in the industry, after all—but we didn’t care.
To make up for the lack of visual quality, many home video games were more complex than their arcade counterparts. They took a longer time to complete, but they didn’t gobble up quarters. There was also an unexpected bonus with home video games: If things went off the rails, you could reset and start again. For free.
Reset and start again for free. That sounds a lot like the idea of God’s grace Christians find in the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ.
Resetting and starting again is a concept we also need to consider in our COVID-19-infected world.
Challenging times force us to rethink the structure of our world—to reset collectively. Living in the age of quarantine provides an opportunity for us to critically assess not only our inner selves but also our global governance (or lack thereof). In quarantine, we must examine and challenge the existing systems and practices that perhaps exacerbated the reach of this virus.
This entire Eastertide season, from resurrection to ascension to Pentecost, is a parable about God resetting our world. I believe these resets occur so we will better emulate Jesus spiritually, mentally, and physically. If you’re not a Christian, then these resets force us to better mimic whichever Ascended Master we follow. If we don’t believe in God or Ascended Masters, these resets happen to make us better humanists.
When we veer off course, God, the Holy Spirit, Nature, Jesus, quantum weirdness—whatever we decide to call the Conscious Universe (I’ve decided to call it the Conscious Universe), jolts us back on track by changing our perception of reality and giving us a glimpse of God’s new world. From the Garden of Eden to More’s Utopia, from Revelation to Star Trek, humans consistently envision God’s love uniting us in peace and cooperation.
Resets push us forward into love as a species, spiritually, mentally, and physically.
Resetting—whether a video game or our perception of reality—gives us a chance to do a better job. Whatever our goal, resetting gives us one occasion after another to try harder, to be more focused, and to accomplish the task at hand at the highest skill level possible, even as the game gets harder.
Most importantly, resetting allows us to learn from our mistakes.
Our reality was reset (or, perhaps more accurately, our perception of reality was reset) when God resurrected Jesus. After that stunning event, Jesus tries to convince his students that not only is he still alive, he also comes bearing a gift: The Holy Spirit, a new way to describe his Jewish follower’s ancient understanding of God within them, Immanuel.
Reset. If we meditate on the idea of resetting, I think we quickly start to realize how natural it is. What are the seasons, but nature’s reset? The cycle of birth, life, and death is a reset. Stars going supernova turning into new galaxies, planets, plants, and animals is a reset. And if we believe in eternal life, then death is the ultimate reset.
What we must try to remember is that every reset—past, present, and future; the resets we perceive and those we have yet to discover, inevitably lead us toward an ascended, more Christlike state of being. And that state of being creates a much more enlightened, awakened, loving, and compassionate world.
But perhaps the best news about a cosmic reset is that it’s unconditionally free, and you can participate from your couch at home.
Amen.
