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"Christ Is Risen – Death Is Destroyed"
On this Day of Resurrection, may the joy and peace of our Living
Lord Jesus fill your hearts and minds.
Last week my 9-year-old son approached my wife and told
her, “Daddy said that we are moving this summer.” His
statement was almost a question to her, and it caught
her off guard. “What did he say,” she asked. And he
repeated, “Daddy told me that we are going to move
this summer.”
My wife started to get a little perplexed and concerned
about this. She was deciding that she needed to have a
talk with me real soon, when my son, with a sly smile,
said, “April Fools.”
People who have a lot of time on their hands have ranked
the best April Fools’ pranks. The winner was the BBC
broadcast describing the excellent Swiss spaghetti crop.
They even had film footage of Swiss peasants harvesting
this crop from spaghetti trees.
Another one in the top ten was the purchase of the Liberty
Bell in Philadelphia by the Taco Bell company. It was to be
renamed the “Taco Liberty Bell.”
The White House played along and announced that they were
planning to sell the Lincoln Memorial to the Ford Motor
Company. The name, of course, would change to the Ford
Lincoln Mercury Memorial.
Of course, a lot of people took them seriously and the
government received thousands of letters protesting the
sale of our heritage.
Today’s Gospel lesson talks about a different kind of
foolishness. It is the foolishness of someone dead,
coming back to life.
The text says, that “when [the women] came back from the
tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all
the others…But they did not believe the women, because their
words seemed to them like” an April Fools’ prank.
It is kind of ironic to me that people in our world today,
are ready to believe that spaghetti grows on trees, but
when the answer to humanity’s greatest need is provided,
when the solution to death is offered, people find THAT
ridiculous.
Death is the horror that has plagued mankind from the very
beginning. Death ruins everything. Anything good, anything
right, anything beautiful comes to a crushing end in death.
We are often told that love is the most powerful thing on
earth. Yet, human love is powerless to stop death. The only
thing our love can do is stand at the grave and grieve our losses.
Freelance writer Greta Christina is surprisingly honest
regarding her dilemma about dying. You see, she is an
atheist, but she realizes she has a problem with facing
death and not believing in an afterlife. Writing in a
magazine popular with skeptics called the Skeptical
Inquirer, she admits: “Death can be an appalling thing
to think about.”
“Not just frightening, not just painful. It can be paralyzing.
The fact that your life span is an infinitesimally tiny fragment
in the life of the universe, that there is, at the very least,
a strong possibility that when you die, you disappear completely
and forever, is staggering.
“In 500 years nobody will remember you, and in five billion
years the Earth will fall into the Sun. This can be a profound
and defining truth about your existence that you reflexively
repulse, that you flinch away from and refuse to accept or
even think about, consistently pushing it to the back of your
mind whenever it sneaks up for fear that if you allow it to
sit in your mind even for a minute, it will swallow everything
else.
“It can make everything you do, and anything anyone else does,
seem meaningless, trivial to the point of absurdity. It can
make you feel erased, wipe out joy, make your life seem like
ashes in your hands.”
I don’t know that I have ever read anything more stunningly
honest about what death means to our human condition.
With such an accurate realization, it seems that the angel’s
message in our Gospel reading would be the most important
news ever delivered: “Why do you look for the living among
the dead?” the angel said, “[Christ] is not here; He has risen!”
But after all she describes, where does Greta Christina find
her hope? She says this. “What matters is that we get to be
alive. We get to be conscious. We get to be connected with
each other and with the world, and we get to be aware of
that connection and to spend a few years mucking around in
its possibilities. We get to have a slice of time and space
that’s ours.”
Greta Christina, “Comforting Thoughts about Death That Have
Nothing To Do With God”, Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 2005), pp 50-51;
Basically, she says, “You are going to die. Your life is
ultimately meaningless. But try not to think about that,
and try to make the best of things while you are still breathing.”
Now, how is that working for you? How is that for hope and
meaning in life? How is that for motivation in life? How is
that for an Easter message?
A lot of people live that way. They just cover over thoughts
about death and the meaning of life.
It is like what the Chinese government did this past
February. The authorities of China’s Fumin county decided
to improve the environment for villagers next to the barren
and mined-out Laoshou mountain. They did this, not by planting
trees, but by spray-painting the mountainside green.
Globe & Mail (Toronto)-AP, 2-14-07
A lot of people live their lives spray-painting the ugly
and barren realities of death with whatever colorful
distractions they can find. St. Paul touches on this in
the Epistle Lesson. He says, "If only for this life we
have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all
men."
If all Christ is, is a religious crutch to help you limp
through life - if all He is, is one of the colors to spray-paint
the ugly reality of death - then we are to be pitied most of
all. If all THIS, the music, the flowers, the singing, the
praying, my preaching…if all THIS is just to make you feel
better about a meaningless life, and the extinction of death,
then MY GOD, what a sham!
But that is not the message today. What we celebrate today
is that Jesus Christ did something REAL about death. Easter
is the message that death can’t stop us anymore.
Easter proclaims that Christ really did come out of the
tomb. It proclaims that Christ’s body really did come
back to life. And, it proclaims that Christ really does
intend to infuse your soul with eternal life.
The Christian faith comes down to this: Did Christ reverse
the dying process, or not? Did He, or did He not, overthrow
death’s power?
And our Christian faith believes that Jesus did exactly
that! Christ rose from the dead! And now the worst that
can happen to us – death, is not the worst that can happen
to us anymore.
All humans live in fear of dying. But in Christ the mystery
of death has been removed. The fear of the unknown is gone.
Death is like a thick, dark curtain. Christ stepped through
it. But, then He parted the curtain and came back out again.
He came back to tell us about the life on the other side. He
came back to take our hand and lead us safely through, when
it is our time.
Our resurrected Lord tells us today, “Don’t worry about that
death thing. It really can’t hurt you, anymore. It can’t stop
my plans for you, and it can’t stop the eternal life I have
prepared for you.”
So how, today, do you choose to live? In the Christian faith,
trusting in Christ’s resurrection and living in the knowledge
and hope of eternal life? Or, living in the skepticism of a
finite earthly existence, trying to find meaning, and fearing
the finality of death?
Last month the West Tennessee Detention Facility in Mason,
Tennessee made a video pitch for California inmates. They
were hoping some would volunteer to be outsourced because
of overcrowding.
According to a March description in a Nashville newspaper,
“The hard-timers should come east, the video urged, because
of West Tennessee’s “larger and cleaner jail cells, 79 TV
channels, including ESPN, views of peaceful cow pastures,
and ... the ‘Dorm of the Week,’ (with its inmates) staying
up all night, watching a movie and eating cheeseburgers or pizza.”
(The Tennessean, 3-6-07)
Here’s the thing to not lose sight of. Living without Christ
and the power of His resurrection in this life means that we
are living in the prison of sin and death. We may think that
we are leading quality lives, but the best you can hope for
in this life is just a prison “upgrade.”
So much of this world strives for position, and status, and
money, and material gain. And all it amounts to is an attempt
to upgrade your position in prison.
Christ offers you a release from prison. He offers you
release from the captivity of sin and death.
The Lord speaks through the prophet, Isaiah, and spoke of
the blessings that Christ’s resurrection would bring. “I,
the LORD, have called you in righteousness; I will take
hold of your hand…to free captives from prison and to
release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.”
On the cross Christ provides the forgiveness for the sins
that imprisoned us. His suffering and death completes the
death sentence our sins deserve. And Christ’s resurrection
releases us from our captivity.
Through faith in Christ we step out into the light of freedom.
We step into the dawn of new life and possibilities. We step
out into an eternal world – begun here on earth and then
continued forever in heaven. We step out into a world where
the power of death has been destroyed.
Easter is Christ’s promise that, even though death can kill
our physical body for now, it can do nothing to our soul. Who
we are – our personality, our loves, our intelligence, our
identity – it all lives on.
Because Christ is risen, we know what will happen to us –
we know that WE will rise again someday. Because Christ is
risen, we can live free of fear about what death can do to us.
Because Christ is risen, we know that death is only a doorway
that brings us face to face with our Savior, Jesus. The moment
we close our eyes in death in this world IS THE MOMENT that we
open our eyes – and see Jesus.
On Maundy Thursday night the choir sang an anthem about how
death has been so radically changed because of Christ’s
resurrection. It was a song that actually pictures death in
a positive way.
And I was uncomfortable with that, until I realized that it pictured
death in a positive way, because THAT is the moment we get to see
Jesus. It celebrates the indescribable joys of heaven that we are
introduced to at the moment of death. The trumpet is pictured as
the Christian called home to heaven:
Blow ye the trumpet, Blow, blow!
Sweet is Thy work, my God, my King.
I’ll praise my Maker with all my breath.
O happy the one who hears.
Why should we startle and fear to die,
With songs and honors sounding loud?
Blow ye the trumpet, Blow, blow!
Lovely the appearance of death.
Only through Christ’s resurrection can we see past death and see
the life Christ has for us. Only through Christ’s resurrection can
we see past death and see our living, breathing Lord Jesus standing
there. Only through Christ’s resurrection are we given this new
and eternal life.
Christ is risen!
He is risen, indeed! Alleluia!
Amen.
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