Death Is Not the Last Stop

Transcript

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[0:00] Our sermon reading for this morning is from Luke chapter 24, verses 1 through 12. And a few words of introduction. You may be wondering, what do we call this day? You know, sometimes we call it Easter Sunday, and lately we've also been calling it Resurrection Sunday. What is the meaning of the word Easter? This is interesting. It could mean east or dawn, and this is an old Germanic language, so would that be a reference to finding the resurrected Jesus at dawn? So that's a very spiritual term. Or it could be named after somebody named Estri, is the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring.

[0:36] Isn't that interesting? And so some people actually have rightly said that Easter might be named after a pagan goddess, right? But it wasn't uncommon for Christians, both at Christmastime and at Eastertime, to sort of rename or reappropriate pagan names or pagan holidays for Christmas ones, because people were used to having celebrations at that time. But the meaning of the celebration definitely changed. And so whatever anyone else may say, we're pretty sure that the early Christians were not worshipping a pagan goddess at Easter. They were worshipping the risen Christ. They had just kind of renamed it. But if we want to avoid this confusion and really center on what it means today, we can call it Resurrection Sunday, and we use that term interchangeably, just so you know. So this is Resurrection Sunday, but you know, I grew up as a kid, we always called it Easter, and we definitely had the Easter bunny. So it's going to be hard to wean myself off of the word Easter. So we'll just use both. It's okay.

[1:30] Now, today we're really going to be talking about, we've talked about the gospel in the past, but we're talking about the gospel today because the gospel always includes the resurrection of Jesus. And you could make a list, if you wanted to sort of narrow down what the gospel was about and really shorten it up, you could say, well, it has to do with the life and death and the resurrection of Jesus. You could say something about the incarnation, perhaps. You could talk about the miracles of Jesus, the teachings of Jesus. But if you want to put it in a nutshell already, you've gotten, it wouldn't even fit in one of these eggshells. It's too long, right? So there's a Catholic bishop named Robert Barron who said, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the gospel. Everything else is commentary. Isn't that interesting? For him, the resurrection is everything. The gospel is just the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Everything else is just commentary. So whatever we call this day and however much it describes the gospel, this is really in the top three of all the days in our Christian calendar. Okay? I can't make up my mind if Christmas is the most important day, right? Or if Easter is the most important day, or if Good Friday is the most important day.

[2:45] And so I would put them all three on the same level, in the top three. And then fourth, I would put like Pentecost is pretty important, okay? And some of the other days. But this is in the top. This is in the top three of all the Christian days on the calendar.

[3:02] And I have a, sadly he's passed away, but he's gone on to glory. A friend who was a covenant pastor, I may have told this story before. One day he was visiting a church and he was traveling. So he was traveling on Easter. He couldn't find a church that he was familiar with. So he looked up in the phone book and he found a church he thought would be good. He visited this church on Easter Sunday. Sometimes I tell the name of the denomination, but I don't want to today because I don't want to say anything bad about them. I don't think this is common. But he said he was looking forward to the sermon, an Easter sermon. What's the Easter sermon going to be about? You know, Easter is about resurrection, everything else is commentary. And the sermon that day was about tithing.

[3:43] Tithing. And he said, this is what he said. He said, could it have been about anything else? Like literally anything else besides tithing. But so some churches don't have a sense of even the rudimentary calendar of the Christian church. But Easter is the day of the resurrection. So we got to preach on the resurrection. You can't preach tithing. We will have a 12 part series on tithing starting next Sunday. So bring your checkbooks. But today is about the resurrection. All right. We have a calendar and it has a pretty important date on it. And today, today is that day is Resurrection Sunday. This is the day, as we're going to see in our reading, that the tomb was found empty. And the angels report to the women who went there to prepare the body of Jesus. That he was not there. That he had been raised from the dead. And he had been raised in the way that he himself had told them a long time ago. So let's go to our reading. Luke chapter 24, verse 1. But very early on Sunday morning, the women went to the tomb, taking the spices they had prepared.

[4:48] They found that the stone had been rolled away from the entrance. So they went in, but they didn't find the body of the Lord Jesus. As they stood there, they saw the body of Jesus. And as they stood there puzzled, two men suddenly appeared to them, clothed in dazzling robes. The women were terrified and bowed with their faces to the ground. Then the men asked them, Why are you looking among the dead for someone who is alive? He isn't here. He is risen from the dead. Remember what he told you back in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be betrayed into the hands of sinful men and be crucified. And that he would rise again on the third day.

[5:28] Then they remembered that he had said this. So they rushed back from the tomb to tell his eleven disciples and everyone else what had happened. It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and several other women who told the apostles what had happened.

[5:45] But the story sounded like nonsense to the men, so they didn't believe it. However, Peter jumped up and ran to the tomb to look. Stooping, he peered in. He looked in and saw the empty linen wrappings. Then he went home again, wondering what had happened. Let's pray.

[6:06] Father, thank you for your word. And we ask that you would add your blessing to it in Jesus' name. Amen. He is risen! Yes! It's a good sort of a call and response. And that saying goes back and forth. And it's a traditional greeting at Easter. And it's based on our reading where the angel says to the women, He isn't here. He is risen from the dead. Now the women didn't say, He's risen indeed, because they were not convinced yet, as much as you are, thank goodness. They still needed convincing. And it turns out a lot of people needed convincing that he was risen.

[6:40] And you could say that the whole book of Acts that we had read from just now is really just a whole convincing of people that Jesus Christ was raised. Every sermon that's ever preached pretty much in the Gospel of Acts talks about the resurrection of Jesus, including the one that Adele read.

[6:57] So people needed convincing that this could actually happen. Because who would believe such a thing, right? Now our reading tells us that the men, who were the ones that used to do all the explaining to the women, were totally confused when the women tried explaining something to them. Right? The men thought it was nonsense. It says it all sounded like nonsense to them. Now I'm going to do a quick poll. Raise your hand if it did sound like nonsense to them because of what was said or who was saying it. So who says it was nonsense because it was just too good to be true? Jesus raised his hand. Raise your hand. And then who thinks that they thought it was nonsense because it was the women that were saying it? Well, you can vote twice. Some of you have voted twice.

[7:46] Also, yeah, the answer is yes. Probably yes. It's funny how the Scriptures model the problem of truth. It's like the idea of mansplaining so far back in time. Like the Scripture understood. The men are like, no, the women can't explain spiritual things to us. They can't explain good news to us. We're the ones that have to tell it to everybody else. But there's this stream in Scripture, and it's there if you look for it, and it puts revelation and proclamation into the mouths and voices of marginalized people. This happens over and over again. And I'm just going to give you three examples. It was the shepherds that got the news of Jesus' birth first outside of the family of Mary and Joseph, and they went and told. So the shepherds, the marginalized. It was Gentiles like the Syrophoenician woman or the Roman centurion who, in what they said, they displayed greater faith than the apostles had. Isn't that interesting? And Jesus praised them for it, right? And here we have the women in Jesus' group of followers, and they are the first to see the Lord. They're the first to see the empty tomb. They're the first to hear the news from the angels. They're the first to meet the risen Jesus. And they're the first to tell everybody else about it.

[9:01] In a nutshell, he's risen. Everything else is commentary is probably what they said. I didn't say everything else is commentary. But they're the first to proclaim. So that's one thing that we always want to hold on to is that the marginalized have a voice in the gospel. The marginalized have a voice in Scripture. Praise God for that. So. Kind of shift gears here. What does the resurrection mean then? So, yes, he's raised, but Peter walked away saying, what could this mean? What is this about? Well, we have to answer that question. What does the resurrection mean? And in the spirit of putting things in a nutshell, let's look at only at the last verse of our second reading where St. Paul writes about what the resurrection means. We don't have to go to it on the slides or anything. Verse 26, the very last thing that Paul writes in this section. After defeating all the enemies of darkness in this world, Paul writes this. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. That's the meaning of the resurrection. The last enemy to be destroyed after Jesus destroys and defeats all the enemies of God. The final enemy to be destroyed is death itself. And of course, you're listening to that and I can forgive you for being a little skeptical.

[10:17] Right? We've experienced death in our congregation in the last several months, two beloved members. And we are facing the impending death of any of us at any time, but especially people who are ill. So you could say in this moment, death is still very much at work. When will it actually be destroyed? People are dying all the time everywhere. Right? There's a world clock that tells how many people are being born and dying every day. And actually that number has flopped. It used to be more people were being born than dying. But now as we understand, I think the world population is beginning to contract. About 106 people die on our planet every minute.

[11:05] That means since the beginning of our worship service here, over about 5,000 people have actually died on this planet. And a lot of them needless deaths, unnecessary deaths. Premature deaths. But not the most. Most are probably the result of age and deteriorating health. People passing away as people do when they get much older and lose their health. But even talking about this makes me depressed.

[11:32] How can we say death is defeated when death is still with us? When 5,000 people have died in the last hour? That's a huge number of people. See, death still has its power over us, doesn't it? We see it coming in the distance. Or sometimes it's closer. We've experienced it as people that we've loved have died. And it can kind of consume our thoughts. The thought of death can consume us.

[11:57] We recently had a sermon series. Here's the answer maybe to that question. We had a sermon series on what the kingdom of God is. The kingdom of God is the rule of Christ breaking into the world and defeating darkness and death. Yes. But one aspect about the kingdom is that it's here now, but not completely. It's already, but not yet completely come around.

[12:21] And we don't usually think of time this way, but God does. And this is the difference between us and God. We have a different sense of time. When God does a thing, it's both started and completed in the same moment in God's time. God is that powerful. He can do it. But in our time, we see the start of it, but we have to wait for the completion of it. So it was started on the cross. It was started at the resurrection. The defeat of death is ongoing. It's happening, but it's not yet fully done. But in another way, it is fully done. We'll get to that. So try to hold that paradox there in tension. And that's something about Christian faith, that there's all sorts of paradoxes like that.

[13:01] Stan Eklund and I talked a little bit about this before he passed away. We were talking about advanced physics, actually. And it's always interesting to talk to him about advanced physics. And, you know, I just acted like I understood it. I understood what he was—no, I'm kidding. He made it very understandable. But his hope, he told me, it's one of the last things he said to me, was that other people who were deep into physics like he was—he's thinking of his fellow physicists—that they would develop a kind of humility from looking at the cosmos and coming to see that they didn't really understand how time works. Right? He said that. Or what the source of dark matter and dark energy are. And that this humility would drive them. Right? And that he would take that humility into the arms of this great being that actually created all of that and understands all of that. That was his hope. And I think he had in his heart this hope, at least for sort of that tribe that he was in, that many of them would come to faith. And that was a great wish that he had.

[14:04] So we talked about—all of us, actually, and hopefully the physicists that he knew—we would someday be in the presence of God. Right? And in the fullness of time, as St. Paul says, in that fullness of time we will be fully known even as we know in full. This idea that God will reveal things to us. And someday that the mysteries of the created universe like time and matter and quantum entanglement—do you all know what that is? I don't either. No, I'm kidding. No, I really don't. Nobody does. And what really happened to Amelia Earhart? Like, I definitely want to know that. Did anyone like—? I learned about this in sixth grade, and I was like, what happened? Like, these unsolved mysteries? There have been some TV shows about it. I think we understood her radio was broken. She probably crashed into the ocean. I don't know. But nobody knows. God will tell us. Like, those deep longing things that we really want to know. I actually want to know more about quantum entanglement than Amelia Earhart. But I'm still curious about Amelia Earhart. But all these mysteries of the created universe, like, how can something be started but not yet done?

[15:12] That will be revealed to us in heaven someday. And we're going to go, wow. Thank you, God, for explaining to this. And I wonder if when people stand in awe and this reverent fear of God in God's presence, will it be because of his vast greatness? And I think the answer to that is yes. But I think it's also going to be because they're going to be thunderstruck at the mysteries that will be revealed in that moment. Like, we'll go, oh, I get it now.

[15:38] I understand how evil has been in my life. I understand how I would not be able to prevail in this world. And I understand how God can still say he loves us through that. I understand how death is defeated and yet at the same time we worry about it and it comes for us, right? And we'll go, wow, God is so good. Thank you for explaining that to me. I hope that's what we'll think and we'll say. And this is what it is with death. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. The resurrection of Jesus is the already. but the not yet destruction of death. That's what the resurrection is. It's the already but not yet fully done destruction of death. Death is dying, but it's not dead yet. Are we confused now? I think we could be, right? I think I am. I know I am. I'm always confused about these things, but there's a death that's, I think I would put it this way, there's a death that's worse than death, than the physical death. It's the spiritual death. It's the separation from the God of life, the one that makes the cosmos and gives us a place in it. And death without Christ is death in the fullest sense. It's a sundering of all life from me, and it's a sundering of me from all goodness, and all astounding mystery. Like that would be the death, is if that's never even

[16:58] revealed to me. That would be great loss, but I think it will be revealed to all of us. That's the kind of death that's just not dead. It's the one that's not dead. It's the one that's not destroyed on the cross. That spiritual death, but not the physical death, not yet, right? Because of the resurrection, there's this hope for a new life even after physical death. So we don't say that physical death doesn't exist, because obviously it does. But we do say that it's not the last word. It's not the last stop on the train. It's just a transit hall to the new life. It's the way sign into this glorious existence where we are with God. And it's something we have to do. And it's something we have to do. And it's something we have to do. And it's something we have to do. And it's something we have to do. And it doesn't have to be something we always fear, and it doesn't have to consume us. So I'm going to say this again in a on Resurrection Sunday, just to remind us ourselves. Because of the resurrection, there is a hope for new life even after physical death. There's a hope for new life even after physical death. Job says this in chapter 19. He says, I know my Redeemer lives, and at the last moment, he's

[18:07] last, he will stand upon the earth, and after my body has been destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God. My heart faints within me. That's what Job says. Our bodies may die, our loved ones may die, but death is being destroyed. Means death is not the end, but it's only the path to the new life where in our flesh we will see God, and our hearts will faint at the sheer majesty of being in his presence. So what do we do now about this? This is great news. Praise God that physical death is not the end. It's just the next step. One thing we do is we rejoice. So praise God we rejoice that Christ's resurrection is the already but not yet destruction of death, and that new life awaits everybody and all of us who have gone on before us in Christ, and that's huge. So new life is waiting for all of those who are in Christ. Praise God. That's what Paul says. But number two is we need to tell it. Peter says it clearly in our second reading. He says, they put him to death by hanging him on a cross, but God raised him to life on the third day. That's the proclamation of the gospel. So I need to mansplain the gospel to everyone, and ladies in the room, you need to womansplain this to everybody. You don't have to do that.

[19:26] Never do the gospel in a condescending way. I'm joking, all right? Just kidding. Tell the story in a way that's not condescending. I'm joking. For sure, right? And it will seem like nonsense at first to somebody you're telling to. Be prepared for that. You should be prepared for that. I mean, I have all sorts of fairy tales about people coming back to life, right? And that's what they'll say. Oh, that sounds like a nice story. That sounds like a quaint story. You know, it sounds like science fiction or fantasy or something like that, like magic. And we could say, well, no, but I could see why you would think that. But no, this happened. People saw it. It was a miracle. It was a miracle. It was a people attest to it it's been written down but stick with it stick with the person and with the story keep telling it right invite people into that place of humility where we don't really understand the universe as well as we think we do right because that's a real place that's a real place that's a that's an appropriate response to the universe as we see it is this great humility about what we don't know invite people into the hope that death isn't the final event in their lives because what does Paul say if we of all people

[20:34] are we're the most to be pitied if Christ is not raised from the dead but really somebody who doesn't have the hope of Christ they think death is the end of everything and is the most to be feared but we don't fear in it we don't fear we don't need to live in fear of it and you tell somebody else that you're telling you don't need to live in fear of death or count down the days to it it doesn't have to occupy your mind at all times tell it like Peter does tell it like Paul does tell it like Job does tell the story of the resurrection that's the other half of Easter is that it happened death is defeated but we tell so much about Easter's proclamation people telling other people what happened so we tell it let's say it again Christ is risen you just told it how was that that was easy right you just told it all the rest is commentary let's pray Right you just told it how was that that was easy Right you just told it how was that that was easy Right you just told it how was that that was easy Right you just told it how was that that was easy Right you just told it how was that that was easy Right you just told it how was that that was easy Right you just told it how was that that was easy Right you just told it how was that that was easy

[21:44] Right you just told it how was that that was easy Right you just told it how was that that was easy Right you just told it how was that that was easy Amen.