April 12

April 12, 2009

The Best Reason to Celebrate
a sermon on Luke 24.1-12, 36-49
by David C. Mauldin
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Mobile, Alabama

Everyone needs to celebrate. We human beings are made that way. You can’t keep going through the usual routine day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. Once in a while you have to set everything aside and find something to feel good about. You have to celebrate!

We see this universal human instinct in every culture. Throughout history, every people group has had holidays. Harvest festivals, festivals based on the new moon or the changing seasons, religious holidays, political holidays—and usually a blend of all of these—holidays based on historical events. People celebrate all sorts of things, often in bizarre ways. A proper celebration only has two real requirements: it is about something people care about, and they can forget about themselves and their worries for a while.

Sports provides many an excuse to celebrate. Win or lose, excitement is in the air. I was in Nashville the year the Titans played in the Super Bowl. It was crazy. Even though they lost, there was still a big celebration with a parade. And when your team wins big, look out. I recently read a classic example of human craziness. A statue of Colonel Sanders—yes, of fried chicken fame—was pulled out of a river in Japan. Twenty-five years ago, the local team won Japan’s equivalent of the World Series. One of the players apparently looked like Colonel Sanders (though I have trouble imagining that), so gleeful fans, flush with the euphoria of victory, tore down the statue outside a KFC and threw it into the river. The team hasn’t won a championship since, so now they are going to put the statue in the stadium in hopes of overcoming “the curse of Colonel Sanders.” If you had any lingering doubts, put them aside: people are crazy. But do you know what? If we didn’t celebrate, we would all go the bad kind of crazy. We have to celebrate. That’s just how God made us.

Now I want to take these reflections on our irrepressible drive to celebrate and look at Easter. Easter is like our other celebrations in many ways, but it is different in the most important way. All our other celebrations allow us to forget about ourselves and our problems for a brief while by reminding us of what’s really important, or by at least connecting us to something bigger than ourselves. So our celebrations are like an eclipse. They come between our problems and us, so that for a brief instant, our problems are not visible. We can feel happy, even if we don’t have much to be happy about. Think of a lunar eclipse. The earth’s shadow hides the moon. It’s still there, but you can’t see it—for just a short while. Celebrations give us that sort of break from our problems and the tedium of life.

Easter also gives us this sort of break, but it is a different kind of thing altogether. If every other celebration is an eclipse, Easter is like the rising of the sun (S-U-N). Think of your problems and the tedium of life as the stars. You look up at the night sky, and they’re everywhere. It can be overwhelming. What happens when the sun comes up in the morning? How many stars do you see at midday? None. The sun doesn’t block them out. It simply outshines them. They are still there, but you cannot see them because the brightness of the sun drowns them out.

Every other celebration hides your problems for a brief moment. The resurrection of Jesus is so important, so powerful, so transforming, that its brightness overwhelms all our problems. Why is that? What makes the difference? Every other celebration distracts us from the rest of life. The resurrection actually changes the rest of life. Because Jesus is alive, nothing is the same. Not even death means the same thing anymore. Death has become, for those who believe, not a final end, but a doorway into eternal life.

New creation has begun! That’s what the resurrection of Jesus signifies. It signals God’s victory, and it shows us where his plan is taking us. Consider the example of Joni Eareckson Tada. Injured in a diving accident in 1967, she was confined to a wheelchair, paralyzed from the shoulders down. She is a Christian. For her, Easter is more than a distraction from her condition. It is the promise that someday she will walk again … and dance and run. She writes:

I with shriveled, bent fingers, atrophied muscles, gnarled knees, and no feeling from the shoulders down, will one day have a new body, light, bright, and clothed in righteousness—powerful and dazzling. Can you imagine the hope this gives someone spinal-cord injured like me? Or someone who is cerebral palsied, brain-injured, or who has multiple sclerosis? Imagine the hope this gives someone who is manic-depressive. No other religion, no other philosophy promises new bodies, hearts and minds. Only in the Gospel of Christ do hurting people find such incredible hope. [Heaven, Your Real Home, p. 53]

Now that’s something to celebrate! Not all of us face those challenges, but for all of us, the resurrection makes all the difference. All of us will die. All of us have lost people we love to death. If we live long enough, our bodies begin to wear out. The resurrection promises God has something better for us. Something wonderful. Something not less real than life as we know it, but on the contrary, something much more real and beautiful.

Do you ever wish you were a better person? The resurrection promises moral and spiritual renewal as well as physical renewal. While some dream of running and walking again, others of us dream of being able to love others the way we know deep down we are supposed to. Imagine the same transformation Mrs. Tada anticipates for her body changing all of your relationships. All the misunderstandings and selfishness and hurt—gone! What if your life could be beautiful, one of God’s most beautiful creations—more beautiful than the Grand Canyon or the Greek Isles or the delicate balance of nature? The resurrection of Jesus is God’s promise that it will be.

Have you ever felt depressed because your life didn’t seem to go anywhere? Or maybe it didn’t go where you had hoped? Or you felt life had no meaning? Let me tell you: Your life does have meaning. It is going somewhere, somewhere good. How do I know this, even if I don’t know you? Because Jesus is alive! The Father raised him from the dead. Through him God gives you a new name, a new identity as his child, and an inheritance that is right now stored in heaven for you, waiting for the day when God will raise the dead and make all things new.

If that seems like pie-in-the-sky-but-what-about-my-life-now, listen up! You do not have to wait until you die to experience the benefits of Jesus’ resurrection. For starters, he is alive, and he has promised to be with all who believe in him. So you can know him and the power of his presence in your life. He gives us peace, joy, and resilience right now. And there is no peace, joy, or resilience like the kind Jesus gives. Plus, when the Father raised Jesus from the dead, he laid claim to all creation. “It’s mine,” he said. Jesus did not live on as a spirit. He rose bodily from the dead. God cares about this world he created. He is not content to save our souls and let everything else go. God wants it all. And this means that the present matters.

When Paul got to the end of his great chapter on the resurrection, 1 Corinthians 15, he ended it by saying, “Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.” Your labor for Christ and his kingdom are not in vain because his kingdom will come and he will rule; and all the good you do, God will preserve it into eternity. We hear the same message in the Revelation. In chapter 14 a voice from heaven says, “Write this: Blessed are the dead who from now on die in the Lord.” And the Holy Spirit adds, “Yes, they will rest from their labors, for their deeds follow them.” If belonging to the Kingdom of God and making a contribution that lasts eternally doesn’t give life here and now meaning, I don’t know what does.

Some years ago a group of Canadian Christians went on a mission trip to Brazil. They visited one of the poorest slums in Sao Paulo. It was the kind of place where the poorest of the poor live on a garbage dump and build houses out of cardboard and corrugated metal. The Canadians were overwhelmed by the poverty. You can see things like this on TV, but it’s nothing like being there. They were overcome with a sense of despair. They asked the local pastor, who was one of the poor people and lived among them, “Where is the hope in this situation?” He stared at them in bewilderment, and then answered, “We have Jesus. He is our hope.” The poor Christians in the slum understood the gospel better than the educated Christians from an affluent nation. The Canadians could not imagine hope apart from material prosperity. Can you? It’s hard for us, isn’t it? Take away clean water from the tap and our electricity, and we go nuts pretty fast. Every few years a hurricane reminds us we couldn’t live like that. I admit I am a fan of clean water and electricity, but let us not be blinded by our prosperity. Our hope is Jesus. When we have him, we have everything. We are kings and queens, whether we have anything else or not.

The living Jesus brings hope to the poorest of the poor; to the broken in body, mind, and soul. He brings meaning to life and hope for eternal life. He promises justice, peace, beauty, and goodness. His resurrection means all of this and more. He can do it. He will do it. We can be absolutely certain because … well, he did rise from the dead. He died on a cross because he claimed to be God. He had preached about his coming kingdom and what it would be like. Then he rose from the dead. The resurrection dramatically confirms his identity and trustworthiness. It’s not the sort of thing that just happens.

But did it happen? The best argument I know against the resurrection is simply that it is too good to be true. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Years of advertising have taught us that. A stranger in Nigeria is not eager to share his lotto winnings with you, and Bill Gates will not pay you thousands of dollars for forwarding chain emails. Given how wonderful the resurrection of Jesus is, dare we buy into it?

Well, I can tell you why I have. First, a good, solid historical case can be made that Jesus rose from the dead. His death, burial, the empty tomb, and the claims of his followers to have seen him alive again are all historical data that have to be explained. Only one hypothesis covers all the facts well, that Jesus did indeed rise again. You can only get around the evidence by dismissing it. If you decide in advance that a miracle like that can’t occur, because either there is no God or God is not capable of doing that, then why bother with evidence? But I don’t see how you could know those things.

Second, this probably won’t be convincing to you, unless you know him too, but I am convinced Jesus is alive because I know him. Call me a mystic if you want, but the Jesus I meet in the gospels I have also met in my own life and seen in others. I hope you have too.

Third, and finally, the way I see it we really have two options. Either the world is bad (from our perspective) because of things like death, disease, poverty, injustice, and all the rest—or, as Christianity claims, the world is good but it’s broken. If God made the world, why can’t he fix it? That’s what Christianity claims God is going to do, fix everything. It’s called new creation, and it started when the Father raised Jesus from the dead. Jesus once asked a question that has helped my faith more than anything else he said. “Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!” [Mt 7.9-11] My point is: Do not let your fear hold back your faith. Yes, the resurrection does sound too good to be true. But all you need to change that is the possibility that God loves the world he has made. If he does, new creation makes perfect sense. It’s not a dream. It is the faithfulness of God acted out in our world.

Therefore, I invite you to believe. I invite you to celebrate. The resurrection of Jesus is the best reason of all for celebration. God has changed everything. By raising Jesus from the dead he turned everything upside down. Now we have hope. Now we have life. Now we have Jesus … and all the amazing blessings he gives us. Amen.

rev_mauldin@yahoo.com back to sermons