The Episcopal Church of the Epiphany

Easter, April 4, 2010

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Does it matter? This story of the resurrection of Jesus, does it matter? Some Christians today don't think that it really does. They think the modern mind simply cannot accept this absolutely incredible story.

I read of a mother who was asked by her six-year-old son to explain Jesus' death and resurrection. She used her best theological language that was of course geared for his age.

She explained the last hours of Jesus' life, told about his death, and then she told him about how Jesus rose from the dead. When she was finished, her son responded with great skepticism, "Now I've heard everything."

But hey, many people today share this child's skepticism. But this skepticism is not new. The church of Corinth was a place of believers and skeptics. In Paul's letter to Corinth, he was writing to a very diverse church. There were a mix of Jews and Christians.

Corinth was mostly a secular society. It was a seaport with many transient people traveling through and exchanging ideas. The citizens of Corinth had a conglomeration of ideas and, like a lot of us today, there were many who were confused about what to believe.

And like many today, they questioned the reality of the resurrection, because it is so fantastic! Is their doubt and even fear surprising?

So again, the question, does it matter if it happened or not? Paul absolutely thought it made all the difference! The very existence of the Church hinged on it. Is that still true?

Paul preached, as did Jesus' disciples, the resurrection of Jesus, without any doubt whatsoever, even though he was persecuted for doing so.

Paul claimed that he had experienced the risen Jesus, and he had talked to a great number of people, including the disciples, who had seen, conversed with, and ate with the risen Jesus.

Paul said, if it didn't happen, well then, our faith is futile. He said, "If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied."

For Paul, for those eyewitnesses who said they saw Jesus raised from the dead, and for us, Easter brings up life-and-death concerns.

When I was serving a church in Dallas, I will never forget the time when one of my parishioners, a woman about my age, received a call telling her that her 21-year old son was dead.

He was attending North Texas University in Denton and was out running when he just collapsed and died immediately.

He seemed to be in excellent shape; he had just gotten out of the Marines and was attending college, and then this happened. Apparently he had an undiagnosed heart defect. I will never forget the horrific shock and painful grief she went through.

A number of us know that experience. I know something of it. My mother was in fine health when she got the flu. I was in the sacristy one Sunday after services talking with Fr. Doug Travis, when Bob came in and told me my mother were dead. It was a horrible shock.

When things like that occur it almost seems unreal; in fact everything seems absolutely surreal and dark. There is no sense of hope in the freshness of that grief. One is only in a daze of grief and pain and even fear.

That is what the disciples of Jesus were experiencing. They had just seen Jesus go through this horrific, torturous death; they were in the throes of insurmountable grief and pain, but not only that, they were terrified that the same thing could very well happen to them.

The women were a little safer, (men were the ones who were charged with insurrection and crucified for it). So these women who had followed Jesus everywhere went with this heavy dark grief to the tomb to anoint His body.

But then they found the tomb empty, and these strange men, these messengers told them that Jesus wasn't there because he had been raised from the dead. What? Alive! What?

No wonder the men at first didn't believe them. Would any of us have automatically believed them? But when they found it was true, well, think how it would be to have your emotions jerked from one extreme to the exact opposite extreme.

I would think that kind of dramatic change of emotion, though wonderful, would be a bit hard on the human system.

Easter brings up life-and-death concerns. A Canadian scientist said, "I have only two questions to ask: One, has anyone ever defeated death? And two, did he make a way for me to do it also?"

Well, the story that we celebrate tonight is the answer to those two questions. Yes, Jesus did defeat death, and yes, he did make a way for us to do it also. At least that's the Christian story.

This hope is the heart of Jesus' message. It is what the apostles fearlessly and unflinchingly preached.

Albert Einstein spoke many times of how a scientific hypothesis works. He said that "A scientist tells himself a story and then finds out by experiment whether it is true or not."

Before he was the nationally famous chaplain at Yale University, before he was the minister of the great Riverside Presbyterian Church in New York, and before he was a well-known activist in the field of peacemaking, William Sloane Coffin Jr. was searching for faith.

He described a crucial transition in his faith-journey: "Slowly," he said, "I found myself changing from the seeker who looks hoping something's there, to the kind who knows something's there, if only he can find it."

Some of us here tonight have absolutely no doubt about the truth of the resurrection. Some come with doubt. And some are somewhere in between. We are all in different places on our faith journey. What is important is that we are here.

The story of the resurrection of Jesus is the central story of our faith. It matters that the resurrection happened! This story not only proclaims the risen Jesus, but also summons us to follow Jesus and to obey and trust him.

Wherever we find ourselves on our faith journey, this is our story, and so this is our experiment; it is the greatest experiment of a lifetime!

If we embrace this story and daily undertake this experiment, the truth of it will become evident. We will discover how God's Spirit brings hope to people who can't imagine a way out.

What looked like a dead-end becomes a thoroughfare. What appeared to be a cave turns out to be a tunnel through the mountain. God�s Spirit brings resurrections, not just One long ago, but again and again in God's people.

If we undertake in hope this experiment, proclaiming the story of the resurrection of Jesus and following Him, we will demonstrate to ourselves and to the world how profoundly true the story of the church, the story of Jesus is. Amen.