Tabernacle Presbyterian Church
March 23, 2008
Easter Sunday

Rev. L. John Gable

“THIS STORY NEVER ENDS"

Matthew 28:1-15, Ephesians 2:1-10

We come once again to this day and to this place to hear once again the great proclamation of the Christian faith, “Christ is risen!”  The very same message the women received from the angel on that first Easter morning centuries ago comes to us anew today. “He is not here, for He has been raised, just as He said.”  And so with believers in every time and place we join in the chorus, “He is risen, indeed!”

          This is the Good News of the Gospel. Christ is risen!  He is alive!  May our ears and our hearts never grow tired of hearing this glorious message for this is the great pronouncement of our faith and the firm foundation on which it stands.  The great Reformer Martin Luther confessed, “Anyone who would preach the Gospel must go directly to preaching the resurrection of Christ…for this is the chief part of our faith….Everything depends on our retaining a firm hold on this article in particular; for if this one totters and no longer counts all others will lose their value and validity.”  Scholar John Leith writes, “The pivotal event in human history is God’s raising Jesus Christ from the dead, vindicating His life and ministry, and declaring Him Savior and Lord.”  Without the resurrection, this Jesus of Nazareth is just another misinformed prophet in a long line of “wanna be” messiahs.  However, if the Easter story is true, as we believe it is, then this is the confirmation that Jesus is who He said He was, the King of kings and Lord of lords, our Savior and our God.  It all hangs on this!

          But, if we are totally honest with ourselves, which I hope we are whenever we come to worship or turn to the teachings of Scripture because they are brutally honest with us, we are here not simply to reminisce about an event from which we are now 2000 years removed.  There is no real power or meaning in this story for us unless we can somehow find ourselves in it, and friends, God assures us that we can.  The Easter story is, in effect, not just Jesus’ story; it is our story, as well.  In truth, we have come to do something more than celebrate an event of the distant past.  We have come to encounter that same power and presence of God that is available to us still today.  The real benefit of the Easter story, at least from our perspective, is not simply that God gave Jesus new life back then, but that He is offering that same power for new life to you and to me today.

          Yes, the bold proclamation of the Christian faith is that God raised Jesus Christ from death to life, but because He lives we shall live also.  What God has done for Jesus He has promised to do for you and for me, to raise us from death to new life, beginning even now.

          What this really means is we have not come here today simply to retell the story of an empty cross or an open tomb.  We have come to worship a Risen Lord!  From the beginning of Christian history the most powerful witness to the truth of the resurrection has been the experience of those who have encountered the risen Christ, not just then, a long time ago, but today, among us still.  Matters of faith are never really proven convincingly through arguments and rationale.  Rather faith is best communicated by the evidence of changed lives.  Recall the words of the philosopher Nietsche as he says, “If you want me to believe in your Redeemer, show me that you are redeemed.”

          There is an old preacher’s story about the town drunkard and reprobate who gave his life to Christ and changed his ways.  His friends could hardly believe it and tried to make him feel like a fool for having “found religion”.  They tried to provoke him, saying, “You don’t really believe those miracles, do you?  You can’t really believe Jesus turned water into wine.”  To which he humbly replied, “I don’t know whether He turned water in to wine in Palestine, but I do know in my house He has turned beer into furniture.”  The most convincing argument for the truth of the resurrection, and hence of the Christian faith, is the evidence of lives that have been touched and changed by His presence, including yours and mine today.

          George Bernard Shaw, in the preface to his play, Androcles and the Lion, discusses the New Testament Gospels.  Here is part of what he writes about Matthew’s Gospel, although his comments could apply to any of them.  “Matthew then tells how after three days an angel opened the family vault of Joseph, a rich man of Arimathea, who had buried Jesus in it; whereupon Jesus rose and returned to Jerusalem with His disciples, assuring them that He would now be with them to the end of the world.”

          Shaw then comments, “At this point the narration abruptly stops.  The story has no ending.”  Matthew actually says essentially the same thing, as he writes in our lesson this morning, “And this story is still told to this day.”  Now, I am quite certain that Shaw said there more than he ever intended.  Having personally rejected the traditional Christian interpretations of Easter, in writing “this story has no ending”, he is inadvertently underscoring what Christians have been saying about Easter all along.  For the one who puts their trust in Christ the events of Holy Week, including the crucifixion, do not mark a tragic ending, but a new beginning.  The Gospels declare that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead on that first Easter morning and immediately believers came to the full awareness that Jesus was alive, and their lives were forever changed by it, and ours can be, as well.

          The story of our faith is that of a spiritual ripple effect that emanates out from the events of that first Easter morning, from Jesus to His disciples through the centuries to you and me today, and, in the words of Buzz Lightyear, “to infinity and beyond”. This is the real proof of the resurrection. The Good News of the Easter faith is that this story has no ending.

          Friends, the real essence and promise of the Christian faith is simply this: because He lives we shall live also as we are found in Him.  What God has done for Jesus, He promises to do for you and for me, and for all of His children, as we put our trust in Him.  He promises to change us, to renew us, to transform us and to resurrect us from death to new life.  The promise of Easter is not merely the remembering of a past glory or even the anticipation of a future hope; it is our laying hold of the power of a present reality.  Our resurrection with Christ begins right now.

          This is what the Apostle Paul is saying in his letter to the Ephesians.  He begins by describing our old life, without Christ, and this is where God truly is brutally honest with us.  Paul writes, “You were dead in your sins.”  Without Christ alive in us we are dead in our sins, lost in our brokenness and sinful disobedience, running head-long down a dead-end path to our own destruction.  Paul isn’t saying that about just a few of us, only the really bad people.  He says about all of us, “All of us once lived that way.”  That is the “bad news” which precedes and necessitates our need for the Good News, without Christ “we are dead in our sins.”

          But then comes the Good News.  “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which He loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ and raised us up with Him.”  Paul is using resurrection language here, and not just about Jesus, but about us, as well.  Just as Jesus lay dead in the grave, incapable of raising Himself to new life, so we lie dead in our sins, incapable of saving ourselves in any way.  But what we are unable to do for ourselves, God has done for us, in Jesus Christ.  He has raised us up and given us new life as we put our trust in Him.

          Friends, this is the heart of the Christian faith and the promise of the Easter day: because He lives, we shall live also.  We too are alive in Christ!

          Now, lest we get too carried away with how great we are for having this new life, let’s remember where it came from, from God and not from us.  We really didn’t have anything to do with it is Paul’s point here.  Remember, we were “dead” in our sins.  And dead people can’t do anything to help themselves, so God had to act on our behalf; which He did, conclusively.  Just as He raised Jesus from the dead on that first Easter morning, so He has raised us to new life in Christ.  We are not mere observers of the Easter story.  We are participants in it.

          This is what Paul means when he writes, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not the result of works, so that no one may boast.”  All we have to do to receive this new life is to accept it as the gift it is, given to us as an expression of God’s great love, but accept it we must; for unless, and until, we accept it, we are still dead – dead in our sins.

          In his book, My Quest for Beauty, the famed therapist Rollo May tells of his lifelong search for beauty.  After having suffered a nervous breakdown he began traveling the world, looking for beauty wherever and however he might find it.  He tells of visiting Mt. Athos, a peninsula of monasteries off the coast of Greece.  There he happened to stumble upon an all-night celebration of Easter, which is the way they celebrate it in the Greek Orthodox Church.  They announce the resurrection at midnight on what we would think of as being Saturday night, and then the celebration begins.  Though not a believer himself May decided to attend the service. The chapel was packed with worshipers and incense hung thick in the air.  The only light came from candles.  At the climax of the service, the Greek Orthodox priest gave to each person in attendance a brightly colored red Easter egg, saying, “Christo Anesthi!” – Christ is risen!  Each then responded according to custom, as we have done this morning, “He is risen indeed!”

          May writes, “I was seized then by a moment of spiritual reality.  What would it mean for our world if He had truly risen?”  He concludes that in the Easter story God has given us a promise, not that there would be no more pain or suffering or death, but that there would be hope for the future.  The promise of Easter is that there is the possibility of new life.  The promise of Easter is that there is a hope and a future in Christ.  And in that moment of spiritual awakening Rollo May passed from death to new life.

          Isn’t that our burning question today, the question that brings us here, “What would it mean for our world, and more personally for you and for me, if Christ truly has risen?”  The witness of our faith is this: it would mean the possibility of our new life in Him, beginning even now.

          Paul ends this teaching by saying, “We are what God has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.”  In effect what he is saying is this, since we have this new life, we must live like we have it.  We must no longer live as though we are dead in our sins.  We must no longer act as though we are unforgiven or unforgivable, unloved or unlovable, and we most certainly must not treat anyone else in that way.  We must no longer live as though there is no hope for the future or no possibility of change in the present.  As theologian Karl Barth put it, “If you have heard the Easter message, you can no longer run around with a tragic face and lead the humorless life of one who has no hope”, because now we are alive in Christ.

          The real power and promise of the Easter story is not just that God raised Jesus Christ from death to life, long ago and far away, but that He continues to do the same for people, the likes of you and me, today.  The most powerful witness to the truth of the resurrection is the evidence of a changed life, yours and mine.

          This is the Good News of the Easter faith: Christ is risen!  He is risen, indeed!  And because He lives, we shall live also.  What God has done for Jesus, He promises to do for you and me, as well, as we find ourselves in Him.  This is the Good News: this story never ends.   Amen.

Let us pray.  O Lord our God, we give You thanks for the glory of this day and this great promise of the Gospel.  Grant us the faith to believe and the grace to receive this gift of new life You have so freely given.  Grant us also, we pray, the courage to live as Your resurrected people, alive in Christ, now and forevermore. Speak and confirm Your truth to us, even now, in the silence of this moment, for we pray it through Christ Jesus, our risen and reigning Lord.