PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Col. 3:1-17                                                           RESURRECTION WITH CHRIST

Sermon for Easter March 23, 2008:  People's UCC, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

 

          He was dead.  His voice was silent, his healing hands stilled.  Close the chapter, begin all over again without him.  But there is one last kindness—a duty, really:  there had been no time to complete the rites of preparation for burial—the washing, the anointing.  The women who would have done it make their way out to the cemetery.  Would the Roman soldiers detailed to guard the tomb against his disciples—would they be so kind as to break the official seal and move the stone so the women could slip in and perform their duties?  Probably not, but they had to try, anyway. 

          The sun was still below the horizon.  Shadows stretched across the road.  The birds that had begun their morning songs hushed—some took flight.  Animals can feel an earthquake coming before people do; and sure enough, the ground started shaking.  The women huddled together until it stopped, then they looked toward the tomb; and to their surprise the guards were lying flat on the ground, unconscious; and the tomb was open.  There was a man sitting on the toppled stone.  He spoke to the women, "Don't be afraid.  You've come looking for Jesus who was crucified.  He is not here:  he has risen."  He pointed into the tomb—a great black hole in the world, nothing to see.  He said, "Go tell his disciples that he will meet them in Galilee."  Matthew says they rejoiced.  Mark wrote earlier, and he said they ran back to town terrified.  Paul wrote even earlier, and he doesn't mention this at all.  What Paul wrote, however, holds the key to understanding what the resurrection of Jesus on Easter morning means to you:[1] 

 

 

and a little further on:

 

 

and once more:

 

 

          From ancient times Christians have greeted each other on Easter Day with the words we used for our Call to Worship this morning:

                                                                  

This is the Easter proclamation, today's grand theme.  Please say the response with me:  "He is risen indeed!"  This is the gospel.  Please say it with me again:  "He is risen indeed!"  This is what the people of Christ say in the world with our lives; because in Christ, "you have died, and your life is hid with Christ in God."  And now he is alive in you.  So we greet one another:

         

 

          I know that Christ is alive.  It's not a ruse, and it's not a fairy tale:  I know the crucified One is alive, because he has met me on the road I travel, in the life I live.  Sometimes he has been as rough with me as he was with some of the scribes and Pharisees; and he has been as gracious to me as to those who heard him say:[2] 

 

 

          Have you ever had a life-long goal, a heart's desire?  And you prayed for it every day, and sought God's help in getting ready to receive it, and in doing what you needed to do to achieve it?  And then the time came for your heart's desire to be fulfilled, and it failed?  I was forty years old.  It was a Palm Sunday night—all the local ministers in the denomination were together sitting in the choir loft of old Franklin Circle church, wearing our black Geneva pulpit robes; and the church's pastor was celebrating Holy Communion.  He gave the plates of bread to the deacons and they moved out among the congregation.  A plate was passed among the ministers in the choir loft and I took a wafer.  As I sat there among my brothers and sisters, holding in my hand this symbol of the broken body of Christ, I was silently screaming at God about my own brokenness—the loss of my life's dream:  "Why?  Why?"  And Jesus came and sat beside me; and in that moment I knew just as surely as heat rises, just as surely as the square root of four is two—I knew that even as my dream died, I was not left alone:  I had and have the love of God to sustain me.  Resurrection!

 

 

And I saw.  I left the tomb of my life's dream more shaken than joyful, but I knew that the message of the resurrection is true:  let's say it again:

 

          In that passage I read from Paul's letter to the Colossians, he said that it changes your life; and it does.  Albert Schweitzer was a genius:  by the time he was thirty he had four doctorates—one in music, one in medicine, one in philosophy and one in theology.  He grew up during the high tide of nineteenth century German Liberalism, and he was a Liberal.  The New Testament scholars of the time were engaged in what has come to be called "the second search for the Historical Jesus," and it was Schweitzer himself who, in 1933, capped off the project with his summarizing book titled The Quest of the Historical Jesus.  Many of the nineteenth century Liberals didn't believe in the deity of Christ, or they explained it in a way that was obviously more secular than religious; but Albert Schweitzer had been to Africa as a physician-missionary, and he had climbed to the heights of the human spirit performing the music of Bach on some of Europe's grandest pipe organs, and in these experiences he had come to know that Jesus was more than a great prophet or a wise teacher—he had come to know the risen Christ.  He concluded his book on the Historical Jesus with these words (and I think this is what Paul was getting at, too):[3]

 

 

          This is what Easter is about.  This is what it means to believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  It's about how he keeps confronting you now.  And the first witnesses quickly realized that the only way to explain it is … resurrection.  So let us not be ashamed of the ancient Christian greeting:  let us repeat it in our hearts every day, as we proclaim it with our lips today:

 

AMEN