Sermons

---

Totally Different!
Easter Sunday Apr 15, 2001
Pastor Dan Baumgartner

Luke 24:1-12

We started Lent on Ash Wednesday, February 28…the day of the earthquake. That rattled many of us. I doubt if I’ll ever forget being in my office, waiting as the ground shook, and wondering what would happen.

I remember when it stopped, all of us softly and hesitantly opening the front door and sort of tiptoeing out onto the front porch. We looked around rather carefully, but a little eagerly…wondering if something major had happened…wondering if, perhaps, the world had somehow changed. We looked, I imagined, a little like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz…the house had landed, and she opened the door into an entirely new world. Everything was different.

Our season of Lent is complete. Forty days, six Sundays of quiet reflection and contemplation, times of confession and communion … walking word by word and picture by picture … through Christ’s journey to the cross…now it’s over. The dark purple cloths of Lent are replaced by the bright white of Easter, the stripped sanctuary of Maundy Thursday is filled with banners and flowers. Everything IS different…it is the day of Resurrection.

It began with this group of women: two Marys, Joanna and others, going to a tomb on a Sunday morning. They did not find what they expected. They expected to find a dead body. After all…they had SEEN Jesus die. They expected to find a corpse, bloodied and lifeless, that they would anoint with spices and give a proper final burial. They expected to feel, as they looked at Jesus’ body…the death of their own hope, for they had dared to dream that God was doing something extraordinary…and now their hope was crushed and lifeless.

That is what they expected to find. They did NOT expect to find the tomb open, the stone which had blocked the entrance rolled away. They found instead an empty tomb. The found what they did not expect.

We do not expect to “find” resurrection. In fact, most of us find resurrection difficult to comprehend. We are skeptical…perhaps cynical. It’s hard to get your mind around, hard to imagine, hard to believe. That is as it should be. Resurrection is something totally different. Totally outside ourselves, something over which we have no control, we cannot manufacture or plan or engineer. We have nothing to do with resurrection.

It is hard for us even to come up with a model of resurrection that is helpful. Easter eggs and bunnies are totally extraneous. Butterflies are often used as a metaphor for Resurrection Day, for Easter…so is Springtime. Butterflies that SEEMED dead (but weren’t) emerge more beautiful and better than ever. In Spring, things that seemed lifeless (but really weren’t) bloom, and draw our appreciative awe.

In resurrection, in THE resurrection, the person of Jesus Christ who had really and truly died…was raised to life, never to die again. Resurrection is not a kind of springtime. At best, spring is a pale and inadequate illustration. Resurrection is something totally different. It’s so different, in fact, we need help to understand it…the ladies in this story needed help too. The gospel writer Luke is very persistent in recognizing that God meets our need to understand.

At the birth of Christ, way back in Luke 2, you will remember that God sent an angel to the shepherds to explain the significance: “I bring you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day…a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” That was the beginning.

And now here, at the end of Luke, it is the word from angels which instructs the women, first with a question: “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” They were, we must remember, in a graveyard.

Last month, I was part of three different funerals, all wonderful ladies far up in years. Funerals are something, quite frankly, which I thought in becoming a pastor I would have to just endure…there are things about every job you just get through! I have since learned that the end of life is a very holy time, a precious time, a painful time and a celebration all rolled into one.

The last of the funerals ended with a graveside service right down here at the cemetery on Queen Anne. I was struck by the apparent finality of the place. Grave markers, large crosses, headstones everywhere, everything signaling the end of life. And yet, in the middle of that place, with death all around…we gathered and committed a dear sister to the Lord with these words: “In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our sister…”

The resurrection changes everything. Even the most final thing of human experience, death…is no longer the last word. Everything is different.

“Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, he has risen…JUST AS HE TOLD YOU.” Jesus had told them…that he must be handed over, that he must be crucified…but that he would rise on the third day. And as the angels spoke, those words of Jesus, which had died inside of these women, sprang to life.

The light switch that had been snapped off on Good Friday…snapped on. Could it really be? Is the dead Jesus now alive?! Is the world totally different? C.S. Lewis writes,

Jesus has forced open a door that has been locked since the death of the first man. He has met, fought and beaten the king of death…and everything is different because he has done so.”

The resurrection changes death, and life after death. Jesus’ ascent to heaven assures us that we will join him there some day. We need not fear death. But if that is all we understand about resurrection, the scholar Richard Hays suggests that it is “a terribly thin account of what resurrection means.”

It is more than just a personal guarantee for the after life. It is an invitation to life. Resurrection is a wonder that causes us, as it caused these women and then Peter and then everyone who saw the risen Christ…to enter into life in a different way. We can never know what is coming next. Resurrection says God has invaded the very realm of death, and begun to set things straight…to set everything straight, people, animals, earth. And so life becomes different.

As I hang around the local coffee shops, periodically I’ll sit near someone whose voice is so distinct and carries so far that, no matter how hard I’m concentrating on my reading, I hear every word they say. Last week one such man described to another a very difficult situation in his life…and then wrapped it up by saying, “You know, you just do what you have to do, and you move on…and you cover your bases.” A lot of us ascribe to that philosophy of kind of gutting it through life, slogging towards the end.

But…what if? What if the resurrection is true, what if God has invaded and life is different? We would be in a world where wonder has crept in, where we never know what is coming next.

If the resurrection is true (and it is)…if the tomb was empty because God raised Christ (and He did)…if that risen Christ appeared to many people (as the story goes on to tell)…if God’s resurrection power is loose in the world…If God can do resurrection work…then he just might do it in me.

If God can do resurrection work, then those parts of you and me that may have died: goodness, joy, wonder…might just be resurrected too. Nothing is final.

If God can do resurrection work, then those signs of death in our lives: our anxiety, our addictions, broken relationships, hard-heartedness, self-absorption may disappear. You and me...we might experience resurrection now, in life. Swept along by the continual possibility of wonder, we may live life differently.

When we were in Hawaii last year, one of the big hotels had a huge water park that we went to with the kids. All around the outside is a sort of river with a very gentle but persistent current. And if you lowered yourself down into that channel, you would find yourself being gently taken away. You have to give yourself to it.

The resurrection of Christ allows the current of God to move you. It happens all over…I love to watch for it. Many of you know that the Kleber family is preparing to move to Portugal to work with Habitat for Humanity. You just don’t do that, you know! It violates all the rules of safety, security, risk, accumulation. But everything is different now. If Christ is alive and in the world, it’s okay for the Klebers to get in the water. The rules have been changed, and they can trust the current. ...

Maybe God is calling you to live into the wonder of resurrection right now. Maybe you have a decision to make…career, relationship, business, lifestyle. Something you may not have expected, or something you expected that didn’t happen. Maybe it won’t make sense in the grid the world puts on things…but in the light of the resurrection, everything is different. Maybe it’s time to give yourself to the current. It’s a wondrous thing, totally different.

What does it feel like? JRR Tolkien wrote a trilogy of books called "The Lord of the Rings." Toward the end of the third and final book, after the last of many, many battles of good versus evil and light versus dark, two of the heroes, Sam and Gandalf the Wizard unexpectedly find each other alive:

Sam said, “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought that I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?”

“A great Shadow has departed,” said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count. It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears. Then, as a sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring and the sun will shine out the clearer, his tears ceased, and his laughter welled up, and laughing he sprang from his bed.

“How do I feel?” he cried. “Well, I don’t know how to say it. I feel, I feel” -- he waved his arms in the air -- “I feel like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!”

Everything, indeed, is different. We are free to live into the wonder of God … made firm in the resurrection.

The apostle Peter, the same Peter who heard the women and ran to look in the empty tomb…begins his first New Testament letter this way:

By God’s great mercy, he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

Friends, I want to give you one very simple suggestion this morning. I don’t often do this. But I want to encourage you…today, this afternoon, tonight. Go someplace for a moment of quiet. Step out onto the front porch, go for a walk, sit in a park somewhere. The world is different, your future is different, your life is different, you are different…because of what God has done. And stop just long enough to let the wonder of the resurrection well up in you. And as a prayer of thanks, whisper the words for yourself: “He is risen—he is risen indeed.”

Say them with me now: “He is risen—he is risen indeed.”

Everything is different. Thanks be to God.