If God gives points up in heaven, I think you would get extra points for sitting on the floor or standing up for an entire service!...but I don’t think He gives points!

Friends, one of the ancient traditions of the church, still practiced some places, is that when it comes time for the Gospel reading, the whole church stands. So, this morning as I light the candle and turn to the story in Luke 24, please stand with me.

Luke 24:1-12

Christ has risen! He is risen indeed!
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

There. We’ve said it. Now, do we believe it? Do we believe that Someone beaten, nailed to a cross, hung in the air, dies, is buried…is alive? Really? If that’s a stretch for you…good. It should be! Our experience on this earth is that death is final. Really final. We’ve lived that out liturgically this week.

On Thursday night at the Maundy Thursday service, at the close of it, all of these elements -- cross, communion elements, cloths, Bible, even the communion table -- were draped in black and carried out, and we left in silence.

On Friday for the noontime service, the sanctuary was stripped and bare. We read the scriptures, Christ being crucified and finally dying. They are hard to read. It is finished. It is final. But it’s not just liturgical symbolism that makes death seem final. You have some experience with death. So do I.

In these last few years, Anne and I have lost all of the remaining family members of our grandparents’ generation. Both sets of our parents were married quite young, and so we knew our grandparents well, even great grandparents, and great uncles and aunts.

Being the only pastor in the family, it seems I’ve been involved in a steady stream of funerals. When Anne’s Grandma Thora died in November, we went to a little cemetery in Ballard to bury her ashes. The sign at the entrance to the cemetery said, “Space Available.”

What?! I’m not sure who is doing their advertising. But you know what? I bet they won’t have space available for long. Death is the great equalizer, the ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction, the thing that no one avoids no matter how wealthy, famous, good, poor, ordinary or corrupted. There won’t be space available forever.

On that day, after we’d prayed and read scripture and committed Grandma Thora into the Lord’s hands, the attendant at the cemetery set the box with the ashes into the hole in the ground, and we all pushed the dirt over it and filled in the hole. It was very final. That’s the way death is: Irrevocable. Final.

I want to tell you about three people this morning, very quickly:

Bertrand Russell was a well-known, brilliant philosopher who was also a very determined atheist. Here’s what he said about life…and death.

“The life of a man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain, toward a goal which few can hope to reach and where none may tarry long. One by one as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent death. Brief and powerless is man’s life…For man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day.”

Good Lord, Bertrand, is there nothing to believe, only that there is no tomorrow?

Peter Barton. Some friends, knowing that I occasionally like to read, sent me a book this year called Not Fade Away (it’s actually a title from an old Rolling Stones song). It’s a short autobiography of a man named Peter Barton. Barton was an achiever, an early founder of cable television who made a pile of money in those early years. He was a man who lived life with zestful energy. And when he was 47 years old he found out he had cancer. A lot of treatment bought him a year of life, but then the cancer returned. At the time he wrote the book, he knew he would die. It’s a very honest book, and there are some extremely poignant moments.

Barton was not a religious person. In fact, throughout the book, he intentionally stayed miles away from any concept of a God that might be known personally, or that was anything more than just an abstract thought or philosophy. He didn’t want to be tied down. But also throughout the book, Barton kept expressing this sense that there was something beyond death. In fact, at one point he addresses a paragraph to each of his children, and then one to his wife. To his wife, he writes:

“I believe that there’s Another Side. I wouldn’t call it Heaven, and I’m not making any guesses about what it’s really like…but I do believe that souls are reunited there…so I’ll wait for you at the end of the jetway.”

“I believe that there’s Another Side.” Oh, but Peter, why do you believe it? Is it enough to just want it, or to just think that it would be nice?

Jerry. I went down to the lookout this morning that faces out over Lake Union. The sun was just coming up, the water beginning to shimmer as the light hit it. And I remembered that the last two Easters, I have done the exact same thing. And both years, I saw a man named Jerry there at the little park. I knew who Jerry was, but nothing about him until later. He was about 65, had been quite an athlete at Queen Anne High School years ago. He’d had a very hard life, and for many years was lost in addictions and darkness. A few years back Jesus had met him in a very powerful way, and his life had begun to change.

Anyway, both years he’d been there at six in the morning, doing the same thing as me. Alone. He was tall, with white hair, and an Oakland A’s hat (for which we’ll forgive him!). Both years he turned as I came up to the lookout and looked at me with a sparkle in his eyes, and said simply, “He is risen!” And I replied, “He has risen indeed.” And off he would walk. Those mornings were an incredible gift from God to me.

Jerry wasn’t there this morning. I knew he wouldn’t be. He died last year in a fire here on Queen Anne, just a few blocks over. I met his family, and did his memorial service. And when I went this morning to see the sun coming up, I thought about him. You see, Jerry knew God. He believed what God had done for him in Jesus Christ. He knew a risen Lord. And I believe with all my heart, that today, this very day, Jerry is in Jesus’ presence.

Why do I believe that? It starts with something that comes even before the empty tomb. It starts with what Jesus told his disciples would happen to him long before his death:

In Luke 9 and again in Luke 18, Jesus gathers his disciples around and tells them essentially the same thing:

“the Son of Man must undergo suffering, he will be rejected by the leaders, and killed…and on the third day be raised.”

In the other gospels it is the same. Jesus carefully explains what will happen to him, and why. Sin will be covered. The finality of death will be undone. His followers hear, but they don’t hear. They hear, but don’t understand.

That’s not so surprising. Most of the large scale media representations of Jesus from these last decades just skip over the resurrection. The ’Sixties musical “Godspell.” The rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar.” The book and movie, “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” All have no resurrection, or just a hint or a glimpse of a resurrected Jesus.

A resurrection, after all, would be hard to depict in a believable way. And for some of the writers of these pieces, the resurrection is difficult to get their arms around. For us, too.

But I guess we could offer the same critique of our passage this morning, if it was just these twelve verses. There is no resurrection here, just an empty tomb. No description of the resurrection …

• fireworks?
• shafts of light?
• whirlwind?
• radioactive glow coming from the tomb?

We have no idea because no one was there when it happened! The story is told based on what happened afterwards. What happens is that the women go to the tomb. Same faithful women who were with Jesus in Galilee. Same ones who were eyewitnesses to his death. Same faithful ones who go on the first day of the week, that is…Sunday…to embalm his body. These are the women who see the angels, who hear the question that rings with both joy and incredulity:

“Why do you seek the living among the dead? You just walked by the Space Available sign, you’re looking for someone who is living, don’t look here! Just like he told you would happen…he has risen.”

Prompted by the angel, they remember that Jesus did tell them this would take place. They go and tell the apostles, the men. And despite knowing that these women have been faithful followers, companions and eyewitnesses to all that has gone on…the men decide it is an idle tale, and don’t believe it. They just couldn’t believe it.

One writer sees here the complete vindication of women throughout the history of the church. If, because of Eve, women have taken the rap for the Fall in the Garden of Eden…the resurrection story puts the shoe on the other foot. The women are faithful, the men fail. In fact, after the debates of the 20th century over whether women should be ordained in ministry, the suggestion has been made that after this resurrection story, women should be meeting to debate whether men should be ordained!

But the resurrection story is not just about an empty tomb. Yes, there is ample evidence that something amazing has gone on. A huge stone rolled away. Burial garments laying by themselves. Angels laughing,

“You’re looking in the wrong place…only dead people here!”

But as the story unfolds in Luke, the risen Jesus that very same day appears to two of his followers. And then to his eleven disciples and others. He is not a ghost, not a spirit. They touch his flesh and bones. He eats a piece of fish.

He may be different…one does not walk out of grave clothes and through walls without being different, having some kind of a different body. Dale Bruner says the resurrection gives us a transformed Jesus…but a transformed Jesus. They knew him, recognized him, touched him. Not a ghost. Jesus. And you know what He says?

“I told you so!”

Do you think they believed it? Really believed it? Now they did. They had to meet Jesus for themselves, and in that we are not so very different. We can hear people talk about Jesus a lot…but at some point, if we are to believe, we must meet Him…or be met by Him.

Did they believe? Out of that tiny group, uneducated, fearful, doubting people…God built his church. Started a movement that to this day continues to multiply in the world. It changes lives, families, nations. Why? Death was undone. For Jesus…and so for us. Jesus was the first, but not the last.

Now note, death is not reversed. Jesus is not resuscitated, only to die again. Death is undone. It is undone. Broken. What was absolutely final: patting the dirt onto the grave, seeing the last breath taken…is no longer final. God -- not sin, not death, not an accident, not a disease -- God has the last word. Death has been undone.

And that changes everything. Everything. If the thing we thought to be absolutely, non-negotiably final has been defeated, then everything is different. And not just in heaven. Here too. If God is going to come for you at death and transform you, you don’t need to fear the end. But more…

• I don’t have to be who I have been.
• You don’t have to keep up with anyone.
• I don’t have to be imprisoned by the things which have seemed inescapable.
• We can take life as God gives it to us. If God can “undo” death…then he can certainly “do” life.

Maybe that’s why the poet Wendell Berry says we should “practice resurrection.”

• Live as though you don’t have to be limited by the way things have been.
• Live as though you follow a living God.
• Live as though nothing is final, except one thing: God has the last word.

Resurrection changes everything, now and later. Maybe that’s why the resurrected Jesus’ last words to his followers in the gospel of Luke actually aren’t about eternity at all. They are about how to live. Jesus says,

“You are the witnesses. God has the final word. Proclaim it to all the nations, repentance and forgiveness of sins, proclaim it to all the nations.”

Jesus knew full well that they would run into resistance, persecution, sickness, heartache, even death. But God has claimed the final word. So we are free to practice resurrection.

Resurrection undoes death. It changes everything. Our lives here and now are full of possibility…and our hope for eternity rests solidly on what God has done – in time and space and history – in Jesus Christ. And so I believe that someday, when I get to the end of that jetway, I will be greeted by a tall man with white hair and sparkling eyes, maybe still wearing an Oakland A’s hat (for which we’ll forgive him!). And he will smile and say simply,

“Christ is risen.”

And I will reply,

“He is risen indeed!”

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!

Hallelujah! Amen.