EASTER SERMON
Giving Up Dead
Ends Luke
24: 1- 12
Pastor
For many people, today’s a day filled with family traditions that include ham dinners, egg hunts, fancy clothes and candy, candy, candy! I don’t know if you know that Easter is second only to Halloween for candy sales in our country, and the children (and chocolate lovers like myself…I’ll admit it!) love it! I remember the year that my three siblings and I all got giant chocolate bunnies on Easter morning. Our mother watched as we bit the ears off, and poured Coke into the hollow bunnies and drank it down as fast as we could before the sugar fizz overflowed down the sides. We did that over and over. That was at Sunday noon. Sunday evening we became ill with stomach aches. After that, our Easter baskets contained only jelly beans and a few foil wrapped chocolate eggs. It is a day with many family traditions.
We have gathered here to observe the oldest of all Easter traditions. Long before chocolate bunnies, jelly beans, colorful eggs, and marshmallow peeps, Christians gathered at sunrise to consider the astonishing account of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Unlike the gods and heroes of
mythology, Christ lived among us in time and history. He was born. He grew up.
He preached the Kingdom of God. And He died. It is recorded in scripture for
all to read. It is part of salvation history.
And, as the Gospels tells us, on a
certain first day of the week – specifically at early dawn – Jesus’ empty tomb
was discovered, and the proclamation of His resurrection began as the women
made their way back to the others and told them what they had seen and heard.
That proclamation continues to this day.
No one saw the resurrection. No one
knows just when it happened or how. There were no leads. No film at eleven. No
body. The tomb was open and empty, abandoned except by a couple of ethereal,
angelic figures and a few devoted, if somewhat inconsolable, women. For
something at the very heart of our faith, this remains pretty slim pickings.
Where was CNN? Where was Fox News? An embedded reporter or two would have been
nice. We have only their word for it.
We do not know how this can be so.
But then there are a lot of things we do not know. How the cosmos got started,
for instance. Or even how our parents fell in love. Just as our lives are in
some real sense mysteries we shall never fathom, so is the resurrection an
invitation for us to share in the mystery of God’s own life.
We know the story that surrounds this mystery: On Friday it looked like the beautiful hope placed in Jesus as Messiah and Savior had hit a dead end. On Friday, Jesus’ body was taken down from the cross and hurriedly placed in a small tomb. Then, as early as their custom would allow, some women followers of Jesus made their way to the grave to begin the painful task of embalming His body. But it wasn’t there. The stone, which had sealed the tomb, had been rolled away.
That huge, heavy stone was rolled into place to block the entrance of the tomb on Friday. It doesn’t matter which gospel you read, in each version, the stone had already been removed before the Sunday morning visitors arrived. Was it an earthquake? Grave robbers, perhaps? Was it Roman soldiers or Jewish skeptics or followers of the Savior? Theologians over the centuries have agreed that it was God who moved the stone–miraculously and graciously. You see, God did not move the stone so that Jesus could get out, no, God moved that stone so we could get in. We are the ones needing to get face to face with a resurrection miracle.
The resurrection of Jesus has been the bedrock event of the Christian faith for over 2000 years. If Jesus did not resurrect from the dead, all the rest of the Bible is nonsense. If the resurrection is not true, then Christians have invested their lives in a facade. But if the resurrection is true, (And I have wrestled intellectually and have come to believe it to be true.) then everything about the world changed on that first Easter Day. Grace, love, forgiveness, peace, eternal life: it all flows from the Risen Savior. That’s why we celebrate today.
Yet, there is still a question that must be addressed. The women on the way to the tomb asked it, remember? “Who will move the stone for us?” And it occurs to me that the important question today is not “Who moved the stone for them?” but rather, “Who will move the stone for us?” Most of us, in the course of our lives, find ourselves separated from God. We are on the opposite side of some heavy boulder, some barricade that stands between us and heaven. We can’t even see past it, not to mention get around it or go through it. Who will move that stone for us?
Perhaps your dead end is the stone of reason and you’re not going to commit your life to something you can’t scientifically prove exists. And there is no compromise for you; to do so would be to insult your own intelligence. You’re in good company. Please consider something as simple as coming back to worship next Sunday. If you do, you’ll hear the story of Thomas—Doubting Thomas—who said he had serious doubts. Is that you? Who will move the stone for you?
Maybe you are standing behind the stone of bitterness. Things have happened. Things have happened that shouldn’t have happened. Life has dealt you some tremendous blows and somewhere along the way you’ve concluded that it is God punishing you for something you did or didn’t do. You feel that you could never trust a God like that, and I wouldn’t blame you. A man by the name of Murry Haar says, “God gets too much credit and too much blame for the stuff that happens in this world.” But who will move this stone of bitterness from your life and lead you out of this dead end?
Maybe your dead end is a rocky past that prevents you from feeling good enough to be loved by anybody, least of all God. You may not be familiar with the name, John Newton, but you have probably sung his song: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now I’m found; was blind but now I see.
Newton grew up in England, and he became a slave-trader, just like his father. He made six trips from Africa to Great Britain, each time transporting and selling a boat of human cargo. On his final trip, a terrible storm rocked his boat and in fear, he cried out “Lord, have mercy upon us!” Later, Newton would tell others “If God can love a wretch like me, he can surely love a wretch like you.” If your life is cluttered with terrible words and deeds, who will move the stone for you?
Maybe you are locked behind the stone of uncertainty, or the stone of pride, or the stone of fear, or the stone of hatred, and you are weary, so weary, from trying to get free from it on your own. All the positive thinking and self-actualizing and doing good for others hasn’t been enough. I get it. Who has the power to open up what has been closed down for so long?
Tell me what your stone is, and I will tell you who can open up a way.
You see, it doesn’t matter what your stone looks like or how long you have been boxed in by it, we all have the same predicament. There are barriers that stand between us and God. We can’t move them. We can’t change it. We can’t get to God by going over it, around it or through it, but Jesus can, Jesus has, and Jesus will again.
This is the ultimate reality of Easter: The dead end boxed canyons that have blocked humankind for generations were blown to bits on the Day of Resurrection.
Today, before you sit down to a ham dinner, eat the chocolate bunnies and find the colored eggs, may you know this truth: Jesus is alive! His victory over death has removed every barrier between you and eternal life. There’s only one thing left for you to do …Before the sun goes down this evening take some time alone and talk things out with the Risen Lord. Ask the Lord to roll back your stone and help you give up your dead end living.