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"Full of Surprises"

Sermon by Dr. Greg Knox Jones
on Luke 24:1-12
given on Easter Sunday
April 8, 2007

A few years ago, Tom Long visited South Africa, and while he was there he met a young Johannesburg physician whose specialty was the AIDS virus. The physician worked in a dingy inner city hospital where the beds of the sufferers spilled out of the wards and into the narrow hallways. Taking a few minutes’ break from his weary and hurried rounds, the physician sat behind his desk, massaging his temples. He said, “The numbers are growing at a fearful rate. In some areas, over half the population is infected, and we do not have enough to help them. We don’t have enough medicine or enough beds or enough staff or enough knowledge.”

Professor Long listened as the physician described the desperate situation, and then asked, “Man, what keeps you going?”

The physician replied, “My faith.” He stared out the window at the steel gray sky and then added, “I am holding on to the possibility of hope.”

The “possibility of hope.” This young physician said it just right. There was no bravado, no smiley faced optimism, no naive sentiment that “for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows.” To have said such a thing would have been a callous disregard for the sea of human suffering engulfing him. There was not one thing in his situation to produce a shred of optimism.

The facts had to be faced: the virus was spreading, his patients were dying, and the surge of suffering was flowing beyond all human power to contain it. What kept this man at work in these wretched wards of pain was his belief that the full truth about the current situation was not evident. What allowed him to face the grim facts and to forge ahead was the hope that God would, in some way, redeem the situation.

The pain and death that surrounded him challenged him to struggle against them, and what gave him the strength to continue working was his hope that pain and death were not the last words on the subject. God still had something to say about the ultimate outcome. (1)

Easter Sunday is the unsurpassed day on the Christian calendar. More people may show up at Christmas than at Easter, and more people know the words to Christian carols than to Easter hymns, but the birth of Jesus would not even rate a footnote in history if it were not for the resurrection. Simply put: No Easter, no faith.

The earliest writings in the New Testament are the letters of Paul. Some of them were written less than 20 years after the death of Jesus and more than 20 years before the gospels were written. If we scour Paul’s letters, digging for what he says about the birth of Jesus, we come up empty. However, Paul declares that the resurrection is the absolute foundation of our faith. In one of his letters to the church in Corinth he wrote: “If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain.” (1 Corinthians 15:13&14).

The story of the resurrection is found in each of the four gospels. And in the same way that eye witnesses to an event today do not always fully agree on the details of what happened, the gospel writers do not all explain the event in precisely the same way. However, each of the gospels places the resurrection center stage. It is the startling event that changes everything.

This morning we look at the story in the Gospel of Luke. It tells us that at dawn on the first day of the week women went to the tomb to anoint the body of Jesus. However, when they arrived, something had happened. The author of Luke says that the stone covering the tomb was rolled away and the body of Jesus was nowhere to be found. Two men in dazzling clothes announced that Jesus had risen and the women dashed off to tell the disciples.

However, when the women told the disciples what had taken place, when they blurted out the words describing the event that would eventually lead to the largest religion on earth, the reaction of the disciples could not have been more disappointing. The words of the women seemed to the disciples, an idle tale. You can picture the disciples rolling their eyes and saying,

“Those wacky women are at it again, babbling utter nonsense! They can be so emotional!” And the text says, “And the men did not believe them.” But we know who had the last laugh.

Well, maybe most of the disciples did not believe them, but something got to Peter. It might have been the stunned look in the women’s eyes; it might have been the breathless fear in their voices. Something prompted Peter to sprint to the tomb and he found it precisely as the women had claimed.

I have no idea what a video camera would have captured on that first Easter morning. The details in the four different accounts do not mesh. But something astonishing jolted those first followers of Jesus, because if something overwhelming had not happened, we would never have heard of him. Jesus would have disappeared and soon been forgotten the same as many nameless revolutionaries who were crucified in the first century.

Something awesome shook those disciples because we witness a dramatic transformation in their behavior. When Jesus was standing in their midst, their faith was shaky. When Jesus was arrested, they fled in fear for their lives. But something happened shortly after Jesus died that ignited a tremendous burst of courage in them. The disciples experienced Christ’s living presence and it made such a powerful impact that they became bold defenders of the faith. Most were persecuted and executed because they refused to recant their faith in the risen Lord.

What inspired such courage in them was hope. Hope that God is always working to bring good out of evil. Hope that this life is not all there is.

Belief in the resurrection inspires hope. It gives us hope that even though we have to pass through the valley of the shadow of illness or grief or divorce or loss or death itself, that is not the end. (2) The resurrection declares that God’s very nature is rebirth and new life.

A few years ago when Ted Wardlaw was the pastor of a Presbyterian church in Atlanta, he invited a guest preacher from the National Baptist tradition to preach at one of their Good Friday services. The guest was unaccustomed to Presbyterians. We can be so formal, dignified, orderly - and some would say a little too tightly wound! But he loosened them up a little bit and even cajoled them into saying a couple of “Amens.” However, the most memorable thing he said that day was after he finished reading the story of the crucifixion. It was not the usual “The Word of the Lord; Thanks be to God.” Instead he said, “May God bless you, and may God protect you from the enemy who will try to steal the Word from you.”

When we become too accustomed to hearing the daily death toll from the war in Iraq, when we assume that poverty is simply inevitable, when we become increasingly cynical about our world, when we fear that death is the end and there is nothing beyond our earthly existence, I become very worried about that enemy, too. I worry that the other storyteller is stealing the Easter Word from us.

Christ’s rising from the dead means the power of resurrection is loose in the world. It means that God still has some surprises in store for us. It means the story of hopelessness that the other storyteller is peddling is nothing but Friday talk. (3) It means that death is not the final chapter.

Perhaps you heard about the seventy-nine-year-old man whose broker called him to say that he had bought some stock that in five years would make him a millionaire. “Five years!” the man exclaimed. “I don’t even buy green bananas anymore.” (4)

He knew what each one of us should know. Any of us could go any day. The sober truth is that some sitting here this morning don’t know it, but this is the last Easter they will celebrate on this earth. That is a depressing thought only if you have not come to terms with the fact that death is a part of life. That knowledge can lead you to despair OR if you grasp the hope of the resurrection, it prompts you to make the most of your time on earth. It motivates you to live the rich and purposeful life God wants you to live. A life marked by compassion and forgiveness and generosity. A life built on courage and justice and joy.

We believe in a God who is full of surprises. A God who can show us a way when there seems to be no way. A God who can bring light when there seems to be only darkness. A God who can bring life, even out of death.

And that is why churches all over the world are packed today. It is not because we are naive optimists or because we have blind, but rather because we believe there is nothing in life and nothing in death that can separate us from God. Christ has risen and because Christ lives, new life is always possible.

NOTES

1. Thomas G. Long, “When Half Spent Was the Night: Preaching Hope in the New Millennium,” in Journal for Preachers, Easter, 1999, p.14.

2. Joan Gray, “Beyond Rescue,” in Journal for Preachers, Easter, 1999, p.51.

3. Theodore J. Wardlaw, “Unnatural Event,” Christian Century, March 20, 2007, p.19.

4. John Buchanan, “In The End is the Beginning,” preached at Fourth Presbyterian Church on April 16, 2006.

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