"Where It All Begins"
The empty tomb allows us to let go our fears.
Sermon Preached by
The Reverend Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, March 27, 2005
Text: 1 Corinthians 15:50-58
A couple of weeks ago, I was on the treadmill (as hard as it might be to believe). My pulse rate was going up, and the amount of calories I was burning was going up, and hopefully, my cholesterol was coming down. As I was really worked up, I put on some headphones and a CD player, and I listened to, of all things, Van Halen. Now, to the uninitiated: Van Halen is not one of the great Dutch master painters; Van Halen did not build the Canadian Pacific Railway; and Van Halen was not a great American industrialist. Van Halen is a rock band founded by brothers Alex and Eddie Van Halen - and it's great music by which to walk on a treadmill!
As I was listening to Jump and few other spectacular pieces, another, less familiar piece came on and I actually, for the first time, listened to the words. They were fantastic! antastic!
Everybody is looking for something,
Something to fill in the holes.
We think a lot, but don't talk much about it,
Till things get out of control.
How do I know when it is love?
I can't tell you, but it lasts forever.
On the surface, these words may sound like sentimentality. It's a nice, cozy idea that makes us all feel good - something that “lasts forever.” But the reality of our human existence often suggests the exact opposite. In fact, it often appears that nothing really lasts forever. Indeed, we get holes in our hearts, holes in our lives when we look at those things around us and find that the things that we love the most are perishable. Even when we look at the lives of those who are dear to our hearts, we see that they are perishable, and when we are honest enough to look at our own selves and our own bodies, we se that these, too, are perishable.
Does anything really last forever? It seems not - not even our values, the ideals that we hold dear. So often, they are shattered, as when we hear of children shooting children in Minnesota or, as we all have seen in this last week, when a woman's life is used as a political football. What a terrible way to make law: to take a person and pull her life in different directions! It breaks your heart! Nothing seems to last forever.
Not long ago, I visited a woman who had been diagnosed with very serious cancer. When she looked at me, I could see the hole in her heart. She said, “Andrew, be honest with me. Do you think this [pointing to her body] is going to last forever?” It seems it is nothing more than sentimentality to suggest that things last forever. In our own lives and in our own experiences, we feel the perishable nature of human existence
Now, philosophers throughout the centuries have tried to make sense of this in some way. The Greek philosophers, such as Plato, concluded that our bodies don't matter that much, since all that matters is our immortal soul, which goes on and on and on into the eons. Others have suggested (and it is very popular and in vogue at the moment) that we are reincarnated, that we come back as something else. Our identity changes and we come back as an animal or another person or a being other than our natural selves.
The Apostle Paul, in our passage from the Book of Corinthians this morning, makes another argument. He says, “Our bodies are perishable.” That which is perishable, which is mortal, cannot inherit that which is imperishable and immortal. Our bodies, as they are now, cannot inherit eternal life. They do not last forever; they fade away. Then Paul, as a classic Jew and someone who views the resurrection of Jesus as a Jew, says, “Look what happened to him. He had an earthly body.”
Now, some have suggested otherwise, that Paul did not believe that Jesus was fully human. But one only needs to read the first chapter of the Book of Romans to realize that Paul saw Jesus as a Jew, as fully man, but he saw this man not only dying but rising from the dead, with a body of sorts, a spiritual body that had gone through a change. So much so, that when he appeared before the disciples afterwards, they recognized him in some way, although they realized that he wasn't exactly the same as he'd been on the cross or when he was performing miracles in their midst.
In other words - and this is so important - his mode of existence seems to have gone through a process of change, but his identity stayed the same. Paul says (and I paraphrase), “This is what is going to happen to us. In the twinkling of an eye, in the flick of an eyelash, we'll be changed. Through the resurrection of the dead, we will share in Christ's resurrection. The body, which is being shown as mortal, will rise as immortal; what had been perishable will become imperishable. Our identity, as in who we are, will be eternal.”
So just when we think that everything is perishable, just when we believe that nothing lasts forever, just when our experience says everything dies, the message of the resurrection of Jesus Christ bursts in and says something entirely different. I recently saw a wonderful cartoon on the back of The Messenger, which is the magazine of my former church, Parkdale United in Ottawa. A young man and a young woman were standing in front of the empty tomb, and the caption underneath said “Nothing is certain except what and taxes?”
The empty tomb then causes us to see that death is not certain. By the uncertainty of death, I don't mean just the absence of our physical, bodily death, but the eternal life to come. Our identity is not killed off; who we are is not destroyed; who we are lives eternally. We see this in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and it changes everything. It changes our entire perspective on death.
Many people, however, scoff at eternal life. Woody Allen said: “The chief problem about death, incidentally, is the fear that there may be no afterlife. A depressing thought, particularly for those who have bothered to shave. Also, there is the fear that if there is an afterlife, no one will know where it is being held.” Oh, it's funny, but does it really alter the way we look at death? Does it really say anything hopeful? I don't think so!
Our view of death is so determined by our experience that we often cannot see beyond. We are like the little girl who would walk with her mother to a playground. To get there, they walked through a cemetery. One day, the little girl saw a man hammering a stick into the ground next to a gravestone and hanging a wreath on it. She asked, “Mummy, what's that man doing?”
Her mother said, “He is hanging the wreath and driving in the stake to remember the person who died.”
The little girl replied, “When I die, will someone do that for me?”
The mother said, “Yes, dear, someone will do that for you.”
There was a long pause, and then the little girl said, “Mummy, that's so unfair, because all I would see would be the stick!”
That is how we look at death - from the point of view of below. We look at death from the point of view of the ground. We look at death from the point of view of the cross.
The Christian message is not to look at death from the point of view of below, but to look at it from the point of view of above: to look at it from God's perspective. God's perspective is that through his Son, it is not the tomb, it is not the grave, it is not anything that we know or understand that really speaks about God's ultimate intention for our being. It is the resurrection of Jesus, and that is why Paul quotes from Jeremiah and Hosea: “Oh death, where is your sting? Oh grave, where is your victory?”
The resurrection, then, causes us to look at death from the point of view of God's eternal life in Jesus of Nazareth. My friends, if there is anything we need to take with us today, it is that assurance that the empty tomb of Jesus did not just happen that one time in history for just him. It happened for us. Even though our mode of existence may change, our identities will never change, and will live eternally with God, through God, and by Christ.
It also alters profoundly the way in which we look at life. Very often, I hear it said of Christians, and I have quoted this before, that we are “so heavenly minded that we are of no earthly use;” that we often ponder the afterlife and think eternity, and that somehow we don't care about what happens around us. Nothing could be further from the truth! The evidence suggests otherwise, over and over and over again.
Just a couple of weeks ago, when I was in Chile, I met a number of Christians who had risked their lives to better the lives of others. They had risked their lives in such a way that through the threat of Marxism, through the threats of totalitarianism, through an economy that at one time had dropped through the floor and had left 40 per cent unemployment, these Christians decided that they were going to help the weakest and the most vulnerable of society.
They did so by creating the Vicaria de la Solidaridad, small groups of people coming together and sharing their gifts and their abilities and their talents. By pooling their resources to make products and to sell them to the world, they could survive even in the midst of poverty.
The state saw this as a threat. It saw these collectives as a way of undermining the economy, and it shut them down brutally and arrested all the leaders and founders. All of those who took part in the Vicaria de la Solidaridad were Christians. They were committed to making life better for people. They were committed to making justice a reality, and nothing was going to stop them. Why? Because they saw each individual child of God as a child with an identity, which, through the resurrection of Christ, lives forever. The value they placed on human life, their desire to make life better for others, was because of their commitment to Christ.
Therefore, believing in the afterlife is not an excuse for not caring for the here-and-now. Karl Barth, the great Swiss theologian and one of my heroes, put it thus:
So the Christian hope affects our whole life. This life of ours will be completed. That which is sown in dishonour and weakness will rise again in glory and praise. The Christian hope does not lead us away from this life, it is rather the uncovering of the truth in which God sees our life. It is the conquest of death, not a flight into the beyond.
My friends, it is this very belief that causes us to set aside all the fears, all those things that Van Halen calls “holes” in our lives, that make us feel that everything is dark and perishable and morbid.
The resurrection of Christ tells us to let those fears go. It is like the true story that I read about in Darlington, Maryland. I noticed it because I had grown up, in part, in Darlington, England, and the headline immediately drew my attention. It was about a mother and her eight children, who were on March break. The mother didn't know what to do with the children - they were running wild - and she finally left them in the house for a while with the oldest daughter in charge, and went out to get a few groceries.
When she came back, to her utter amazement, all eight children were sitting in a circle in the middle of the living room - quietly! She had never seen anything like it in her life! She went up to them and peered into the circle, and there in the middle were five little baby skunks. So the mother screamed, “Children, get out! Run, right now while you can!”
So the children got up and ran - five of them taking the baby skunks with them!
They ran into the bedroom, and the mother followed, shouting, “For Heaven's sake, let the little skunks go!”
Frightened, the children squeezed the skunks in their arms - and you all know the rest of the story, don't you?
Human beings are like those children. We hang on to our fears. We look at life from the perspective of the stick going into the ground, not the resurrection and the empty tomb. We look at our lives from the perspective of their being perishable, rather than with the joy and the freedom that comes from living our lives now for others, with others, by others in the knowledge that our identity is guaranteed, that life is eternal. The day of the resurrection will come, and I believe that knowledge makes all the difference to human life.
Recently, a young man called Brian Nichols went into a courthouse in Atlanta and shot several people. He was so terrified about what he had done that he ran away. Finally, at two o'clock in the morning, trying to find a place to hide, he burst into the apartment of a young woman that he had been following, and he tied her up at gunpoint.
This young woman, Ashley Smith, sat there, bound, with this man pointing a gun at her. But rather than being paralyzed by her fear, she decided to share with him a great book called The Purpose-Driven Life by Rick Warren. She did so out of a profound Christian faith. What was amazing about this story is that she is a young widow, a single mother, who had wrestled and struggled with life, with little or no hope, but who was getting her life back together. She was visiting her child weekly; she was going to church; she was reading the Bible: She was on her way up.
Here was a young man who had worked for Hewlett Packard, who had been a pianist in a Baptist church, but now had shot four people and who was on his way down. Now, they met in a room. In that room, this young woman saw that this man's life still had a purpose; that this man still had an identity. While it seemed that he was dead spiritually, while it seemed in many ways that his life was over, she still believed and had the courage to share her faith with him, and in such a way and in such a trust that she left the house and came back again, not frightened. Why? It was because she believed that God had sent her there to minister to him. She had courage at that moment, and she saw in his life something that was worth redeeming. Her faith in the risen Christ enabled her to do it.
My friends, if you don't think the empty tomb makes a difference, think again. If you think nothing lasts forever, and everything is perishable, including love, including God, including Christ, then think again. Just remember this when you feel that “hole” in your heart, when everything seems perishable and dark. Remember where it all began - in an empty tomb with Jesus of Nazareth! Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.