God Must Laugh

The deal is simple.

You get:

• One free Easter sermon rough draft, shared on a Creative Commons License. (Non-commercial, Share alike)  You are free to remix, tweak, and build upon this work non-commercially, as long as you mention my name or my website in any performance or copy, and you agree to license your new creations under identical terms.
• An invitation to offer comments/critique on an Easter sermon, the sermon that will likely be heard by more people than any other sermon this year.
• One polished Easter sermon, as preached from the pulpit, again shared on a Creative Commons License, to be posted the week after Easter.

I get:

• Free proof-reading, comments, ideas, and critique that will (hopefully) improve the quality of the sermon.
• To feel good knowing that if someone was totally stuck for something to preach on the highest Christian holiday of the year, they’ll at least have some ideas to get the ball rolling.

Here’s your free Easter sermon rough draft. Title: Resurrection Matters. Text: John 20:1-18.

Some of our more theologically liberal friends will tell you it doesn’t matter if Jesus rose from the grave. What’s important is justice, peace, and love. And all those things are true even if Jesus never literally rose from the grave.

I know because I used to be a bible thumping fundamentalist, and my purpose in life was to stop those dirty liberals from destroying the church and undermining  all that was right and good in America.

My goal was to prove that the Bible is true, that Jesus really did live, die and rise again, and that your relationship with him determines you afterlife. My method was to engage you in conversation, steer that conversation toward the Bible, and prove by irrefutable logic that you were wrong. The result was either you’d agree with me, or you’d prove yourself willfully ignorant, thereby absolving me of responsibility.

The argument goes like this:  You all got up this morning and came to church. Some of you did this, certain in your own mind that you were going to be bored. You don’t want to be up this early, dressed in these clothes, sitting in these pews, surrounded by these people, singing these songs, just so that someone can ask you for money you don’t want to give.

Why would you do that? How, in spite of all that, has this church lasted for 150 years?  How, in spite of corruption, crusades, scandal, inquisition, and abuse does the church continue to exist? How, in spite of repeated attempts to eradicate it, was the church born? There has to be a reason. Like ripples in a pond, there has to be a cause.

Jesus had 12 disciples. Only one died of old age. The rest suffered and died, for what? For saying that God loves everyone and we should live lives of justice, peace, and love? Who’s against that? No. They were killed because they claimed that Jesus, the Son of God was raised on the third day, and that he’s coming back to claim his own.

This was their claim, and they held firm to it, even to death. This was the primary content of every sermon they left for us in the Bible. And this, according to Paul, is the foundation of our faith. “If Christ is not raised,” he said, “Then we are above all to be pitied.”

Resurrection matters. At least it did to Peter and to Paul. Is our vision so much clearer than theirs from a distance of 2000 years? The tomb was empty, and Jesus had a resurrection body. This was their conviction, and it ran contrary to every historically verifiable conviction of their culture. They didn’t expect it. They had no reason to hope for it, so the couldn’t have imagined it.

In spite of their expectations, something happened that so confounded them, they couldn’t even come up with a coherent narrative to explain it. The first witness on the scene was a woman? In that culture, you might as well have relied on the testimony of a child. Something happened, so unexpected, so compelling, that they started a movement so powerful that people who don’t even want to be here are listening to this sermon 2000 years later.

So, that’s the argument. Unfortunately, it turns out that those dirty, stinking liberals were right. No one is going to listen to your argument, no matter how logical it is, if your name is tied to oppression, war, and hate. Turns out, it’s impossible to logically badger someone into heaven.

Peter saw the empty tomb, and he didn’t believe. Thomas heard the story directly from eyewitnesses who were also his closest friends, and he didn’t believe. The empty tomb, even if you could prove it, proves nothing! Hearing the story is not enough.

Imagine if I kicked the president’s dog and they decided to publicly execute me. You go to the graveyard to pay your last respects or dance on my grave, whichever you prefer, but when you get there, there’s a big hole and at the bottom of it, an empty coffin with an open lid. Your first assumption would be, “Rob Brink is the risen son of God!” Right?  No, your first thought is, “Am I in the right place?” and “Who took the body?”

Suppose you went back to the church looking for answers, and on the front step you found a twelve-year-old kid shaking with fear. And the kid says, “I saw Pastor Rob. He’s alive! At first I thought it was somebody else, but then he said my name, and it was him!” And you’d say, “I knew it! I always suspected that he was the second person of the trinity. I knew death couldn’t keep him down.” Right? No, you’d tell the kid’s parents to invest in a child psychologist. The empty tomb proves nothing. Hearing the story is not enough. You have to meet the Lord.

You know why Mary was the first witness? She’s the only one who stayed. The men saw the body was gone and they left, confused. She stayed. She cried. She prayed. She searched. She asked. And she received news she never dreamed, and saw something she could barely comprehend. She told no one, because she was so terrified.

Turns out the liberals were right for the wrong reason. The resurrection does matter. But he questions isn’t “Did the resurrection really happen? The question is “Since the risen Lord has called us, how then shall we live?” The answer is: we live as he lived. We love as he loved. We suffer as he suffered. We die as he died. And we rise as he rose.

He walked into Jerusalem knowing full well what was coming. He orchestrated the whole thing. Why? So that his disciples would know their brokenness, so the crowd would know its fickleness, so the Pharisees would know their hypocrisy and the Sadducees their duplicity, so the might Romans would know their weakness, so we all would know the awful cost of the sin we wink at. And above all else to let us know God lovevs us anyway, that God’s yes is bigger than our now, that even death itself cannot separate us from the Love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord.

Christ is risen. [He is risen indeed]

Christ is risen. [He is risen indeed]

Christ is risen! [He is risen indeed]

Alleluia.

Resurrection Matters by Rev. Robert J. Brink is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at RevSmilez.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at RevSmilez.com.