It’s been a busy week, so in order to keep myself moving I started
consuming more sugar than usual. I
have so much sugar in me that I haven’t slept since Tuesday – and I feel great. If you were here for the Easter egg
hunt yesterday and enjoyed that nice, sweet lemonade, it was totally unsweet
until I put my fingers in it. So
if you enjoyed that lemonade yesterday, you’re welcome.
I enjoy the pictures that can be seen as more than one object. You know the kind – one person sees an
object or person, and another person sees something different. These types of pictures reveal more
about the observer than the picture itself, so they become a Rorschach test.
What do you see when you look at a picture of the empty tomb? The empty tomb becomes a Rorschach test
as well, because what one sees reveals much about them. Do we see nothing more than an empty
hole in the ground or do we see the place from which Jesus rose from the dead?
Our Scripture passage this morning, not
surprisingly, is the resurrection story. We will read Matthew’s version – Matthew 28:1-10 –
1 After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first
day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.
2 There was a violent earthquake, for an
angel of the Lord came down from heaven and, going to the tomb, rolled back the
stone and sat on it.
3 His appearance was like lightning, and
his clothes were white as snow.
4 The guards were so afraid of him that
they shook and became like dead men.
5 The angel said to the women, “Do not be
afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified.
6 He is not here; he has risen, just as he
said. Come and see the place where he lay.
7 Then go quickly and tell his disciples:
‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you
will see him.’ Now I have told you.”
8 So the women hurried away from the tomb,
afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples.
9 Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he
said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him.
10 Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be
afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”
I
like the last phrase of that passage – there
they will see me. I like that
phrase because it can be understood in more than one way, just like a picture
of the empty tomb. When Jesus says
they will see me it refers to more
than just their ability to physically see him, but really stands as a way of
placing a challenge to all of humanity, for all time – can all those who come
after see him as well?
For the next few minutes I want to take the three great affirmations
of the Christian faith and apply them to what we see about the empty tomb, and
they are the affirmations that Paul makes in that famous chapter from I
Corinthians 13, verse 13 – now these
three remain: faith, hope, and
love. These are what allow us
to see Jesus.
1. Faith
I get a lot of emails,
like most of you, and the other day one came into my inbox that had links to
many articles about Easter. All of
them were written from the point of view of faith except for one, which was
titled Why No One Should Believe In the
Resurrection of Jesus. The
subtitle was Extraordinary Claims Require
Extraordinary Evidence. I’m not sure how that article managed to get in
with the others.
I didn’t read past the title and subtitle of the article. I didn’t read any further because I’ve
read a lot of writing from that perspective over the years. I’ve read all of the claims of unbelief
and all of the reasons why we should not have faith, and here is my basic
response to the claim that Extraordinary
Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence – no they don’t, at least not when
the claims have to do with matters of faith. It’s called faith for a reason!
I think I have taken the time to consider the evidence from both
sides of the faith equation and, obviously, I come down firmly on the side of
faith. But it’s not because I’ve
been convinced by overwhelming evidence or because I haven’t asked enough
questions. I’ve asked a lot of
questions over the years. I also get
asked a lot of questions, and as I’ve aged here is a determination I have come
to – I have fewer questions now to ask and the ones I do ask I don’t worry
about as much. I don’t know what
the latest upset in the Middle East means in light of the book of Revelation,
and I’m not sure anyone else does either.
I don’t know how detailed God’s plan is for each person’s life. I don’t know why bad things sometimes
happen to good people and why good things sometimes happen to bad people. I have my theories, but I don’t know. What I do is accept a couple of basic
truths – God exists, God loves us, and God demonstrated that love in Jesus.
I don’t wander around worrying, wow,
I don’t have many answers. I
believe I have the answers I need, and the rest I’ll take on faith. In fact, when someone tells me, as the
author of that article wants to do, that I need to present some extraordinary
evidence for the extraordinary claims of faith, it only makes my faith
stronger. I have considered the
alternative to faith and I have stayed with faith. In fact, the more I have considered the alternatives to
faith, the stronger I have become in my faith. Though I don’t have the answer to every question, I will
always choose faith.
2. Hope.
I visit a lot of hospitals, and sometimes, as I visit, someone in
another room or another part of the hospital will find out I’m a minister and
ask me to pray with them. At one
hospital, some months ago, in the short distance from the entrance of a hallway
to a nurse’s station, five people stopped me and asked me to pray for
them. The other day someone
stopped me at a hospital and asked me to pray with them. Interestingly, they did not ask me to
pray for healing. Most people
would assume that a prayer for healing would be the most common prayer in a
hospital, but that has not been my experience. The most common prayer I am asked to offer in a hospital is to help find a sense of hope.
In visiting hospitals, sometimes you also see extraordinary things
happen. And maybe extraordinary
things happen because it is in places like hospitals that people are so
desperately searching for hope, which allows them to be open in a greater way
to God’s moving in their lives.
Some months ago, as I visited with a patient in the hospital, I was
standing at the foot of the bed, and in the middle of our conversation they
pointed at the chair next to me and said, very calmly and matter of factly, Jesus is sitting in that chair. You might be surprised at how often
those kinds of experiences happen in hospitals. And I know there are those who will offer scientific
explanations for those events.
Tanya recently recorded a segment of the Dr. Oz show for me, in which he
offers all the scientific explanations for near-death experiences, but here is
the truth, as I have experienced it – there is so much more to us, to life, to
the universe than what can be explained by science. We are spiritual beings, not just flesh and blood, and we
are people who possess souls and those souls need something and the something
they need is hope.
We hear more and more these days about the loss of faith in our
culture. I don’t know how much
that is true, but if it is I can’t help but wonder about the connection between
a loss of faith in our culture and the rise of addiction and the terrible toll
is has, and is, taking on so many lives.
If faith is diminishing, even in small ways, that means, I believe, that
hope is diminishing with it, and what can you offer if you have no hope? As people lose hope they begin to
self-medicate, as a way of coping with a loss of hope.
There are so many people who need hope. The resurrection brought hope to the disciples. They did not expect to find life in
that tomb. They did not expect to find
the tomb empty. Even though Jesus
told them he would rise after three days it was beyond their comprehension such
a miracle could be possible. When
hope came to them, everything changed.
Hope always changes everything.
The gospel is a message of hope!
3. Love
I am often amused at the productions we do here. I want to clarify the way in which I am
using the word amused. I think they are great productions –
Christmas, Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Easter, and other times. But if you could experience things
behind the scenes, you would get an idea of what I mean. Things never go as planned, but here’s
what else I think. That’s
okay. In fact, that’s more than
okay, and with apologies to Jane, Tanya, David, and all the others who work so
hard on those productions – it’s okay if things don’t always go as planned. Sometimes, I think, we seek to make
church too perfect. Church should be
reflective of life, and life is chaotic.
Life is disorderly. Life is
messy. And when life is all of
those things – and more – we attempt to bring order and control into life. We seek to control people, we seek to
control events, we seek to control worship, and we even seek to control God. Stop trying to control things. Let go. When we are trying to control every facet of our lives and
the lives of others there’s very little room for allowing God to move in our
lives. It’s scary to let go, but
if we can’t let go there is little or no room for love.
It is under the affirmation of love that our question of what do you see really comes to us. I believe, as Paul says – that the
greatest of these three affirmations of faith, hope, and love – is love. And that is what I see when I look at
the empty tomb. The empty tomb is
the evidence – the great evidence – of God’s love. And without God I don’t believe love can really exist,
because love is a spiritual experience and proves that we are spiritual beings.
No one
reduces life simply to the level of what can be tested in a laboratory.
Everyone recognizes that life is much more than the sum of its physical parts;
it also includes the metaphysical components, and the ultimate evidence of this
is our recognition of the existence of love. To me, the ultimate evidence of
transcendence, and thus faith, is that of love. In a universe without faith, love
cannot exist, because love is a transcendent quality, something that takes
place in the brain but possesses a quality that takes us into the realm beyond,
into the spiritual. If God did not
exist, if faith did not exist, what we call love would amount to little more
than a feeling of pleasure generated by some chemicals in the brain and neural
activity or, perhaps, biological determinism. Love is a transcendent, spiritual quality, and it is one that
points to something equally transcendent that is the underlying force of our
universe, and I believe that is God.
Mother Teresa said that the hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger
for bread. All of us long for
love and, I believe, faith and hope as well. These – faith, hope, and love – are the gives that come to
us because of the empty tomb. That’s
what I see in the empty tomb.
What do you see in the empty
tomb?
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