What About the Resurrection

David Orendorff · John 20:19-23 · April 23, 2006

We are a modern people, a sophisticated people, aren't we? We have the advantages of remarkable educations. We live in the information age where we can learn almost anything we want to know from books, magazines or the internet.

And we are a modern people that have stuff; boy do we have stuff. No one in the history of the world has had the stuff we have. Houses, garages and storage lockers get bigger and bigger to store more and more stuff.

With all this information and all this stuff we ought to be pretty darn happy, and pretty darn secure in life. But we aren't, are we? In fact there are studies of us that indicate we are half as happy as we were 50 years ago when we had half the stuff and a quarter the information.

The survey was done across society. The disenfranchised were in on it. The results indicate a general level of happiness among all people of all socio-economic levels. Were those on the lower end of the economic scale less happy than the white power elite? I don’t know. What I do know is that the poor and the rich are all richer today than they were 50 years ago and much less happy.

True happiness which is a joy that supersedes the conditions (wealth, health, prison) comes from the love we have from God, for, God and share with each other, because only the love of God has conquered death.

No matter what we know or how much we have, death still haunts us; death from terrorism, death from economic failure, death from cancer, and death from broken loves; all kinds of deaths. In fact, the more we try to rely on our information and our stuff for our security the more frightened we become. Our minds and our things become locked rooms in which we attempt to hide from whomever and whatever. When death threatens we run for information thinking we can lock out the threat. When death threatens we consume stuff, more food, more toys, more alcohol and various other drugs trying to lock joy in and death out.

But like the first foolishness of the first disciples, locked doors will not save us. Locked doors become prisons of confusion, insecurity and fear.

Our great brains and our plethora of stuff can't give us peace. Peace does not come in knowing all things, or having all things. Peace comes from a soul confidence that in all times, no matter what threatens us, God is with us and cares for us.

Even if we are richer and smarter than those first disciples, we are still no match for the demons seeking to consume us. We can amass great wealth and still we are vulnerable to death. We can put great armies together and aim horrific weapons at our enemies and still we are vulnerable to death. We can exercise, at right, and stay flexible and still we are vulnerable to death.

What today's scripture would have us know and trust is that no matter the failure of our knowledge, and no matter the failure of our stuff, death is the loser and we are the winners because God is on our side. By Jesus' coming again to life we are told that God is still with us beyond the grave, and that in this and not our knowledge and stuff, is our hope.

Our lives are so much more than brains and stuff. Our lives are the precious embodiment of divinely created souls, and God does not let perish such beauty, such compassion and miracle, but gives to us everlasting life. And if this is not true, if there is no resurrection, then our faith is a lie. In his first letter to the new Christians in Corinth Paul makes the point writing:

Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is not resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, than Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.1I Corinthians 15:12-14

 

If there is no resurrection of Jesus then we are hopeless, and the French existentialists are right, this life is absurd, without meaning, full of agony and then death. Or as a bumper sticker succinctly put it, "You’re born. You suffer. You die."

We forget, like those first disciples forgot, that when the baby Jesus is born and we are told that his name is Emmanuel, meaning "God with us," that we are not alone and not on our own in the cosmos. We forget, though we have been told again and again, that after Jesus has been arrested, tortured, murdered and buried, there comes a day when he is raised from the dead and is with us again; that "God with us" never leaves us.

As I said in the beginning, we are a modern people, a sophisticated people that can explain many mental and physical illnesses; that can split the atom and go to the moon; that can kill thousands of enemies at a time. Such a people have no need to trust God because we have our own self-made power. We are too modern, too sophisticated, to smart to fall for all that spiritual resurrection baloney.

Who of us really believes that Jesus is in our locked rooms? If we believed it the doors would be thrown wide open to the world. Who of us has ever seen Jesus and heard him speak the words "Peace be with you!"? If we had we would be without fear. Who of us really believes that Jesus is back from the dead, that Jesus is in this room with us now, that God will conquer every death?

Maybe all of you are true believers. Maybe none of you is a modern skeptic. But me, I am a product of my time and its mind. I struggle with believing in resurrection. It seems so surreal, so unnatural to everything I understand about how this life works.

How does one use ones senses to touch, taste, smell, see or hear a resurrection? How can one speak of spiritual things with the words and science of a spiritless vocabulary? How do we talk about Jesus coming back from the dead, entering locked rooms and penetrating frightened people with peace and have it sound like anything but a script from the twilight zone?

Yet, that is our faith. It is a faith that challenges everything we think is true about death. It is a faith that makes foolish the rational and reasonable mind.

I think, though, that most of us spiritually shy folks have something to learn from less shy evangelicals, charismatics and mystics. I don't mean the woman who thanked Jesus when I had just opened the door for her. I don't mean those that think they know God better than anyone else and so sit in judgment on folks like me who confess their confusion and wonder.

But I do mean we have something to learn from folks like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and E. Stanley Jones, and Mother Teresa and Francis Willard, whose fear of death was conquered by God's promise of life. We have something to learn from those who say that Jesus rose from the dead and came to a locked room full of frightened people and said, "Peace be with you."

And I mean folks like the Hindi Mohandas Gandhi, and the Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh, the Jewish scholar Abram Heschel, and Sufi Moslem Muhammad Hafiz. I mean the mystics of Christianity and all the great religions who believe that there is more to this life than our five senses and our great minds can imagine. There is a confidence in God's presence, in resurrection that would do our lives and our souls well to know and trust.

Oh how I want to believe that Jesus is alive again, still full of love for every child, for every leper, for every Jew and Gentile, for every slave and every free, for every man and every woman. How I pray to trust my day, my marriage, my children, my country, my world, my illness, my fear and sin, to this living Christ.

My longing prayers are answered by memory. When I doubt that God in Christ is with me I need only remember that I used to use various drugs to numb my anxiety and lock the doors against my fears. When I doubt the resurrection I only have to look to the forgiveness that has so undeservedly come to me when I broke trust, when I broke love. When I doubt our faith I need only remember the unreasonable, incomprehensible, peace that has come upon me when facing death in all its faces.

I cannot explain how what I remember works to me, and so I cannot explain it to you. I can only tell you that again and again God has conquered death to me by making life anew, by resurrection.

Someone sent me a story that goes something like this.

A scientist goes to God and says, "We don't really need you any more. We have pretty much figured out how things work. We can make and destroy mountains. We can even make and destroy people."

And God says, "You can? Show me how you make mountains and how you make people."

The scientist agrees and reaches down, scoops up some dirt and begins to shape it into a man but God interrupts him saying, "No, no, no! Get your own dirt."

If we were our own gods there would be nothing to fashion, nothing to make, nothing to love. If there were no God of eternal life then death would be god and there would be no life, no dirt.

Resurrection is more real than death, more real than our minds and all the stuff we gather. Resurrection, Jesus coming again, and again, and yet again, to fear filled children, is the most real part of reality, the truest part of this life and all that is beyond this life.

In the end, when there is no more me to doubt, there will be God's love still loving, still invading locked rooms, still challenging all that is to trust holy compassion and to be at peace. Peace be with you!

Shalom and Amen.