Easter 2007

BUT
This will probably not be the very shortest sermon you have ever heard, but it certainly has the shortest theme and text - one word (and a little one at that)... a single word which begins the gospel today and repeats throughout our Easter worship, the single word BUT. [1]

It's a word that shouldn't be there. Good Friday, you know, stopped where you'd expect such a story to end, at The End. "Jesus breathed his last and died."

The End. And afterward, the epilogue. "The crowds who had gathered to see the sight returned home in deep mourning." The End, except for two brief sentences describing what usually happens next, even for us - the funeral arrangements. The End involved not only "dead" but "dead and buried." Then they all went home. That's it. The story ends.

"But..." St. Luke goes on, surprisingly. It doesn't belong there, that word, not after Good Friday, nor does the sentence that follows it belong, nor yet the entire paragraph. It doesn't work that way. "But... they found the stone rolled away. But... when they went in they did not find his body. He is not here but... he has risen." "In this life if we have only hoped in Christ, we are most to be pitied. But... Christ has been raised..."

I spent one Sunday afternoon last month in Solvang, California, but I spent only 10 minutes there in a Christmas store. You know the kind I mean; every tourist town has at least one of them these days, a Christmas shop. Well, I entered unwillingly but I did find this book. [2] (It was also an Easter shop, apparently.) I noticed this because I had already spent a lot of my vacation time thinking about this Easter sermon, and since I did ('s my work, you know) I'm wondering if the cost of that whole trip could be tax deductible, eh? Whaddya think?!? Well, at least the $2.95 book...

It's one of many similar products. How 'bout Christianity for Dummies, 408 pages, $21.99 on Amazon.com Or the one I discussed last summer, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, by the head of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins. He and Richard Dawkins have been appearing in public, each on a different side of the atheist/believer debate. Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris (on the one side) are the latest of the high-profile authors who debunk the Christian faith.

And I'm sure you've heard about "The Last Tomb of Jesus," haven't you, the ossuary, the box of his bones, found in the Jesus-family burial plot, containing also the remains of Mary Magdalene, Judah son of Jesus, plus other children from their union. Film maker James Cameron produced a recent TV documentary; perhaps you've seen it. There's also the Gospel of Judas and Dan Brown's book The DaVinci Code. They don't always admit that there's plenty of disagreement over their claims, and some of their information is historically inaccurate. Children, there's just no end to the movies, books, archeology, and opinion that discredit Easter.

But. That one word changes everything. But. Try it within your heart. Say it softly to yourself as you deal with heartache, with perplexity, disappointments, and death, your own or for anyone you love. Every story we know comes to an end. For each of us - our hopes and plans, our decisions and convictions, and our lives... too soon we have to write, The End. God answers, But...

Now, that's not an easy answer, not for us, not in the face of all the counter-arguments and evidence. But not an easy answer earlier, either. The first followers of Jesus had much more data than we have; they knew a great deal about him and the circumstances of those last three days. Yet having all that information did not guarantee faith. Faith was not the first response to the empty tomb on Easter. Disbelief, that's what they felt, not faith; sheer disbelief, or even unbelief. [3]

The women were perplexed, then terrified. Peter went home amazed, not knowing that to think. And all the modern "explanations" to discredit Jesus' resurrection from the dead were proposed right away. Someone moved his body, they said. Or it was hysteria or hallucination when the disciples saw a risen Christ. Or you know, they're women; they got turned around and lost on that dark morning, poor dears, and they misidentified an unused grave as the Jesus-family plot, saw an empty ossuary instead of the box of bones found back in 1980.

In the Bible itself the story of Easter shows that if there's faith it has to emerge despite the doubt and unbelief. I remind you that we call it the Christian faith. Nowhere, to my knowledge, it is ever called the Christian "certainty." [4] You can be sure about a lot of things in life. 2 + 2 = 4 - now that's got the kind of reliability you can trust... most of the time, depending on your tax accountant, I suppose.

You trust your life to another person in marriage; that's a kind of faith. You live by principles of honesty and integrity because you believe that's the right thing to do, regardless of the environment at work. You make sacrifices now in order to gain something greater in the future. Those are acts of faith.

There are no certainties in anything important, not even in what we'd think are cold, hard facts-is-facts things. No sure thing. Signing a mortgage based on your income, going to college based on your high school grades and financial aid, accepting a job based on what the interviewer told you. Those are acts of faith, too, and that faith is sometimes disappointed, but we don't stop taking action based on uncertainty. The decisions that make us genuinely human, lives of value and nobility in our relationships... the really important things of life, all involve risk.

And if that's true, there will always be elements of doubt, times when you wonder if you made the right choice in giving your life to this person. You'll have questions in your marriage. Some days you wonder, is it really worth pushing back against pressures on the job, holding true to your values and morals. Or, why not just give in and live for the day? We look at the evidence - including the claims against the resurrection - and we think we're losing the battle.

In 1815 allied troops under General Wellington engaged Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo, which was a village in Belgium just south of Brussels. In those days, of course, no satellite uplinks or digital technology, so news of the battle was transmitted by code using lighthouses on the English Channel.

The words were spelled out, "Wellington defeated..." but the weather, so typical of the English coast, was so bad that at this point a fog obscured the signal. "Wellington defeated" - the dreadful news spread to London and by messenger across the land and Britain was in despair.

But one night later when the fog had lifted they could see the final word. "Wellington defeated Napoleon." [5]

You could argue, of course, that whoever authorized the message could have reworded it, said simply, "Napoleon defeated." But we're not always that smart, are we, and weather is unpredictable. So is the environment of Easter. We don't always see as clearly as we'd like, have all the information we want, or think things through. But that doesn't trounce or change reality. We live as people of faith, not only an Easter faith but in all those other risky, relational ways. I think people are built for faith, but it doesn't come easily and sometimes our heads (or our hearts) are foggy.

Most of us can identify with those women in today's story. "To the others," it says, "the women's words seemed like an idle tale, and they did not believe 'em." But you might also identify with Peter. "He got up and ran to the tomb... and went home, amazed," confused at first, yes, but... on his way to faith.

That's why I chose that (often wedding-season) paragraph from St. Paul for Easter this year. We do know only in part. Our knowledge, even in the 21st century, is incomplete. We see through a glass, darkly. So do James Cameron and Richard Dawkins, and so do Francis Collins, Nate Castens, and Pope Benedict, and so do you right now.

But... "someday we will see face to face." But... "when the complete comes, the partial will be ended... Then we will understand fully." For all the uncertainty and debate, "now faith and hope and love abide, but... the greatest of these..."

Now, that's an Easter!

Nate Castens
Chanhassen, Minnesota

[1] I believe I borrowed this idea from another pastor but I can't now remember who it was or any of the details!

[2] Understanding the Resurrection of Jesus Made Easy, Hendrickson Publishers, 2005. Completely inaccurate information about Luther's Small Catechism - which proves you can't trust everything you read, even if it's on your side!

[3] Thanks to Craig Koester, Luther Seminary, St. Paul for these insights during a Kairos Week, "Preaching on the Gospel of Luke," November 1997

[4] The next few paragraphs are prompted by an Easter sermon by Mark Trotter, First United Methodist Church, San Diego

[5] Unattributed story I found somewhere on the internet