April 16, 2006 Sermon

How Not to Believe
Matthew 28:1-15

In March David Stern, a reporter for the New York Post, met three times with billionaire businessman Ron Burkle. Burkle claims Stern was trying to shake him down, that he was threatening to publish dirty secrets about him unless he paid Stern $200,000. Stern claims the whole thing was a set-up by Burkle, who has had a red-hot running feud with the Post for years. Which man is telling the truth? Is either man telling the truth? We may never know.

We live in a corrupt age. Bob Thompson introduced me to a wonderful new word: kleptocracy. It sounds like aristocracy, in which people come to power by being born into the right families. In a kleptocracy, however, people come to power by stealing. (“Klept” comes from the same root that gives us “kleptomaniacs”, or people who have a pathological need to steal.) But who comes to power by stealing? Politicians, of course! We live in a kleptocracy, a system run by people who get and use power by stealing from the rest of us.

Sham land deals in Arkansas that enrich the governor, who then uses the money to buy influence with the big law firms and judges in his state: kleptocracy. A president of the United States who pays burglers to steal information from his opponents’ campaign headquarters, then lies about it to the nation: kleptocracy. Soldiers, church officials and a governor who conspire and bribe to get their story out to the people before their enemies do the same: kleptocracy. The first two examples come from 20th century America . The third comes from the Bible. We just read it. It happened on Easter.

People will go to extraordinary lengths to kill the truth. Trying to buy the truth is one of the most common strategies we employ. What’s that I said? Did I use the first person, plural “we”? I did. We try to buy off the truth. Maybe we don’t blackmail billionaires. But we try to buy off the truth. Maybe we don’t pay political hacks to do dirty tricks for us. But we try to buy off the truth. And one truth we try to buy off is the truth of Easter.

One Passover some 2,000 years ago Jesus of Nazareth walked out of the tomb he had occupied as a dead man for some two nights, a day and a morning. Do you believe this truth claim? Or do you try to buy enough stuff to keep you so busy you don’t have to think about it?

My grandparents owned a farm fifteen miles east of Indianapolis . At least it was fifteen miles from the city in my father’s boyhood. Now the very land on which I can remember riding a tractor and watching barn kittens get born and ice skating on the pond lies beneath the Washington Square Mall, one of the largest shopping centers in the state. In the old days the Memorial Park Cemetery bordered the farm to the west. The Washington Park Cemetery lay right across Washington Rd. to the south.

The developer who built the mall wanted to buy those cemeteries, too. According to an article in the Indianapolis Star newspaper archives, he wanted to move all those graves so he could build even more strip malls and apartments to surround his big mall. His spokesman stated, “Given the right amount of money an awful lot of resurrections could happen.” It was the wrong thing to say. Those cemeteries are still there.

We have grown cynical even about death. For the right price, we feel, even the grave can give up its contents. If we feel this way, how can we possibly believe the wild idea that Jesus walked out of the grave?

Before the sun had set on the very day they crucified Christ, Roman guards and Jewish religious leaders hatched a plot to confuse the resurrection issue. Money changed hands. A conspiracy to hide the truth emerged. We can well imagine that the plot found receptive ears. After all, a resurrection? Are you kidding me?!?

But here’s the thing. Whether you believe in Jesus’ resurrection or not, you know that Matthew tells the truth about this plot. And look again at who does the dirty deed. Roman soldiers and Jewish religious leaders, people who despised each other, found common cause in trying to kill the Jesus movement. Those pesky Christians threatened their kleptocracy.

They tried to buy off the truth about the resurrection. That’s a great, big Sin with a capital S. but is it fair to lump us in with them? Do we really try that hard not to believe? Do we bribe and conspire? Do we lie? Of course we do. We do all these things. We may do them in minor ways, but we do them. We differ from those soldiers and religious leaders only in the size of our sin, not in the type.

We try to buy peace when the only real peace we can have comes from believing in the resurrection of Jesus. We buy things in the false hope they will calm our hearts. We know the lie, we know that getting things only makes us want still more things, but we need peace so badly we fall for the lie. We buy homes in nice neighborhoods removed from poorer people in part so we will not have to see them and have to think about their needs. We buy politicians to protect our interests. How does this differ from trying to buy silence about Jesus’ resurrection?

I entitled this sermon, “How Not to Believe.” We can avoid believing in the resurrection of Jesus Christ the same way those soldiers and religious leaders tried to keep the word from getting out: by trying to buy peace. We can buy our way out of believing for a lifetime. Trouble is, when we do that we buy our way out of having true peace, as well.

Why build your life on stealing from the truth? Why try to buy peace when you can have it for free? Our middle year of seminary we lived next door to Harvey and Gertrude Sindima. They came from Malawi , a small country in southern Africa . Harvey was already a minister; he had come to America to get a doctoral degree so he could become the head of the Presbyterian Church of Malawi. That would take four or so years, after which he and Gertrude would return home. In the meanwhile, they were torn. They loved the freedom of living in the USA . But they mourned the lack of spirit in American churches.

Harvey was a poet. That was his problem. He had written poems that criticized the president of Malawi . The president had called him into his office and told him he could either stop writing poems about him or leave Malawi forever. Harvey , afraid of losing his ministry, stopped writing poems. What had he written that so upset the supposedly democratically-elected president? He had compared him to a lion that never makes the kill, but always eats the meat. Ronald Reagan was our president at that time. The seminary community did not care for Mr. Reagan. Harvey could not get over how people openly criticized the president without fear.

On the other hand, the Sindimas could barely stand to worship in American churches. Please understand: their criticisms were gentle, thoughtful. But they strongly felt that American Christians acted as though they did not truly believe in Jesus and his resurrection. I cannot recall exactly how he said it, but often Harvey would comment with something along the lines of, “You have peace here, but it is the peace of boredom. You have too many things but you do not have the one thing you need. You need the peace of Christ.”

We can try to buy peace, or we can find true peace in the gift of faith in Jesus Christ, and him resurrected from the dead. May this Easter morning become for you the time when you dedicate yourself to seeking the peace of Christ through faith. Pray for it. Worship like you mean it. Stay within the fellowship of the church. Live for peace and you will find it. Try to buy it, and it will lead you straight into the grave.