April 26, 2009 Sermon

Our Resurrection
I Corinthians 15:12-28

For years my mom and dad’s answering machine message has said, “Pat and Dotti are out volunteering or they just can't find the phone. Please leave your number and they'll call you right back.” The message tells the truth. Often they cannot find the telephone in time to answer it. And very often, they volunteer. I typed these words sitting on my brother's couch. The family had gathered in Bloomington, Indiana, which last Tuesday honored our parents with its Lifetime Achievement in Volunteering award. They earned it. I am proud of all the years they have given to the thrift shop, Rotary, their church, the Heifer Project, the Teachers' Free Resource Center, the Red Cross, Meals on Wheels and more. They have given many a gift to many people.

My brother picked me up and delivered me to the airport about an hour away. We used some of that time to talk about mom and dad. We spoke of our concerns for their health and their future. We spoke of memories good and bad. We know that our dad is not 100% a hero nor is our mom 100% a saint. But we also have made enough laps around the sun to know that to a great extent they reflect their own parents. And we understand that in a few key ways they chose not to become their parents. Unlike his father, my dad decided not to become a racist. Unlike her father, my mom has remained determined to meet every family responsibility. Taken as a whole, our parents have given their sons the gift of a solid model to follow.

One important gift mom and dad worked to impart was faith in Jesus Christ. They took us to church. More importantly, they tried to live the Christian life the other six days of the week. I am extremely thankful for their faith in Jesus. It helped me to believe. They have shown me the path to a meaningful life. Not only do they believe in their risen Savior, they understand all that volunteering they do as being, in part, a response to His sacrifice on their behalf. They are quite clear on this. Neither of them likes to engage in theological analysis, but they see Jesus' death and resurrection as the foundation for their own lives. If Jesus did not really do all that the Bible says He did, nothing we do will matter in the end. If Jesus did, then our work can bring real hope to hurting people. My parents have based their lives on this.

The Apostle Paul emphasizes this in our passage from I Corinthians. With a risen Christ, life has meaning. Without a risen Christ, life has no meaning. Paul has just finished laying out his case for the resurrection of Jesus. He lived. He died on the cross. He rose from the dead and appeared to many witnesses. Now Paul applies this assertion to our lives and deaths and lives after death. He starts with the bad news possibility: “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” Christianity without the resurrection is no Christianity—and no life—at all.

Europe in the mid-20th century was a grim place. Two cataclysmic wars had just rolled across it, with a terrible economic depression sandwiched between. The educated, law-abiding, cultured people of Germany had participated in genocide. Theologians and philosophers struggled to hold onto faith. They struggled to believe in any god, and they struggled to believe in the optimistic theories about human nature of the Romantic period before. Existentialism emerged. Existentialism attempts to make sense of life without a god. Existentialism also has the important secondary component of trying to take responsibility for living a “good” or “ethical” life in the absence of any divinely-inspired revelation of truth.

Around 1955 Jean Paul Sartre, a French Existentialist, wrote, “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.” There is no god, in other words. His contemporary Albert Camus added the second half of Existentialism (acting rightly in the absence of god) with his summary comment, “A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.” Sartre and Camus sound harsh because they did not flinch from speaking honestly. So many today, even here in Grand Traverse County, struggle to live a “good” life, to live ethically, without faith in God. They want to act responsibly, to find some kind of meaning, to hope for even a sliver of a meaning for their existence, but they cannot find it because they cannot seem to believe in any god—much less in Jesus Christ risen from the dead. What a great blessing it is, therefore, that the Bible leads us to Christ!

Though existentialism arose in Europe sixty years ago, it was nothing new. 2,000 years ago Paul dealt with a philosophy that taught many of the same precepts. It was called Stoicism, and Paul preached a sermon in Athens addressed primarily to the Stoics. In my estimation the second-most common “religion” in America today is a blend of Stoicism and Existentialism. Paul's words therefore apply well to us here and now. To his harsh point that, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins” (that is, unforgiven), he adds, “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ we are of all people most to be pitied.” If Christ did not rise from the dead we are pitiful. Weak, in Sartre's word. Nothing more than wild beasts with bigger brains, as Camus put it. Deluded as though on drugs, as Marx put it.

Paul, thank God, does not stop there. He professes his faith that not only did Christ rise from the dead; He did so as the “first fruits”. He became the first among many to “ripen”. Paul uses a double-parallel to explain. Sin came into the world through one man, Adam. From the beginning the human race has been sinful. Earlier in this letter Paul stated that sin inevitably leads to death. Because we sin we die to God eternally. After we leave this earth we exist in spiritual torment. But Paul adds the doubled parallel that resurrection also comes through one man: Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus rose so we can rise. Jesus ripened into full maturity, into eternal life in the blessed presence of God, so we can, too. When we believe in Jesus as our risen Lord we find meaning in this life and hope for the life which is to come. “All will be made alive in Christ,” Paul claims.

Paul concludes this passage by emphasizing the authority of God. Though his thought gets a bit confusing when he dives into its Trinitarian side (the Son being made subject to the Father yet all-in-one and therefore Lord of all), the main point remains clear: God has power even over death. Jesus, the Son of God, God in human flesh, killed death. He did it by dying on the cross for our sins—and by rising from the dead to display his power and authority. Paul confidently writes that “the last enemy to be destroyed is death.” He refers not only to physical death, but to eternal life. When we believe in the risen Christ, who died to take away the sins of the world, we receive life now and life forever.

How many times have I heard people of all ages say words to the effect of, “I don't know why I'm here.” When we believe in the risen Jesus Christ we know why we're here: We're here to praise Jesus for saving us. We're here, in the words of the grand old Westminster Catechism, “to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.” But we can praise, glorify, enjoy only through faith in the risen Jesus. Without faith we are pitiful. With it we really live. I think of an aged woman who had a stroke about two weeks ago. For as long as I have known her she has had the most relentlessly optimistic spirit. A few days after her stroke I heard her say, “I don't know why I'm here.” She certainly did not mean that she was confused about being in the hospital. No, she meant that for the first time to my knowledge she could not see a reason to keep living. A stroke can do that to a person.

Earlier this week I visited with this woman a second time. She had made good progress physically. More importantly she had recovered her spirit. She told me, “I guess God has more for me to do here.” I guess so, too. For example, her spiritual confidence transformed my afternoon. I had awakened quite early that morning. I had traveled. Through O'Hare airport. Need I say more? I had returned to a desk overstuffed with paperwork and messages and demands. I had gotten away to visit her so late an orderly cut short our time in order to wheel her to supper. I was exhausted in every way and praying to be able to give her the attention she deserved. But instead of ministering to her, God gave her the strength to minister to me.

We are here to praise God. We praise God through volunteering to meet every kind of need God's children have. And we praise God through keeping the faith—faith in the resurrected Jesus Christ. As we reach the close of this, the third sermon in a row on resurrection, we also reach the third consecutive appeal to us all to work on our faith in Jesus, and Him crucified and resurrected. This would be tiresome were it not so critical. Do you believe in the risen Christ? If you do not, or if you are not sure, if you belong to that great crowd of Stoic Existentialists, give yourself the greatest gift possible: work on your faith. Pray for faith. Pray daily for faith. Hang out with the Jesus crowd. Fellowship and serve with the church. Read your Bible. I strongly suggest you start with the Gospel of Luke. There you will meet the man Jesus who killed death itself on the cross. There you will meet the Son of God Jesus who rose from the dead. He did it so you could, too.

Believe and live. Live now. Live with Him forever. Jesus rose so we could rise. Believe it, and know the blessed power of a life lived with purpose and meaning.