Easter Sermon 2016

     If you’ve been to the Skydeck of the Willis Tower (formerly named the Sears Tower) in Chicago in recent years you know about the glass overhangs that have been installed around the perimeter of the top floor.  With glass walls, ceilings and even a glass floor they let you step beyond the walls of the building and out over the sidewalk over 1000 feet below.

            Many people don’t have the nerve to go out on them.  They don’t go for stepping over the edge of one of the world’s tallest building onto glass.  I think they’re a blast!  You can see for miles and miles around.  And of course you can look down down down to the sidewalk and miniscule people below.  Perhaps it’s my engineering background, or a complete lack of sense, but I felt perfectly safe; indeed delighted to be cheating gravity like that.

            In hindsight I realize how much blind faith I have in the whole thing.  I understand some of the glass overhangs developed cracks when they were first installed and needed to be redone.  But I trusted the people who made the glass.  I trusted the people who installed them.  And I trusted the engineers who designed them in the first place.  Ultimately I trusted everyone who built that skyscraper that reaches to such a dizzying height.  I never met a single one of them, but I put my life in their hands.

            I call this ‘faith in the power of the human intellect’.  We humans are smart creatures.  We can figure things out.  We can understand things.  We can build amazing things.  Sure there are always risks involved, but for the most part we can do things safely.

            At one of my son’s recent Boy Scout meetings the boys made presentations on historical figures.  One of the historical figures was Charles Darwin.  And of course Darwin is credited with evolutionary theory.  The adults were allowed to ask the scouts questions about their characters, and I was amazed at the level of detail of the questions: What year was the theory created?  What was the species of bird that gave Darwin the idea?  Where in the world was he?  What was the name of the island chain?  And what was the name of the ship he traveled on?  The scouts or other adults knew every answer!

            I wondered if their biblical knowledge could be so detailed.  Now you probably know I don’t have any problem with evolutionary theory on biblical or theological grounds.  I do have problems with it on scientific grounds – it doesn’t jive with the laws of thermodynamics – but on the whole most people just blindly ignore those problems.  Instead we have made the principles of evolution the principles of the existence of everything.  The evolutionary theory has become the crowning achievement of human intellect.  Given enough time and resources and we humans can figure out anything and everything.

            So what do we do about Easter?  What do we do about an empty tomb and the resurrection?

            Let’s not beat around the bush here.  If we’re honest with ourselves, for most of us Easter is a family tradition and the Bible’s stories are myths for children that are a part of that tradition.  In 1952 theologian Paul Scherer wrote, “Much is made in our time of the fact that ‘the idea of a bodily resurrection’ is not congenial to the modern mind.  The very statement itself might seem in a measure offensive.” (Interpreter’s Bible Commrntary, Volume 8, Pg. 415-6)

            Indeed true.  But we who believe in tall buildings and glass floors and grand scientific theories should not think ourselves enlightened because our minds have concluded that bodily resurrection is impossible.  The challenge has been posed for thousands of years.  In fact the challenge is posed in the Bible itself.  The four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all crash into the impossibility of the resurrection like an Olympic sprinter who has just run into a brick wall at top speed.

            In our gospel reading today the women at the tomb struggle to comprehend what has happened.  The men have an even harder time believing.  Next week we’ll read about Thomas and his refusal to believe without more proof.  Matthew’s gospel records an appearance of the resurrected Jesus to the disciples but he also records that as Jesus was standing there with them and they could see him and talk to him and touch him they still had doubts!  We often say that seeing is believing… not when it comes to the resurrection!

            The word I like to use for all of this is the word incursion.  Webster’s Dictionary defines an incursion as a hostile entrance into or invasion of a place or territory, especially one of sudden character; raid.

            We humans, with the supremacy of our intellect, can ignore the resurrection, call it a myth, and leave the supremacy of our intellect intact.  Or, we can recognize it for what it really is – an incursion into our world; an incursion that makes no sense and cannot be controlled.

            Perhaps that offends us.  Perhaps we don’t like to think that powers exist in this universe – or perhaps beyond this universe – that are beyond our ability to grasp, predict and understand.  Or perhaps we are truly wise enough to recognize that this is a good thing.  No matter how much we think we advance we cannot stop death.  And there is nothing in our human intellect that can resurrect the dead.  Perhaps we can keep biological processes going on for a while, but death is still ultimate.  We are limited.

            God and God alone can save us.  God has to be beyond us in ways we cannot understand for God to truly be God.  A god we can understand, predict and control is not strong enough to do us any good.

            God’s incursion into the universe with the resurrection would be a terrifying thing – what is the enormous power that exists outside of what we can observe? – if it weren’t for the crucifixion.  There we see the true nature of our God – a God whose love is so deep and true as to be willing to suffer us at our worst.

            There’s an important Greek word that shows up various times in our gospel reading for today.  It is the word rhma.   It means utterance and enactment.  The two men at the empty tomb tell the women, “Why do you look for the living among the dead?  He is not here, but has risen.  Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.”  Then the remembered his rhmatwn,  and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and all the rest… But these words seem to them an idle rhmata and they did not believe them.

            Utterance and enactment, rhma is words put into action.  It is belief that is lived out in reality.

            May your reality this Easter not be idle rhma, a belief that is just a myth or a family tradition, but a real rhma, beliefs put into reality.  May you live with boldness and confidence.  A confidence not based on the power of your human intellect, but a confidence based on the power of your God, who has the power to upend things as God chooses.

            Let me conclude with these words I shared in the sermon at the early service from Paul Scherer, “One does not need to be told what an appalling sense of utter uselessness presses down in our modern world on the human soul: the laws and measurements of a huge order that leave little freedom and less stature; a civilization that drives people around for a while like gadgets on the flywheel of progress… And then the little room we have: a bit of a home, a bit of a job, two children, and a few friends; that about says it.  We wonder sometimes why on earth in such tiny places we should get so excited about things.  Come another century and what difference will it make?  Until God flings down this glove at our feet, daring us not to be as little as we think, but as great as we are, trying to show us as best he can what poor fractions of reality we are crawling into most of the time.”  (Interpreter’s Bible Commentary, Volume 8, Pg. 416)