The man leaned in close to the preacher and whispered, I m in the secret service!

Transcription

1 George A. Mason Easter Sunday Wilshire Baptist Church 1 April 2018 Dallas, Texas All Things New Revelation 21:1-7; John 20:1-18 A big strapping man was coming out of church one Easter Sunday, and the preacher was standing in the narthex shaking hands. He recognized the guy as an infrequent attender, and ever the recruiter, he grabbed him subtly, pulled him aside and said, You need to join the army of the Lord! The startled man replied, I m already in the army of the Lord, Pastor. The pastor questioned him, Then, how come I only see you at Christmas and Easter? The man leaned in close to the preacher and whispered, I m in the secret service! So there s your Easter/April Fools Day joke to start off the day. You may not know this, but Eastern Orthodox priests begin every Easter sermon with a joke. We don t do that here in the Western church, being a bit graver about resurrection than they are. But considering today is April Fools Day and Easter both, I made a feeble exception. I actually asked our pastoral residents to help me with this and challenged them to a competition for who could give me the best Easter joke for my sermon. Apparently, the prize I offered wasn t incentive enough, because I only received a submission from Kevin Gardner- Sinclair. His wasn t something I could tell with kids in the service, but he gets the chocolate bunny anyway, don t you know?! So, any idea why this tradition developed? It may be tied to some ancient theologians who thought God pulled a fast one on the Devil at Easter. They believed that on Good Friday God paid a ransom to the devil with the death of Jesus that allowed the world to go free. Since the Garden of Eden, the world had been held hostage to the powers of sin and death. No one could break the chains. But by giving up the only Son of God in exchange for the world, the Devil finally got the bargain he was hoping for. The Devil thought he had pulled one over on God, until the break of Easter morn when God pulled a rabbit out of a hat, so to speak, by pulling Jesus out of the grave. The Devil hadn t won at all. God played the Devil for the fool. In the resurrection of Jesus, God proved who really holds all the power. We have nothing left to fear, including the grave. We can even laugh at and mock the

2 supposed powers of death and darkness and devils. Now, to be honest, I m not much on the so-called ransom theory of the atonement. I think it makes the relationship of God to the world into a contest of wits between God and the Devil. It makes us something like pawns in a spiritual chess match or property in a commercial transaction or bit characters in a cosmic play. But underneath it all is a basic truth we can affirm: God s love wins over all the powers of heaven and earth. As we heard from our text in Revelation, the resurrected Jesus has become the harbinger of the new creation. The God who was in Christ is not captive to history but is still making history. See, I am making all things new, says the voice from the throne. All things new. That s the gist of Easter. God is making all things new, beginning with Jesus. Notice how the Jesus who speaks to Mary Magdalene in the garden outside the tomb is the same Jesus and yet different, too. First, he s one and the same. That is, he is still a man, even if he is raised. When Mary looks at him, she doesn t take him for a ghost or a spirit. She takes him for a gardener. Of course, we want to know why she doesn t see him right away as the Jesus she has always known and loved. But it shouldn t be hard to imagine how in the in-between time of the early morning, when dawn is breaking and the light is trying its best to beat back the night, it s hard to see clearly. But isn t it also true that we tend to see what we expect to see, not what s actually there? Like, how many of you with young children colored Easter eggs and spread them around the house before your kids got up on Easter morning? The Easter bunny had been there before dawn and left a basket with all sorts of goodies. When your kids wake up, they walk through the house like it s any other day. They go to the kitchen for breakfast and walk right past the colored eggs and Easter basket, leaving you to have to prompt them to look around to see if anything s different. We tend to see only what we expect. Mary expected Jesus to be a corpse. He might not have been in the tomb, but that could only mean his dead body had been cruelly moved by someone. Well, it had been, but it wasn t just moved, it was morphed. That is, 2

3 it was changed. God had raised Jesus from death to life incorruptible. The mortal Jesus was now the immortal Christ. Mary s taking Jesus for a gardener wasn t a case of mistaken identity; it was a case of a makeover identity. Same Jesus, but not the same old Jesus. Same Jesus, new. My daughter Jillian has been married now for two and a half years and she had a little boy a month and a half ago, named River Shannon. Not sure if I told you. And that last name, Shannon, is the key here. When Kim and I went to the hospital to be there for the birth, they told us there was no one there by the name of Jillian Shannon. It took us a while, but we finally figured out that the girl hadn t changed her last name yet. She was still listed as Jillian Mason. The change is more cumbersome than you think, but it s underway now, since she is officially part of another family, too. Same Jillian, but not the same old Jillian. Same Jillian, new. God is making all things new, not all new things. There is continuity on the other side of the grave. The Jesus of history has become the eternal Christ, but he is none other than the one who was born of Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried. God made Jesus new that first Easter. But God is making all things new, too. A new Jesus and a new world, which includes a new future for you and me. Easter isn t a one-off event that happened to one man because he happened to be the Son of God. It s a signal of what God is up to for all first with Jesus, next for the rest of us through Jesus. When the risen Christ tells Mary to go tell his brothers he is raised, the message is that he is ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God. The really good news of Easter is in the conjunction of my and your. AND. The God who raised Jesus from the dead is also our eastering God. We are joined to Jesus. What happened to him is promised to us, his brothers and sisters. We are part now of the eternal family of God. Keep in mind, Jesus is telling Mary to tell this to his brothers who deserted him in his time of need, to those who betrayed and denied him. Which is to say, my friends, God is not holding your sin against you. God does not judge you forever on the basis of what you have done or failed to 3

4 do. God is judging you on the basis of what God has done in Jesus. Easter means that resurrection, not death, is God s final word to the world. The great Bishop of Alexandria, St. Athanasius, put it this way: He became what we are so that we might become what he is. Which means that if there was hope for Jesus, there is hope for you. God is making all things new, including you. Same you, new. And not just people, all things! God doesn t lose anyone or anything. God is a saver, not a thrower away. All things are precious to God. God is renewing creation right before our very eyes. The bursting forth of spring is a sign of the God of resurrection at work. There s a hint of God in all things and for all things. Life, not death, prevails. This is why we get a picture from Revelation of the New Jerusalem coming down. Same world, new. All things new includes a new Jesus, a new world and one more thing a new outlook. Woman, why are you weeping? the two angels in white ask Mary at the tomb. Then Jesus appears to Mary and asks the very same question. Woman, why are you weeping? It s not that grief and mourning are forbidden emotions to us now. It s that loss is not the ruling experience of our lives any longer. We have a new outlook on the world and our lives. Resurrection rules. Death and loss are transitory, not forever. We are now people of buoyant hope. Nothing can rob us of the future. The good of the past and the bad of the past are both simply that past. Jesus tells us not to hold onto the past for dear life, because the dearest life is yet to come. Mary s first instinct must have been to hug Jesus tightly and never let him go. John doesn t describe that touching moment in detail, but we can infer the tenderness of it both from her love for Jesus and what Jesus says to her. Do not hold on to me, Jesus says. And in typical fashion to John s way of writing, there s a double meaning. Don t hold on to me also means don t try to keep me from the future God has for me. Same Jesus new had to go to the Father in order to continue his ministry to the world in a new way. By ascending to the Father, he could be present by the Holy Spirit to 4

5 everyone everywhere at once, drawing the whole world to himself. Christians must now live with a new orientation to life. The best witness Christians have to the resurrection is our joy. Joy for what is and for what is yet to be. Gratitude and hope are the present and future tenses of joy. Scott Hamilton is an Olympic gold-medal-winning figure skater, whose path to success was unlikely. He had a mysterious childhood illness that stunted his growth. He s only five feet, two and a half inches tall. But he s got a giant heart. Many of us watched the Winter Olympics last month and saw that Tara Lapinski and Johnny Weir had replaced Scott Hamilton as the figure skating analysts after Scott had held that role for 25 years. now it s over. But change happens to everyone even me. In the last two decades, Hamilton has faced Stage 4 testicular cancer, and after that three brain tumors one every six years since He has a brain tumor right now. Despite his disappointment, he s done again what he s always done: get up and start over. I calculated once how many times I fell during my skating career 41,600 times, he said. But here s the funny thing: I got up 41,600 times. That s the muscle you have to build in your psyche the one that reminds you to just get up. 1 Where does that come from? Scott is a Christian with a resurrection outlook. My faith in God was always lifting me to new heights I never could have reached on my own. 2 Lifting, he said. Hmm, sounds like Easter to me. When asked about his reaction to the news, he replied, There was a sadness for about 10 minutes. I lamented it being over. I thought, Oh, man, that was such a beautiful part of my life and 1 rts/olympics/figure-skating-nbc-scotthamilton-.html 2 5