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Do
you remember the song “I’ve Been Looking for Love in All the Wrong
Places?” That’s been called the song that launched a thousand sermons.
You can imagine a lot of ways a preacher could go with material like that,
but the song popped into my head when I was looking at the gospel text for
this morning. When the women came to the tomb they expected to find a tomb
sealed with a rock, and inside, a dead Jesus. Instead, what they found was
an open tomb, the rock rolled away, and inside, two men who asked, “Why
do you seek the living among the dead?”
Why
do we seek the living among the dead?
Mary Magdalene and the other women had certainly seen enough miracles from
Jesus to know that with him, nothing was impossible, yet they came to the
tomb with no expectations other than a body that needed to be buried
according to Jewish law, with the proper spices. After following Jesus and
hearing his stories, nothing had changed for them. It was as if they were
waking up from a happy dream, a dream of a man who preached that love is
stronger than hate, and now they had to go back to a grim, cold reality.
Sadly,
many people still come to church on Easter morning also lacking an
appreciation for what has happened. They certainly don’t come expecting
their lives to have been changed. My friends, Easter really is a big deal.
The biggest deal of all. But the problem with most people is that they
think small. Their actions, their thoughts are consumed with every-day
junk, their job, their house, their family and what’s on TV that night.
Doesn’t that sound about right? They don’t realize that there is a
much bigger reality that they do not see and don’t appreciate, much like
we don’t appreciate the air we breathe, even though it keeps us alive.
Anybody
here ever see the play “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder? In one of the
scenes a teenage girl, leaning out of her window on a moonlit night, tells
of a strangely, precisely addressed letter that came to someone in their
little town of Grover’s Corners. “It was addressed Grover’s Corners,
Sutton County, New Hampshire, United States of America, Continent of North
America, the Western Hemisphere, the Earth, the Solar System, the
Universe, the Mind of God.” What we think is important often seem very
small when set against the big picture.
Why
is Easter so big? Why is Easter so important? What has brought us here so
early? First of all, we are celebrating the victory that Jesus won over
death. Someone has been to the other side of death and has come back to
tell us that there’s nothing to be afraid of, there is a way to the
other side. We’re not going to end up in a hole at the cemetery and that
will be the end of our story.
Second,
we celebrate the reality that there is such a thing as truth in this
world. Do you understand what I mean by that? For so many people today,
there is no such thing as truth—absolute truth, solid, totally reliable
truth. That’s why they love to laugh at the resurrection. The world
likes there to be an infinite number of opinions on spiritual matters, but
no hard truth. As long as Jesus is just another moral teacher, his
morality may be right for you but I can take it or leave it. But if he has
defeated death, his opinion is the only one that matters, and what he said
is good for everybody.
I
don’t know about you, but I think having truth that you can count on is
reason to celebrate. Those who are a little older may remember the brief
but popular God is Dead movement back in the 1960s, which basically meant
that men and women were free agents when it came to making moral choices.
Nothing was written in stone. To which more than one human said,
“That’s just great. What am I supposed to do now?” The truth is, God
knew that man would mess up big time if left to his devices, and our world
reflects that. That’s why he left us with a rule book called the Bible,
and all of it points to Jesus Christ and Easter Sunday. The message of
Easter is, “If you want this outcome, here is the path to follow.”
And
the third thing that we celebrate is that because of Easter Sunday, we are
not alone. We are not cut off from God, and we are not cut off from our
own loved ones. Because Jesus lives, we know that our loved ones live, and
so will we all. It is why we long for Christ’s return, for that glorious
morning will signal not only the coming of his kingdom, but the
resurrection of all believers.
These
days I’m always a little sad on Easter in spite of myself, and I’ll
tell you why. At our house, one of the traditions on Easter Sunday was to
hunt for our Easter eggs. On Saturday us kids would dye dozens of eggs;
some of those eggs would wind up in a table decoration for Sunday dinner,
and some would wind up in egg salad sandwiches the following week, but my
mom would take one of those eggs for each one of her kids and hide them.
When we got home from church we all had to find our egg, and sometimes she
was real clever and come up with new hiding places.
Even
after we grew up and moved away, we were still expected to find our Easter
egg when we came to Mom’s house, and you know how it is when you grow
up, you don’t want to be treated like a kid any more. I can remember on
the way to her house thinking, “Oh, man, I don’t want to have to look
for an Easter egg.” And I would be all grumpy and impatient to have to
go through the ritual. My mother died in February 1998, just before the
start of Lent, and that Easter, and every Easter since, I would give
everything I own to have to look for an Easter egg my mother had hidden,
once more.
But
thanks be to God, thanks be to Christ’s resurrection, I’m going to see
my mother again. We all are going to see our loved ones again.
The
four gospels differ slightly in the details of the resurrection, but they
all agree on the essential point: that the tomb was empty. The dead body
the women sought was gone, and in its place was life. Jesus’ body was
physically revived, and ours is the only faith that makes that claim. The
tomb of Confucius is occupied. The tomb of Buddha is occupied. The tomb of
Mohammad is occupied. The tomb of Moses is occupied. But the tomb of Jesus
Christ is empty. In fact, if anyone ever proved that some bones dug up in
the hills of Israel were those of Jesus Christ, I would tell you to stay
home and go back to sleep, for our faith has been stripped of truth.
In the book “Growing Deep in the
Christian Faith” there is a story about a Sunday School teacher who was
trying to determine how much her children knew about Jesus and what he
did. She found one five-year-old boy who knew absolutely nothing about
Jesus or religion. So she got right to the heart of the story. She told
him about Jesus dying on the cross, and he said, “What’s a cross?”
She picked up some sticks and showed him a cross, and told him that Jesus
had been nailed to a cross and died. The little boy with eyes downcast
said, “That’s too bad.”
But
then she told him that Christ came back to life and rose again, and
hearing that, his eyes got as big as saucers. His face lit up, and he
said, “That’s totally awesome.”
Well,
it is totally awesome when you think about it. Satan took his best shot at
defeating God, and he couldn’t do it. The victory is God’s, and God
wants to share it with us. Christ stands on both sides of the grave, and
nothing, absolutely nothing, can separate us from his love. Just don’t
look for him in the grave. He is not dead. He is risen. Allelulia!
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