FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ATLANTA, GEORGIA
Sermon by Dr. George Bryant
Wirth
EASTER DAY
April 20, 2003
FROM HERE TO ETERNITY:
THE STAGES OF LIFE, DEATH
AND RESURRECTION –
“HOLDING ON TO HOPE!”
Scripture: John 20:1-18
Before
we pray, I want to say again how glad we are that you have come here to worship
today – especially the many visitors in our midst. That is not always true in every church – sometimes visitors feel
that they are on the outside looking in.
So
it was for a charismatic Christian woman who visited a buttoned down
traditional kind of congregation one Sunday morning. After the opening hymn, as the people were seated, she remained
standing and shouted out loud, “Praise the Lord!”
The
ushers were concerned and began to watch her more closely. After the choir sang the anthem, she stood
up again and shouted out “Thank you Jesus,” as the ushers moved down the aisle
toward her.
Finally,
after the sermon, she stood up once more and shouted out “Right on
preacher!” The head usher went to her
pew, took the woman by the arm and began to escort her out of the
sanctuary. He said, “What do you think
you’re doing?” And with a big smile on
her face she answered, “I’m praising the Lord!
I’ve got the Spirit!” The usher
frowned, shook his head and said, “Well, you didn’t get it here.”
My
friends, just the opposite is true in this place today! There is a powerful Spirit alive and at work
in this place – the Spirit of the Living Christ. And we are glad that all of you have come here to celebrate His
Resurrection from the grave. Let us
pray.
Great
and eternal God, help us to hear your word.
And may the words of our mouths and the meditations of all our hearts,
be acceptable in Your sight, our Love, our Strength and our Redeemer.
Through
Christ we pray. Amen.
As
many of you know, our series of sermons throughout the Lenten Season has
focused on the theme “From Here to Eternity: The Stages of Life, Death and
Resurrection.” Since Ash Wednesday
early in March, we have been talking together about Jesus and His first
disciples on their journey toward Jerusalem – to the Upper Room, the Garden of
Gethsemane, and finally to Calvary’s Cross and Easter’s Empty Tomb.
The
four gospels have helped to guide us along the way, and we have tried to
discern and describe how that difficult pilgrimage long ago is like the stages
of the grief process which we, all of us, sooner or later, will walk through
today: stress and loneliness, anger and fear, depression and despair which can
ultimately lead toward what the Lutheran pastor and author Granger Westberg
called “Good Grief,” as we experience God’s grace and peace, as we embrace His
healing power and love, and find the faith and courage we need to go on instead
of giving up.
And
so our journey has brought us to this glorious Easter morning, where together
with the saints down through the ages, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus
Christ with joy in our hearts as we lift up our praises: “The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed!”
I.
Now, I must confess that the first phrase of this Lenten theme does not come from a religious source or biblical text, but rather from the novel by James Jones which was made into a film that won the Oscar for best picture back in 1953: “From Here to Eternity.”
The
title sounds spiritual and heavenly, but if you have read the book or seen the
movie, you already know that this is an earthy story about the men and women
whose lives collided into one another when Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941. Those characters were portrayed on screen by
Deborah Kerr and Donna Reed, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Montgomery Cliff and
Frank Sinatra – not exactly a Sunday School roster.
But
all of them were trying to recover from and navigate through the disaster that
hit the Hawaiian Islands and pulled America into World War II.
Now
it seems to me that those characters portrayed in “From Here to Eternity” were
similar in some ways to the women and men who came to Jesus’ tomb on that first
Easter Day.
All
four of the gospel authors – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – report that Mary
Magdalene arrived there before or together with the others, and she was a woman
whom Jesus had saved from a bad reputation.
Peter and John showed up next, and reading carefully between the lines,
we can detect the kind of competition that had developed between them. The Bible says that they both ran to the
tomb, but the other disciple (John) got there first. Now remember, it was John himself who wrote
those words! Jesus had warned those
men, over and over again, not to play that egocentric game, but they were still
trying to one-up each other on Easter Day.
So
Mary Magdalene, with her checkered past, and Peter who had betrayed and
deserted Jesus at the last, and John who prided himself in being so fast that
he won the race to the cemetery – they were the motley crew who first arrived
at the empty tomb! And truth be told,
they were no more qualified to be there than you or me. And that is the first point of this Easter
story: our hope for all of eternity
does not depend on our reputation, credentials or success. It comes instead through the life, death and
resurrection of Jesus, who has offered God’s grace, love and forgiveness to all
of us.
A
New Yorker magazine cartoon depicts a man standing at the gates of heaven,
talking to an angel who is sitting behind a big desk. The man has a troubled look on his face and the caption below
reads: “You mean you really do count
SAT’s?”
As
Christians and as Presbyterians who affirm the biblical and theological principles
of the Reformed Tradition, we believe that just the opposite is true: it is not
what we do, but what God has already done through Jesus Christ that gives us
abundant life on earth and eternal life in heaven. The late Dr. Hugh Thomson Kerr, who was Moderator of our
Presbyterian Church a generation ago, put it this way:
“The grace of God is not dependent nor conditioned on what we are or do. Just as the rain falls and the sun shines on the just and unjust, so is the grace of God manifested to saint and sinner alike. It is a gift.”
And for anyone who doesn’t like it that way, because they are so certain about who will get in and who is going to be turned away at the gates of heaven, let me remind you that Mary Magdalene, Peter and John were not exactly stellar candidates for God’s eternal kingdom…except, except for the grace and love and forgiveness of Jesus Christ.
You
have heard this poem before, but I repeat it without apology, because I firmly
believe that it is true and points us toward the hope we have been given from
here to eternity:
SURPRISE!
“I dreamt death came the other night,
And heaven’s gates swung wide.
An angel with a halo bright
Ushered me inside.
And there, to my astonishment,
Stood folks I’d judged and labeled.
As ‘quite unfit,’ ‘heretics’
And ‘spiritually disabled.’
Indignant words rose to my lips,
But never were set free,
For every face showed stunned surprise:
No one expected me!”
In other words, our hope is built on nothing less than God’s grace and love and forgiveness which has been given to us through the life, death and resurrection of His Son our savior Jesus.
II.
Now
there’s a second thing in this Easter story from the 20th chapter of
John that bears witness to our hope as Christians. And to be honest with you, this is a new insight for me which
came through my reading and research for our sermon.
After
John and Peter had been to the empty grave and then returned home on that
Easter Day (verse 10), Mary Magdalene stayed there beside the tomb and suddenly
met Jesus face to face. At first, she
did not recognize Him, perhaps because of the aura around His resurrected body
or the flood of tears in her eyes. But
when He said her name – Mary” – she looked and saw that it was Jesus and called
Him “Rabboni,” which in Hebrew means “teacher.”
Then
He said to her, Do not hold me, because I have not yet ascended to the
Father (verse 17). And this is the
thing I had never seen nor thought much about before. If Jesus had wanted to prove that His resurrection was real, all
He had to do was to ask His friend to touch and to feel His hands and feet, His
face and ears and eyes.
But
that’s not what He did. Why? Because He wanted Mary Magdalene to know
that something had changed, and that their relationship – in fact – the world
as they had known it, and the world as we know it, would never be the same
again.
This
discovery for me came through reading an Easter sermon by the Episcopal priest
Barbara Brown Taylor, who is one of our country’s finest preachers and a good
friend to me and this congregation. In
reflecting on this same text from John 20, Barbara Brown Taylor offers this
profound explanation:
“Do
not hold on to me, Jesus cautioned her, because I have not yet ascended
to the Father.
It was
a peculiar thing for him to say since there is no evidence she was holding on
to him in any way. Unless it was what
she called him – “my Teacher” – the old name she used to call him. Maybe he could hear it in her voice, how she
wanted him back the way he was so they could go back to the way they were, back
to the old life where everything was familiar and not frightening like it was
now. ‘Rabbouni!’ she called him, but
that was his Friday name, and here it was Sunday – an entirely new day in an
entirely new life.
He was
not on his way back to her and the others.
He was on his way to God, and he was taking the whole world with
him. This may be why all the other
gospel accounts of the resurrection tell us not to be afraid – because new life
is frightening. It is unnatural. To expect a sealed tomb and find one filled
with angels, to hunt the past and discover the future, to seek a corpse and
find the risen Lord – none of this is natural.
Death
is natural. Loss is natural. Grief is natural. But those stones have been rolled away this happy morning, to
reveal the highly unnatural truth. By
the light of this day, God has planted a seed of life in us that cannot be
killed, and if we can remember that, then there is nothing we cannot do; move
mountains, banish fear, love our enemies, change the world.
The
only thing we cannot do is hold on to him.
He has asked us please not to do that, because he knows that all in all
we would rather keep him with us where we are than let him take us where he is
going. Better we should let him hold on
to us, perhaps. Better we should let
him take us into the white hot presence of God, who is not behind us but ahead
of us, every step of the way.”
(From
“Home by Another Way” by Barbara Brown Taylor,
Cowley Publications, 1999, pages 111-112)
Now, if Barbara Brown Taylor is right, and I believe
she is, that Jesus was telling Mary Magdalene and all of us ever since that the
old has passed away and the new has come (Revelation 21:4-5) through His
resurrection from the grave, then I stand before you on this Easter morning to
say with hopeful anticipation:
Let go of all those things that keep you back and
drag you down and prevent you from being and becoming all that you can be…and
let God help you move on through your stress and loneliness, your anger and
fear, your depression and grief and guilt and despair. Then, trusting in the peace and power of
Jesus Christ, ask Him to help you hold on to the hope of abundant life, here on
earth and forever in heaven. That is
the promise of the resurrection, and it is the greatest promise which we have
been given as Christians.
Back in 1987 and 1988, during the most difficult and
painful time in my life, a friend of mine gave me this devotional book – “A
Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants.” As Easter finally came during that year of depression, I read a
poem in this book written by Mary Ann Bernard entitled “Resurrection.” This poem has been and always will be a
hopeful and encouraging word to me that God is love, that Jesus is Lord and
that He has promised to work all things together for good. On this Easter morning, 2003, I hope and
pray that these words will become God’s word to you:
“Long, long, long ago;
Way before this winter’s snow
First fell upon these weathered fields;
I used to sit and watch and feel
And dream of how the spring would be,
When through the winter’s stormy sea
She’d raise her green and growing head,
Her warmth would resurrect the dead.
Long before this winter’s snow
I dreamt of this day’s sunny glow
And thought somehow my pain would pass
With winter’s pain, and peace like grass
Would simply grow.
(But) The pain’s not gone.
It’s still as cold and hard and long
As lonely pain has ever been,
It cuts so deep and fear within.
Long before this winter’s snow
I ran from pain, looked high and low
For some fast way to get around
Its hurt and cold.
I’d have found,
If I had looked at what was there,
That things don’t follow fast or fair.
That life goes on, and times do change,
And grass does grow despite life’s pains.
Long before this winter’s snow
I thought that this day’s sunny glow,
The smiling children and growing things
And flowers bright were brought by spring.
Now, I know the sun does shine,
That children smile, and from the dark, cold, grime
A flower comes.
It groans, yet sings,
And through its pain, its peace begins.
-
“Resurrection” by Mary Ann Bernard
“The Lord is risen, He is
risen indeed!”
So hold on to hope, my friends – hold on to
hope! And let Jesus Christ lead you From
Here to Eternity!
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy
Spirit. Amen.