Sermon by Dr. George Bryant Wirth
Easter Day
March 23, 2008
THE APOSTLES’ CREED:
I BELIEVE IN THE RESURRECTION OF THE
BODY
AND THE LIFE EVERLASTING
Scripture: Mark
16:1-13
INTRODUCTION
As many of you know, I have
tried every Easter to abide by an ancient ritual called the “risus pascalis,”
which is Latin for “the Easter smile.”
During the Dark and Middle Ages in
So, in keeping with that
tradition, here is the risus pascalis for Easter 2008 – three vignettes which a
church member sent to me entitled “Live To Be A Hundred”:
“Jeanne Calment, at 120 years
old, was the longest living human being who’s birthdate could be
authenticated. When she was asked by a
friend to describe her vision for the future, Mrs. Calment replied “Very
brief.”
Harry Smith, as he turned
102, was interviewed by a local newspaper reporter who asked him on his
birthday what he liked best about living that long. Without hesitation he answered, “No peer
pressure.”
And The Rev. John Fetterman,
rector of Grace Episcopal Church in
He had said “Dorothy, I
notice you have written down in capital letters underlined with red ink ‘No
male pallbearers.’ What do you mean
by that?” She had looked him right in
the eye and replied “They wouldn’t take me out while I was alive, so I don’t want
them to take me out when I’m dead.”
And by the way, I have an
article here from USA Today with a headline that says:
“Worshipers Live Longer Than Those Who Skip Services”:
“The reward of going to church might
be a longer wait for heaven. Regular
worshipers live 10% longer than those who never attend services, says a
national study. Life expectancy for
weekly churchgoers is 82 and 83 for those who attend more than once a week
(according to Demography Magazine and a survey called ‘Religious Involvement
and U.S. Adult Mortality’).
Non-churchgoers, the survey found, live an average of 75 years. (From
USA Today, by Richard Willing, Monday, April 26, 1999)
Well now, I hope that will be
some incentive for all of you to come back again next Sunday morning! So much for the “risus pascalis.”
I
We have come through the long
weeks of the Lenten Season, focusing our attention on The Apostles’ Creed, and
we are gathered here this glorious morning to rejoice and to celebrate. For we believe that Jesus Christ, who was
crucified, dead and buried…we believe that He rose from the grave on that first
Easter Day and has shown us the way from here to eternity.
The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed! And we will stand at the end of this service
to proclaim in the Creed: “I believe in the resurrection of the body and the
life everlasting!”
During our Lenten journey,
the Gospel of Mark has guided us along the way and provided us with insights
and inspiration from the events that happened to Jesus and His disciples long
ago. Biblical scholars basically agree
that Mark was the first gospel to be written, sometime around 65 A.D. But what is unusual about this account is the
way that Mark ends so abruptly with chapter 16, verse 8. The women who had gone to the tomb and found
the stone rolled away, were told by a young man (who could have been an angel):
Do not be alarmed; you are looking for
Jesus of
So the
women went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized
them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid (Mark 16:6-8).
Matthew and Luke, who wrote
their gospels not long after Mark, and then John sometime later – they all tell
the rest of the Easter story. And you
may have noticed in our reading of the lesson today that there are two
paragraphs, called “the shorter ending of Mark” and “the longer ending of Mark”
which have been added on and include a few of the appearances of the risen
Christ.
But that’s not the way the
original version of Mark concludes. His
gospel ends with the description of “fear and amazement” that gripped those
women so that they said nothing, initially, to anyone.
The Bible commentator William
Barclay suggests that Mark may have died before he finished his gospel, and
that others filled in the closing lines…or that the last pages of the original
manuscript might have been torn off or lost.
Either way, it would appear
that we have an incomplete story here, somewhat similar to Schubert’s
Unfinished 8th Symphony, which has only two movements instead of
four and was discovered after the composer died, found in the archives of the
orchestra to which he had sent the original score.
And although this “unfinished
resurrection story” in Mark might be upsetting to some of us, I think it comes
ever so close to the real truth about how those women and the first disciples
reacted to the resurrection of Jesus.
Mark uses the words “amazement and fear.” Why?
Because they knew, and we know it too, that when people die they do not
come back to life.
I have been to many funeral
homes over the years, and stood beside the open casket of someone whom I have
known and loved as their pastor, family member or friend. And every now and then, I reach out
intentionally to touch the hand of that person who has died, to say a quiet
prayer of gratitude. But with all due
respect, I cannot begin to imagine what it would be like for that person to
suddenly open his or her eyes and come back to life. Because it just doesn’t happen. When people die, we say goodbye and God be
with you until we meet again in heaven.
But never, ever do they come back to life…
Except…except for Jesus. Mark tells us that the women who went to the
tomb on that first Easter morning found it empty and then heard the words “…You
are looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified…He has been raised; He is
not here!” And not long after, as the
other gospels report, they, and the disciples and many others saw the risen
Lord face to face.
That’s what the Presbyterian
pastor and author Frederick Buechner was trying to put into words in his
marvelous book “The Magnificent Defeat.”
He said:
“I cannot tell you…what I think I
would have seen if I had been there myself…But I can tell you this: that what I
believe happened, and what in faith and great joy I proclaim to you is that He
somehow got up, with the life in Him again, and the glory upon Him…I was not
there to see it, any more than I was awake to see the sunrise this
morning. But I affirm it as surely as I
do, that by God’s grace, the sun did rise this morning because that is why the
world is flooded with light.”
(Frederick Buechner, “The Magnificent
Defeat,” 1966)
My friends: that is the
center, the core of the Christian faith!
And it is all about how God conquered the forces of evil that had done
their worst to destroy the best that God could give us in His Son, our Savior
Jesus; it is all about the Lord’s love and light overcoming the world’s despair
and darkness; it is all about how the risen Christ can heal that which has been
broken, redeem those who feel forsaken, and transform our fear of death into
the faith, hope and courage we need to go on instead of giving up; and at the
end of the journey, it’s all about trusting Him to help us let go, and let God
welcome us home.
All of that and so much more
is found at the open door of the empty tomb.
We cannot completely comprehend it, neither will we ever be able to
fully describe it. But as Christians, we
can and we do trust that it is true. And
that is why we stand up to say in The Apostles’ Creed Sunday after Sunday “I
believe in the resurrection of the body”!
II
Which takes us to the final
affirmation of the Creed and leads us toward heaven as we say: “I believe in
the life everlasting.”
We’re talking now about what
the Apostle Paul called “a mystery…that someday we will all be changed…as our
mortal bodies put on immortality…and death is swallowed up in victory” (I
Corinthians 15:51, 54).
It is mystery because, when
all is said and done, only God knows what will happen as we cross over to the
other side. But human nature being what
it is, we have plenty of questions as we envision that transition into eternal
life.
Barbara Brown Taylor speaks
up for all of us in her book “Home By Another Way”:
“(So) what about cremation? I do not want to spend eternity in an
urn. And what about people who have lost
their limbs, their gall bladders, or their minds? Will they be raised with or without their
missing parts? Will my old Springer
spaniel Chip be there, or is resurrection for human beings only? Will any of us recognize each other, or will we
all be morphed into creatures of light?”
(From
“Home By Another Way” by Barbara Brown Taylor, Cowley Publications, 1999, page
205)
To tell you the truth, I have
heard people ask all of those questions, including “the big one” about who will
be there in heaven and who will be left out.
When people start to argue
about that question, my inclination is to lighten things up a little by telling
the story of a man who died, met St. Peter at the gate, and asked him how to
get in.
A few hours later, St. Peter
asked the same man to hold down the station for him while he attended to some
other business. The man was standing
there alone when he saw a woman arrive whom he knew. It was his mother-in-law. She looked surprised and said “What are you
doing here?” He answered “I’m guarding
the gate for St. Peter.” “How do I get in?”
the mother-in-law wanted to know. “Just
spell the password” said the man. “What
is it?” she asked. “
Now the reality is, when we
cross over to the other side, only God knows all of the mysteries of
heaven. But His Son, our Savior Jesus,
who is the way, the truth and the life, He has promised to lead us in. And when He told us that we need to become like children to enter the kingdom of
heaven (Matthew 18:3), He was talking about child-like trust and hearts
full of hope that open us up to be welcomed home by God.
As a young boy growing up out
on the eastern tip of Long Island, my father was the pastor of a Presbyterian
church there, and I remember Easter Sundays with mixed emotions. There was a lot of commotion and some anxiety
as our mother got us out of bed early and quickly dressed so that we could make
it on time to the sunrise service. Then
there was Sunday school, followed by sitting on the front row during the 11:00
worship where we were supposed to be still and look perfect (which we weren’t).
After that, we were all off
to lunch with the president of the Board of Trustees, and then piled into our
1952 Power Glide Chevrolet to make the rounds visiting shut-ins (as we used to call
them), delivering Easter lilies and telling those older folks what had happened
in church. We usually had an early
supper with Miss Garipe, my Sunday school teacher, reciting Bible verses and
talking about spiritual things, until we climbed back into the old Chevy and
headed for my grandparents home which was close to
It was a long drive, and one
by one my brother and sisters fell asleep in the back seat. I was always the last to close my eyes,
looking through the rear window and counting those old wooden light posts as
they flashed by one by one on the Southern State Parkway. And somewhere between Sag Harbor and
What I remember next was
waking up the following morning in a great big four poster bed in my grandparent’s
guest room. I heard people talking and
laughing in the kitchen, and I could smell the eggs and bacon as I made my way
down the stairs to where my grandparents were – looking at me with love in
their eyes, as they opened their arms and said “Welcome home, Georgie (that’s
what they called me). We’re glad that
you are here.”
CONCLUSION
And although I never really
thought about it then, I have thought about it a great deal since, about how I
got from the back seat of that old Chevrolet into my grandparents big bed where
I spent the night in peace.
I know now, because we have
done it with our own children, and so have many of you – I know now that my
father or mother carried me there, making sure that I was safe and secure.
And I also know and believe
that this is true: when we are tired, too tired to go on in this life, or even
when our time comes abruptly, earlier than it should – Jesus Christ, the Lord
of our life, comes somehow and some way to carry us home to His Father in
heaven. We don’t know exactly how that
happens, but we believe that it does happen, that it will happen someday for
you and for me.
And our greatest hope and
most secure promise as Christians is that when we close our eyes on earth for
the last time, and open our eyes in heaven for the first time, we will see the
Lord face to face, and He will embrace us with words of welcome, saying “Well
done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of my eternal kingdom (Matthew
25).” And those whom we have loved and
lost a while, will be waiting for us there too…and what a wonderful reunion
that will be!
Christian friends: because
Jesus Christ rose from the grave, we can say “I believe in the resurrection of
the body.” And because He has called all
who follow Him by faith to be with Him forever in heaven, we can say “I believe
in the life everlasting.”
So in keeping with our
Christian tradition down through the generations, let us stand and lift up our
affirmation of faith as we say together The Apostles’ Creed:
I
believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth;
And
in Jesus Christ His only son our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead,
and buried.
He
descended into hell; the third day He rose again from the dead;
He
ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I
believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy catholic church; the communion of saints;
the forgiveness of sins; the resurrection of the body; and the life
everlasting. Amen!
In the name of the Father,
and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.