A Sermon Based Upon Luke 23: 46-49
Dr. Charles J. Tomlin
Easter Sunday, Zion-Flat Rock Partnership
April 4th, 2010
Have you ever been ripped off?
While living in an East Germany, I went down to the basement of our apartment building where everyone had individual storage rooms. I immediately noticed the lock of my door was broken and when I looked inside, I saw my new mountain bike had been stolen.
I drove to the police station to file a report. “Is there any chance getting my bike back?” I asked. The policemen looked at me with a helpless expression and said, “Do you realize that by now your bike has already been repainted and is unrecognizable even by you?” I could tell by the look in his eyes, I had been ripped off and there was no hope of getting my bike back. It’s could have been worse. I had insurance. I bought another one. But that was my first Mountain Bike and it was special.
Most of us have had things stolen. When you discover that something has been take from you a strange feeling of anger, then helplessness goes all over you. You have no control. It is completely unfair. And worse of all, there is nothing you can do about it.
It especially feels good when you are able to foil someone’s plans to rip you off. I did get lucky once on a bus in Rome. All the travel magazines had warned me about pickpockets on a certain bus 81. I got on a different bus. It was very crowded and I had to stand. I was especially careful and observant and I patted my wallet in my front pocket every five seconds. After the bus jarred to a sudden stop and had to grab hold with both hands only for a mere millisecond, I immediately reached down to check and the wallet was gone.
I knew it just happened so I screamed out, “Wallet!” I jump off the bus and grabbed a man getting off the bus and without seeing anything accused him in English! “You’ve got my wallet!” The man didn’t understand a word and looked acted innocent. Everyone was watching me to see what this 220 pound guy was going to do with this short, 150 pound fellow. Then, in the next moment a passerby, who happened to be a deaf man who had keener eyes than most, who was in Rome for a convention of Deaf people, pointed down under the bus and I looked down and there was my wallet. Evidently the man dropped it when I rushed toward him. I found out later because of all the tourists, Roman police are hard on pickpockets and that they will drop everything when they are discovered.
Even though the wallet I had only had $100 and one credit card, I was so very proud to have been able to stop someone from ripping me off. But today, I want you to know that some day we will all be “ripped” off and there is nothing any of us can do about it. I’m talking about “death” which is the ultimate rip off.
YOUR LIFE IS NEVER COMPLETELY YOURS
The title of my sermon today comes from a 1972 play by Brian Clark entitled, “Whose Life Is it Anyway?” The play tells the story of a British sculptor, Ken Harrison, who was injured in a car accident and rather than being allowed to die, due to all the advances in medical science, survives and is a quadriplegic. In the play, Harrison is very angry because he doesn’t think the government had any right to save him and he now thinks, in his condition and under these circumstances, he has the right to take his own life and end this terrible condition for himself. He believes his life is his own, but the government keeps doing everything it can to keep him alive and helping him live, even against his own will to die. (From
We all know the answer that most people give to this question: Whose Life is It? Of course, my life is my life and I’ll do with it what I please, right? I have a “right to life!” Correct? This is what many are inclined to think. I want to tell you today, why I hope your life and my life do not completely belong to us. In this final word from the cross, when Jesus cries his final word “Father, Into Your Hands, I commend my Spirit!” Jesus is doing what all of us one day will have to do. Whether we want to or not, we all will have give our lives back to God or we will have to face the ultimate rip off. We will either have to let go and fall off into the outer darkness of who knows where, (I talk more about that later) or we will have to “commend” our “spirits” into God’s hands.
WE MUST COMMEND OUR SPIRITS TO GOD
Strangely, commending your spirit to God can be good news. It is part of the great message of Easter. Even though this final saying comes from the cross and not on Easter, it is the only saying that prepares our hearts for what comes next. In this word from the cross we find the only real hope of avoiding the ultimate rip off of our own lives through sin and death.
How does Jesus avoid the ultimate rip off? Take note of what had just happened to Jesus! The world had been knocking him around for quite a while now. He had been beaten, slapped, ridiculed, and finally was crucified. While his life was in his hands, the devil kept trying to kill him off, and now would finally succeed. As death comes near, Jesus is no longer able to fight off the corruption of the world, the weakness of his flesh, nor the destruction of evil and death. As he said in his final prayer in Gethsemane, “The Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” His life is fading, but in his spirit he still will not surrender nor allow the devil to steal his spirit.
What we must understand is Jesus’ cry of surrender to God is not a cry of weakness, nor a moment of defeat, but it was a cry of Jesus’ great spiritual strength and his victory. Again, Jesus is quoting Scripture. These words are not just his words, but they are the well rehearsed words of the faithful in prayer. Jesus is doing what he has always been doing in private and public prayer. He is doing what we must do and rehearse in our own lives. By commending his spirit into “the Father’s Hands” he is placing his heart at the one place where the world, flesh and the devil cannot go. As Jesus he told us, nothing can pluck or snatch us from of the Father’s hands (John 10:29). And Jesus is practicing what he preaches because by commending his spirit to the Father, he is storing his own heart as his greatest treasure. He is storing his spirit, “in heaven, where moth and rust cannot corrupt and where thieves cannot break-in and steal.” (Matt. 6: 19ff.).
Easter asks us all to consider, where will we store our greatest treasure, which is our soul, our heart, or our spirit? One day we must all give our “spirits” back to God. One day we will all lose the fight against the corruption of our flesh. One day, we will have to commend who we have been, who we are, and even who we aren’t, and who we hope to be, into God’s hands. To fail to do so----to fail to give our spirits to God means that in the end, our lives will be finally overtaken and fully overcome by the ultimate rip off---death.
Whatever Easter is to you, for me, and for all of us eventually, Easter is the only way we can look straight into what is coming for us and know that it will not be an ultimate rip off. On Easter, we can celebrate life in the only way we could ever really celebrate it which has both feeling and spirit. On Easter, if we commend our hearts and our spirits to God now, already in faith and hope, we can believe that when the final day comes, it will not be our last because this was not the last of Jesus. On Easter, we know commending our “spirits” to God will give shape to that which lasts, which survives, what is eternal, and what is most real and matters most.
ONLY GOD CAN GIVE YOU YOUR LIFE BACK
Why should we trust “our spirits” to God? Why should we give God the both treasure of our hearts and the soul of our life? Why was: “Father in your hands, I commend my Spirit” Jesus’ final word of faith? Let do more than explain, let me tell you a true story of the someone commending themselves to God.
Vigen Guroian is an Orthodox believer who teaches religion at the University of Virginia. Once he traveled in Armenia, where he was sitting in the dark talking to a friend. This Armenian friend, named Kevork, told him a terrible story: On a sunny December morning in 1988, the earth shook so fiercely in Armenia that the high-rise apartment in which Kevork, his wife Anahid, and his two children lived crumbled to the ground. The parents, Kevork and Anahid had gone to work before the quake struck. But ten-year old Armen and his seven-year old sister, Lillit, were preparing to leave for school when the floor fell from under them and they were thrust into a black bit, buried beneath ten stories of twisted metal and stone.
Kevork raced back home from the school at which he taught. Frantically, he began pulling chunks of concrete out of the jagged mountain of wreckage until his hands bled. When he realized the futility of his efforts, Kevork ran across the ruined city to reach someone with the machinery to rescue his children for their dark Sheol. But for three dreadful days, Armen and Lillit remained wrapped in suffocating darkness, removed from the land of the living.
Through it all, Armen courageously encouraged his sister to keep hope. On the third day, he rescue team found the children. Two days later Armen died in the hospital. His youthful body had been crushed from the waist down. Remarkably, Lillit survived, even though she had been pinned to the ground by a steel beam that lodged itself in her forehead.
“I have argued with God day and night!” Kevork exclaimed. “But God has not answered! Armen is gone! I will go on living my life in this sorrow, but I no longer worry about what God’s purposes are or what he can do.”
“Kevork, you can’t really mean that, his friend Vigen responded, to which Kevork continued with a question; “What is left for me? As a heart-stricken Father, Kevork bowed his head, then after a few minutes of silence he spoke again. “
Vigen, my friend, have you heard of the Hare Krishna religion? My nephew brought me a book that I want to show you. There are drawings in it about the afterlife and the migrations of the soul. When I was a young man, we were taught in our atheism classes that Marxism is materialist and Christianity is spiritualist. If that is so, Vigen, explain to me what is the difference between what is said in this book and what the Bible teaches. Are not both religions spiritualist? I know that we Christians believe in resurrection, but help me to understand how this belief is different from what is shown in the picture of this book.”
“Kevork,” Vigen asked, “do you have a Bible?”
Kevork got up and disappeared into the darkness. Soon he returned with a Russian Bible, the book that his nephew had given him, and a dictionary that translated from Russian into Armenian. Vigen got out an English Bible and an Armenian-English dictionary. With these material spread on a small kitchen table, in the candlelight, they read from 1 Corinthians and the last chapter of the book of Job.
“Kevork,” Vigen said, “St. Paul speaks of resurrection in chapter 15. Why don’t you read the Bible while I do the same in mine?” So this Armenian Job read his Russian Bible, and Vigen read in his.
Slowly, Kevork read and reread the whole of chapter 15. His eyes grew wide and his lips moved rhythmically as he read to himself half-aloud. Then as he read where “the corruptible body has put on incorruption, and this mortal body has put on immortality, then is the saying come true, “Death is swallowed up in victory”, his face started to glow. He looked up and shouted, “Vigen, Christianity is materialist! It says we will have bodies! I will see Armen’s face again, just as I see yours now, here in the candelight!” (From “Descended Into Hell” by Vigen Guroian, in Christian Century, March 23, 2010, p. 26).
What the Hindu doctrine could not promise this broken Armenian father, the Bible, Christianity and Easter did. St. Paul assured him that he would see his son again in the kingdom of the Father, in whose hands we all can commend our spirits. For only by giving our spirits to God, can we know we will not be finally ripped off by either life or death.
When death comes to steal your body and take your life, make sure you have given your soul to God, so that one day, you will be guaranteed, through Jesus' own resurrection, that on that day and in God’s time you will get both your life and your body back. The is the great Easter Hope of the Risen Christ. Amen.
© 2010 All rights reserved Charles J. Tomlin, B.A., M.Div. D.Min.
No comments :
Post a Comment