Living Easter

A sermon based upon 1 Cor. 15: 1-11

Dr. Charles J. Tomlin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

Easter Sunday, April 8^th, 2012

It was Easter Sunday 1998.  In preparation for the Easter Sunrise service, my wife and I had purchased Butterfly cocoons, which hatched just in time for Easter.  We had them placed safely in a container and at the proper time, and at the conclusion of the service, we would release them to let them fly as a representation of our shared hope in the resurrection.  It was a bit cool that morning, so Teresa kept them close to her until I gave her the signal to release and launch 30 plus Butterflies into the air.  She opened the container and nothing happened.  She pulled a few out and they fell to the grown.  It was a disaster.  Finally, one little butterfly managed to wing it into a bush.  Instead of a moving, inspirational moment, all those present gave us a sympathetic laugh. 

At first, we couldn’t figure what happened.   I thought it was because of the cool temperatures that morning.  Upon further investigation, I came upon this truth about butterflies.  Butterflies cannot fly until the sunlight hits their wings.  It is the sun that puts the energy into their wings for them to fly.  That would have been a good illustration, if I had known it. 

I can’t help but also think that the first Easter had some trouble “taking off” in the hearts and minds of those first followers of Jesus.   As Marilynne Robinson has suggested, “The gospel accounts of the Resurrection famously differ…, (but)…. an element they all share is the skepticism of the earliest witnesses.” (The Christian Century, April 4, 2012, p. 22).   Amazingly, each account of resurrection is filled with as much confusion, discussion and doubt about Easter as there are assertions and proclamation of Easter’s truth that “He is Risen!”. A case in point is John’s account of Mary Magdalene when she finds the tomb empty.   She simply assumes someone has carried the body away, thinking that she sees the gardener rather than the resurrected Lord.   Other followers of Jesus are just as confused, not recognizing him either, even when he is among them.   As Robinson affirms, “In every case the angle of vision is a skepticism based on the expectation that with Jesus’ death things will have taken their ordinary course.”   He should be where all us mortals will one day be; dead and gone. 

Ironically, that Easter begins with many failures of comprehension is a good thing.  Jesus does not rebuke Mary for her failure to recognize him.  Jesus seems to enjoy her surprise, and neither does he reject his disciples for their own doubts and fears.  All this surprise, confusion and lack of comprehension is how things should be when something “other” dimensional and “other worldly” suddenly breaks into our world.    

Easter is first and foremost an invitation to step into the light of God’s new reality.  Much of what Paul writes in today’s Bible text is in response to people still trying to grasp this “new” reality.   Right as our text ends, Paul finally pops the question he most wants to ask: “How can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?”  The burden of our text is to answer a counter question: “How can Paul tell us there is a resurrection of the dead?”  Are we able to move through the confusion of our own world and affirm this Easter message today?  If the most obvious truth of life is that we are all going to die, how do we “live” Easter, especially when we know already that we are as good as dead?

EASTER FAITH IS A RECEIVED FAITH

In our text, Paul tells the Corinthians that Easter begins with a reminder of the core of the gospel story.   Here, Paul calls himself a “reminder” of “the good news”.  This is a good description of the job of a preacher, isn’t it---to remind you of what you should believe.   “Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you….”  (I Cor. 15:1ff).   Taking our cue from Paul, how did you come to believe in Easter?  Paul says Christians don’t make up the gospel, nor do we figure out the gospel on our own, but he says that we “receive” the gospel.  So let me ask you today: how did you “receive” the gospel?   

Most of us did not attend a school where we were introduced to the gospel in some theology or philosophy class, but most of us have “received” the gospel story from others who have believed it.  The gospel is more like “hand-me-down” gift to us than it is something we have discovered or figured out for ourselves.   This is, of course, both good and bad news.   Think about it this way: Do you like “hand-me-downs”?  Some do, some don’t.   It’s a good thing that we have been given the gospel as a “gift” from our parents, our church, and our childhood.   Who does not cherish all those wonderful memories of caring parents, nurturing churches and Bible schools, where we first heard the good news? 

But as good as this is, this can also become “bad” for us if we have only received the gospel as a “tradition” or a good story, and even as a true story which we haven’t learned to accommodate or live so that, as Paul says, “we stand on it” are “being saved through it”, and are still “holding on” to it, and sometimes “holding on for dear life.  What I’m saying is that it’s one thing to receive “Easter” but it’s quite another thing to learn how to “live” Easter.  Do you know how to live Easter?

I find it most interesting that in this passage, Paul reminds early Christians of the gospel they have received in two very specific ways.  First, he reminds them about “what they received” as the “core” of the gospel.  He tells them that the gospel is that “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures” and that he also was “buried and was raised on the third day, in accordance with the Scriptures”.   His point is that what God was doing on Easter by resurrecting Jesus from the grave was not an afterthought, but it was God’s plan all along.   All that happened to Jesus is God’s plan to save us from our sins and to give us eternal life.   Isn’t this still the core truth of the gospel we need to remind ourselves today?   Easter is not primarily about Easter Bunnies, Butterflies, Egg Hunts nor about Family dinners or having a Spring holiday away from work and school.  Easter is about God’s gift of eternal life through the resurrected Christ offered to each of us.   I know that this might sound like a childish reminder, but we do need to be reminded.   I read recently how a certain town in the Midwest had to cancel a local Easter Egg hunt because too many people showed up and children were selfishly grabbing eggs, not leaving any for the others so that all kinds of complaints were coming.   The complaints about the Easter Egg hunt grew so large it had to be shut down.   Even for us, it can be hard to stay with the meaning of the story as it was intended.  We need are reminder that at the core of Easter is the resurrected Christ, or there is no Easter at all.

TO BELIEVE IN EASTER, WE MUST ALSO “LIVE” EASTER

But most of what Paul writes about in our text is not about the truth of “what” is received at Easter, but it is the truth about “how” the story of Easter was first received.   Do you see that Paul goes on to describe “how” Easter came and also implies how Easter still gets to us?  Paul says, beginning in verse 5, that “he” (the resurrected Christ), “first appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.  Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died….”   Paul does not stop there, but he continues to speak of how the resurrected Christ “also appeared to James, then to all the apostles.  Last of all, as to one untimely born, he also appeared to me……”    

Reading this, we should be reminded that the whole gospel story would not have been received by any of us, if it had not come through someone who had first experienced the risen Christ in their own lives.  In fact, it is even more amazing to contemplate that the very gospel we have be given, even our opportunity for eternal salvation would not have come to us at all if it had not been for the faith of only 500 witnesses.  Everything we know came through them. 

The point Paul is making is this: unless someone before us has experienced Easter themselves, there is no Easter for us to experience either.  Easter can’t be known by us nor received by us, unless someone has lived Easter before us.   This means that just to say “Jesus lives” means nothing, unless we can show “how” Jesus is alive in us.  Listen again to what Paul is saying, as he reports “how” Jesus came alive in his own life: “He appeared also to me….I am lest of the apostles…because I once persecuted the church of God.  But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me has not been in vain.  On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them---though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.  Whether then it was I or they, so we proclaim and so you have come to believe.” (8-11).

Do you grasp the full impact of Paul’s concluding words, “so we proclaim and so you have come to believe….”?   The implication is that Paul proclaims the gospel with the “resurrected life” he now lives for the gospel truth.   He has included himself as one among those first 500 or so witnesses to the risen Christ, of which he makes himself a living example of the Christ who is alive and well in human experience.  Again, the central point for us is this: Unless someone “lives Easter” no one really “receives” or experiences Easter.  

In her book, “Christianity After Religion” Church historian Diana Butler Bass paints a grim picture of the future of the traditional, established Church in the United States.   But she does not believe that Faith in Jesus is done for.  On the contrary, she believes that the Christian Faith is currently undergoing a kind of radical, spiritual, surgery which will change how we all understand and do everything as Christians and as Churches.  At the center of this coming transformation are three major areas of “how” we live the faith.   While there is no real threat to “what” we believe, how we “believe, behave, and belong” in faith will determine the future of faith that will be “received” by the coming generations. 

WE ARE CALLED TO BE EASTER PEOPLE

So, the most pressing question for us today is not “what” is Easter, but “how” are we living Easter?    It’s not at all automatic, is it?  We can celebrate Easter without ever learning how Easter should impact our lives?  To fail to live Easter is to miss it, and if we “miss” Easter in our own time, we will fail to pass it on to the next generation, and they will miss it too.  So my question to us is simply this: How will you “live” Easter, so that, as Paul suggests, “his grace to you will not be in vain”?   How will you live Easter in a way that “the grace of God is visible in you”?   Can you visualize it?  Can you see Easter being “realized” and fully “received” in your own life?

In April of 2006, Diane Cameron, sent an editorial into USA Today.   She opened that piece describing how, “One of the lowest points in my life occurred years ago when I was living in Washington, D.C., at Easter time. My older sister had recently died and both of my brothers were seriously ill; my best friend was leaving town, and on top of that I was questioning my work.   In my journal that April I wrote, "Am I depressed?" When I read those pages now I laugh and shake my head. "Depressed?" That I even had to ask. In that long year I thought I'd never laugh again, just as I thought I'd never again feel love, the joy of easy friendship, or the satisfaction of good work.”

She continues: “I went to church that Easter out of both habit and desperation. I had grown up in a church-going family. It was what we did. And so to honor the family that I was losing I went. Easter after all, is the centerpiece for Christians, honoring and recalling Christ's triumph over death.   I chose a big downtown church for Easter services — one with hundreds in the congregation — not daring to visit a smaller church where I might have to speak to people or be embarrassed by my own tears. I wanted the paradoxical safety and anonymity of being in a crowd.

The minister that Easter Sunday said many things that I don't remember, but one sentence has stayed with me all these years. He said, "We live in a Good Friday world."   That I understood. A Good Friday world is a world full of suffering, questioning, unfairness, trouble, mistakes, hurts, losses and grief.   Good Friday in the Christian faith is the day Christians commemorate Christ's suffering and death on the cross.  So that certainly made sense to me at that difficult time in my life.

"But," he continued, "We are Easter people." Those words stopped me cold. I was stunned to be reminded that painful morning that there was something other than what I was feeling.   My life was not instantly transformed; his words did not change the course of my brothers' illnesses nor give me answers to my questions. But the idea of being "Easter people" gave me a pause in my grief and the teeniest hope that there really did exist something other than pain.

By “living” toward the hope that is still ahead of us, we become people who are living toward God’s new possibilities.  Even though we all still live in a “Good Friday World” where “Bad Things Can Happen to Good People”.   And even though we live where people get hurt, die, and where churches struggle and faith can fail in our lives, God constantly puts new possibilities ever before our troubled, hurting, seemingly hopeless lives.   This is “how”  God keeps calling us to be and live as Easter people.  We are not to be content to live only by what has happened, but we are called to live toward what will happen and by what can happen in God’s time and in God’s future.  Living toward God’s promised future is the only way we can ever learn to live toward the new possibilities for life God puts before us.  As those “drooping butterflies”, we are to let the “energy” of God’s promises and purposes shine into our souls, weakened by the cold, dark, realities in life.   As we receive Easter’s promise again and again, we can hopefully pass it forward to those who will live Easter after us.   Amen.   


© 2012 All rights reserved Charles J. Tomlin, B.A., M.Div. D.Min.