Easter sermon based upon 1 Corinthians 15: 1-11
By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
Easter Sunrise, April, 21 2019
In his book, Contexualizing the Gospel Brian Harbor reminded us that in the ancient world, many Messiahs came and went, but who today recalls their names?
Do you remember Simon Bar Giora? In 69 AD he rallied Palestinian Jews to march against Rome. 40K soldiers responded. They called him Messiah, Christ. They marched. Even coins with his name have been unearthed, saying “Redemption of Zion”. He lost. Rome burned Jerusalem. Jews were scattered in Diaspora.
Do you remember Simon Bar Kochba? In 135 AD this other Simon was called by Jews in Palestine the Christ, Messiah. People had high hopes. They rallied behind him. But Rome dashed in and put him to death. Who remembers Simon Bar Kochba, except scholars?
Finally, go back to 30 AD. Certain Jews experienced a very different kind of Christ. He was a compassionate preacher, healer, and also a prophet, who exposed the evils of his own world, but taught people to love anyway. But those evils rallied against him, and put him to death. But instead of dispersing his followers, they began to grow, preach, and teach that he was the true Messiah—the true Christ. But he was a very different kind of Christ. Today, he has followers on every continent of the world, who say that this Messiah is their Christ. “He came unto his own, and his own rejected him; but as many as received him, became sons and daughters of God too.”
Today, on Easter Sunday morning, while all these other Messiah’s are long forgotten, we come here not only simply to remember, what happen differently to this one called Jesus of Nazareth, but we come here not to remember him, but we come here because the hope of Jesus as the Christ , our Savior is alive in us. This hope has been passed down to us, just like it was passed down to Paul the apostle, when he said, to the Corinthians: “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures (1 Cor. 15:3-4 NIV). Paul goes on to say that this Jesus, who was ‘raised’ then appeared to Peter, one of his disciples, and to the other disciples as well, and finally he appeared as many as 500 others, many of whom were still living as Paul writes.
What is most amazing about Paul’s message, is that this Messiah, this Christ, and this Jesus of Nazareth would have been forgotten too, just like all the other would-be-Messiahs, had it not been for Easter morning. Easter morning makes everything look different. Before Easter, on Friday, everything went dark. During the late Thursday evening, Jesus was arrested, then falsely tried and convicted of blaspheming God. Then, during the early morning, he appeared before the Roman governor, who wanted to release him, but the crowd cried out against him. Then, by 9 am, Jesus was crucified between two thieves, just like thousands of other people were in those days. Who remembers any of them? Can you name a single one of those thousands of people the Romans executed as a criminal?
So, here’s what I want help us understand today. Easter, because those 500 or people experienced it, caused them to see everything differently. They not only established a spiritual community based on the Easter hope which they had, with the help of the Holy Spirit, their hope became the Christian faith, and for us, the churches that still live in that hope of everything Jesus taught, lived, and arose to pass on to us. Because of this Easter experience, we join them in the kind of faith that both sees life, and also lives life, differently because of Easter.
What I want us to consider why does Easter matter? What difference does Easter still make?
WE SEE GOD DIFFERENTLY. People believed in God before Easter, but after Easter God is understood in a whole different way.
Before Easter, God was a distant; perceived to be removed from our human struggles and suffering with sin and death. He was a God who really didn’t understand. But now, because of Easter, we know that God understands. Jesus called God Abba, Father, and Jesus instructs us call him Father too. And as God’s Son, taking upon himself human flesh, in Jesus, God suffers death just like we do to reconcile us to him.
While God did not remove death from this world, God comes to transform death and he promises us that nothing will ‘separate us from the love of Jesus Christ….neither death nor life…. Nothing!
Perhaps the most important difference in our human understanding of God, through Easter is that God is ‘for us’, not against us. Some people still think God is out to get them (or us), but what Easter proclaims to us that has come not only to save us, but through the resurrection of Jesus, God shows us his promise to bring about a whole new creation. God not only loves us, he wants to point us toward the world that is still coming and the future that is still coming. God is not any kind of God who is out to get us, any of us, even sinners, but God is up to something. Through Jesus Christ, God ‘proves his love for us’ and reveals, once and for all, that he a saving God, not a condemning God, who wants to save us for what God will do next.
WE SEE JESUS DIFFERENTLY TOO. Because we can now see God differently, as a God who is for us, not against us; through Easter we can also see Jesus differently. As I said before, everything Jesus did, taught, lived, and died for would have been forgotten, had it not been for the Resurrection. But when God raised Jesus from the grave, God not only proved his love for us, but he vindicated everything Jesus was about while he lived his short life on earth.
Isn’t this what the 4 gospels are about? Isn’t this what the ‘apostles’ teaching’ is about? Isn’t this what ‘discipleship’ and Sunday School, and also Worship is about? Everything we do in the church today, is because God put his stamp of approval on everything Jesus said, did, lived and died for. And what was that?
When Jesus preached the sermon on the mount, Jesus revealed a whole new way of interpreting the law. Jesus said, ‘you’ve heard it said, but I say to you…. Blessed are those who mourn….Love your enemy…Do good to those who hurt you! Those are just a few of the very strange teachings Jesus gave us. We would call them all ridiculous, and some still do, except that God put his stamp of approval on all Jesus said and did. He did this through Easter. Through Easter, we are all challenged to live the truth that Jesus lived.
Another thing different about Jesus is that we know not only what he said was true, but we know that God accepted Jesus, the sinless one, as the sacrifice for all sin. Because of validating and vindicating Jesus, God says that sin is not a problem; unless we want it to be. We still have a free choice, but because of Jesus, when we put our faith in him, sin is forgiven, sin is forgotten, and sinners are transformed by God’s love.
The final thing different about Jesus, is not just what God approves of, and who God as excepted as the final sacrifice for sin, but the truth of Easter tells us that we too can put our trust in Jesus. Just as Jesus trusted the Father and put himself into God’s hands, we too can trust God to the very end and put ourselves into God’s hands. Because God was faithful to Jesus, we can know that God will be faithful to us, and we can trust our lives into this very faithful God.
Some time ago someone spoke about how it’s hard to trust anyone or anything anymore. We used to trust the military, then came Vietnam. We used to trust the politicians, then came Watergate. We used to trust the engineers, then came the Challenger explosion. We also thought we could trust in our Broker, then came Black Monday. We thought then, that we could trust in the preachers, then came Jim Baker and Jimmy Swaggart. In a world that is broken, fallen, and still rebellious, who can we trust?
Who can we trust who will never let us down? We can trust in Jesus. Jesus never stopped loving the world, and neither does God. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes (trusts) in him, will not perish, but will have eternal life.” If we can’t trust in Jesus, and we can’t trust that God raised, him; there is nothing, no one else to trust, because we all fall short of God’s glory. But Jesus doesn’t fall. Jesus is faithful to the end, just like God will be faithful to all who put their trust in him; not in this world.
Finally, because we can now see God differently, and because we can see Jesus differently, WE CAN NOW LIFE DIFFERENTLY TOO. When the woman sang in that sad song, “Is this all there is?” We now can answer, from our hearts, from the truth in our lives, and from our trust in Jesus and in God’s hope, that THIS LIFE IS NOT ALL THERE IS!
The Bible calls Jesus’ resurrection ‘the first fruit’ and the Holy Spirit given to us through the resurrected Christ, the ‘earnest’ of what is still to come. Now, every time we face the darkness of death, we can face it like going to sleep at night, trusting that one day, we will all wake up in the world that is still coming. “Our Father, who art in Heaven… Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will Be Done, On earth, as it is in Heaven.” Because of Easter, when we pray, we pray differently. When we live, we live differently. And even when we die, we also know that we die differently. We live in hope and we die in hope, because God’s new life, new world, and new creation is still ahead of us. In Easter the Kingdom rule of God has already started in our hearts, and in our lives too, when we follow, trust, and live out of this Kingdom hope. But we still live toward the Kingdom, that is not yet hear, but is coming.
It may sound strange to say that God only gave us part of his promise at Easter. The best part is still to come. But isn’t this the best way we can live. God gives us hope, promise, and peace, and God transforms how we can live, treat, and love each other, but God still gives us something to live for because we have something to live toward. Promise. God tells us, in Jesus resurrection, that with life, the best is yet to come.
A child’s SS class Teacher was telling her young class about Easter, telling them the story in ways they could understand. She told them about how Jesus was a good man who did many good things to help people. Then, she told them how bad men went against Jesus and decided to kill him. Now, some of the children who were in the class that day, had parents who never went to church, except on Easter, so they didn’t know this story. One of those little tenderhearted little boys, named Petey, looked at the teacher and started to cry, asking why they did this. Why did such a good person have to die. When another little boy, who did come to church, saw that his friend Petey was going to cry, he said to him: “Don’t worry Petey, he comes back in the in!”
Isn’t this the message of Easter for all of us, no matter what we are facing in life? Life can seem unfair. Sickness, illnesses can overcome us. Someday all of us have to face obstacles, even death that we can’t overcome in this life. But we don’t have to worry, Jesus came back. Jesus comes to us, in Spirit of peace, hope and love, still today. And Jesus promises, that if we trust him, we can trust that we will come back too. As Paul told the Thessalonians: “For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. (1 Thess. 4:14 NIV). Did you hear that? “God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.”
When you believe that Easter is not just about what God did when he raised Jesus, but that Easter is also about what God will one day do in Jesus, for all who have fallen asleep in him. You see that God looks differently. Jesus looks differently. Life and Death looks differently too. And all this started, when God raised Jesus from the dead, but this God isn’t finished yet. That’s how Easter makes everything different. Jesus is not a long-forgotten Messiah, because God is still promising us, more to come. Trust him. Follow him. Live for him. Hope in him. Even if you are old, especially if you are old, Hope in God. As Robert Browning wrote:
“Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made. Our times are in his hand who saith, 'A whole I planned, youth shows but half; Trust God: See all, nor be afraid!” I like that. That’s why I believe, in God, in Jesus, and in Life! The Best is not past, but the best is yet to be. Amen.
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