Celebrating the Resurrection

August 19, 2007                                                                                    Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

Sometimes I’m asked, “Do you take the bible literally?”  I say, “Of course.”  Of course in our day it’s not fashionable to do that.  A lot of people say, “Oh, no, I don’t take the bible literally.”  But like a professor I respect and have read a lot says, “We ought to at least take the bible literarily.”  What he means by that is that the bible has different kinds of literature in it and we need to interpret it that way.  So there are some parts of the bible that are more symbolic than others.  At the same time there are narratives that are intended to be history and intended to be taken literally, in fact, there are some truths in it that we must take literally.  First and foremost of those facts is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a literal truth; and the resurrection that we will have at the end of history because of him.  The apostle Paul says in Romans “if we confess that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that God raised Him from the dead, we will be saved.” In other words, belief literally in the resurrection impacts whether we are Christian or not, who we are as a people.  In fact, Easter, the Easter event, is central to our faith and without it we might as well not be here, other than getting together and chatting and eating; of course we like to do that too.  It is central to our faith and to who we are.  So this morning I have chosen two scriptures for you, among many, talking about the promise that God – see God is in the renewal business; He is in the recreating business.  Human beings have fallen into sin, creation has fallen into war and disease and hurt, and God is out to remake it all.  It is the story of the bible and that promise is made in the bible in several places and fulfilled in Jesus Christ.  So from Isaiah 25 the prophet says: (Isaiah 25:1-9)

Oh Lord, you are my God; I will exalt you and praise your name, for in perfect faithfulness you have done marvelous things, things planned long ago…..  You have been a refuge for the poor, a refuge for the needy in his distress, a shelter from the storm and a shade from the heat….On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine- the best of meats and the finest of wines.  On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever.  The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove the disgrace of this people from all the earth.  The Lord has spoken.  In that day they will say, “Surely this is our God; we trusted in him, and he saved us.  This is the Lord, we trusted in him; let us rejoice and be glad in his salvation.

Promise made by Isaiah; Promise fulfilled in Jesus Christ who says of himself, (John 6:35-40)

“I am the bread of life, he who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty.  But as I told you, you have seen me and still you do not believe.  All that the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away.  For I have come down from heaven not to do my will but to do the will of him who sent me.  And this is the will of him who sent me; that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day.  For my Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”

Would you pray with me?

God our Father, we thank you for the promises that you’ve given us through our Lord and Savior, Jesus.  We ask you Lord to give us faith to believe them, not things that might have happened; but things that have happened and will happen that change our lives and remake us to be your children. Father we trust in you.  We ask for your help and we give you this time, in Jesus’ name.  Amen.

You might have heard the story about the young minister who was asked by a funeral director to hold a gravesite service for a homeless man who had died while traveling through the area.  The service was to be held in a new cemetery way back in the country.  This man will be the first person laid to rest there.  As he was not familiar with the back woods area, the young minister soon became quite lost and finally arrived over an hour late.  He saw the backhoe by the grave and noticed that the crew was eating lunch nearby but the hearse was nowhere in sight.  He apologized to the workers for his tardiness and stepped to the side of the open grave where he saw the vault lid already in place.  The young preacher assured the vault crew he would not hold them long, but this was the proper thing to do.  The workers gathered around still eating their lunch.  The young preacher poured out his heart and his soul and as he preached the workers began to say “Amen.”  “Praise the Lord.”  “Hallelujah.”  The young preacher preached and preached like he’d never preached before.  He closed the lengthy service at last with a prayer and began to walk toward the car feeling he had done his duty to the homeless man and that the crew would leave with a renewed sense of purpose and dedication.  As he was opening the door of his car, taking off his coat, he overheard one of the workers saying to another, “I ain’t never seen anything like this before and I’ve been putting in septic tanks for over twenty years.”  We laugh about things that make us feel uncomfortable and therefore there are zillions of great jokes about death.  One of my favorites is the funeral notice for a movie theater owner.  It read like this:  Martin Levine, owner of the movie theater chain in New York City, has passed away at age 65.  The funeral will be held on Thursday at 2:10, 4:20, 6:30, 8:40 and 10:50.  Like I said, sometimes, if you’re like me, you make a joke when you are talking about something uncomfortable and I must confess a little discomfort today, because my subject has to do with funeral services or memorials.  Just for clarity, a funeral service is when the body is present and a memorial is when it is not.  It is not because we are talking about death and dying, but because of the services themselves.  Because I think there is a growing misunderstanding about why we do these services. 

As you know, for the last several weeks I’ve been preaching a short series of sermons a little different than what we usually do, on subjects about things we do, like baptisms and marriages and the Lord’s Supper.  Every now and then as a community, as a church, we need to talk about why we do these things because there is a creeping philosophy out there which tends to spoil them a little.  There is a creeping set of ideas.  For baptism, that sometimes means for people baptism is kind of a check the block, kind of thing.  We need to baptize our child, or get baptized, whether it has anything to do with being part of the church or not.  Baptism is most heartily about being part of the community and we talked about that.  These days, marriages seem to be like a racket.  I don’t know about you as father of the brides, there are a lot of checks to be written and there is a lot of pressure to write those checks.  Now I’m not against a lot of that stuff, but it just seems like the more money we spend the more married we are; and marriage is a totally different thing from the scriptures.  What about services when we’ve lost a loved one?  Well I find too that things seem to be going in a direction that I think we need to be careful about.  I want to be careful, because as I talk about these things I am not pointing fingers; my intent is to encourage all of us.  All of this was brought home to me several years ago when I received a long letter from a widow.  In that letter she praised the service we had done.  She said it was a blessing to everybody including herself, but that I had offended her.  My offense was this, that as I do with almost everybody, as we met to plan the service I said to her, “This is a worship service and God has priority.  That this is about God primarily first and about your husband second.”  Whoa.  That was not something she wanted to hear.  That lies at the heart of what I am trying to get at.  What are these worship services about, anyway?  Well if you are following along in the notes that I have, worship services are about three things.  You will notice three blanks there and then another blank with two asterisks by it.  They’re about God; they are about our loved one or friend, that we lost; and lastly they are about ourselves; then the blank with the asterisks is for, ‘in that order.’  You see, it is not really about what we do, it’s how we do them, and in what order; and in this particular case, God is always first, because as I tell folks when we get ready to do a worship service and in the service itself, we are gathered here to worship God.  I’ve noticed that in our culture as it is today, we tend to reverse that order or at least put number one at number three.  Our culture over the last several years has become more what I would call me-centered.  It’s all about us.  Things exist to make our lives better here.  So sometimes when people come, and again I’m not pointing any fingers, this is years of looking at it, they’re more in touch with the idea of remembering their loved one; and they are more in touch with finding some kind of therapy or healing for themselves, both of which are legitimate.  But God becomes sort of an afterthought.  In fact, God’s purpose is to support the other two.  These days I have noticed an increasing idea; for example, people will come in with twenty million pictures and will want to put them on a power point and run them on the screen.  I’m not against that, honestly, I’m not against power points at all; but I kind of want to go, “Oh, are we worshipping them or worshipping God?”  I have to admit sometimes I feel like a traffic cop.  I think some of the problem really has to do with the clergy; because when people come to you they are so emotional, they are feeling so emotional, and who are we to say no to what they want to do.  Yet sometimes we have to say, “Well it’s not quite like that.”  Now please don’t hear me say we are not to remember our loved ones; but, first and foremost, what we are doing is worship, and God is the center of worship.  If you want to remember anything I say today, be God-centered in everything.  That’s easy to remember.  God-centered, Christ-centered, that’s what we have to struggle to be in everything that we do.  There is kind of a creeping philosophy and it really is called original sin, about being ‘me’; it’s about ‘me’.

 So first and foremost it is a worship service because God is the one who created us.  God is the one who redeemed us.  God is the one who has given us this promise of Jesus Christ of a resurrected life, and he is going to remake creation. We come to thank God for that, first and foremost, and then we move in to the second purpose, which I call remembering our loved one.  Now there is a distinction here that I hope will be helpful to you.  You know, I think part of the deal is that when we see services done in public, like for celebrities or somebody else, we see people get up and eulogize people.  Now what does eulogy mean?  It means to praise.  So speaker after speaker gets up and that’s what people expect, we are going to eulogize the person.  Truthfully in a Christian worship service, we never eulogize anyone, because praise is reserved for God, but we do remember them.  We do remember them and we are supposed to remember them.  We do it in the context of saying thank you God for this unique person who lived.  Part of the grief in any funeral service is that when someone dies we’ve lost who they are.  You know it is appropriate in some sense that I am preaching this sermon and in two days I will be doing a service for Jack.  I am going to miss Jack.  I haven’t been here that long but I got to know Jack.  I love the gruff exterior and yet a gentle heart, played golf with him and he didn’t even say any appropriate words.  I was amazed.  He was a good guy.  We got to talk a little bit and I got to know him.  I’m going to miss him.  I’m going to miss him.  I’m going to miss who he was.  Everybody is unique.  Everything we do, everything we are, is God-made.  We are all alike and in a lot of ways we are all so different.  He will never be here again and there’s grief in that.  I think God has given us memories to help us to remember that person, to heal us.  Now sometimes our memories aren’t that great of people but in many cases they are and we need to remember what’s good about them. 

Not only do we remember our loved ones, but there are other things we need to remember as well, in the context of worship.  You see, when we do a funeral service it’s very much like preaching Easter.  I love to preach Easter.  I really do.  I have been an associate a couple of times and I missed preaching Easter service.  I love doing funerals.  I love doing memorials.  I feel the hurt and the sadness, but I love to preach it because I get to talk about Jesus.  I get to talk about the gospel.  I get to talk about the resurrection.  What preacher wouldn’t like that?  We are to remember the person in that context, and praise God for that person and that they are alive and will be alive and will be there to greet us.  But there are some other things we need to remember.  We need to remember the story of the gospel.  So we need to remember that something is very wrong.  One of the things I talk about in these services, and they are not very long services in terms of the sermon, but there is something wrong with the world.  A novelist named Harry Crews shares an insight into the human condition he learned as a youngster.  He says this, “I first became fascinated with the Sears Roebuck catalog because all the people in its pages were perfect.  Nearly everyone I knew had something missing – a finger cut off, a toe split, an ear half-chewed away, an eye clouded with  blindness from a glancing fence staple; or if they hadn’t had something missing, they were carrying scars from barbed wire or knives or fish hooks – but the people in the catalog had no such hurts.  They were not only whole but they were beautiful.  Their legs were straight and their heads were never bald and on their faces were beautiful expressions that I never saw much in the faces around me.  Young as I was though I’d known for a long time that the catalog lied.  I knew that under those fancy clothes there had to be scars; there had to be blemishes and malformations of one kind or another because there are no perfect human beings.”  Not only is there something wrong with the world but wrong with us.  A man was experiencing stomach pains and went to his doctor. The doctor reported that he had an ulcer and the man said, “I must be eating the wrong foods.”  The doctor said “No what is eating you is on the inside.”  What eats all of us, and what eats the world is human sin.  When we talk about death and dying in a service, it is not just enough to talk about how great that person was, or what a wonderful sense of humor they had, and all the stuff that they did; we have to talk about what God has done to fix this.

Along with that we remember to prepare.  Every time we go to a service we need to remember that we are mortal.  The bible says “teach me to number my days that I may gain a heart of wisdom.”  One minute we are alive and well and the next minute we are standing before God ready to give account.  We don’t like to think about that.  Jack died suddenly in a car crash.  A few weeks ago someone died in their sleep.  Other people go in less pleasant ways.  But all of us will go.  So remember also to whom we go.  Psalm 23 has comforted millions of people.  “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for why, because thou art with me.”  So we remember to whom we go.  We can’t fix this ourselves.  Only God can.  We go to the God who is the God of the universe.  Those of us who are more logical might say, “Well how can I believe in the resurrection of the dead?  I haven’t seen anybody like that.”  You know I got one of those emails a couple of days ago that said, “You have received a birthday card from you mother.”  Now my mother has been gone for seven years.  I thought that would be an interesting card.  I’d want to send one back saying “Well, where are you?  Can you tell me about it?”  But it all depends in what kind of a God you believe in.  Do you believe in a God who is all powerful?  Well, what’s death to Him?  Not only is there comfort from our God, God has given us comfort from one another as a community.  Some of you have heard me tell of a story about a little girl who came home from a neighbor’s house where the neighbor’s little girl had died.  The father asked, “Where did you go?”  “To comfort her mother” said the little one.  “What could you do to comfort her?” asked the skeptical father.  “Well I climbed in her lap and cried with her.” 

Last, but certainly not the least, we remember that death is not the end of the story.  Death is not the end of our story.  God is in the resurrection business.  God is in the renewal business, the recreation business.  A little over thirty years ago at St. Peter’s at the Vatican, a man leaped over a tiny wall in one of the chapels.  He took a hammer that he had smuggled in and began to break into pieces Michelangelo’s statue depicting Mary, the Mother of Jesus, holding the dead body of Christ.  Forty pieces of the statue laid on the floor when he got done.  The Vatican assembled together a team of experts to restore it as near as possible and fortunately they were equal to the task and they renewed the statue.  As delicate and enormous as that task was even more enormous was the restoring and reconciliation that has happened to restore us to God.  God has made us to be remade.  The older I get the more I am like Billy Graham who was asked by Larry King several years ago, “What happens when you die?”  Graham replied, “I believe that an angel will take me by the hand at that moment and take me into the presence of Christ and I am looking forward to it with tremendous anticipation.”  Do you look forward to your death?  You should.  Not as a death wish.  Graham is eighty-eight years old.  He’s lived as long as he can and he’s going to live a little while longer; but he looks forward to – we all should look forward to – being remade.  Now I’ve told you before that I received a shock a while back by taking a picture I had of myself ten years ago and then looking in the mirror.  I gasped at the difference.  You don’t notice it while you’re going through it but then you go, “Ohhhhh”.  I look forward to new knees and a new face, among other things.  You know most of all I look forward to a remade creation; there is so much evil in this world.  God is going to deal with it all.

Which I think leads to the last thing.  You know there is this sense in which part of the purpose of a service is certainly to be comforted, to have therapy.  It is therapy. I think that services really do help in closure for people, the process of it.  But I always talk about how we ought to also have a sense of joy.  You may say, “Well, how can we do that when we are just numb?” and that’s what you are when you lose your loved one.  You’re just numb; you can’t feel anything; but it is the beginning.  You know, it is kind of the intrusion of joy because God’s default mode is joy.  Yes, God gets mad at sin; yes, God will judge it; yes, there is sorrow in this world; but God’s default mode is joy.  That’s what truly heals.  It is the process.  Maybe not at this moment but as we go along we will truly be healed of our grief, or at least be able to live with it, when we come back to the fact that God is the victor.  God is the winner.  There is a wonderful story that I will close with about a woman who was visiting a friend of her’s who had lost her husband.  They went to the cemetery and stood by the grave.  There they shared some memories, then they were silent, nobody seemed to have anything to say.  But then the young daughter in the family, a little girl named Liz, all of a sudden ran and did a cartwheel over the grave.  The woman must have looked very surprised because Liz’s mother smiling broadly said to her, “Liz hasn’t done any cartwheels since Bob died.  He used to love it when she did.”  I love that image – cartwheels over the grave.  That’s what we do in services; we remind ourselves that death is not the end of the story.  If we are all about just remembering our loved ones or trying to get therapy, which are all legitimate, we have missed it.  It begins with God and ends with God, as does everything.  It’s not about us, first.  It is about Him, and thank God it is.  Because only through Him will we do cartwheels over the grave.

Would you pray with me?

Father in heaven, thank you for your victory; give us faith to believe it, especially when we lose people; because then we are hurting so bad, sometimes we can’t see things.  We pray Lord you would heal us and help us see once again your victory, that death is not the end of our story but the very beginning, a door into eternity.  We pray this in Jesus’ name.  Amen.