Resurrection: We Believe, Part 2
Ken Whitt April 8, 2007
Old Testament Lesson, Isaiah 65:17-25: Jeff Akers
The Glorious New Creation
17 For I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
18 But be glad and rejoice forever
in what I am creating;
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,
and its people as a delight.
19 I will rejoice in Jerusalem,
and delight in my people;
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,
or the cry of distress.
20 No more shall there be in it
an infant that lives but a few days,
or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;
for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth,
and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.
21 They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
22 They shall not build and another inhabit;
they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
23 They shall not labor in vain,
or bear children for calamity;
for they shall be offspring blessed by the LORD—
and their descendants as well.
24 Before they call I will answer,
while they are yet speaking I will hear.
25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
but the serpent—its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain,
says the LORD.
(A pause. Jeff backs away from the podium, then returns.)
By the way, do you believe this?
New Testament Lesson, Luke 24:1-12: From, The Message Lauren Akers
At the crack of dawn on Sunday, the women came to the tomb carrying the burial spices they had prepared. They found the entrance stone rolled back from the tomb so they walked in. But once inside they couldn’t find the body of the Master Jesus. They were puzzled, wondering what to make of this. Then out of nowhere it seemed two men, light cascading over them, stood there. The women were awestruck and bowed down and worshiped. The men said, “why are you looking for the living one in a cemetery? He is not here, but raised up. Remember how he told you, when you were still back in Galilee, that he had to be handed over to sinners, be killed on the cross, and in three days rise up.” Then they remembered Jesus’ words. They left the tomb and broke the news of all this to the eleven and the rest, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the Mother of James, and the other women with them kept telling these things to the apostles, but the apostles didn’t believe a word of it. So, they thought they were making it all up. But Peter jumped to his feet and ran to the tomb. He stopped to look in, and saw a few grave clothes, that’s all. He walked away puzzled, shaking his head.
(A pause. Lauren backs away from the podium, then returns.)
Oh, by the way, do you believe this?
Do you believe this? Hey, John. What about you John. Come on down here! Stand in for everyone else. Speak for the whole church. Do you believe this?
John: Exactly what do you want to know if I believe it.
Ken: Well, how about that part about the lion and the lamb?
John: Anything is possible
Ken: But your wife told me that when you hear this story or one like it you always say, “It will never happen.”
John: I think I had better not say anymore.
John is reluctant to say he does not believe that the lion and the lamb will lie down together in peace. But he is probably right. The lion and the lamb and the wolf and the bunny and the alligator and the frog will likely never lie down together in peace. But that is not the point. Those are metaphors, symbols of peace. The real question is, What about you and your neighbor?” Or, “What about you and your enemy?” Is peace possible at all, even among Christian brothers and sisters? Catholics and Protestants? Fundamentalists and Pentecostals and Progressives?
Do you believe this? That peace is possible? That metaphorically, the lion and the lamb will lie down together and nations that were once at war will wage peace instead? The prophet Isaiah is painting a picture with words to describe the end times, the ultimate destiny of the creation and all of God’s children and all of the nations of the world. Isaiah paints a different picture than the one you more often see, a picture of an ending to history that is all about cannon fire and bombs and Armageddon. But the prophet Isaiah, and other voices in the Old Testament and other voices in the New Testament, paint a picture of God’s future which we sometimes call The Peacable Kingdom. It’s an amazing portrait of life as God means it to be. And God always accomplishes what God intends. This Peacable Kingdom is coming and the lion will lie down with the lamb.
All you have to do in order to understand the importance of Isaiah’s vision is to have had an experience of the extraordinary difference between the way things are and the way God intends them. Maybe you have had an experience that fits into any one of the categories that the Prophet Isaiah talks about. For example, maybe you lost a premature baby or a young child. God says that in the Peacable Kingdom that happens no more. Maybe you’ve known poverty or maybe you remember the stories of slavery from America’s past where some oppressed folk did all the labor and others, the oppressors, consumed all the produce. In God’s peaceful kingdom, that kind of poverty, that kind of oppression is no more. No more. If you build a house, you get to live in it. God treats everyone fairly, everybody treats everyone else fairly. Do we believe that that is God’s destiny for God’s children? Do we believe?
The resurrection story asks similar questions. The gospel of Luke recounts story after story of those who struggle to believe. The women, not believing anything and grieving their loss, painfully in love with Jesus, go out early in the morning on Easter to bring spices in order to anoint the body of Jesus for burial. They’re doing this in the midst of their pain and their exhaustion and their despair. They don’t believe anything about Jesus, but they encounter events which cause hope to rise within them. First, they encounter an empty tomb, where all there is to see are some clothes lying on a stone slab where the body of Jesus had been And then there is this character. He seems like an angel, but he’s also something like a man. He’s something in between. This angel-man figure comes says, “Why are you seeking Jesus in a cemetery? He’s not dead. He is out among the living”. They don’t see Jesus right away, but hope is restored, and they go racing back to the disciples and they run into a cadre of men, This fairly large group of women, all now excited and hopeful, roar toward the men, and the men don’t believe a word they say, except maybe Peter, who wonders enough that he races over to the tomb and he sees the whole thing.
Do you believe? Would you have been Peter racing to the tomb, hoping beyond hope, that we would see something that might confirm the women’s story? Or would you still be locked in some room for fear of the Jews, not believing anything about the resurrection, not believing anything about the power of God to overcome the darkness and the death and the despair and the injustice and the poverty in the world?
Do you believe in what God can do?
Believing in the resurrection is not a simple matter. Christians have different viewpoints about what it means to believe in the resurrection, but I believe eventually they all point towards the same vision of God and God’s future. Sometimes, Christians are skeptical about Jesus rising with a physical body, and there’s some reason for that skepticism. Jesus rose--it appears from of his encounters with people along the way--Jesus rose in spirit and in mind and body because--Thomas could touch it, put his hands into the wound. But it wasn’t an ordinary body. It was a body that walked through walls; it was a body that could transport itself from one place to another. It wasn’t a physical body in the way we usually understand it. So some people believe that the resurrection of Jesus from the dead was a spiritual experience, and some believe that it was a physical experience. I personally, believe it was a mind, spirit, body experience, all three. I’m going to tell you why I believe that in a little bit.
But for now, let me say that in a sense it doesn’t matter how you interpret that because if you really believe in resurrection, no matter how you interpret that experience, what you believe in is the power of God to overcome the power of death. You believe in the power of God to transform the lives of frightened men, huddled together for fear of the Jews, skeptical of anything the women gave testimony to. To believe in the resurrection is to know that these men, whose lives were utterly broken, somehow, someway found their faith, found their courage again, and went out there and lived their lives for Christ and changed the world.
The broken and lost did not stay broken and lost. They found hope. They found resurrection, and they transformed the world. And if you believe that, if you believe in resurrection, then you can change the world, and you can change any circumstance in the world by the power of God. There are no dead-ends. There are no insolvable problems. There is only the power and grace and love of God working in and through us to transform the world by the power of Jesus Christ. I believe that that’s exactly what God can do and exactly what God is doing through us.
Now I want to tell you something about why I believe in resurrection. This is my basketball. It says on it. Dr. Ken, as in Dr. J., you know. I used to be a good basketball player. I am not a good basketball player anymore. My basketball doesn’t even have any air in it, well not much. This basketball has something in common with the gospel of Luke. You’re not supposed to be able to guess what it is, cause it’s kind of a far-out idea. When you watch a basketball game, the most exciting parts of the game are most often the first and the last few minutes. Sometimes the last few minutes last an eternity. This is also true with football. They keep stopping the clock and the score changes back and forth and with all your heart you want your team to win, but in the best movies it seems impossible. The movie, Coach Carter, is like that. The last couple minutes of the game is just a mind blower, and the last few seconds of the games seems to take forever.
That’s the way it is in the gospel of Luke. So much of the energy in the story is in the beginning couple chapters and in the final couple of chapters. The story in the middle is filled with amazing accounts. There are great events. But if you’re talking about the power of God to come down to earth and change lives, the incarnation at Christmas and the resurrection at Easter are the heart and soul of the power of the story of God in the Gospel of Luke. One of reasons we can tell that is that those are the only places you’ll find stories of angels, in the Christmas story, you have angels warning, protecting, guiding, providing, sending messages from God. In Holy week and Easter, you also have angels giving messages, instructing, protecting Jesus, providing for him. Heaven is so close to Earth in the beginning and at the end of the Gospel of Luke that anything is possible, anything can be. Jesus who died can be raised back to life. If you have had any experience of being close to heaven, in a way that changed your life, it is not that hard to believe in the resurrected Jesus.
With far less at stake. I have experienced heaven touching earth, let’s say, a thousand times. I am just an ordinary guy, and all of you who are listening to me are ordinary people living at an ordinary moment in history. This is not the Christmas incarnation. This is not the Easter resurrection. Yet God has taken care of us in a thousand times a thousand ways and we have experienced God’s love a million times, and healing has happened in front of our eyes. Well, then, how much more might God, at the critical juncture of history, when the fate of the whole world was at stake, choose to bring back Jesus from the dead to bear witness to the power of God to defeat death.
Well, of course, God could do that. If God could do the things that God’s has done in my life and the things God has done in your lives then God could, at that extraordinary time in history, raise Jesus from the dead.
In April of 1992, I was traveling across Eastern Europe from Vienna, Austria through Hungary on to Arad, Romania to preach in evangelistic services at the Golgotha Baptist Church. This story is a lot longer than I have time to tell today, but I’ll try to make a primary point and then complete the story another day.
I was traveling with a friend named Joan Bence, a member at Mountview Baptist in Upper Arlington, over by Columbus, and Joan told me that I should get some sleep before we arrived at our destination of Arad. So I took a nap, but only after extracting a promise from Joan that she would stay awake and would wake me up before our arrival in Arad. But a couple of hours later I awoke to find our train speeding across the plains of Romania, 150 miles from our destination. Joan swore she had stayed awake and did not have a clue what had happened.
The train next stopped at Deva, Romania, but the stop was so short we hadn’t even gotten our bags to the door when the train roared away. Shortly we arrived at a small village called Samaria. We threw our bags off the train onto the platform. We had about 300 pounds of luggage, mostly things to leave in Romania, and jumped off the train on to the bags. I immediately went into the station to buy tickets, but we were too early and the ticket window would not open for another hour. We were very hungry, but the vendors in the courtyard would not take my dollars. My friend Joan gets very ornery when she does not eat and it have been about 14 hours since supper the day before. I saw a row of telephones and pulled out my ATT calling card. I would call my friends in Arad and they would tell us what to do, or even send help. But you can’t even use the phone to dial long distance in Romania. You have to go to a post office, where they have banks of special phones for long distance. I went into the plaza and I looked around for some seemingly extra-intelligent people, who might speak English, and I found a couple of ladies, and they spoke great English, and they said they’d help me get a ticket, but on the way over to the ticket window, I told them that we didn’t have any lei and they just threw their hands in despair. “You can’t buy tickets and there’s no place to change money in Samaria.”
I was getting discouraged and even frightened, but you can’t keep us Americans down for long. I would outsmart these Romanians. I’d set up shop! I had all of this great stuff in my suitcases, including cigarettes to bribe boarder guards. I even had salamis, the meat of choice among Romanians, and lots of life savers. They would save me. I started to put all this together to have a little sale, and then my mind was assaulted by the words, “black market.” They could throw me into a Romanian prison for black marketeering. What could I do? I was struck by the thought and feeling, everything I had was useless. There is nothing I can do to get us out of this trap.
Everything I have I don’t need, and everything I need I don’t have.
Think about the meaning of the phrase. Everything I have I don’t need, and everything I need I don’t have.
I knew what to be in this situation. Scarred. But I did not know what to do. I was standing in line again to go find out how many lei I would need to buy tickets. Maybe someone would give me the money. That is when a young man about 27, dressed in a dirty white shirt and dirty white pants and dirty white sneakers walked up to me and in perfect English, without an accent, said, “It looks like you need help”. “Boy do I need help”, I said. “We are absolutely stuck here, completely stuck here.” And after I told him my little story, he just turned and walked away, as if I was a hopeless case.
But about 15 minutes later he came back. I don’t know what he’d been doing. He came back and he said, “They’ll let you on that train”. And he pointed to the far-side of the train platform, about 200 yards away, and I said, “No, that train’s about to leave. They won’t wait”. He said, “They’ll wait for you”. And I said, “We have 300 pounds of luggage”, and he said, “I’ll help you carry it”.
So, he grabbed two seventy-five pound bags and I carried two, and Joan carried the carry-on bags and we went across the platform and down this tunnel and up the other side, and about 50 yards down to the other end of that platform and we threw the bags up onto to train and we jumped on top of them and the train roared away.
And we’re sitting there catching our breath, and I looked over at Joan and she looked at me and I just knew what was in Joan’s mind, and she said that she knew what was in my mind, and simultaneously we knew and Joan gave words to our thoughts, “That was an angel.”
I said, “Yeah, that was an angel”.
Experiences like that are self-validating. You can’t really prove them to anybody else, but within yourself, when you have been learning to listen to God in prayer, you know when you’ve come face-to-face with God. When heaven and earth have touched and you’ve been present in the midst of that miracle—it is an unmistakable experience.
Still, evidence accumulated supporting the miraculous nature of our escape from Samaria. Over the next could of days, as I prepared for and began to preach for the evangelistic services, I realized that the spiritual lesson I had learned on the train platform in Samaria was insight I would need for the ministry that was ahead of me. Everything I had I did not need. Everything I needed, I did not have. I was absolutely dependent on God. Only God could accomplish the purpose Pastor Bulzan and the Golgatha Baptist Church had established for their evangelistic services. Everything I had I did not need. Everything I needed I did not have.
What do you do when you know you are in such a bind? You wait, upon God, for a miracle of God’s power and grace, for resurrection. And the sooner the better. The sooner you admit that you have to surrender to God, the easier it will be for God to intervene. You and I will realize at some point in the future that we are not where we need to be and do not know how to get there. The sooner we admit our need, the sooner God can help.
I certainly hope on this Easter Sunday that this spiritual truth is a principle you are learning to live by. Belief in resurrection is not an intellectual proposition. We declare our belief in resurrection by the way we live.
Jesus Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed.
Amen.
