"A Sermon Series on the New Creed"
Part IV: For All Time
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Text: I Corinthians 15:42-58
I want to confess to you today that I am a sucker - for happy endings. When I go to the movies, I don't want to see films like No Country for Old Men, Titanic, disaster movies or Romeo and Juliet. I want fiction. I want happy endings. I want to see Bridget Jones's Diary. I'll be trying to live that down with many of my colleagues for a long time. I want to see Chariots of Fire, or Bond movies that end with the hero getting who he should get. I want to see those great endings because I want my fiction to give me what my non-fiction doesn't.
I realize that oftentimes in this life there are not happy endings. People find themselves in situations that are anything but happy at their ending. There are natural disasters, shootings of innocent children in our streets, people whose lives end in poverty, those who find that ill health catches up with them and untimely deaths. Therefore, I do not subscribe to the belief that there are always happy endings. I disagree, for example, with the character of Dr. Pangloss in Voltaire's Candide who said that this is the best of all possible worlds and that everything is going to work out. I love positive thinkers and optimists - I would much rather be around optimists than pessimists - but I can never believe in the axiom that everything is going to work out all right in the end. There is too much evidence to suggest otherwise.
Rather, I am more in tune with a story my father told me as a boy about a boxer who went into the ring, got punch drunk and staggered to his corner after a number of rounds. His coach said to him, “Everything is going all right; he hasn't laid a glove on you.”
After a long pause, the boxer had a moment of clarity and he said, “Well, in that case, keep an eye on the referee because someone out there is knocking the living daylights out of me!”
In other words, you can try to tell people that everything is okay and everything is working out perfectly, but the reality in this life is that is not always the case. Indeed, it is not always the case that the most honourable, upright, morally pure and seemingly perfect people are the ones who have a life of quiescence, ease, satisfaction and victory. There are many snake oil salesmen posing as religious leaders who keep trying to sell that to people as if it is the truth. Evidence suggests otherwise.
So what do we believe in? And where is the hope? Where is there a source of joy if there are not inevitable happy endings? I believe in what we say in the United Church's creed. I believe in the line that says the Church is “to proclaim Jesus, crucified and risen,” and the line that follows shortly after, “in life, in death, in life beyond death ... we are not alone.” Not some frivolous happy ending, but a belief that in life and in death, in those things that are wonderful and those things that are not, and in life beyond death, God is with us.
I base that on 1 Corinthians 15, in which Paul talks about the resurrection. Paul makes a case for hope and for what he believes in. He says it is the resurrection that makes all our work worthwhile and is our source of inspiration and strength for our labours. Without it, we have nothing more than vanity. Paul places his trust in Christ's resurrection; it is his basis for hope. He makes no reference to an inevitable immortality of the soul. Paul's understanding of humanity's hope of eternal life is predicated on the bodily death and the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and he bases all of this on evidence.
I want to look at that evidence because there is a movement these days that questions Jesus and the resurrection and separates the witness of the Apostle Paul from the apostolic witness of the original disciples. Some authors claim that by separating Paul's witness from that of the other apostles, the true faith can somehow be found. But this has gone on for hundreds of years. There have been many attempts to separate Paul's writings from the rest of the New Testament and to separate Paul from the other apostles. The Book of Corinthians suggests that at the time Paul was ministering, he saw similar divisions in the early Church. Paul begins his letter to the Corinthians by talking about these divisions and how some people followed Cephas, some followed Apollos and others followed Paul. Paul was concerned about this division because he saw it dividing the witness to Christ. Emphasizing individual leaders and putting them on pedestals took away from the allegiance to Christ.
When Paul talks about the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, notice how he uses all of the witnesses to make his case. He says the first witness was Peter, then the disciples and then Jesus appeared to 500 others. He appeared to James next and last of all, to Paul. The whole of these witnesses form the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. If you take Paul or anyone else away from the testimony to the resurrection, you weaken the evidence for it. Some people ask, “Do you mean that the whole of our belief in the resurrection is dependent on witnesses?” The answer is, “yes.”
Today, you and I believe in their witness; we believe in the evidence that they gave us. That is why we subscribe to the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Some people say that this is not really evidence. It is not scientific and their testimony can't actually prove Jesus was raised from the dead. No, it can't - but it is still evidence.
Dan Meeter, the minister of Old First Reformed Church in Brooklyn, New York, told the story of a woman in his former congregation who insisted that she would never believe that human beings walked on the moon. She said quite categorically whenever she could that there was no evidence human beings actually landed on the moon. She proudly stated that it was all just a great, big hoax. She maintained that the American government showed everyone a Hollywood movie to convince them that the moon landing really happened. People tried to convince her otherwise, but there was no persuading her.
How do you prove to her that she's wrong? Dan has never been on the moon. He wasn't with Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin; he didn't say, “One giant leap for mankind.” He bases his belief that people walked on the moon on the testimony of those who were actually there. Dan argued that he believes their testimony and takes it as evidence that humans have been to the moon.
Physicist Arno Penzias discovered the cosmic microwave radiation in the universe. He believes that the hum that comes from the universe is actually coming from the Big Bang. That hum is the evidence that proves the existence of cosmic radiation. Penzias won a Nobel Peace Prize for looking at evidence of something that happened millions of years ago, yet the scientific community believes in the evidence and in his witness to that evidence. Even with scientific knowledge, you still have to look at evidence, listen to the witnesses to it and assess their legitimacy. But it doesn't mean that even the greatest witnesses were actually present when something occurred. It means that they have looked at the evidence that has come from it and deduced that it happened.
In the case of the resurrection, we have people who bore witness to something that they had actually seen. But we have something more. We not only have the apostolic witness that Jesus was raised from the dead, we also have the Spirit. The Spirit testifies with our spirits that we are now the children of Jesus. The Spirit bears witness to the truth of the evidence that the apostles gave, and it is on this truth alone that we base our hope.
This evidence demands a verdict; to say, “Yes, I believe this to be true.” “When you do,” says Jürgen Moltmann, “it is just like God laughing at death. When you believe this it is the greatest of joy. It is an outburst that says, ”˜O, death, where is your sting? O, grave, where is your victory?'”
It is the power of understanding that God has had final victory over death and has granted us eternal life, and it's a powerful thing.
Louis the XIV, the great king of France, said those famous words, L'État, c'est moi - “I am the state.” He really believed in his own greatness, and when he died in 1715, there was a magnificent service to remember his life that he had planned. He decreed that he would be buried in a gold casket, which would be brought into the church and placed right in the middle. All the candles and lights would be extinguished except for one light, one great candle shining over the gold casket. Bishop Masillon entered the church, went up to the coffin and there was a great sense of expectation that would say something marvellous and wonderful about this great king. He went up to the candle - and blew it out. He said, “Only God is great.”
The resurrection of Jesus Christ says, “Only God is great.” Where there may not be happy endings, it is only God who can transform the power of death into the power of life. Where there is defeat, or so it appears, it is only God who can give us victory. Where it appears that all is lost, it is only in God and God's act of grace that we get salvation. “Only God is great.”
Recently, I thought of my mother and those times when she was gracious and kind to me. My mother is now deceased and I thought back to the time when I was about four years old. I had very bad legs from birth and I was constantly visiting the orthopaedic hospital in Manchester, England. Every night, my mother had to put me to bed, not like you'd normally put a child to bed, but with leg irons that strapped my legs together tightly to hold my hips in place. It was extremely painful. Every night my mother would have to strap these things on me and then lift me on to the bed - and even at four I was not a light weight, let me tell you. She'd always say a prayer and have me say a prayer of thanksgiving. I'd pray for everyone from our next-door-neighbour to granny and for the world, and then my mother would turn and put the light out. I would just lie there in my leg irons.
I used to notice that oftentimes, my mother had a tear in her eye after she said her prayers. Over the years I suppose I had just been self-absorbed, thinking of only myself and what I went through so many nights over a two-year period. Recently, I thought about what my mother must have been going through, the incredible difficulty of getting me to bed, putting those irons on my legs, seeing the pain in my eyes and having to walk away and leave me alone. I thought about the difficulty of getting down on your knees, praying and keeping your faith when it really seems dark and dim.
When I look back on my life, I think of my father and how he bore witness to God's love and grace. He was wonderful. But the one who really had the greatest impact for the faith was my mother. She bore witness that even in the midst of those great difficulties and those dark nights, she kept her faith. Even in her tears she had the strength and resolve to care. It didn't appear that there was going to be a happy ending, but even so, she bore witness to the faith.
I think that the Church is like that through Pentecost. It bears witness to the continued love and grace of God in Jesus Christ. That grace and love is not a statement that all things will end well; it is a statement that God, in the end, will have the ultimate victory and that, “In life, in death, in life beyond death, God is with us.” We know God is with us through the power of his risen Christ, and we know the power of his risen Christ through the presence of the Spirit. And the presence of the Spirit is with us for all time and beyond. Thanks be to God. Amen.