April 11, 2004 - Easter Sunday
Acts 10:34-43
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John 20: 1-18
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"The Resurrection-Driven Life"

“Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’; and she told them that he had said these things to her.”   “I have seen the Lord”: in those five words we find the substance of the resurrection-driven life.

The title of this sermon is a nod to Rick Warren’s ‘purpose-driven’ books.  Some years ago he came out with The Purpose Driven Church and recently has added The Purpose Driven Life to it.  Warren is the pastor of a very large church and as a guru for church growth has clergy hanging on his every word.  I suppose that one can’t argue with success, rather one should rejoice in it; and I do.

There are some people and some churches for which the approach of reducing life to a set of five or so basic precepts is working.  For years others have done it through the articles of the creed or the pages of a confessional statement, so in some ways nothing is new here.  To that I would also say, good. I rejoice whenever there is the possibility for growth and for a deepening of the spiritual relationship – whether it is historical or otherwise.

What I do question, though, is why we always have to reduce things to the lowest common denominator?  Why is it that the things we value the most – like how to go about living out our relationship with God or with others, for that matter – are the things we try to simplify by a system or an angle?

It doesn’t mean these systems or angles don’t work.  After all, the late Dr. Atkins’ diet has helped a goodly number of people – I’m afraid I’m not one of them, however.  Twelve step programs of various types continue to guide people away from addictive behaviors as well.  Creedal statements have helped to guide the church for centuries.  Given time one could go along and point out system after system that has worked for people.  Wonderful.  Outstanding.

The point I’m trying to make is that somewhere, sometime we have to move beyond the medium becoming the message, running counter to the late Marshall McLuhan.  We need to get beyond the package to the product.  The core of every system and program is about dealing with, enhancing, or resourceing life – the lives we lead as individuals and the life we lead as communities, on multiple levels.

It seems to me that when you break it down, every system has two goals.  One is getting us through the rough spots in life and making those rough spots a minimal part of our experience.  The other is making the smooth spots readily available and celebrating, even luxuriating in them.  Ultimately, the goal any system is to live and to enable one to live well.  When you look at Easter that is what this day is about too.

It’s unfortunate, but it seems that we’ve managed to theologize the life out of the Resurrection.  However, that is what this day, what this event, what this doctrine is about: LIFE. Mary Magdalene came back from the empty tomb and told the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.”  One who had been dead was alive.  One who embraced our humanity in its fullness had now taken that embrace to the next level, opening a new realm to every one of us.  The bottom line was, and is, that Jesus is alive.  Not as some dim historical figure, nor as a metaphor, or even as a ‘best principle of human life,’ but alive.  Alive so that each one who opens the eyes of mind and heart can say the same thing Mary did, “I have seen the Lord.”

This point is made powerfully for me by a story from the life of the great Congregational minister and theologian R.W. Dale.  We read in his biography about his experience when writing an Easter sermon: “the thought of the risen Lord broke in upon him as it had never done before.  ‘Christ is alive,’ I said to myself; ‘alive!’ and then I paused; -- ‘alive!’ and then I paused again; -- ‘alive!’  Can that really be true?  Living as really as I myself am?  I got up and walked about repeating ‘Christ is living!’  ‘Christ is living!’ . . .  It was to me a new discovery.  I thought that all along I had believed it; but not until that moment did I feel sure about it.  I then said, ‘My people shall know it; I shall preach about it again and again until they believe it as I do now.’ . . .  Then began the custom of singing in Carr’s Lane [church] on every Sunday morning an Easter hymn.”  [A.W.W. Dale The Life of R.W. Dale, p. 642]  Dale had a life changing encounter with the living Christ; he got beyond the medium to the message itself.

For so many of us the resurrection is a concept for another time and another world, if it is true to begin with.  We think the resurrection is the stuff of funerals, not everyday life and in that thinking we miss the point.  We can see the Lord, not just in the hereafter, but in what one scholar has called, “the herenow.”  Coming to understand the reality of God’s life intersecting with ours makes a difference in how we think about ourselves, how we think about our life together, and the way we manage both of them.  So many things that we hold dear – our notions of human dignity, of freedom, and of human rights – are tied at root to the resurrection, because it speaks to us not only of the promise, but the reality of life.  I fully believe what I read recently in The New Yorker when a columnist quoted one of the Islamic extremists condemning modernity and the West as saying, “You are in love with life and we love death.”  Unwittingly this follower of Islam has caught the key to the Christian faith, that we love life.  Why do we love life?  The resurrection.  In the resurrection God is revealed as One who is not only the author of life, but who is the God of life, and is for life.

The reality of the resurrection, the ability to see the Lord, is not something to be confined to dogmas, creeds, precepts, or systems.  If those truths – “Christ is alive” “I have seen the Lord” – are to be at all valid, they must be lived.  We hear the living of those truths in the Acts of the Apostles as they are sent to tell the story of how “[Jesus] went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed.”  In their own turn they did the same and part of the oppression they healed was through the gift of forgiveness.  I have read, repeatedly, that most people who are in therapy are there because they are overwhelmed with guilt.  The life that we are called to lead in Christ isn’t about guilt – it’s about forgiveness.  The essence of our faith is life and thus faith, as many of the great teachers of the early church will tell us, is therapeutic.  It’s about making us whole again.  It’s about life.

I invite you, then, to look beyond any medium to the message itself.  Open the various books which reveal the resurrection.  Experience the resurrection in the book of nature.  Open your eyes to the awakening world around you.  Each green shoot bursting through the earth, each bud on the tree is a sign of the triumph of life.  Take the time this Easter day to celebrate the resurrection by going for a walk – and perhaps, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, you will meet Christ on the road.  Take some time today, or in the days ahead, to drink in the beauty of the world around you.  Quiet your heart and your mind so that you can really hear the song of the birds.  Who knows, perhaps you’ll hear the voice of the Creator as well?

I invite you to experience resurrection in the book of our life together as human beings.  Open your eyes to the people around you and understand that in each one of them – even the ones you least expect – the Christ waits to meet you.  I so love the concept of the Deus absconditus, the hidden God, who waits to encounter us again and again in the most unlikely places and through the most unlikely people.  John Shea beautifully summarizes this in his book An Experience Named Spirit.  He writes:

Jesus Christ is not only the past founder of our relationship to God but also its present mediator.  He not only overcame the law of time by not being forgotten, he overcame the law of death by not being lost.  He lives among us!  And our rhetoric for his presence ranges from the lyrical Hopkins’ verse “Christ plays in ten thousand places” to the sudden, shocking revelation of Zooey Glass, “And don’t you know – listen to me now – don’t you know who that fat lady really is? . . .  Ah, buddy.  Ah, buddy.  It’s Christ himself.  Christ himself, buddy.”  [p.17]

A believer in the resurrection every day should be able to, very truthfully, declare with Mary Magdalene, “I have seen the Lord.”  We must look for the Christ, as the early Celts did, “in the eyes of all who see me, on the lips of all who speak to me.”  If we look, if we listen, there we will see the Lord as we read with people the books of their lives.

I invite you to experience the resurrection in the book of your own life.  As we look back over the pages of our life how many resurrection stories are there among them?  Resurrection stories tell a tale of new life, and of renewed appreciation for life.  These stories will take many forms, but they are our own stories of change, of growth, and of renewal.  I have many stories of resurrection as I think back over my life, but my recent brush with a possible cancer diagnosis floods into my mind.  When the word came that I was “all clear,” I felt as though I had a new lease on life and wanted to live it even better than before.  Am I still learning how?  Yes.  Have I achieved my goal?  I don’t think so, but I remember the story and the story helps me to realize how precious, how wonderful, how beautiful life is.  The resurrection isn’t just some abstruse dogma, or just a rote line from the creed, “I believe in the resurrection of the dead,” because the resurrection begins with the living – with us.  Open the book of your life today.  Take a moment or two to reflect, to appreciate, to be grateful for life.  How many times have we been raised to life?  Understand that life eternal has already begun in you and then let it out in all of the ways that you live.

I invite you to experience resurrection through the book of the church and through the church’s book, the Bible.  Delve into the stories of the resurrection in the pages of the four Gospels.  Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John each have a different ‘take’ on the resurrection.  In these Easter days, because the season of Easter extends ten days longer than Lent, read the Acts of the Apostles and see how those early ones who had seen the Lord responded to their encounters.  Sometimes we get so rarified in our language and our thinking about these important events, these life-bearing stories, that we lose the immediacy and the wonder the early church felt.  They had seen the Lord and heard the Lord and they went forth as witnesses to the One who had taught, touched, healed, and loved them.  Years may separate us from them, but is it really any different for us?  It shouldn’t be.

Today, if at all possible, take some time and open the Gospel of Luke and read the story of the encounter on the Road to Emmaus.  It is best read in the evening, for that is when it happened.  What you’ll read there is the account of most of us, who walk through life’s roads with Christ right next to us and never realize it.  In the simple act of breaking bread they finally recognize him and they understand that all-along their hearts have been “burning within” them.  Their experience, to know the Lord with burning hearts, and then to witness with almost breathless enthusiasm, “I have seen the Lord,” is meant to be ours as well.  It is offered to us again and again.

The church is to be a place of encounter with the living Lord and the Bible is a living word, not a dead letter, or a rule book.  The gathering of the Lord’s free people is a resurrection thing and our life together here is resurrection-driven.  Together, in this place, open to God’s Word, we should be raised to life. Every time we’re together we should say to one another, and leave saying to others, what Mary Magdalene told that early gathering of the church, “I have seen the Lord.”