Let Us Be Glad and Rejoice in His Salvation

Scripture Lessons: Isaiah 25: 6-9 and John 20: 1-18 Sermon Title: Let Us Be Glad and Rejoice in His Salvation Preached on April 4, 2021 Sometimes people ask me about my Easter Sunday sermon. In the last week or so, a few friends have asked, “Joe, big Sunday coming up. What are you going to preach on?” “Well, I’ve been thinking about a sermon on the resurrection.” In a lot of ways, it’s easy to preach on Easter Sunday. It’s all right here. Today is the day. There’s not much left for the preacher to explain or illustrate. He is risen. He is risen indeed. Thanks be to God. What more need be said? But this is what I want to emphasize today: that what happened on Easter Sunday so long ago when Mary went looking for a corpse to bury and instead encountered the Lord, risen from the dead, changes everything. And it doesn’t just change the way we look at death, no longer with fear but hope for our own life eternal, but it must change the way we look at the everyday, from the moment we rise up in the morning to when we put our head down on our pillow at night. From the moment we sit down at our desk, bored already, or walk through the front door, not at all enthused about getting to another baseball practice. The resurrection must change our perspective on all the good plans that fall apart and all the crushing blows that have us reeling, because the truth of the resurrection colors how we understand the world around us and changes the way we understand what happens to us from our greatest successes to our deepest disappointments. Faith changes things. Faith in the resurrection changes things. Now, if you asked me to define a word like “faith,” I’d say something like what I just said, that faith is a way of looking at the world and understanding our lives so that we never fall victim to despair and avoid getting lost in temptation or heartache. Faith is like a lot of the words Christians like us use, but then, when we are asked to define them, we struggle to do so simply. When I’m searching for a good way to define one of our Christian code-words I often look them up in a short dictionary written by one of my favorite preachers, Frederick Buechner. When he defines the word faith, he quotes the book of Hebrews, “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Then, referring to Sarah, who God told would have a child in her old age, Buechner says that “faith is laughter at the promise of a child… and “faith [even] dies, as it lives, laughing.” “Faith is not a noun, but a verb, more a process than a possession.” “Faith is not being sure where you’re going but going anyway.” It’s like friendship, which, should you put it to the test you’d ruin it. Ask someone to prove that she’s really your friend and watch how it hurts her. Likewise, faith can’t be proven but that hardly means it isn’t true. A life of faith is one lived expecting something good to happen, because you know good things have happened before, and it enables us, not just to look in one empty tomb but every empty tomb with the hope of people who are willing to be surprised by God despite a mountain of disappointment. What I’m trying to say here isn’t something simple, but of course it is. Simply put, faith is just a way of looking at the world and filling in what you don’t know, and so while we Christians often strictly define faith in positive terms, it also takes faith to look out on the unformed future with pessimism, because no one knows that they’ll be disappointed, but people often walk around with the faith that they will be. You see, people who are always pessimistic don’t know it all. They don’t expect surprises, though surprises come. Have you ever met someone who said, “I’m not a pessimist, I’m just realistic?” That’s not entirely true, for it’s not realistic to never expect anything good to ever happen. Good things happen all the time. For example: Mary was being pessimistic and realistic when she looked into the tomb, but it was empty. The Prophet Ezekiel went to a valley of dry bones and they all came back to life. The Hebrew people were saved from slavery in Egypt. David slayed a giant with a rock and a sling and the pessimist would have bet against him in that fight and would have lost it all because the giant fell. Christian faith calls us to take surprises into account, and real life often surprises us just as often as do the old Bible stories. Think about it. You can imagine how many people told Orval and Wilburn Wright that they’re plane would never get off the ground? Likewise, I once told my daughter that she could keep the old dryer I put on the side of the road if she pushed it up a hill. I told her that with pessimistic faith that she’d never be able to do it, and yet she did. I was even more surprised by her than I was at a ball I once attended in Columbia, Tennessee wearing just most of a tuxedo. No one even made fun of me for my lack of cummerbund though I expected someone to. I tell you that because only a fool is always pessimistic. A fool goes through life imagining everything is going to turn out bad. A fool confuses pessimism with realism. Murphy’s Law discounts the hand of God. And lacking imagination is sorry way to go through life, for miracles spring up all around us and I don’t want you to miss them. Consider faith then, the kind of faith which the resurrection inspires, which is nothing more than taking what you know God has done and daring to believe that God might do it again. Faith is seeing a church, wounded by division and decline and imagining that it might be named the Best Place to Worship in Cobb County three years in a row. Faith is planting seeds in the ground and expecting them to grow. Faith is sending kids to school and trusting that they’ll learn. Faith is driving your car into a roundabout and daring to believe that you’ll survive. Faith is taking the truth of an empty tomb and allowing it to color your vision of every relationship that feels like it’s hit a brick wall. For how many times has reconciliation happened? How many times have you said, “I’ll be she’ll never call,” and then the phone rang? How many days have you been sure that nothing would ever change and yet it did? How many mornings felt like Groundhog Day and yet a new day dawned. I tell you it’s happened plenty of times. It’s happened far too often for you or me to have the outlook of a pessimist. Easter Sunday calls on us to take the truth of the resurrection and allow it to change the way we see the world around us. It is a day for celebrating every seed that bloomed into flower though it seemed to be nothing more than a seed. Every child sent off to college who came back educated and purpose filled. Today is the day for giving thanks to God that even this season of pandemic is ending, and now we have the chance to do things differently than we did before, because it did not end us or close the book on our story. My friends, we can write a new story staring now. And we can write it with greater kindness. Greater unity. More respect and common decency. Having seen poverty and felt disease this last year, we may now dare to believe that something might be done to ensure a brighter future. Having heard the people shout for justice, we might listen and reimagine rather than get stuck in the cycle of the way things are. On this Resurrection Day, dare to believe that new life is jumping up from the ground and leaping from every tomb, for there is no power in death other than the power that we give it. Christ has concurred it, and it is not the end. Today is the beginning. For he has risen. He has risen indeed. Let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation. Amen.