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Resurrection Living(Thanks to Eugene Peterson and his book, "Living the Resurrection" for some of the ideas for this sermon.)
Introduction: The Possum in our house… You may remember it from the email I sent out earlier this week. We were waiting for some of Becca's friends to come and pick her up, a possum walked in our front door. Sure a skunk would've left a more lasting impression but the possum sure got us excited! Girls were up on chairs, I was grabbing a broom handed to me by my daring wife, and doors to bedrooms were being quickly shut behind me. A dull night of TV had erupted into something completely different! After a bit of gentle encouragement by the broom handle and screams from those around, the possum waddled out the front door into the darkness. Now there's probably a good chance that the possum was more scared than we were last night, but I have a feeling we'll remember his (or her visit) much longer than it will. So there's the comic lead in to talking about the most dramatic entrance of New Life into the world... a Resurrection entrance that we still remember and celebrate today. Sadly though, we often don't get as excited about it as we should. The surprise re-entrance of Jesus into this world caused a great deal of jumping and crying and yelling and laughing and wondering back in the day... now we celebrate with candy and bunnies? Easter is the day when we celebrate the risen Lord! It is the most important major holiday for a Christian. But my sense is that like most things, we’ve all got something upside-down. We celebrate the Resurrection Holiday for one day… we make a big deal of it. Some people pick this or Christmas as the only days that they go to church… It’s the big day! And churches make it even worse. Some of us line up for this day like retailers before Christmas, sending out our advertisements, developing cool marketing plans, even buying into the secular sentiments that surround the Holiday. Much of this isn’t bad… it just isn’t all that good. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ isn’t meant to be celebrated one day a year, it is a truth that we are called to live 365 days a year! Let’s take a look first at the Easter story, then the Easter responses, and finally at a way that we can live the resurrection each and every day! 1. The Easter Stories - All four Gospels tell the story with a few differences… at the center of each story is a deep sense of wonder concerning what had happened. a. Matthew, the most Jewish of the Gospels, records the earthquake, the rolling away of the stone, the two women finding the empty tomb, running to tell, running into “the gardener” who is Jesus. i. Mark, the women arrive to do the work of embalming, the stone is rolled away, an angel is inside and he tells them to go and tell. They are astonished! The NIV states that they left “trembling and bewildered…” ii. Luke the historian adds more detail, additional unnamed women, and Peter running to the tomb… the meeting on the road to Emmaus, everyone leaves with a sense of wonder… iii. And then John adds an even larger dose of wonder to the resurrection story… John runs with Peter to the tomb 1. …and they look at the evidence, the way the burial wrappings are laying and deduce that something beyond grave robbing has happened. They make some sense of what doesn’t make sense. 2. And then Mary wandering through the garden, coming upon someone she thinks is the gardener, but then the “gardener” speaks her name, “Mary” and the reality of wonder fills her vision! “RABBONI!!!” My dear teacher! 2. The Easter Responses! In all the stories we are given a picture of people doing what they normally do, working and being uncertain. As each person walks toward (or as John relates in the road to Emmaus, with) the Resurrection they are going through the motions of daily life. For them, Jesus was truly dead and all that was left was to do the best they could with what they had left. But that’s not the life God wants us to live! Our lives are meant to be lived in wonder! a. Two words are at work in the Gospel stories, fear and worship. These words are wonder words. Both of them move us beyond the motions of daily life. i. The Roman Guards were paralyzed with fear, the women set free by it to worship. 1. Plain old fear is blinding… only one thing is seen and felt, FEAR! 2. But the Fear of the Lord is a good thing… it puts our lives in a place where we can see all other things clearly. 28:8 So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. ii. Worship… 28:9 Suddenly Jesus met them.” Greetings," he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshiped him. 1. Isn’t this the most natural thing they could do? 2. I’m not so sure… it would’ve made almost as much sense (at least if you didn’t know Jesus/God very well) to just up and run away from this new supernatural event! a. We don’t like things that are beyond our control, things we don’t understand. b. We like to take those things we don’t understand and align them with what we do understand and then use them in comfortable ways… but I am getting ahead of myself… b. Beyond the Fear of the Lord and worship came action, running and telling. These actions were dripping with wonder. The people who saw Jesus remembered what He said, who he was, and what had happened and… i. People were excited, ii. And people doubted. John adds the famous story of doubting Thomas. 1. It’s easy to offer a nice prepackaged sermon on Easter, one that is filled with all the neat stuff, the stuff that we expect to hear on Easter. 2. But the Easter story is not simply a story. We tell stories to convey ideas… but it is not easy to convey the sense of wonder that so permeates this story. a. People like to point out the differences in the stories as proof that the Bible is false… b. I like to point out that the differences prove that the story is filled with wonder! It’s amazing! Beyond imagination! iii. Good Friday was a day drenched in the working of God, the pain of sin, the power of Christ’s action for us… A day of darkness and realization that things aren’t what they seem, life is dark and painful. iv. Holy Saturday was the day that all was put on hold, the Sabbath forced stillness upon everyone in the story… 1. Yet it was a working stillness, hearts were breaking, minds were spinning. 2. And God was working in the waiting. Preparing hearts for the wonder of the next day… yet those hearts still had to wait. Questions unanswered, dreams not fulfilled. 3. Our lives can feel a lot like this, can’t they? a. Some of us are waiting to live… waiting for that moment of wonder to fill our lives and let us truly live. New Christians drip of this sense. They are the exciting ones to be around. For them life IS new! b. Some of us have heard the stories, felt the wonder, and then let it drips away in the face of the day to day. We have either never heard or forgotten that The Resurrection of Jesus Christ isn’t meant to be celebrated one day a year, it is a truth that we are called to live 365 days a year! SO WHAT IS YOUR RESPONSE TO EASTER? c. Have you done your time for the year, for the day and now you can safely escape back to the real world? Did I just say “safely escape back to the real world?” Because all of us know that the “real world” is not as real as it appears and it most definitely isn’t safe. But it is what we know. i. It is not easy to convey a deep sense of wonder, the kind of wake up wonder that is found here in the stories of the Resurrection. Wonder catches us off guard, like a possum in the living room, it confounds expectations, it shatters assumptions. ii. And we like control, we like our expectations and assumptions lined up neatly in rows… d. But God does not work this way no matter how hard we try to get Him to. His wonder can’t be packaged or worked into a frenzy. It happens and God is in charge of making it happen. He asks only two things, some sense of our being there and some sense of engagement. i. Being there seems like an easy thing… you just have to show up… but think for a second, to experience true resurrection living where do we need to show up? 1. Do we need to make a pilgrimage to the Holy City? 2. Or maybe it’s something even harder. Something like leaving our perspective of this world behind and living in the Kingdom of God right here and now. a. This is easy to say and hard to do. b. It requires that we show up in a world where we expect God to be involved in each and every moment. c. Now, we may not be able to do this all the time, it is easy to be overwhelmed by our human senses… but we need to try, and it helps us if we do it together. ii. And being engaged. We are so easily engaged with the things of our own lives: our hobbies, our jobs, our feelings, our difficulties, our hopes, and our pain. But these things make much more sense when looked at in light of the real Light, the one who gives life to men. 1. What are you most concerned about in your life? 2. How would your concerns change if God was at the center of them? iii. This shift allows the WONDER of God to become a part of our everyday life. 1. Our reactions to life become founded in the wondrous expectation of resurrection, of new life. 2. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ isn’t meant to be celebrated one day a year, it is a truth that we are called to live 365 days a year!
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