To Listen to this sermon, click here: http://sermon.net/ststphnfw/sermonid/1200034601
We Are Risen Indeed!
Matthew 28: 1-10
By Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
Easter Day, 2013
Holy Jesus, I hear God’s mighty “Yes!” in your Resurrection. You invite me to live also, and I want to say “Yes!” to you. Take me out of the tomb that imprisons me: lead me into the morning of new life, and walk with me wherever your love may lead.
Peter Storey, Listening at Golgotha
Mary Magda
lene and “the other Mary,” probably Mary the mother of James, go to the tomb on Easter day, and what they aren’t expecting– is Easter.
They are expecting to find a tomb guarded by soldiers. They expect to find a great stone rolled in front of the grave. They expect to find Jesus in there, even more dead as He was a couple of days before.
Instead, an angel appears, with a face like lightning and clothing white as snow. Tough, battle-hardened soldiers are so fearful they become like dead men. They could deal with invasions of barbarians, but invasions of the supernatural? That’s way above their pay grade.
The angel rolls the stone back and says “don’t be afraid.”
Don’t be afraid. It’s hard not to be afraid if you’ve just been fired, or if you’ve been diagnosed with a terrible illness, or if you have a disability and no one seems willing to help you, or if you’re dealing with a mental illness that manifests as fearfulness.
We’re all afraid of something. Broadly, the things we fear fall into two categories: things wrong with the world, and things wrong with us. We’re afraid of things that are wrong with the world because they could affect us, and we don’t have much control over them.
But the things we are afraid of about ourselves are often scarier because we feel like we OUGHT to be able to fix them, but we’re afraid we can’t. So we either pretend they aren’t there, or deny their power over us.
What are you afraid of? (Long pause)
Don’t be afraid.
You’ve probably heard at some point that faith is the opposite of fear. But that depends on what you have faith in. The Bible doesn’t directly say anywhere that faith, as such, is the opposite of fear. But here’s what it does say.
It says “Perfect love casts out all fear.” (I John 4: 18)
Those Roman soldiers, they had faith. They had faith in Caesar, who they viewed as a kind of god. But even if they didn’t have that, they had faith in the strength of their arms, in their training, in their ability to take care of themselves in a daunting situation.
That faith really didn’t do them much good facing an angel from heaven.
That faith was based on an assumption about what makes a person worthwhile. The assumption is that capability is what makes us worthwhile. Having internal resources and external training, being tough enough mentally, physically, psychologically. That kind of faith takes all kinds of forms. It doesn’t have to be military or even physical. It can educational—build yourself up by getting degree after degree and becoming as smart as you can be. It can be trying to be the best at whatever it is that you do. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it runs the risk of being a kind of faith in ourselves, that we can handle any situation.
And there are situations that we just can’t handle.
Our fear of what we can’t do, of our shortcomings and our flaws, whether real or imagined, can overwhelm us with dread when we face the unexpected. It can freeze us into indecision, just like the soldiers at the tomb, who become immobile like dead men.
These soldiers saw and angel. Angels are interesting characters in the bible. In almost every appearance of an angel in the New Testament, the first thing they say is, “Don’t be afraid.” After all, they’re manifestations of supernatural forces at work in the cosmos. Remember in the Old Testament, how Jacob wrestled what he thought was a demon, until it turned out to be an angel? Sometimes it’s not always clear if they are angels, or if they are demons.
To a certain extent, whether it’s an angel or a demon is in the eye of the beholder.
Isn’t that often true of anything unexpected in our lives?
If you’re convinced that the world is a dangerous battlefield of traumas and troubles, and you’ve spent your life either training to face trouble or trying to hide away from trouble, why then whatever powerful, uncontrollable force of the cosmos suddenly appears in your path is going to be a demon, no matter what it is. After all, you’ve spent your whole life preparing to fight demons, or hiding from them, and suddenly something appears that you can’t fight or hide from. Of course it’s a demon!
Except it’s an angel. That’s what the two Marys saw. They arrived at Jesus’ grave with a lot of reasons to feel about as hopeless as you can get. But unlike the soldiers, they saw an angel.
They see a supernatural being, an uncontrollable force of the cosmos, and they have a choice. They can be afraid. They can see this new, unexpected reality as a demon, a terrible threat, a cosmic cataclysm, and run away in fear….
…Or they can see an angel giving them the Gospel news that the empty grave means that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead.
Everything hangs on which choice they make. Because they are the first to find the empty tomb, the future of the whole Gospel hangs on their decision. Demon or angel?
They saw an angel, and here’s WHY they saw angel:
They believed in love.
If there’s one thing Jesus drilled into their heads as disciples, it was that GOD LOVED THEM. In fact, what they got taught was GOD LOVES EVERYBODY. What they got taught was GOD LOVES THE WORLD. Listen to what they learned at the feet of Jesus: “Do not be anxious about your life, what you’ll eat and what you’ll drink, nor about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?”
In other words, though often we are anxious in dire situations, we needn’t be—because God loves us.
Or something else Jesus taught: “For God so loved the world, that He gave the only son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For the Son of Man came into the world not to condemn the world, but that THROUGH HIM THE WORLD MIGHT BE SAVED.”
God loves the world!
Jesus told them love was the basis of everything that mattered. “Love the Lord your God with your whole being and love your neighbor as yourself.”
Love was the basis of all ethics. “Love your enemies.”
Jesus taught them that God is love.
And because these women believed that God is love, what they saw at the tomb wasn’t a demon. It was an angel. And because they saw the angel, they believed the angel’s absolutely incredible message, “HE IS RISEN.” And because they believed the message, they could recognize the Risen Lord when He met them on the road and said “Greetings.”
He had them at “hello”—because they believed that God is love.
Because they believed in love; because they believed God is love; they therefore believed that the universe wasn’t a demon out to get them, but an angel rolling the stone away from the darkness of death into a completely new and exciting possibility. They believed in love, and perfect love casts out all fear.
Life doesn’t hand us golden opportunities. Every possibility has risks, seen and unseen; every terrible turn of fate has a silver lining. Even good changes are frightening and fraught with uncertainty; and even more so when we face the tomb, whether in the literal sense of our or someone’s else’s mortality, or the thousand other ways life can pull a fast one on us.
But when the unexpected and the uncontrollable appear on our path, do we face it with fear or do we face it with faith? That depends on where we’ve put our faith. Do we believe that the universe is ruled by dark uncertain forces, or do we believe that it the cosmos is ruled by love?
The Gospel message is that when God raised Jesus from the dead, that was the victory of love over death. It is God saying, “Yes, the cosmos is ruled by love!”
God loves us, and love has won the victory.
Our greatest fear is that we aren’t lovable. Maybe we keep working hard to earn that love; or maybe we fear those things we don’t love about ourselves and try to hide from them.
It doesn’t matter. God loves you.
We’re afraid to pray sometimes because we know prayer will shine a light on our shortcomings. But that’s okay if we know that God loves us. We know God loves us, flaws and all. Then our shortcomings become opportunities for growth and renewal and new life.
We worry about things we can’t control, or things we can’t change, and that’s understandable. That doesn’t go away overnight. But those fears abate, and we find inner spiritual strength we didn’t know we had, if we believe that God loves us. We see new possibilities and find light in darkness, when we believe that God loves us. We rise to new life and new possibilities, even and often especially in the darkest times, when we believe that God loves us. That belief enables us to see new possibilities we couldn’t have imagined, take new chances we never thought we’d take, develop inner resources we didn’t know we had—because we know this isn’t a universe of fear, but a universe of love.
Because we believe in God’s love, even life’s demons become angels. Because perfect love—God’s perfect love–casts out all fear.