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A New Birth into a Living Hope
A sermon by
Dr. David Burhans
Interim Preacher, First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
March 30, 2008
I
must tell you this story. About seven years ago, First Baptist Church of
Washington D.C. was without a pastor and asked me to supply on a given Sunday at
that church. About two or three weeks before I was to preach, Dr. Sam Hasty, who
had invited me, called and said, “David, I’m very sorry, but our new pastor is
going to be here on his first Sunday that you were to preach, and we will not
need your services.” Four months ago I was invited by one Joyce Clemmons to
preach at First Baptist Church, Richmond, April, May and June. About four weeks
ago she called and she said, “David, I’m sorry but our new pastor is coming to
preach a sermon on March the ninth, and if everything goes well, he will be,
understand, begin perhaps his ministry here at First Baptist on May the
eleventh.” I said, “Not a problem, that’s fine.” I showed up on March the ninth,
sat in the 8:30 service, near the back. Walked into the sanctuary - that Jim
Somerville was sitting up here in this chair. What is it with this man, anyway?
He’s pushed me around now for several years.
I
will make a covenant with you, First Baptist people… if several years from now,
I’m invited to preach at some fine church throughout the country, I’ll alert you
and you check to see if Jim Somerville’s going there.
The
Lord works in mysterious ways, His wonders to proclaim.
Something brand new is beginning to happen at First Baptist. We celebrate with
you. And praise God for God’s good work in your midst in the life of Jim and
his wife. And we look forward to hearing wonderful things about his ministry,
your work, and your witness to the Lord Christ in this community and throughout
the world. I guess it’s appropriate to say, ‘Congratulations.’ And maybe one
of these days, I’ll get to preach some more at First Baptist.
T. S.
Eliot’s play, Murder In The Cathedral, is a drama in which the priests
barred the doors of the great Church of Canterbury against the would-be
assassins; but Thomas, the Archbishop, knowing they have done this for his
safety, will not permit it. “Unbar the doors, throw open the doors, (he says) I
will not have the House of Prayer, the Church of Christ, this sanctuary turned
into a fortress. The church shall be open to our enemies. Open the door.” But
they protested, “You would bar the door against the lion, the leopard, the wolf
or the bear, why not more against beasts with the souls of damned men?” His
answer rings out in response. “We have fought the beast and have conquered. Now
is the triumph of the cross. Open the door!”
Little to fear! No despair! Instead, trust, hope and confidence. We have fought
the beast and have conquered. The Apostle Paul wrote something almost, well
quite similar to this, in his letter to the Christians in Rome. Just about 20
years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. Writing to those Christians,
he says: “In all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loves
us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor
things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor
anything else in all creation, will separate us from the love of God which is in
Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:38-39).
And
the first letter of Peter written to the early Christians facing persecution,
these words, so beautifully and powerfully expressed, read by Lynn this morning:
“By God’s great mercy, God has given us a new birth into a living hope through
the resurrection of Jesus Christ... an inheritance that is imperishable,
undefiled, and unfading kept in heaven for you” (I Peter 1:3-4). A good summary
of these ancient texts of this play by T. S. Eliot, may simply be: ‘In our
living and in our dying, we can now proclaim that Jesus will have the last
word!’
I
don’t know about you, but these ancient texts seem to be crucial words for 21st
Century Christians - as relevant and up-to-date as the morning headlines. And
God knows we need help. You are aware of the pessimism - all around us. Special
phrases that we use ourselves frequently. Things like: “Might makes right.”
“Do-gooders get done in.” “It doesn’t pay to do good.” “Going from bad to
worse.” “Jumping from the frying pan into the fire.” Or that cynical humor with
a twist to it: “Cheer up, things could be worse. So I cheered up and sure enough
things got worse.” “I’m in a rat race and the rats are winning”.
But
more seriously, novelist, Percy Walker, warns us that this is the Time of
Thanatos, a time of the living dead. Routine, boredom, no joy, almost no meaning
to the journey. John Masefield is the one Poet Laureate of Great Britain, who
wrote about a widowed mother who witnessed the public execution of her son for
crimes against the state. When her son died, this tragic soul of a mother
crumpled to the ground sobbing uncontrollably, and those nearby heard her say
something about “broken things, too broke to mend.”
It’s
overwhelming to feel one’s very existence is not just broken, but broken beyond
repair. We all have a shipwreck or two in our lives - in relation to our health,
our relationships, our children, our careers, some kind of wilderness
experience, some dark night of the soul. Suddenly our world stops. That which
has given meaning and hope to our lives is gone broken, and we agonize and
wonder - too broke to mend? Not, ladies and gentlemen, if we claim the Easter
Story as our own, not if we believe that in our living and our dying Jesus, the
Christ will have the last word.
There
are two valuable lessons from Easter that nurture and sustain me. That reinforce
my hope these days. The despairing, brokenhearted women, these faithful
disciples of Jesus identify the first one. They were on their way to the tomb
early Sunday morning wondering hopelessly, “Who will roll away the stone for us
from the door of the tomb? And looking up the stone was rolled back” (Mark
16:3-4). Here are these women about to come face to face with something beyond
their control. These women are expecting an insurmountable barrier, anticipating
something too great for their meager human resources to handle and discover that
the problem isn’t there when they get to it.
Divine power, God’s creative presence has already dealt with the situation, a
factor they had not anticipated, did not even consider. We so easily forget that
there is a power of love and force for goodness in this world stronger than the
whole hideous alliance of evil and hatred and violence. Stronger than all those
things that threaten to defeat us. When we are tempted to cry, “too broke to
mend.” This is God’s presence at the heart of our journey. Always playing a part
in what is possible out there in our daily lives - in our pain and our
suffering, in our loss and our loneliness, in our fear and in our failures. No
one is asking us to handle this alone. What we have to do is to believe in God
more than we believe in our fears and failures and believe that “God can still
breathe life into piles of dust.”
You
remember surely, just one week earlier we relive Jesus’ last days:
Friday, you recall, the
setting sun casting its dark shadows on a dying man. Sunday, the rising sun
sending its bright rays into the dark recesses of an empty tomb.
Friday, the blinds are
drawn on a dark tragedy. Days later, the shades were lifted to reveal a bright
victory and future.
Friday, a lonely man
praying, stumbling through the streets of Jerusalem under the weight of his own
cross and we say “they did it!” Sunday, we stand before the mystery of an empty
tomb and say, “God did it!”
Friday, we see what we
humans are capable of at our worst. Sunday, we discover what God can do with our
sin and failure and realize nothing is too broke to mend.
“Who
will roll away the stone for us from the door of the tomb? And looking up, the
stone was rolled back.” By the power and presence of the Risen Christ, we have
been given “a new birth into a living hope!” And Jesus, I’ll bet, will have the
last word.
There
is a second valuable lesson, however, from Mark’s resurrection account. “Go tell
his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you
will see him just as he told you” (Mark 16:7). The Risen Christ is Lord of the
future. With the celebration of Easter we are given a chance to start over
again. We are given new opportunities to get it right. That is the message of
all Holy Scripture. In fact, if you want one word that captures the essence of
salvation history: ‘forgiveness.’ It’s ‘forgiveness’ from front to end of this
magnificent word of God. Forgiveness. A new start. A new life. “A new birth into
a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”
It is
this message that makes the Judas story especially poignant for me. The late
Carlyle Marney, a Baptist minister from North Carolina, wrote a sermon entitled
God’s Strong Hands, in which he said that the tragedy of Judas’ life lay
not in his decision to betray our Lord, tragic as that was, but in not staying
around to see what God could do with human failure and betrayal. When the full
impact of what he had done finally hit him, it was more than he could stand.
Judas took his own life. It is so very sad, Marney said, when one underestimates
what God’s strong hands can do with our brokenness. If Judas had only waited
around until Easter Sunday, surely Judas would have heard the women explain:
“Jesus said to go tell the disciples and Peter and Judas I want to meet them in
Galilee.” After all, what Judas did was really no worse than Peter’s denial and
the disciples’ desertion of their Master. But he did not stay around to see what
God can do with failure, sin and brokenness.
So
what does it mean to say Jesus is Lord of the future? It means the Jesus story
gets fulfilled in the midst of daily routine, in the ordinary places of our
lives, where we eat and sleep and work and play. The Risen Christ is present
when we listen with compassion to a friend at work, when we talk to and listen
to our children or when we do what Barbara Brown Taylor suggests, “get down on
the floor with a child and say ‘hello’ to God.”
The
work of Easter is fulfilled and the Risen Christ is present whenever the hungry
are fed, the naked are clothed, the poor are noticed, their actually looked at,
seen, and needs are met there. Easter is fulfilled and the Risen Christ is
present whenever mercy and compassion, acts of kindness, doing justice. What
does the Lord require of us? To do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with God.
These become marks of our lives and our words.
Easter is fulfilled and the Risen Christ is present when laughter lifts our
spirits, when we remember that laughter is the shortest distance between two
people or what Ann Lamont says about laughter, “it’s the carbonated form of the
holy.” And Easter is fulfilled and the Risen Christ is present when any child,
woman, teenager, or man comes alive to faith and trust in the Lord, Christ.
Accepts, receives this One as Savior and confesses Him as Lord. The Risen Christ
is going ahead of you. That’s what Jesus said. “I will meet you in Galilee,”
where we live our lives. He is Lord of the future.
Father John Powell, Professor at Loyola University, tells how several years ago
he was watching the university students file into his Theology of Faith Class
when his eyes fell on Tommy. He was combing his flaxen hair, which hung six
inches below his shoulders. I immediately filed Tommy under “S” for strange -
very strange. Tommy turned out to be the “atheist in residence” in my theology
class. He constantly objected to, smirked at or whined about the possibility of
an unconditionally loving God. We made it through the semester and Tom finally
graduated from college – and I was glad. To be honest, he had become a pain in
the back pew.
But
later, later I received a sad report. I heard Tommy had a terminal illness.
Before I could search him out, he came to see me. When he walked into my office,
I knew he was sick. But his eyes were bright and his voice was firm. “I came to
see you about something you said to me on the last day of class, Dr. Powell. I
asked if you thought I would ever find God, and you said “No.” which shocked me.
Then you said, “But God will find you, Tommy.” I thought about that a lot, but
never intensely until that day when the doctors gave me the prognosis of my
illness. Then I got serious about locating God. I asked, I sought, I begged, I
knocked – nothing happened. So, in disgust, I quit.
I
decided to spend what time I had left doing something more profitable. I had to
tell the people around me “I loved them.” So I began with the hardest one, my
Dad. He was reading the newspaper. “Dad?” “Yes, what?” he asked without lowering
the newspaper. “Dad, I would like to talk to you.” “Well, talk,” he answered. “I
mean, no this is really important.” The newspaper came down three slow inches.
“What is it, son?” “Dad, I love you. I just need you to know that.” The
newspaper fluttered to the floor and my father did two things I could never
remember him doing before. He cried and he hugged me. And we talked all night. I
did the same thing with my mother and little brother. We shared things we had
kept secret for years. Then one day, I turned around and God was there. Right in
the midst of this awful darkness and expressed love, there was God. You were
right, Dr. Powell. God found me.
“Tom,” Powell said, “do me a favor. Come to my Theology of Faith Class and tell
them what you’ve just told me.” Tom kindly thought a few seconds he said,
“okay.” So they scheduled a date. But Tommy never made it. Before he died, Dr.
Powell and Tommy talked one more time. “I’m not going to be able to make your
class, Dr. Powell.” “I understand, I know, Tom.” “But will you tell them for me?
Will you tell the whole world for me?” “I will,” Powell said, “I’ll do my best.”
So
this morning, this Sunday after Easter, we join with Tommy and Dr. Powell and
all those who affirm the presence of God and who claim Him as Lord of their
future. “We are more than conquerors through Him who loves us, for I am
convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor
things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor anything else in all
creation will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ
Jesus our Lord.”
“We
have been given a new birth into a living hope,” and I bet my life that Jesus
will have the last word.
In
His name, Amen.
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