Prayer: Come Holy Spirit, come.  Take my lips and speak with them.  Take our minds and think with them.  Take our hearts and set them in fire with love for you.  In Christ’s name, we ask it.  Amen.

This evening’s New Testament lesson is taken from the 15th chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians.  In this particular section of Corinthians, Paul is reminding the budding Christian community in Corinth of the focal point of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  He writes, “Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news that I proclaimed to you, which you in turn received, in which also you stand, through which also you are being saved…For I handed on to you as of first importance what I had in turn received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures.”  The fulcrum, on which the Christian faith rests, that Paul is lifting up for us to consider, is Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.  So tonight I am going to talk about resurrection.  In particular, I want to consider the question of why Jesus’ historical and bodily resurrection from the dead matters.  For if it happened, it happened nearly 2000 years ago.  How can an event of such remote antiquity have any great importance for us today?  Why on earth do Christians make such a big deal out of it?  Is it not irrelevant?  No, in fact, nothing could be more relevant for our lives.  My belief is that the resurrection resonates with our human condition.  It speaks to our needs as no other distant or current event could.   
  
I believe there are three central assurances, three central claims that you and I can make as Christians, which are a result of Jesus’ resurrection.  We are assured of God’s forgiveness.  We are assured of God’s power.  And, we are assured of God’s ultimate victory—God’s forgiveness, power, and victory.

Alexander Solhenitsyn, the Russian writer, said, “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor through [social] classes, nor between political parties…but right through every human heart and through all human hearts.”  As we are reminded each Sunday during our confession, we have sinned against God and our neighbor, in thought word and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.  We all have moments of which we are thoroughly ashamed.  Our conscience nags, torments, and at times, even, condemns us.  Marghanita Laski, a famous secular humanist in Great Britain, debating on television with a Christian, made this profound confession.  She said, “What I envy most about you Christians is your forgiveness.’’  Then she added, sadly, “I have no one to forgive me.”  You and I do.  Paul writes, “For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for ours sins in accordance with the scripture.”  In the Upper Room, on the night before Jesus was handed over to suffering and death, he took a cup of wine, blessed it, and gave it to his friends, and he said, “This is my blood of the New Covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”  With these words, Jesus forever linked his death with our forgiveness.  Jesus died in our place the death we deserve to die, in order that we might be spared and forgiven.  When we come forward in a moment, during Communion, to drink from the same cup the disciples drank from, know that you are forgiven, leave your guilt at the Altar, let the blood of Christ drown your fears.  You are forgiven of every mistake, of every bad decision, of every poor judgment.  God reached beyond the grave and gate of death to resurrect Jesus Christ forgiving us of every transgression, every sin.  Let Jesus’ resurrection convict you that you are forgiven.

Jesus’ resurrection, also, assures us of God’s power.  What do you think?  Is God able to change the human heart, to make cruel people kind, to make evil institutions uncorrupt, to make sick people well, to make self-centered people unselfish, to make immoral people self-controlled, or to make sour people sweet?  In the spring of 1965, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. went to Selma, Alabama to sponsor a voter registration drive.  Though the blacks represented over fifty percent of the population in Selma, they represented only one percent of registered voters.  The event climaxed in the famous, and at first painfully violent, march from Selma to Montgomery.  Once in Montgomery, at the steps of the Capitol, Dr King proclaimed, “My people listen!  The battle is in our hands.  I know today that some of you are asking. ‘How long will it take?’  I come to say to you this afternoon however difficult the moment…it will not be long, because the arm of the moral universe [which is God] is long but it bends toward justice.  How long?  Not long because my eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”  A few short months after this speech, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law.  An act of congress that ended discrimination against people of color who desired nothing more than to exercise their right to vote and be treated with dignity and respect.  Does God have the power to change the world?  Yes!  Jesus’ death and resurrection substantiates this claim.  Through the death of Jesus, God defeated death.  Therefore, with confidence, we can proclaim, “That all things are possible with God!”  Through the power of the Holy Spirit, God’s power is available to you and me, as well; all we have to do is ask for it.  With the power of the Holy Spirit, you can move mountains; you can change the world—even if it begins with changing yourself.

Finally, Jesus’ resurrection assures us of God’s ultimate triumph.  One of the major differences between the many religions and philosophical ideologies that exist in this world are their vision of the future.  Some offer no hope, but sink into existential despair.  A famous Atheist once wrote—just, fyi, this is seriously depressing, “No fires, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and the whole temple of mans achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.”  Pleasant thought.  Other religions think of history in more circular terms, as an endless cycle of reincarnations, an almost endless and excruciating journey of winning one’s own escape from our corrupt bodies.  Marxists continue to promise Utopia on earth, but the vision has lost serious credibility with the fall of communism in the west.  Secular humanists dream of taking control of their own evolution, but in so far as, this would involve genetic manipulation, the dream degenerates into a nightmare.  Christians, on the other hand, are profoundly confident about the future.  Apart from Christ, the fear of personal death and dissolution is almost universal.  This deep-rooted fear of death underlies our cultures obsession with youth and being young.  Woody Allen, the actor, typifies our cultures subconscious fear of death.  He is quoted as saying, “It’s not that I am afraid to die.  I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”  Living in terror of our own mortality is not the life of a Christian.  We have no need to live in fear.  Instead, we live with profound hope that God has opened the way of eternal life to us through the resurrection of Jesus.  Death has been defeated.  Abundant and everlasting life with the people we love, basking in God’s glory is the promise given to us through Jesus’ victory over death. 

Through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, we are assured of God’s forgiveness, power, and ultimate triumph.  As you are aware, one of the great gifts of being Episcopalian is that we form our identity from the best that both the Protestant and Catholic traditions offer.  Most Episcopal churches, though certainly not all, following the protestant tradition have crosses in them that are empty—that is an image of Jesus dying on the cross is not present, as is the case in this chapel.  The cross is empty so to speak.  The reason for this is to remind us that Jesus is not on the cross any longer.  Jesus is not dead.  Jesus is risen.  He is alive.  He is with us.  He is here.  Can you feel him?  Can you see him?  Jesus is not on the cross.  He is alive.  He is with us.  He is here.

Jesus’ resurrection from the dead is the Good News that we as the Church have been gifted with.  And, as you know, Gifts are meant to be given.  We are to share this Good News with the people around us.  You are the people of resurrection hope.  Tell others about Jesus.  That he is raised from the dead.  That he is here with us.  That he wants every person with life and breath to experience in their own lives God’s forgiveness, power, and ultimate victory.  Amen.

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