"The Son also Rises"

Sermon: Easter Vigil year A

The Rev. Matt Kennedy

The Church of the Good Shepherd

I know a man for whom I have great respect and love. I'm not going to tell you his name because I know he sometimes reads my sermons on the website. He's one of the most influential men in my life. He's about sixty years old now and he's beginning to get very worried about where he is in life. More specifically, he's beginning to worry about death. Now, for younger people like me and even younger people like some of our acolytes and kids here this evening, we don't think about death much. In fact, I never really thought seriously about the possibility of my own death until I was in my twenties sitting in a C130 with a parachute strapped to my back and I suddenly realized, hey I could die. I mean really die, not just some glorious death like in the war movies, but I mean I could just jump out of this plane and if the parachute doesn't open I'll have about 5 seconds before I die.

Anyway, the recognition of my own mortality has been growing in my mind ever since then, but it's nothing like what this man feels. He told me a while back that he's beginning to feel like his life has become meaningless. I mean he has done some amazing things and built a great business and has a wonderful family, but now toward the end he's asking himself, what's the use? Everything I have, everything I've worked for my whole life, everything I love, well in about twenty or thirty years I won't be here anymore so what will it matter? And when I'm gone besides my family, no one will really notice all that much. This man is not an overly depressed kind of guy. He's normal, healthy, and he enjoys life, he's just come to the point where everyday he wakes up a little weaker, a little more tired, a little less enthusiastic about what the day holds because he's old enough to have experienced many days and mostly, their all the same. He sees the rest of his life, he told me, as a dark hallway leading to a dead end. No brightness on the horizon, nothing left to hope for or wait for. It's like he's just waiting to die.

It,s heartbreaking to listen to him sometimes, but it's even more heartbreaking to see what he does to try and help himself. This man has collected almost every self-help book that exists in the English speaking world. The Power of Positive Thinking, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People , How to be Happy in Seven Easy Steps . He plows through one after the other thinking that if he can just form the right state of mind, the right attitude, the right habits, the right kind of self-esteem and outlook on life he can at last find some peace of mind. Each new book works for a few months but none of them have really gotten to the core of his problem.

An atheist philosopher once noted how cruel nature was to human beings. Unlike any other animal or organism in the known universe, we have evolved the capacity, he said, to know and contemplate the inevitability of our own death. Death, he says, in that sense rules our lives. Death is humanity's constant companion and overlord. My friend knows and feels that this is true. He feels that truth in his very bones every morning. He sees it as the calendar flips from page to page, with nothing to stop it. He hears it in the news as friends his age begin to pass away for one cause or another. Death rules and fight it as he might, he knows it will not go away.

We are here tonight because my friend is wrong.

He's afraid of what the future holds because he's living in the past. He's living in a world that died two thousand years ago when Jesus of Nazareth having been dead for three days walked out of the stone tomb where he had been laid, alive.

He was not a ghost. He was not a spirit. He was not a figment of an overactive imagination. He did not rise from the tomb figuratively or metaphorically or "so to speak."

He rose alive, flesh and blood, body and soul, whole, complete, real and true.

He was seen by Mary Magdalene first, then his disciples all of whom not only saw him, but touched him and ate with him, and after that by over 500 witnesses who testified to what they'd seen. Jesus of Nazareth lives in the flesh.

The only difference between the body that Jesus died with and the body he rose in was that his new resurrected body was no longer a slave to death. Listen to the way Paul describes it, "Since Christ was raised from the dead he cannot die again; death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God."(Romans 6:9-10)

Notice the word tense there. The text does not say that Jesus was alive, but that he is alive, "the life he lives, he lives to God". Death, which had ruled over all humanity from the time of Adam's first sin, no longer rules over one man, Jesus of Nazareth.

Now what does this one fact mean for you and me and what does it mean for this man I respect and love. It one very important thing nicely summarized for us in Romans chapter 6:8 one verse before the passage we just read, "Now if we died with Christ we believe that we will also rise with him." For those of us willing to be united with Christ in his death, this passage is saying we will also be united with him in his resurrection.

There is in this verse not the promise of self-help, not the promise of a changed attitude, or outlook, not the promise of a new and fresh way of looking at death or thinking about death, but the promise of liberation, freedom, victory; the promise of a rea,l true resurrection for all who are willing to "die with Christ."

What does that mean?

You die with Christ when you do what I know some of you have just done this week, when you turn your life over to Christ. The old you, with all of the fear, guilt, anger, malice, destructiveness, envy, lust and deceit that once bound you dies on the cross of Jesus Christ. You're old self dies and a new resurrected self with a new heart rises in its place. Not another person, you, but you minus the chains of sin and death. You are made new. You have a new power, a new life, a new force, living in the very deepest part of you, God's Holy Spirit. The same Spirit and the same power by which and through which God raised Jesus from the dead lives inside you and pours his life into your life, his power into your weakness, his light into your darkness.

You rise with Christ to new life.

That means you're no longer a slave.

If you want to quit drinking. You can do it. If you want to quit cussing, or cheating, or lying, or lusting, you can do it. God has set you free from the chains of death and sin. You are resurrected to a new life that will never end.

But it's not just a spiritual resurrection that we're talking about here.

Those who die in Christ also rise with him not only spiritually, but physically too.

One day when Jesus returns to earth, he will call your name and you will rise from the dead, not a ghost or a spirit, but you, resurrected in flesh and blood. The same bodies, and yet transformed and made new, made like his body, a body with no death in it. And from that day you and I will continue to live with him and in him, our resurrected Lord, the source of all life and all light, forever, world without end.

Amen