The Good Shepherd Laying Down His Life For Us

                                                           Easter 4 2015 (Year B)

                                   Acts 4:5-12;Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18

Father Adam Trambley

April 26, 2015 St.John’s Sharon

In this morning’s second reading, John writes, “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us – and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.”   The two parts of this statement are important for us, and more than a little bit overwhelming.  After Lent and Easter, we know that Jesus laid down his life for us, but here John lays out one implication of Jesus’ activity for us: that we ought to lay down our lives for each other, as well.

This fourth Sunday of Easter is sometimes called Good Shepherd Sunday because Collect of the Day, which is the prayer we say at the beginning of the services, talks about Jesus as the Good Shepherd of God’s people, and some of the readings have a similar theme.  The twenty-third Psalm is one of the most familiar parts of scripture, and talks about the Lord as our shepherd, and Jesus appropriates that shepherd image to himself in our gospel.  Jesus describes the good shepherd in the same terms that John uses in his letter.  “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep,” Jesus says.

For Jesus, the quality that distinguishes him as the good shepherd is precisely that he is willing to lay down his life for his sheep.  The hired hand doesn’t have that much love for the sheep.  If the wolf shows up, never mind a lion or a bear, the hired hand is out of there.  Let’s face it; sheep taste better to wolves than scrawny lads hired to guard the sheepfold.  When the hired hand runs away, the wolf will leave him alone and go after the sheep. But the Good Shepherd would rather die than let the wolf get his sheep because he loves his sheep and they are all special to him.  He knows them each by name and they recognize his voice. 

One way the Good Shepherd has laid down his life for his sheep is through Jesus’ passion and death.  Human beings through their own sin and disobedience decided to invite the wolf into the sheepfold.  God wants what is good for us, so when we disobey him, we are basically inviting the powers that want to destroy us to come in and have at it.  We could eat the green grass that Jesus has led us to, but instead we want to try chewing rocks.  We could lie down beside the still waters, but we want to play hide and seek by where the wolves are sleeping.  We could follow along behind Jesus, but we think the grass is greener on the other side and wander off and get ourselves lost.  When all those things happen, our Good Shepherd does not abandon us to face the consequences of our own errors.  Instead, he himself deals with our situation, going as far as to lay down his life so that death could no longer threaten us.  Ever since Jesus died and rose again, we never have to worry about facing death by alone, because even in death, Jesus is now with us.  Not even death can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord, and if death can’t, nothing else is able to, either.  Jesus died fighting off that big bad wolf on our behalf.

But just because Jesus has overcome death, doesn’t mean it isn’t threatening to us.  The twenty-third psalm has this powerful verse: Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil; for you are with me.  A lot more paths lead through the valley of the shadow of death than we might wish.  Death casts his deep, dark shadow in far too many places.  An earthquake in Nepal.  Bombings in Syrian churches.  Plane crashes.  Car accidents.  Terrorist attacks.  Cancer diagnoses.  The slowly accumulating ravages of time that just wear out our mortal bodies.    Looking up at the steep cliffs on either side of us while we go through such experiences is more than a bit scary.  The threats are many and the way ahead is not always clear.  The shadows confuse us, depress us, and threaten to take away our hope.  But with our Good Shepherd, we don’t need to lost hope.  We do not need to lose our way.  And we do not need to be afraid of any evil.  Nothing that happens to us will ultimately be evil, because Jesus is with us and evil can’t win when he is there.  Evil can’t win, can’t touch us, can’t harm us.

Sometimes in those dark valleys, we confuse the real evils from the vagaries of human life.  The real evils that Jesus is always protecting us from are things like hatred and resentment toward whoever or whatever we think got us into this unpleasant situation to begin with.  That hatred and bitterness is the kind of hardheartedness that leads us to kick God out of our lives and turn way his saving love.  Another evil is an amnesia about God’s love for us as his children, where we forget what God has done for us or that he is always on our side.  Still another evil is selfishness that can beset us when we are threatened, where we think we are entitled to whatever we want because the going is difficult, instead loving each other and trusting God to give us what we need.  Real evil separates us from God and one another, and it damages the soul.

We might associate whatever natural processes are causing us difficulty, or are threatening our health, as evil, but they are not necessarily evil.  They may just be part of how life works, even if we don’t understand why the world is set up that way.  If God chooses, he can protect us from any threat and heal any illness, but for some reason that we can’t comprehend, he doesn’t always.  But even in those cases where things don’t seem to work the way we would want them to, we can trust that even in the valley of the shadow of death, even in the shadow of death we find on the other side of our own deaths, we shall fear no evil for God is with us, and, as the last line of the psalm states, “I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.”  Even if the valley of the shadow of death leads us through our tombs instead of around them, Jesus is still with us, ensuring that no evil can harm us after we die any more than it did before we died.   Jesus ensured our protection even after death by laying down his life for us on the cross, descending to the dead, and then rising from the grave.  We celebrate that resurrection throughout this Easter season, as well as every day of our Christian lives.

To return to First John, just like Jesus laid down his life for us, we are to lay our lives down for one another.  We don’t lay our lives down for quite the same purpose as Jesus did.  We aren’t capable of overcome the powers of sin, death and the devil once and for all.  We aren’t the Messiah, but we are supposed to think and act like Jesus, our Messiah, did.  Jesus’ attitude was that it was worth giving up everything, including his life, for people who were messed up, sinful, disobedient, recalcitrant slobs like we are.  Nobody who Jesus died for was worthy of his death. Nobody was more important than him, as if he were the secret service agent taking a bullet. Nobody was even close either to the glory of his divine nature or to the sinlessness of his human nature. But Jesus didn’t care.  He died for us who are so far below him, emptying himself entirely, carrying his cross, and washing our feet along the way.  We are called to follow Jesus, talking up our cross, washing feet, and laying down our lives for one another.

Very few people are called to go so far as to die for someone else.  But our attitude, to be like Jesus’, is that we ought to love anyone and everyone enough to lay down our lives for them if need be.  We are supposed to remember that everyone we meet, from our most beloved family members to our worst enemies at school or work to the most annoying people we meet in line, is someone that Jesus loved enough to die for and that we should also consider them as someone we would die for if necessary.

Since there are limited ways to actually help someone by dying for them, John provides an immediate concrete example of how we can take a step toward dying for another.  He writes, How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refused to help?  John has just lowered the bar dramatically.  If you aren’t called to lay down your life for someone, you should at least help them.  If you see someone who is hungry and you have food in your pantry then feed them.  If you have clothing and someone has no shoes or no coat, then give them what they need.  If you have a checkbook with anything in it and there are people who are homeless or victims of a natural disaster or refugees or in any other kind of need, then write the check and send it to somebody someplace that will do something.  If we don’t, John says, we clearly don’t have God’s love abiding in us. 

Certainly there are also other ways for us to help people in need that come even closer to dying to self.  We could give our time, perhaps our most valuable commodity, to others.  We can give our hearts to them, listening to those who need friendship and love.  We can pour out our souls in prayer before God on behalf of those in need, which is its own type of dying to ourselves for the sake of another.

Note why John says we should people: not because they deserve it (because they might not); not because if we give generously, we will receive generously (although we probably will); not because by helping people we help Jesus (even though we do).  John says to help people in need because it is one component of laying down our life for someone else, and we are supposed to follow Jesus in doing just that.  And since Jesus laid down his life for us and has taken away any evil that death could do to us, then we can confidently lay down our lives for others, or even just give them what we need, confident that as we follow Jesus, we need not fear any evil.

Through Jesus’ Good Shepherding, Jesus loves us and lays down his life for us.  We fear no evil, even in the valley of the shadow of death because he is with us.  We can follow Jesus and help others in their time of need, laying down our lives for them in imitation of Jesus who laid down his life for us.

            We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us – and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.

Children of God -- 1 John 3:1-4

                                                           Easter 3 2015 (Year B)

                                    Acts 3:12-19;Psalm 4; 1 John 3:1-7; Luke 24:36b-48

Father Adam Trambley

April 19, 2015 St.John’s Sharon

This morning’s passage from First John is an incredible declaration.  See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.  John just lays it out for us, without any of the prerequisites, restrictions, or theological footnotes we might expect from such a profound statement.  So often we think of Scripture as a series of conditional promises designed to keep us all well-behaved, instead of the working-out of God’s unfathomable love and effective salvation for the world. Certainly this first letter of John talks about sin and purity, and we’ll look at some of that later, but we can’t really explain what we should do until we understand who we are.  And who we are is first and foremost children of God. 

We may be many other things, as well – Episcopalians, Americans, men, women, children, mothers, fathers,  grandparents, retirees, working folk, college graduates, white people, black people, Asian people, Hispanic people, Native American people, Irish, Italian, Welsh, Polish-Americans, smart people, clumsy people, good people, the right people, the family black sheep, alcoholics, ex-cons, Rotarians, the treasurer of the PTA, cancer survivors, people with mental illness, people with dementia, people who can’t walk steadily anymore, good cooks, bad cooks, green thumbs, black thumbs, Steelers Fans, Browns Fans, Pirates Fans, Indians Fans, bald people, beautiful people, thin people, not-as-thin-as-we-used-to-be people, nerds, geeks, goths, emo’s, jocks, queen bees, wanna-bes, steampunks, Democrats, Republicans, Independents, people who hate politics or people who are just the way we are and you’all can just deal with it.  Whatever qualities we use to group ourselves with others or whatever thoughts we have about ourselves running through our heads, they are all secondary to the over-arching group that God puts us into and the way that God thinks about us.  To God, we are children of God, and we call ourselves that because God has shown us great love and created us as his children.  It really is just that simple.  Being children of God means that we are loved unconditionally by God as we are.  There is nothing we can do to make God love us any more – we are already loved as fully as possible by the source of all the love in the universe.  There is also nothing we can do to make God love us any less, because if God’s love depended on how we acted, then we wouldn’t be talking about our heavenly Father’s love for his children.  Being God’s children also means that we are destined to receive an inheritance of eternal life filled with joy and every good thing, because our Father can give us such unfathomable good things and he wants to.

The next line of the reading deals with one fundamental problem to the first statement, namely, that we don’t really believe.  We don’t see ourselves first and foremost as God’s children, living in the midst of an unshakeable love from the most powerful being in the cosmos.  Mostly we don’t see ourselves this way because nobody else does either.  John writes: The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.  The world didn’t accept Jesus and his love for it, so the world can’t understand the love God has for us or the love of God that we are trying to live out and witness.  Since the world doesn’t accept Jesus, it tears us apart, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally, but either way we can forget who we are as children of God.

Some of the world that does not want to recognize us as children of God is actively hostile.  We have a multi-billion dollar advertising industry dedicated to telling us that we are not lovable without their product.  Really, how could God or anyone else love someone with age spots, or a receding hair line, or bad breath, or no plastic surgery, or dorky clothes, or an old car, or, horror of horrors, who drank Pepsi instead of Coke or Miller Lite instead of Budweiser.  When we spend hours a day seeing surgically altered and computer enhanced people telling us how happier, prettier and sexier we’d be if only we took their self-interested advice, most of us can start to believe the lie that we are not unconditionally lovable.

But the real difficulties for us usually stem from people who really do love us as best they can, and who have tried to know God, but just couldn’t do it fully -- meaning they are human.  Too often we have internalized early messages from parents or other authority figures who did tell us that, in effect, we weren’t fully loved or entirely good enough, unless we did or didn’t do something.  Usually, folks didn’t mean it, and they may not have even actually said it, but somehow that is what we ended up believing.  Maybe we picked up their fear about any number of bad consequences that could happen if we played in traffic, or got too close to the stove, or climbed the tree, or didn’t save our money, or didn’t study for the test, or whatever it was.  Our brains didn’t understand the dangers they saw.  We only understood what felt like a limitation on love, and we need to let go of those limitations to believe we are children of God.  Or maybe something happened that we didn’t understand but assumed was our fault, and internalized the shame and guilt from a family divorce, or an accident, or an illness.  Again, we have a hard time believing we are God’s children if we are responsible for tragic occurrences we really had no control over.  Or maybe someone just inadvertently overlooked something important to us or said something that struck us to the core in ways that made us believe we weren’t loved, or we felt like a burden during difficult times, or maybe we were around people who really weren’t all that loving.  In any of those situations, the full power and love of Jesus Christ wasn’t recognized by people who didn’t know themselves as children of God and couldn’t help us feel like children of God either.  To really believe we are children of God, part of the work for us today is to recognize where in our hearts we doubt it, and ask God to help our unbelief and heal those parts of our lives as they are brought to light . 

This belief that we are children of God would be enough great good news, but John doesn’t stop there.  He says, Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.  What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.  Just when we are finally coming to understand the depth of what it means to be children of God, John goes even deeper.  We are God’s children now, but in the future, what we are is going to be even better.  We are God’s children now, but in the future, we are going to be like Jesus.  We are God’s children now, but in the future, we are going to be beloved children of God in a perfected, resurrected body like Jesus has, be citizens of the eternal Kingdom of God, and live more fully that we can even imagine today.  The gospel descriptions of the post-resurrected Jesus give us some glimpse of what this life is like – moving where we want to go, having fellowship with our friends, eating and drinking, understanding the purposes of God and living completely into them.  We don’t have a lot of details, but when we see Jesus at the end, we will become like him.  Our inheritance as children of God is nothing less than to join fully in the resurrected life of Jesus.

Since the hope of our inheritance is nothing less than a resurrected life like Jesus, we purify ourselves, just as he is pure.  We are not dabbling in a life destined for the trash bins or to be recycled for some future reincarnation.  We will be like him, and we want to see him as he is.  Unless we’d rather stay locked in, looking at our sources of sin.  Unless we’d rather look at whatever fleeting pride, pleasure and passing fancy captivate us more than the beauty of Jesus.  Unless we’d rather run from the love of our heavenly Father and spend our eternal lives seeking something somewhere else.   

But better for us to purify ourselves by doing our best to love and serve him now as a way to prepare ourselves to be blissfully by Jesus forever.  Sure, sometimes we mess up, and look away – we’re still human, even if human children of God.  But Jesus loved us enough to die for us, so he will forgive us if we turn back to him. If we’ve gotten so turned around that we can’t find him, we can call out and our Good Shepherd will come find his lost sheep.  Jesus loves us.  Our heavenly Father loves us.  We are called children of God, and that is what we are. What we will be, we don’t know yet, but we know that we are God’s children now.  Cherish it.  Celebrate it.  Never let anyone or anything make you forget it. 

    

Jesus Walking Through Our Barriers to Belief

                                                           Easter 2 2015 (Year B)

                                  Acts 4:32-35;Psalm 133; 1 John 1:1-2:2; John 20:19-31

Father Adam Trambley

April 12, 2015 St.John’s Sharon

The end of the today’s Gospel passage lays out why the evangelist wrote the Gospel, and why we read it.  “Now Jesus did many other sings in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.  But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.”  The point of everything – everything written in John’s gospel, everything written in all the gospels, everything written in the Bible, and everything we do in church, and pretty much everything of any importance at all – the point of everything is Jesus, and our coming to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through Jesus we may have abundant, eternal life.  Jesus’ own passionate desire, as well as God’s eternal plan, is that we come to accept him as our Lord and God, and become full citizens of his everlasting, glorious kingdom.  Jesus went to great lengths to open this life for us.  Jesus emptied himself and became a human being with all the difficulties human life entails; he taught people who didn’t listen so well; he healed people who were dirty and smelly and not always grateful; he cast out demons, which just wasn’t pretty; he fasted forty days in the wilderness; he went to parties with tax collectors and prostitutes, which, come to think of it, might not have been so bad; he was constantly hounded by Pharisees, scribes or other religious authorities who questioned everything he did; he was betrayed by one of his friends; he was tried and abused by Jerusalem and Roman officials; he died on a cross; he went down to hell to break everyone out of death’s jail; he rose from the dead; and then kept showing up to his disciples so that they believed and had enough to share with those who came after them.  Jesus did all this so that we might believe he is the Son of God and have life in his name, and thanks be to God that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote it down. 

The problem, of course, is that belief is not so easy for some of us, and probably all of us have had some crisis of faith or significant questioning at one time or other.  Maybe something terrible happened to us or someone we love that shook our faith.  Maybe some sort of hyper-rationalism made us doubt things like miracles or God or any kind of eternal life.  Maybe we’ve seen Christians who are such moral failures that we throw baby Jesus out with the bathwater.  Maybe the Christian fundamentalism of the past few decades has created false choices in our minds between religion and science or between love and truth or between something our heart or mind tells us and what the Bible reportedly says.  Maybe faith and morality and God and Jesus have gotten wrapped up too tightly with a relationship with a particular parent or grandparent or priest or pastor or church in such a way that ups and downs of that relationships have made it hard for us to believe and experience the unconditional love of God in Jesus Christ.  Maybe we made significant mistakes in our life and are deathly afraid that believing in eternal life can only mean eternal punishment.  Maybe we feel a powerful pull from God deep in our soul and know that opening our hearts to a full belief in God is going to turn our lives upside down, and we’d really rather be left alone for now, thank you very much.  Maybe we have spent decades saying the right prayers and attending the right church services, and the right church meetings, and the right church outreach projects, and the right Sunday school classes, and the right church dinners, and just aren’t feeling whatever it is that faith should feel like anymore.  Or maybe we are new to all this and no one has given us a reason to believe yet. 

The good news today is that regardless of what the barriers to belief in our life are, Jesus can overcome them.  The story of Thomas is only one of a number of post-resurrection accounts where doubt is present in Jesus’ followers.  If Jesus’ closest disciples had doubts even when they heard reports from their friends or, in some cases, were even seeing the risen Jesus himself, then doubts in those of us two thousand years down the road from that week in Jerusalem can certainly be expected.  But the disciples’ doubts were not their final disposition, nor should we expect our own uncertainties to be permanent barriers to a complete relationship with God.  

The disciples we hear about in the gospel today are locked in a room because they are afraid.  Jesus shows up, and he says, “Peace be with you.”  Jesus overcomes the first set of barriers the disciples put up – their fear and the locked doors—by showing up.  Then Thomas, one of the twelve who was away on Easter evening, puts up another barrier.  When he hears what happened, he says he doesn’t believe it.  Not only that, he says he won’t believe it unless he sticks his finger in the nail holes of Jesus’ hands and puts his hand in the spear hole in Jesus’ side.  This attitude is not only stubborn, but a bit gruesome, as well.  But this attitude is not too much for Jesus, who comes back the next Sunday and again comes through the locked doors, and says “Peace be with you,” and then offers his hands and side to Thomas, who has the good sense not to go up and poke around in them.  Instead, Thomas just says, “My Lord and my God.”  Jesus has overcome the barriers to belief that Thomas put up. 

Jesus is also able to dismantle whatever walls we have built up between ourselves and him, to open any doors we have locked (or to just glide gracefully through them), to allay any fears, to assuage any guilt, to dismantle any pride, or even to meet whatever bizarre and utterly unreasonable demands we may have made as prerequisites for our faith.  But know that God does have a sense of humor – if you decide you won’t believe unless you win the lottery, you might win the door prize lottery and find yourself the recipient of a glow-in-the-dark Jesus nightlight.  Most of us, in fact, don’t need great wonders.  We just need the small signs in our life that let us know that Jesus is paying attention.  If we look for them, Jesus generally gives them to us.  These signs are all around us.  For me, recently, God provided a zip-lock bag on somebody’s front lawn when I was out walking the dog and needed a bag.  I knew it was God.  God will offer you the signs you need in the language that speaks to you.

Once God does speak to us, whether by Jesus showing up some Sunday night or in the more pervasive signs around us, our barriers to faith get taken down and we find ourselves believing.  That belief brings two immediate practical consequences.

Just like he did on Easter with his disciples, when Jesus comes to us, he says, “Peace be with you,” and gives us the authority to forgive each other’s sins.  Our divine, saving faith in Jesus has two immediate consequences.  The first is that we have his peace.  This peace flows out of the conviction that God is in charge of everything and we are OK.   Christ’s peace does not guarantee that there will be no trouble or difficulties.  But we can rest assured that God’s will is done in the end, and that God’s will for us is very good and we don’t have to allow the small stuff in between to destroy our faith or take away our joy.  The second consequence of our belief in Jesus is the renewing of the community of God’s people around us.  With Jesus’ authority to forgive sins, we can repair the broken relationship we have with each other.  We have joy in Christ’s peace and can share Christ’s love with others as immediate consequences of our faith.

Today, one week after Easter, when we read about Jesus’ overcoming the doubts of Thomas and the disciples, we can offer Jesus our own doubts.  Then, being open to belief, we can be aware of times and places when Jesus does in fact show up in our lives to bring faith to us so that we can have the fullness of eternal life with him.

Easter 2015: Don't Just Hold On -- Go Tell Somebody

                                                             Easter 2015 (Year B)

                                  Acts 10:34-43;Psalm 118; 1 Cor 15:1-11; John 20:1-18

Father Adam Trambley

April 5, 2015 St.John’s Sharon

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

The Lord is Risen, Indeed!  Alleluia!

When Mary Magdalene encounters the risen Lord Jesus outside of the tomb, she wants to worship him.  She wants to hold onto him, right there, in that very spot where the Easter miracle occurred, and just praise him for his amazing return to her.  She wants to stop everything and to take a moment to be overwhelmed with wonder, awe and gratitude with her risen Lord.  Jesus, who we would think now has all the time in the world – having conquered death and all – says, “Do not hold on to me…but go to my brothers and say to them ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”  The good news must go out to the whole world, and that proclamation starts immediately with Mary Magdalene going to tell Jesus’ disciples, “I have seen the Lord.”

Of course, Jesus’ appearances don’t stop with Mary Magdalene, but they have the same purpose.  Peter says that Jesus appeared, “not to all people, but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses,” Paul summarizes those people Jesus appears to, noting the gospel he received through Jesus’ appearance and then passed on to others.

So, too, we who are here today are not meant to come just to worship.  We come to encounter the Risen Lord in word and sacrament so that we can go out to witness to the gospel, to tell our brothers and sisters, to proclaim the good news so that others may come to believe.   

But maybe somebody here this morning isn’t clear on precisely what that good news is.  Maybe somebody here this morning showed up because they were seeking something and God led them to this place.  Maybe somebody here remembered the love and joy of Easter mornings long past and is trying to reconnect that childhood experience with their adult understanding.  Maybe somebody just wandered in, desperately trying to figure out what chocolate bunnies have to do with Jesus.

Well, I’m not sure about the last one, but I’m willing to keep eating them until I figure it out.  But the great good news is this:

Jesus Christ, the Son of God come into the world two-thousand-some years ago in Palestine, went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil.  He went to Jerusalem on the Jewish feast of the Passover, when God’s people celebrated their liberation by the mighty hand of God from bondage to the earthly power of Pharaoh.  While he was there, Jesus was betrayed by one of his followers and the religious and political leaders had him put to death on a cross.  On that cross, Jesus died for our sins according to what was written in the Scriptures.  When he had died, a prominent person asked the Roman governor for his body, and he laid him in a nearby cave that no one had been buried in previously, and a large stone was rolled across the opening to that tomb.   

Having died, Jesus made his descent into hell, not the fiery furnace of punishment we so often hear about, but the place of darkness and gloom where the devil held all humanity after death since the first sin of our parents in the Garden of Eden.  Into this diabolical prison, Jesus came, a human being who had died, but also the eternal Lord of Life, sinless and innocent, the unblemished Lamb of God.  Unworthy of his presence and unable to hold him, hell was no match for Jesus.  He shook its very foundations, defeated the devil, and threw down the gates of death.  Taking the hands of our parents Adam and Eve, the first creatures made in the image and likeness of God and the first to sin, Jesus led them and the generations of their descendants out of their tombs and back to God. 

Then, with hell no longer having dominion over him or able to hold anyone ever again, and with the stone of his own tomb rolled aside as he broke everyone out of death’s prison, Jesus rose from the grave and appeared to his disciples.  After appearing to them, he ascended to his Father and our Father, his God and our God.  Now everyone who calls upon the name of Jesus will be saved and everyone who follows him and dies is also able to follow him through the now-eternally-open gates of death to be with him in paradise.  At the end of what we know as this world, he will return to bring the fullness of resurrection to all. 

This is our great good news.  In Jesus Christ we are able to be forgiven, because there is no power in hell that can hold our sins, our faults or our shame over us.  Whatever we have done, whatever we have experienced, whatever our disappointments or failings, Jesus’ death and resurrection allows us to live forgiven and freed in this life because we know that hell cannot hold onto us in the next life.  At the same time, we need not fear any illness, any weakness, any difficulties, because when this life ends we follow our Lord Jesus Christ into the abode of death only to come quickly out the other side.  Even in death, we follow the path that Jesus trod, and we his sheep follow his voice into the eternal paradise of God. 

So this morning, while we may tarry an hour in worshipping our Blessed Savior who lived and died and rose for us, Jesus’ Easter instruction is to go and tell somebody, to be his witnesses with our words, with our deeds, or even our very lives.  The world desperately needs to hear this good news.

So witness with words.  A colleague told me she was buying an assortment of Easter items this week, some more churchy and some more tasty, and the store clerk said, “Oh, you celebrate both stories?”  Easter does not have two stories.  Easter has one story of the resurrection to new life of Jesus Christ, and eggs and spring flowers and beautiful colors all symbolize new life after dark, drab death.  We may be called to share the good news of Easter with words, so that everyone remembers what our culture’s seasonal symbols mean.

Or witness with deeds.  When we truly believe that death cannot hold us, we are free to live extravagant lives of love.  We can care for the sick, unafraid of death and disease.  The earliest Christians helped convert the Roman Empire by caring for plague victims when the smart people were running to the hills surrounding the cities.  We can serve each other, knowing that our time is not limited to this life. And we can forgive one another, regardless of what brokenness has seeped into our relationships, because nothing anyone can do to us can keep us from walking through death into eternal life with Jesus.  We may be called to share the good news of Easter with deeds, so that everyone can experience the freedom and love of the resurrection.

Or even witness with lives.  On Thursday, gunmen entered a college in Garrissa, Kenya.  In at least some cases, they entered students’ dorm rooms and asked if they were Christian.  Those who said they were Christian were killed.  In all, 147 people died for their belief in Christ.  On the surface, this may seem a tragic tale to talk about on such a glorious, festive morning. Certainly, such murders are cause for sadness, wailing and lamentation.  But we have heard the good news, and we know that story does not end with murders, or funerals, or revamped campus security and revised foreign policy.  The story ends with almost 150 new martyrs making the very short trip through the land of the dead before dancing over every lock, chain, and door devised by the devil, skipping through hell’s open entryway, and taking their place at the endless banquet tables in heaven among the countless saints from ages past, listening to the harmonies of choirs of angels with the four-living creatures laying down a booming bass-line and watching the shimmering colors as the light of the flaming seraphim bounces off the jewel-lined, crystal walls.  Christians throughout history have been called to that very same witness and now enjoy that same glorious life.  Jesus says those who lose their lives for his sake and the sake of the gospel save them.  Some here may be called to share the good news of Easter with our lives, and such sacrificial witness does not go unrewarded by God.      

Listen this morning to Jesus’ Easter instruction.  Do not just hold onto him yourselves.  Go tell our brothers and sisters the good news:  Alleluia! Christ is Risen! 

The Lord is Risen, Indeed! Alleluia!