Why Easter Matters! (Easter Sermon)

What a wonderful Holy Week and Easter Sunday!   We hope you were blessed through our Holy Thursday Communion Service, the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday, and our marvelous Easter Services this past Sunday.  

Below is the sermon video and transcript from Sunday.  You can find all our sermon videos from Lent on our website - http://fumcocala.org/first-united-methodist-church-sermons/

I love Easter Sunday.  I love it as a pastor, but I loved it even more as a kid.  I grew up at a time when you had to get a new outfit to wear to church on Easter: The Easter suit. I don’t miss that so much as it inevitably involved wearing a tie. I loved the Easter basket, even if the ears where always mysteriously eaten off my chocolate rabbit. I remember being a bit homesick when I was in college and working at a church so I could not come home for Easter. In mail arrived a chocolate Easter rabbit from my mother, and yes – the ears where still eaten off. Childhood mystery solved.

I can also remember the sense of energy and excitement at church. Everybody came to church that day. Sunday school was packed. Everyone looked so nice. The smell of flowers and perfume wafted through the air – the protestant version of incense.  The music during worship was epic. There was joy as we worshipped and it all added up to the sense that this Sunday was different.

I do not, however, remember any of the sermons.  I am not sure I even remember many of my own Easter sermons. I guess that is because we all preach the same things Easter and they kind of run together after a while. What new can be said? 

I read the blog of a Christian author who lives near Toronto, Canada. He said most people in his town do not attend church anywhere, not even on Easter Sunday. The farmers market is open on Sunday mornings and is better attended than church services. But he says if you walk around that market on Sunday morning and ask people what Easter is about, they could tell you.

And most, if not all, of us do as well. If we are here this morning we probably know the story of Jesus.

• We know about his birth, his baptism by John in the Jordan River.
• We know about his temptations in the wilderness and his calling of the disciples.
• We know of the healing of the blind and lame, touching the lepers, eating with outcasts and sinners, and challenging the self-righteous.
• We know he said the kingdom of God is at hand, even if we aren’t quite sure what that means.
• And we know about Palm Sunday, the last supper, washing the disciples’ feet, praying in the garden of Gethsemane, the betrayal by Judas, his arrest, trial and torture, and the crucifixion.
• And we have heard the story of today. When it was not yet light Mary came to the tomb and found the stone rolled away. She ran to get the disciples who came and saw that everything was as she had said.  After they left, uncertain of what had happened, Mary remained, saddened that the body of her teacher was missing. When she bumps into the gardener she asks if he can help. That is when he says her name and she recognizes now that it is the resurrected Christ standing before her. He tells her not to hold onto him, but to go and share what she has seen and heard. And she went out proclaiming: “I have seen the Lord.”

We know the story. We know what happened. Our challenge is not the “what” of Easter, it is the “why.”  Why does Easter matter?  Why are we here instead of at a farmer’ market in Canada. Or at a brunch? Or still in bed? Why does any of this really matter beyond the nostalgia and traditions.

Why does it matter that Jesus really did rise from the dead?  In words of author and theologian Frederick Buechner, it matters because we want to believe that what we have been proclaiming as true for almost two thousand years really is true. We want to believe Jesus really is who we have been saying he is for all these years.  Or as Paul writes quite bluntly in 1 Corinthians 15: ¹⁴ If Christ hasn’t been raised, then our preaching is useless and your faith is useless. 

Easter matters, in other words, because it is the core belief of our faith.  Many religions believe that Jesus was a profound teacher and prophet. But we proclaim him as Lord. We place our faith and trust in Christ alone for healing, for salvation, for eternal life as we look forward to sharing in the resurrection.

For some of us Easter matters because we know the fragility of life. Some know more acutely than others that our own deaths are not that far away. Others of us have been confronted by the death of our spouse, or parents or grandparents.   Or have suffered through the death of a child or grandchild.  Easter reminds us all that death no longer has power over life. As Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 4: we want you to know about people who have died so that you won’t mourn like others who don’t have any hope.¹⁴ Since we believe that Jesus died and rose, so we also believe that God will bring with him those who have died in Jesus.

Until we come to grips with our own mortality and find in the face of that seeming finality the faith and hope we have in Jesus and his resurrection, we will never find true life. We will never know what it means to truly live in freedom, in joy, in gratitude. We will grip so tightly to this life thinking we have to hold on, never realizing how much more abundantly we could be living with the gifts that come from trusting God in all things.  

Each of us needs to hope in something bigger than ourselves. We need to know that the worst thing is never the last thing, even if it takes us a lifetime to fully understand and embrace that truth.

Easter also matters for much more personal reasons. A few chapters earlier in John’s gospel, Jesus is talking with Martha right after her brother Lazarus has died. She says that she does believe she will see him again in the future on the day of resurrection.  Jesus responds: I am the resurrection and I am the life. What he is saying that she does not yet understand is this: resurrection is not our future, it is our present. Easter matters because we can experience the power of resurrection in our life right now. The promises of God in Jesus Christ have already been fulfilled.  New life can begins at any moment.

For years I felt trapped. I come from a great family. I had tremendous educational opportunities and had the support of so many as I began to live out my call to serve as an ordained minister.  But I still struggled. I struggled with making the same mistakes over and over again. I would fall back into the same habits that would send me spiraling. I struggled with cycles of depression and doubt. It’s like I was a broken record.  My life should have been a great song, but it kept skipping as I repeated the same destructive cycle over and over again. Is this it? Is this really my life?  Why am I so insecure? Why am I so afraid? Why am I so in need of acceptance by others? Why am I so stuck?

I do not have some profound conversion story where it all went away at once. And I still feel some of those old problems lurking in the shadows.  But there were a few key moments where I felt God lift up the needle off that broken record and set it back down in a new place. And I began to live in a new way. I could not go back and erase the past. I still had to live with the consequences and the scars. But if you were listening to my life, you would hear new life beginning to spring forth, a little here and a little there as I slowly became – and indeed am still slowly becoming – the person God created me to be.

That is the Easter message I hope you hear this morning.  That is why Easter matters personally.

Do you feel trapped like I did?  Jesus offers you new life and new beginnings.

Do you feel broken or damaged?  In Jesus you can find healing and wholeness and worthiness.

Do you feel lost?  Through Jesus you can find direction and purpose.

Do you feel anxious? In Jesus you can find hope and a sense of peace in midst of storms.

Do you feel lonely? Through Jesus, and through those who follow him, you can find friendship.

Do you feel victimized? With Jesus you can find justice as we work towards the kingdom of God on earth.

We really do believe that the worst things we have done, the worst things that have been done to us, the worst that life or death can bring is never the last thing. Jesus’ resurrection changes everything.

Paul writes in Romans 8: ³⁵Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?  ³⁷No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. ³⁸For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, ³⁹nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

James Martin is a Catholic priest, editor-at-large for America magazine, and frequent author and commentator. He was interviewed this past week by Vanity Fair magazine. In that interview, he summarized the Easter message: (Easter is) a sign for us of what God can do. I think the message of Easter is that life is stronger than death, love is stronger than hatred, and hope is stronger than despair.

I often invite people to consider the disciples on Good Friday and on Holy Saturday who were terrified, despairing, and cowering behind closed doors because they could see nothing good coming from this. What Easter Sunday shows us is that there are always surprises in store for us. Nothing is impossible with God. God does something surprising.

Believe the good news. We are part of God’s new creation.  Nothing can separate us from that love and grace and hope and joy. Would you open up your hearts to Jesus, and let God surprise you once more?