Sermon on Sunday, April 4
Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her. - John 20:18Earlier this week we had one of those perfect spring days—a day to get outside and get your hands dirty. We did just that at our place and got our garden going again. We made it a little bigger this year, so I was on my knees with the flat spade slicing off the sod. Sylvia was on worm patrol—vigilant in her self-assigned task of making sure that each worm was safely returned to the soil.
Once the sod was gone, I came through with a shovel and turned it all over, and then we both started to break apart the clods with our bare hands. Sylvia said to me, “Dad, I’m Mother Nature and you’re Father Nature, and we’re making the earth soft again.” Hearing her say that strengthened in me what I was already feeling—that simple wonderful sense of spring again.
Coming through Holy Week towards Easter this year, it’s been easy to sense resurrection in the air. New life, new growth—crocuses and daffodils exploding through the ground, buds on the raspberry bushes… and just weeks ago it all sat below a few inches of snow, locked in the frozen soil. But now here we are singing, “Jesus Christ is risen today,” and we sense it all around us.
So, friends, Happy Easter! Today we revisit the essence of our faith—a faith that is nurtured in our understanding of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For close to 2,000 years now, we’ve been attempting to respond to that story. The entire Christian movement—Catholicism, Presbyterianism, Pentecostalism… protestants, Mennonites, orthodox Christians, Charismatic Christians, Baptists, Methodists… all of it: organized religion and disorganized religion has attempted to live in response to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
Bono, the lead singer of the band U2, gave an interview a few years ago. It’s fairly well-known that Bono is a person of deep Christian faith, and he was asked specifically about his relationship with “organized religion.” Bono said, “It's true. I often wonder if religion is the enemy of God.
It's almost like religion is what happens when the Spirit has left the building.”
Maybe you’ve felt that before. Looking back on the resurrection scene in John’s gospel, we see an astonished woman, Mary, who meets her risen Lord. She’s terrified, shaken, amazed, confused… The sight of Jesus alive again has utterly changed her world, and we can well imagine her sprinting from the empty tomb to tell her friends what has happened—consumed with a passion to share what she has seen and heard.
But has the Spirit left the building? Have we become complacent? Comfortably disengaged from that same sense of resurrection awe and wonder? The old hymn, “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” ends with the line: “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.” My soul. My life. My all. That may be true—that the reality of God’s love in Jesus Christ demands everything we’ve got—our very best. And yet I would like to share with you one of the most common and compelling religious question of our day. In essence, that question is this: “Why church?”
I’ll elaborate. Why go to church? Why do we need church? Or, to put an even finer point on it: If Romans chapter 8 is true—and nothing can separate us from the love of God¬, then why should we strive so much to stay connected? Why should anyone bother with institutionalized religion? Why does it make a difference and what are we hoping to accomplish with all this churchy-ness? Sometimes the question comes out like this: “I’m a spiritual person and I believe in God. Why do I need church on top of that?”
For years and years, organized religion has answered these questions with “So that…” You go to church so that you can be a Christian. You need church so that you can be saved. And even: You go to church so that you can experience God’s presence. That’s interesting, isn’t it? In the beginning, when Mary ran from the empty tomb to tell the others that she had seen the Lord, the “church” was a wonder-filled band of misfits who couldn’t believe their ears. But in the eyes of many today, the church has become the establishment—the be-all, end-all broker of spirituality. It’s no wonder, then, that many are questioning its relevance. It’s no wonder that more and more of those who perhaps think of themselves as “spiritually hungry but institutionally suspicious” are leaving the church in their dust—especially when the church itself can’t come up with a compelling enough reason for its own existence.
This may not seem like a terribly wise thing to do—questioning the relevance of church on Easter morning. But maybe there’s no quicker way to irrelevance than failing to do so. And so with the time that I have left this morning, I’d like to offer something of my own answer to the question, “Why church?”
For me, and for many of you who are part of this particular family of faith, my sense is that our answer to the question, “Why church?” does not begin with the words, “So that,” but “Because of.” Because of… And there’s a difference. There’s a big difference between “I go to church so that I can experience God’s presence” and “I go to church because of my experience of God’s presence.”
There’s a huge difference between “I go to church so that I can be close to God” and “I go to church because of God’s closeness.” You see, at its very core, Christianity is a because of faith, and not a so that faith. What that means is that Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection articulates a truth of God’s love and not a condition.
Think about the Holy Week we’ve just been through. Unfortunately, there is a forceful and convincing “so that” explanation of the cross. And it’s this: Jesus died on the cross to take the punishment for your sins—a punishment, by the way, that you deserved in the first place. This was God’s gift of grace for you. Your job now is to receive that gift so that it can be yours. So that… Lined up behind that theology are a whole bunch of other “so that’s.” Accept Jesus so that you can be saved. Pray so that God will hear you. Be faithful so that you can be acceptable to God…
But friends, I don’t believe that Christianity is a “so that faith.” Rather, it’s a “because of faith.” So let me share with you a “because of” explanation of the cross. It’s this: God loves us. God loves us so much that nothing can keep God from us. Jesus’ life is really the life of Emmanuel—God with us—God who couldn’t be kept from us.
One way to think of the cross is to think of Jesus taking blame and punishment for our sins. But another is to simply say that on the cross, God said to us, “This is how I am with you. This is how I am with you! I am with you in your pain, with you in your brokenness. Nothing can keep me from you and nothing can ever separate me from you. You can betray me like Judas and deny me like Peter, but I will still always go to the ends of the earth for you. I will still be faithful to you—even when it means giving up my life for you.”
So many have tried to reduce Christianity to a series of yes-no questions and to the grand litmus test of whether or not you’re saved. But on the cross and out of the empty tomb, Jesus Christ says to the world, “It been done. And God’s love isn’t something that you have the power to undo. You can leave it, deny it, doubt it, and refuse it, but you can’t make God’s love any less real.”
I am a part of a Christian family of faith because of that love. I worship in a church family because I want to live my life in light of that love—that all-consuming, gracious love that I have come to understand in the life of Jesus. That’s why I am a part of this church—and because I believe that the church, at its best, can be a living, intentional community of that same love.
Easter itself offers a series of questions for us, and they all use the words, “because of.” Because of God’s love expressed in the life of Jesus, how will you live? Because of Jesus’ love for not only his friends, but also his enemies, whom will you love? Because of God’s love for you, can you love yourself? Because of God’s faithfulness to you, can you be faithful? Because of God’s passion for humanity, will you reach out in acts of compassion? Because God’s love in Jesus rose from the grave, can you trust that love never dies?
The Christian faith is a “because of” faith, and because of that, it’s good to be church here with you. Happy Easter. Amen.
Welcome to the Eastertide. A resurrection quote for you today from Henri Nouwen. May we be mindful today that “nothing that belongs to God will ever go to waste.”
