Transcript
In the Christian life, Easter is not just a day. It is a season. It is not merely a season. It is a place to stand, and a place from which to view life. Hear then God's word as it is read from the first letter of Paul to the Thessalonians, the fourth chapter beginning at the 13th verse. But we would not have you ignorant, brethren, concerning those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do,
who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so through Jesus God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with the cry of command, with the archangel's call, and
with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we shall always be with the Lord. Therefore, comfort one another with these words. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray. Let the good news come now, O Lord, not only in
word but in power, in the Holy Spirit, and with full assurance, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. When Gladstone was Prime Minister of Great Britain, he was approached one day by the son of a dear friend. Mr. Gladstone, the young man, began, I would appreciate your giving me a few moments of your time. I would like to lay before you my hopes and plans for my future. Observing Gladstone's evident interest, the young man went on to
spell out his dreams. First he said, I should like to study law. Yes, said the great statesman, and what then? Then, sir, I would like to gain entrance to the Bar of England. Yes, young man, and what then? Then, sir, I hope to have a place in the House of Lords. Yes, young man, and what then? Then, I hope to do great things for Britain even as you have done. Yes, young man, and what then? Then,
sir, I hope to retire and take life easy. Yes, young man, and what then? Well, Mr. Gladstone, then I suppose I will one day die. Yes, young man, and what then? The youth hesitated a moment, obviously perplexed. I'm sorry, sir, he finally replied. I have never thought any further than that. Gladstone looked at him sternly and said, young man, you are a fool. Go home and think your life through. Many of us, perhaps many of us
here this morning, have never thought any further about our lives than that young man. And like him, we are the victims of an inadequate horizon of hope. You and I, by nature, are future-oriented. We are created to live in hope. Without a confident faith in the future, we deny our own humanity. Some time ago, a psychologist asked some 3,000 people this question. What are you living for? She was surprised to discover that 90%
of those questioned were simply putting up with the present while they waited for the future. They were standing around waiting for something to happen tomorrow, waiting to graduate, waiting to fall in love, waiting to be promoted, waiting for their children to grow up, waiting to retire, waiting for someone to die. This waiting game prompted one cynic to observe life is what happens to you while you're making other plans. Now, it may be true that many of
us allow our todays to slip away while we're waiting for our tomorrows, but it's even more true that without a hope in our tomorrows, there would be no todays worth living. Halford Luckock tells of a dinner party he once attended. One guest fascinated the others with a story about the little town of Flagstaff in the months before it was covered with water from a lake created by a new dam. He told how all the improvements, all
repairs in the whole town stopped abruptly when the creation of the dam was announced. Why paint a house that will be covered by water in six months? Why fix anything when the whole town is doomed? So week after week and day after day, the town simply deteriorated. The people simply let it go to seed, and in the end, it was nothing more than a broken and bedraggled facsimile of its former condition. And the man finished his
story by saying, Where you find no faith in the future, you will find no power in the present. Where you find no faith in the future, you will find no power in the present. That's why Gladstone sternly challenged that young man, that son of his friend, to go home and think his life through. For if death is the limit of our horizon of hope, then we will never know any real power in the present. The Apostle
Paul knew such powerless men and women in the first century. In his first letter to the Thessalonians, he refers to them as those others who have no hope. And by that, he meant people who have no hope in the face of death. Such hopelessness is not limited, however, to the first century. The descendants of such folk are very much alive and well in the 20th. Bertrand Russell once declared, All the labors of the ages, all the
devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human geniuses are destined to extinction in the vast depth of the solar system. Philosopher Will Durant is convinced that it is impossible to give life a meaning that cannot be annulled by death. H.G. Wells prophesied, The end of everything we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded. Mademoiselle Simone de Beauvoir, the companion of the late Jean Paul Sartre, says, Since I have come to
see that my future has an end, moments are no longer eternal. This barrenness is the fate of many of us after the age of 60. We are too well aware of where we're going. Clarence Darrell, the brilliant lawyer who won the famous Scopes Monkey Trial, was an agnostic and at the end of his life he said if he had it to live over again he would climb to the top of the highest building and jump off.
But contrast that statement of despair with the words of Harry Emerson Fosdick. In his autobiography he declares that if he had his life to live over he would climb to the top of the highest cause and jump in. Or contrast the despair of Mademoiselle Beauvoir over passing age 60 with this story told by Ruel Howe. A woman he knows in her middle 40s was disturbed by the rapid rush of the years. She was feeling old age
hurtling towards her. So she said to a friend quite a few years, her senior, I wish I could grow old gracefully like you. My dear, replied her friend, you don't grow old. When you stop growing you are old. Now what is it that makes this kind of difference in one's outlook on life? What makes a Darrell want to jump off and a Fosdick want to jump in? What makes one woman give up on life after age
60 and another grow up? I submit that the difference lies in the range of your horizons of hope. The one cannot see beyond death and that produces a jaded view of life. And the other can see beyond death and that produces a joyful existence. You see it's all a matter of perspective. I love the story of a little boy and girl who drifted away from their mother in a large department store one day. Pretty soon they
had made a game out of riding up and down the elevator. Did you ever do that? I did. Each of them was armed with a double decker ice cream cone. And on one crowded ride the boy noticed that his cone was dripping so he wiped it against the back of a woman's mink stole. Watch yourself, Jimmy, his sister Warren, you're getting fur in your ice cream. It's all a matter of perspective. In his wonderful book, Eyes
of Faith, which I commend to you, says that your point of view is always determined by your point of viewing. What you see depends upon where you stand when you look. And that's true of our visual experience. We sit in this chapel this morning and despite the beautiful windows we have a very limited view of the world as we sit here this morning. We're boxed in. I compare this with the first time my wife and I
climbed an alp. Well, we didn't exactly climb, we took the train to the top. But what a view. I'll never forget that vista. How much bigger the world looks from different points of viewing. Death is like these four walls. It boxes us in on every side. It limits our vision. And if you cannot see beyond death, you will have a very limited understanding of life itself. But there is another point of viewing that gives you a
different point of view. Paul says, for since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. The resurrection of Jesus is a place to stand in life, a place to look out on life and see it against a larger horizon than the box of death. We believe, Paul emphasizes, we believe and therefore we hope. Of course, hope is always a matter of faith. Ah,
but isn't that the rub? Can we really believe that God raised Jesus from the dead? Let me make a bold statement. Let's pretend that we have a course at Princeton Seminary called RF01 and RF02. That's Resurrection Faith 01 and Resurrection Faith 02. In Resurrection Faith 01, we deal with all of the philosophical problems that try to convince us that it is simply irrational to believe that God raised anyone from the dead. And let's pretend that that
course is so successful that we all come out of RF01 at least believing that it is sensible to believe that Jesus rose from the dead. And then we go into RF02 and we deal with all of the historical problems and all of the conflicting witnesses of the Gospels, the witnesses to the appearances and the witnesses to the empty tomb, and we deal with the nature of history, and we finally come out of RF02 and we now
at least understand that it is as sensible to believe that it happened on the basis of that witness as it is to believe that it didn't happen. All of that would simply clear the underbrush. Even if successful, that course would not bring any one of us to faith. It might make it possible for us to consider faith, but it would not bring us to faith. Because even if we could be convinced that God raised Jesus from
the dead, we would then be faced with the question, will he raise me? Can I trust God with my life in death? The real issues of faith are not the issues of the mind as important as they are. The real issues of faith are the issues of the heart. Who do I trust? And can I trust God with my life in death? There's a wonderful story about a mother and her little boy during the bombings of
England, of London, during the Second World War. Their house was hit and they ran outside looking for shelter and cover. The mother jumped into a bomb crater and held up her arms for her little son to jump into them. The little boy heard her voice in the darkness urging him to jump, but he froze in his tracks and he finally cried, I can't see you! I can't see you! But the mother could see her son outlined
clearly against the night sky and the flickering flames. And she shouted, you can't see me, but I can see you. Jump! Faith has frequently been called a leap into the dark. And you know what? It is. But it is not an empty darkness. For in the darkness there is a voice. And the voice is the word of God. And the voice is saying to us in Christ, Jump! I can see you, even though you cannot see
me. So faith always comes to the decision. Will you leap? Will you leap? Let us pray. We who prepare ourselves for ministry to your church and through your church to the world, O Lord, are ourselves confronted day by day with the issues of our own faith. And we confess that it is sometimes difficult to be vibrant believers when we are taking faith apart, a piece at a time here, and seeking to put it back together again.
We pray that we may indeed be enabled by your Spirit to think through all of the issues of life, the intellectual issues, the philosophical issues, the historical issues, but enable us also, O God, to face ultimately the existential issues as to whether or not we, one by one, do in fact trust you with our lives. And will we trust you in the hour of our death? Enable us to think through our lives to the end, to
the true end, that is not the finish, but the new beginning. And enable us then to live in the light of that hope that these days and the days before us will not be meaningless, that the work of our hands and of our lives will not be in vain, for we work and labor in the Lord who is alive, even Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen. Go forth in peace and in hope, and the
grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.