William H. Willimon - "Thy Kingdom Come" Easter Service 9:00 am (April 15, 2001)
MP3
Loading the media player...
Transcript
- Download transcript as:
-
Text
-
PDF
-
WebVTT (includes timecodes)
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
| - | The gospel lesson comes from Saint Luke, | 0:07 |
| the 24th chapter. | 0:11 | |
| But on the first day of the week, | 0:15 | |
| at early dawn, they came to the tomb, | 0:17 | |
| taking the spices that they had prepared. | 0:21 | |
| They found the stone rolled away from the tomb. | 0:24 | |
| But when they went in, they did not find the body. | 0:27 | |
| While they were perplexed about this, | 0:32 | |
| suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. | 0:35 | |
| The women were terrified, | 0:40 | |
| and bowed their faces to the ground. | 0:41 | |
| But the men said to them, "Why do you look for the living | 0:44 | |
| "among the dead? | 0:48 | |
| "He is not here, but has risen. | 0:50 | |
| "Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee | 0:54 | |
| "that the son of Man must be handed over to sinners | 0:59 | |
| "and be crucified. | 1:04 | |
| "And on the third day shall rise again." | 1:06 | |
| Then they remembered his words, | 1:11 | |
| and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the 11. | 1:13 | |
| And to all the rest. | 1:18 | |
| Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, | 1:20 | |
| Mary, the mother of James, and the other women with them, | 1:24 | |
| who told this to the apostles. | 1:28 | |
| But these words seemed to them an idle tale, | 1:31 | |
| and they did not believe them. | 1:35 | |
| But Peter got up and ran to the tomb. | 1:38 | |
| Stooping, and looking in, | 1:41 | |
| he saw the linen cloths by themselves. | 1:44 | |
| Then he went home, amazed, at what had happened. | 1:48 | |
| This is the word of the Lord. | 1:54 | |
| - | Thanks be to God. | 1:57 |
| - | An article in USA Today proclaims, | 2:04 |
| "Death is no longer a Downer." | 2:09 | |
| Quote, "Death's former finality has been upstaged | 2:13 | |
| "by Hollywood's vision of the afterlife. | 2:18 | |
| "Where in recent movies, dearly departed communicate | 2:21 | |
| "with loved ones, influence events, even come back | 2:25 | |
| "for another go-around." | 2:28 | |
| We have always liked movies | 2:31 | |
| that end happily ever after. | 2:33 | |
| But in today's pop-culture, happily ever after | 2:36 | |
| has been extended. | 2:40 | |
| The TV Show, Buffy and the Vampire Slayer, | 2:43 | |
| features Buffy and her boyfriend, Angel, who just won't die. | 2:46 | |
| Then there was Meet Joe Black, an interminable movie | 2:52 | |
| about the delayed termination of a tycoon. | 2:55 | |
| In What Dreams May Come, Robin Williams is killed | 2:59 | |
| in a car crash, but incredibly reunited | 3:01 | |
| with the family dog in a sort of German romantic landscape. | 3:03 | |
| In Titanic, Jack and Rose end the movie happily | 3:08 | |
| after all, despite the iceburg thing. | 3:13 | |
| Gerald Celente, in his book, Trends 2000, | 3:18 | |
| has this theory for all these movies of immortality. | 3:23 | |
| He says that we Baby Boomers are watching parents die, | 3:28 | |
| we're getting Aids, we're saying to ourselves, | 3:32 | |
| "Wait a minute. | 3:35 | |
| "A generation as wonderful as ours can't die. | 3:36 | |
| "Maybe we won't." | 3:41 | |
| When Meryl Streep dared to die of cancer in One True Thing, | 3:44 | |
| it was a box-office bomb, giving credence to | 3:48 | |
| James Swanson's idea, in the Chicago Tribune, | 3:52 | |
| that the grandiose narcissism and impertinence | 3:55 | |
| of the Boomers. | 4:00 | |
| They're determined, that for them, death is avoidable. | 4:01 | |
| He calls it Faith Lite | 4:06 | |
| Princess Di is Elton John's "Candle in the Wind." | 4:09 | |
| She is forever. | 4:13 | |
| We just go on, and on. | 4:16 | |
| We're immortal, like Jack Frost, Michael Keaton, | 4:18 | |
| in which a deceased father comes back as his son's snowman. | 4:21 | |
| Now, just one thing about all this immortality glitz | 4:28 | |
| It has nothing to do with Easter. | 4:36 | |
| You heard the story. | 4:41 | |
| Jesus really died. | 4:43 | |
| He didn't appear to die. | 4:48 | |
| He was not asleep. | 4:49 | |
| He died a death more cruel than we can conceive. | 4:51 | |
| He wasn't dead for a moment on the operating table, | 4:55 | |
| having an out-of-body experience. | 4:58 | |
| He was sealed in the grave for three days. | 5:00 | |
| His disciples did not deceive themselves about his death. | 5:06 | |
| They did not think that, though crucified, he will live | 5:09 | |
| on in our memories, or any such Pagan drivel. | 5:13 | |
| You heard how the disciples came to the first Easter, | 5:18 | |
| in great grief. | 5:23 | |
| They came to Jesus' tomb with no cheap, false consolation | 5:26 | |
| such as, "His message will never die." | 5:31 | |
| Or, "If we endow a chair at the university, | 5:34 | |
| no one will forget him." | 5:37 | |
| When they saw the empty tomb, they didn't think, | 5:40 | |
| "Jesus has risen from the dead." | 5:44 | |
| They thought, "Somebody stole his body." | 5:45 | |
| And yet, within about three days, | 5:50 | |
| followers of Jesus came | 5:55 | |
| to understand that what happened to Jesus | 5:56 | |
| was according to the scriptures. | 6:00 | |
| According to the scriptures, Israel believed that one day, | 6:04 | |
| God was going to solve the problem of Israel's suffering. | 6:09 | |
| And while God was at it, God would solve the problem | 6:13 | |
| of evil and injustice and death in all the world. | 6:16 | |
| The scriptures promised a day of divine victory. | 6:20 | |
| And on Easter, the disciples discovered that day | 6:25 | |
| in the resurrection of Jesus. | 6:31 | |
| The cross, which they thought was the end | 6:33 | |
| of their relationship with Jesus, | 6:36 | |
| became, really, the beginning. | 6:39 | |
| Easter was God's great answer to the deep question, | 6:44 | |
| "What's to be done about the world?" | 6:49 | |
| In The Green Mile movie, when something good and spiritual | 6:55 | |
| is about to happen, this odd glitter started falling | 6:59 | |
| out of the sky. | 7:03 | |
| And the camera got out-of-focus and fuzzy. | 7:04 | |
| And everything was blue. | 7:07 | |
| That's the way Hollywood does God. | 7:10 | |
| God is something otherwordly, fuzzy, blue, glitter. | 7:13 | |
| Well note, that the gospels go to great length | 7:18 | |
| to demonstrate that what happened to Jesus on Easter, | 7:21 | |
| while it was unexpected and it was strange, | 7:24 | |
| it was experienced here, now. | 7:28 | |
| It happened when it was still dark. | 7:34 | |
| There was a linen cloth rolled carefully. | 7:37 | |
| Mary weeps. | 7:39 | |
| These are mundane details from everyday life in this world, | 7:41 | |
| where people weep and are confused | 7:45 | |
| and things end in tragedy. | 7:47 | |
| This is daily death. | 7:50 | |
| What we're seeing here is resurrection of the body, | 7:54 | |
| not immortality of the soul. | 7:59 | |
| It's not even really like life-after-death. | 8:03 | |
| There is life after death. | 8:07 | |
| And God's people can expect it. | 8:09 | |
| But it won't be Hollywood. | 8:12 | |
| Christians don't believe in the immortality | 8:14 | |
| of some disembodied soul. | 8:17 | |
| We believe, just as we will say in the creed, | 8:20 | |
| in the resurrection of the body, | 8:23 | |
| not the resuscitation of the body, | 8:26 | |
| a corpse come back to life, | 8:29 | |
| not in the immortality of the soul, | 8:32 | |
| some divine spark that just goes on-and-on. | 8:36 | |
| That happens only in Hollywood. | 8:41 | |
| We believe, that dead Jesus was raised | 8:44 | |
| by a loving God who would not be defeated by death, | 8:48 | |
| here and now. | 8:54 | |
| The disciples found the grave of Jesus empty. | 8:58 | |
| Jesus' dead body was gone. | 9:02 | |
| When the risen Christ appeared to Mary, | 9:05 | |
| he appeared not as some disembodies ghost, | 9:07 | |
| some kind of spirit, but as a body. | 9:10 | |
| Sure, his was a changed body. | 9:14 | |
| Mary did not recognize him until he spoke. | 9:16 | |
| But it was his body. | 9:18 | |
| Late in the risen, Christ would appear | 9:21 | |
| to his disciples, and he would touch them in his body. | 9:22 | |
| And so, Christians really do believe, | 9:27 | |
| as people sometimes say, | 9:30 | |
| "When you're dead, you're dead." | 9:32 | |
| Death really is death. | 9:34 | |
| Fini. | 9:36 | |
| But we also believe in resurrection. | 9:38 | |
| We believe that God decisively acts, | 9:42 | |
| defeats death, makes a way when we thought there was no way. | 9:46 | |
| And this is better than Hollywood. | 9:54 | |
| The resurrection of the body, Jesus' or yours. | 9:57 | |
| It means that this world matters. | 10:02 | |
| And it matters now. | 10:05 | |
| We may not know exactly how resurrected bodies will look. | 10:08 | |
| As Paul says, "It does not yet apparent what we shall be." | 10:13 | |
| But we believe, just as Jesus was raised, | 10:17 | |
| so, by the love of God, shall our bodies be raised, as well. | 10:20 | |
| And this means that the matter of this world matters. | 10:26 | |
| We're not into some disembodied, fuzzy, Never-Neverland. | 10:32 | |
| God has made a decisive bridgehead against the onslaught | 10:38 | |
| of death, right here and now. | 10:42 | |
| You will notice, in the scripture and in the hymns, | 10:45 | |
| there's a kind of battle quality about them. | 10:47 | |
| This thing is political. | 10:52 | |
| That's why we pray, each Sunday, "Thy kingdom come | 10:54 | |
| "on earth as it is in Heaven." | 10:58 | |
| Resurrection is about God at last getting what God wants, | 11:01 | |
| here, now, on earth, in the body. | 11:04 | |
| that which God will one day have, in Heaven, forever. | 11:08 | |
| It's not just that there's some cushy afterlife | 11:14 | |
| in store for those of us who manage | 11:17 | |
| to make the grade, someday. | 11:19 | |
| If it were, then Christianity could be justly accused | 11:22 | |
| of being some pie-in-the-sky, by-and-by religion. | 11:25 | |
| When in reality, it is a | 11:30 | |
| Thy-kingdom-come-on-earth-as-it-is-in-Heaven religion. | 11:32 | |
| If Easter was just about Jesus exiting the tomb | 11:38 | |
| in some ethereal, spiritual sense, | 11:41 | |
| leaving the body in the tomb to rot, | 11:44 | |
| leaving the world to stew in its own juice, | 11:47 | |
| well where would be the hope? | 11:51 | |
| Better go make movies | 11:53 | |
| that do death as something only apparent, | 11:55 | |
| and spirits taking off to pastel skies. | 11:58 | |
| But resurrection is not some vague, | 12:03 | |
| inner spiritual experience. | 12:05 | |
| It's about a Kingdom come on earth as in Heaven, | 12:08 | |
| a new Heaven, a new Earth, | 12:11 | |
| first hinted at in the resurrection of Jesus on Easter, | 12:14 | |
| one day come in fullness when God does Easter | 12:17 | |
| for the whole creation. | 12:20 | |
| God faced evil and death on Good Friday, | 12:22 | |
| and on Easter, triumphed. | 12:27 | |
| And now God intends to do, for the whole world, | 12:31 | |
| through us, as Easter people, | 12:35 | |
| what was done for Jesus on Easter. | 12:39 | |
| In Hollywood, when people die, | 12:43 | |
| things tends to get sort of vaporous and fuzzy and pink. | 12:45 | |
| But here in church, when we do Easter, | 12:50 | |
| you notice that we use the things of this world, | 12:52 | |
| flowers, and parades, and people, and above all, music. | 12:55 | |
| It's as if a world out-of-tune, | 13:01 | |
| marching to the dirge-like beat of death | 13:04 | |
| finally gets its intended song, | 13:07 | |
| as if the whole Creation, | 13:12 | |
| once destined for deadly futility, now soars, | 13:14 | |
| healed, reclaimed, by a God determined | 13:18 | |
| not to leave us in death. | 13:21 | |
| Karl Marx charged that Christianity lulls people | 13:26 | |
| into political complacency. | 13:31 | |
| Christianity's got nothing but Heaven in its head, | 13:33 | |
| some future spiritual thing, removed from the struggles | 13:37 | |
| of the here-and-now. | 13:40 | |
| John Brown's body lies a moldering in the grave, | 13:42 | |
| but God goes marching on. | 13:46 | |
| No. | 13:50 | |
| The first witnesses to Easter knew something had happened. | 13:52 | |
| Their world encountered, entered, wrought, reformed. | 13:57 | |
| Easter wasn't God saying, | 14:03 | |
| "Now let me get you out of this deadly tearful world." | 14:06 | |
| Easter was God saying, "Let me give you a peek | 14:10 | |
| of what I am going to do to your world, | 14:14 | |
| and you, now, here." | 14:17 | |
| You take away the resurrection of the body, | 14:21 | |
| Marx is right. | 14:23 | |
| Christianity is some kind of wish-fulfillment, | 14:24 | |
| escape into some Nirvana of our creation, | 14:27 | |
| some exit from the here-and-now. | 14:30 | |
| But you take resurrection of the body seriously, | 14:35 | |
| or maybe to the point of today's music, joyously, | 14:39 | |
| and responsibility is laid on you. | 14:43 | |
| Because if you can sing, "Hallelujah, Christ has risen," | 14:46 | |
| then you're singing that Jesus Christ really is Lord. | 14:50 | |
| And all the would-be little lordlets of this world, are not. | 14:55 | |
| When we sing, "The Strife is Over. | 15:00 | |
| "The Battle is won," | 15:03 | |
| it means that we've got to join Jesus | 15:04 | |
| in the mopping-up action, wherever evil still exists, | 15:06 | |
| wherever anybody tries to challenge the reign of a good God. | 15:10 | |
| The Jesus seminar of a few years ago said that on Easter, | 15:16 | |
| what happened was, the disciples of Jesus had some kind | 15:21 | |
| of experience of Christ's presence. | 15:24 | |
| No. | 15:28 | |
| That just won't lift the luggage. | 15:30 | |
| The resurrection was not some inert spiritual experience. | 15:33 | |
| It was God's bodily outer act in Jesus, visible, | 15:37 | |
| rising of a son, | 15:41 | |
| whose glory put all other sons to shame. | 15:43 | |
| Today the great master of defeat, death, has been defeated. | 15:47 | |
| So Paul says that in the resurrection of Jesus, every ruler, | 15:53 | |
| every pompous politician and presumptive power | 15:57 | |
| is in big trouble. | 16:00 | |
| You heard the scripture, | 16:03 | |
| for he must reign until he's put all enemies under his feet. | 16:04 | |
| And the last enemy to be destroyed is death. | 16:09 | |
| The great battle has been fought and won. | 16:13 | |
| And the kingdoms of this world | 16:18 | |
| shall be the kingdoms of our Christ. | 16:20 | |
| And he shall rule forever and ever. | 16:24 | |
| Amen. | 16:29 |