As Easter approaches, I was recently reminded of one of the better sermons I've ever heard. The church I grew up in had an awesome tradition of holding Easter sunrise services at a beautiful lake in Nashville. To make it, we had to be up at like 4 a.m., or as one of my sisters so eloquently puts it, "the butt-crack of dawn." But after that initial shock to my system, I was always glad to be there.
Especially one year, when the preacher built a sermon around this thought: "If you wanted to condense the entire Bible into one question, it could be 'What do you think about the Resurrection?'
That pretty much says it all. We face so many questions in life, but none more important than this one.
Do you believe Jesus was raised from the dead? Becuase, if so, that changes everything.
And if not, that changes everything, too.
To paraphrase CS Lewis,there are really only 4 options for what you can do with Jesus: you either call him a Legend, a Lunatic, a Liar or Lord.
To call him a Legend means you don't really believe he ever existed. I read once where there are more historical references in books besides the Bible about Jesus than there are about Julius Caesar. I never hear people debating whether or not Julius Caesar existed, or becoming "Caesar atheisists." Why is that? Combine that with the fact that we are still debating the life and impact of Jesus 2,000 years later, and it just seems to me to be a greater leap of faith to say that Jesus never lived than to say He did.
To call him a Lunatic is to say that you believe he lived on this earth, it's just that he was completely nuts. While many of his teachings are hard to grasp, many of them are so profoundly brilliant, I just can't buy that a delusional mind would come up with them. I mean, if everyone in our society were to practice Jesus' teachings about grace, forgiveness and loving our neighbors, what would our world be like? So who's really the crazy ones?
To call him a Liar is to believe that he lived, and maybe even that he was a prophet or an exceptional human...just not the Son of God. I feel like a lot of people probably fall into this category. I know I certainly have at different points in my life. This is where faith comes in. Can we trust that God would love us just the way we are...but provide a perfect plan to make sure we don't stay that way? In other words, can we accept that God offers us immeasurable grace for all the things we fall short on? Do we believe that Jesus boldly and emphatically stared death in the eye and said that it shall not overcome us. Ever.
To those of us who choose to call him Lord, we are chosing to believe that this world is not all there is. We believe that we are only renters here on Earth. That as difficult and confusing as it can be to be a disciple of Jesus, any hardships are just speedbumps on the route to eternal joy in Heaven.
And to believe all that is what makes Good Friday all good.
Happy Easter.
No comments:
Post a Comment