From Unbelief to Belief

If you were not able to celebrate Easter Sunday service with us, you missed a truly wonderful sermon from Pastor Greg. Here is the text of the sermon, we hope it allows you to stay close to our congregation and the message of Christian good news.


“From Unbelief to Belief”
Easter Sunday, April 4, 2010
Luke 24:5

Unbelief does not necessarily mean that people believe nothing. Rather, it means that they believe something else. People say "I don't believe it" because there is something else that they believe more strongly.

To move from belief in one thing, that which is the stronger belief, to something new, in this case a belief in Jesus Christ as resurrected, gives witness to God’s presence and the experience of that resurrection! It is Easter being lived out in and through us. What Peter experienced, what the women on that fateful morn so long ago experienced, I contend that each one of us experiences also. Some make the journey more easily than others but a journey made by all.

I want to share with you a poem I learned in seminary, a poem I have shared with the Bible study adult class when we talked of the Holy trinity and of Jesus’ death on the cross. It is a simple poem yet very profound, albeit, its profundity is often missed at first hearing. My poem:

“I had a dog and his name was Rover. When he died he was dead all over.”

Don’t laugh. This is very serious. Each of us has bought into this poem’s truth. As did the women at the tomb, and as did Peter. Let me explain.

The story begins with the obvious: Jesus died, and his followers assumed that he remains dead. The women come to the tomb because that is where they saw the body of Jesus placed after his crucifixion. They bring spices along to anoint the body of Jesus, to show proper respect for the dead. The discovery of the empty tomb does not lead to an easy change of perspective. It brings confusion, not clarity. Bodies that are dead presumably remain dead (Like my dog Rover who was dead all over). The most one can do is to treat them with respect.

We too, assume that death is death, and that our proper response should be to enshrine the dead. We all experience life and lean to accept the limits that life brings: NO one lives forever, some choices bring consequences that cannot be reversed, and not everything will go as planned. Sometimes we just have to accept things as they are, after all, it is what it is.

The women receive a word that runs counter to what they know to be true: "Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen". One might be tempted to linger over the description of these angelic messengers, but they are not the point. The focus is on the message, not the messengers. What is most striking is that the women encounter the resurrection through this message. They are told that Jesus has risen, but they do not see the risen Jesus. What they have is a word, a message, one that is beyond their wildest imagination and one that flies in the face of all they have come to know and believe. It can be difficult to move from unbelief (believing in something else more strongly) to belief (something radically new).

This brings the Easter experience uncomfortably close, because this is precisely what we have—the word of resurrection. One would think God would work differently. It would seem so much easier to have the women come to the tomb and watch Jesus walk out into the light of a new day. And it would seem much easier for Jesus simply to appear in dazzling glory to us, who gather on an Easter morning generations later. And this is precisely where our situation is like that of the women on the first Easter: We are all given a message of resurrection, which flies in the face of what we know to be true. The only logical response to such a message is unbelief. We are asked each and every day, but especially on this day, to move from unbelief to belief, from believing in one thing and move to believe in something else.

Experience teaches that death wins. The Easter message says that Jesus lives. When such contradictory claims collide, it only makes sense to continue affirming what we already know. This is what Luke reported. The women bring the message of resurrection to the others, and they respond as thinking people regularly respond: they thought that the message was "an idle tale, and they did not believe them".

Yet here is where the Easter message begins its work, by challenging our certainties.
Experience teaches that death wins and that even the strongest succumb to it. Experience teaches that life is what you make it, so get what you can while you can because it will be over soon enough. And the Easter message says, "Really? How can you be so sure?" Death is real, but it is not final. In Jesus, life gets the last word.

The Easter message calls us from our old belief in death to a new belief in life. The claim that the tomb could not hold Jesus, and the idea that the one who died by crucifixion has now risen is so outrageous that it might make one wonder whether it might—just might—be true. But death was death. Yet the message was so outrageous that Peter had to go and take a look for himself. He had to wonder, "What if it is true?"

We who have gathered for worship on Easter Sunday follow in the footsteps of Peter. We have heard the rumor that Jesus is alive and come to hear again for ourselves: "What if it is true? What if death is real, but not final? What if Jesus is not merely past but present? What if Jesus were to meet me here? What would life be then?"

The Easter reading stops with Peter's amazement, but the Easter story continues far beyond, as God continues to challenge the certainty of death with the promise of life.

This is more than just about Jesus rising from the dead. The Easter story confronts all those things in life that we hold to be true simply because it is what we know and have seen (Rover is dead all over). Easter challenges our beliefs, those things we hold on to more than the Easter story. It challenges them reminding us that as Jesus was raised from the dead, going against all things we hold to be true (what we believe in so strongly) and invites us to believe in a new thing. Where God is all things are made new.

Life reigns and the power of the resurrection happen in all our lives. God, through the living resurrected Jesus is doing a new thing do you not perceive it?

"Why do you seek the living among the dead?" God wonders. "Through the living Jesus I give you the gift of life. Why would you think that I would offer you anything less?"

AMEN