AN EASTER SERMON John M, Buchanan
I Corinthians 15:51-58 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
April 15, 1979 Columbus, Ohio

"Death is dead,,.Death is dead"; so says Lazarus in Eugene O'Neill's play,
Lazarus Laughed, The man who was raised from the dead by Jesus of Nazareth disappears
from the Gospel narrative, But in O'Neill's play he travels to Greece and there, by
chance, encounters Gaius Caligula, the mad and cruel successor to Tiberius Caesar,
"So you're the man who teaches people to laugh at death," the Emperor says and
threatens to have Lazarus executed once and for all, But Lazarus, laughing softly
"like a man in love with God" answers, "Death is dead, Caligula, Death is dead,"
(See John Sutherland Bonnell, I Believe in Immortality, p, 90-91).

Speaking the same language, Juergan Moltmann, contemporary German theologian,
in his most recent book writes, "Easter hymns have celebrated the victory of life by
laughing at death.,,Easter sermons in the Middle Ages are said to have begun with
good jokes,,,Laughter disarms a threat by taking away its seriousness, When people
can laugh they. can no longer be threatened or blackmailed." (The Passion for Life,p,74).

Reading those two vignettes this week: from O'Neill's play and the heavier
theology of the German scholar, I discovered why I love I Corinthians 15 so much, It
is essentially theological laughter - "O death, where is thy sting?" It is the
original Easter joke - "0 grave, where is thy victory?" It is the very Easter hymn -
"Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory," It is the original Easter sermon:
“therefore, be steadfast, immovable.,.knowing that your work is not in vain,"

It is one of the texts George Frederick Handel set to music near the end of his
soaring masterpiece, Messiah, Evan Whallon, Columbus Symphony Director, told us last
Sunday how Handel's servant came into the room as the master had finished the
Hallelujah Chorus and found him with tears in his eyes, transfixed, Handel said, "I
thought I did see the great God himself,"" Lovers of the Messiah are inclined to
agree. But I think Handel was nowhere more inspired than when he took this text from
I Corinthians, "O Death, where is thy sting; O Grave, where is thy victory," and
wrote it into a lilting, almost playful duet, It could have been terribly severe
and ponderous, But Handel wrote it with a twinkle in his eye; a kind of musical
joke,

Now ordinarily we try to have our Easter joy without much laughter because
somewhere along the way we learned that important things are serious things, that
laughter is trivial, if not banal; that something as important as a proposed
resurrection of the dead requires serious and hard thinking, not soft laughter, And
so we try to be happy but what we're really doing all the while is working very hard
intellectually, trying to think this thing through; attempting to find some in-
tellectual category in which it will fit, some logical explanation that will allow
for it, even though we never saw a resurrection or knew anyone who did,

The trouble is that no matter how hard we think about it there is only one
verifiable, provable fact, That fact is that the friends of Jesus came to the con-
clusion that He had risen from His grave, There are other quasi-verifiable bits
of the story, No one seriously suggests that there wasn't a Jesus, Most serious
historians concur that He was probably executed, and that the Romans weren't in-
clined to botch the job, But after that things become opaque rather quickly, The
resurrection of Jesus Christ can be argued, debated, discussed, It cannot be
proved, But - and we seem to forget this part of it - neither can it be disproved,

- 3.4

The simple fact is that empirical knowledge, the way you and I know most of
what we know, doesn't help us much here, There are no pictures, no writings with
His signature, no records, no artifacts, and unlike Tutankhamen, no remains, There
is no empirical data, except this stubborn conviction of His friends, and while that
is quite a bit, it is not cold, hard fact, "Therefore", the modern inteliect reasons,
“in the absence of empirical data we conclude that the resurrection is a metaphor, It
means that Jesus lives on in His immortal teaching," The empirical way of thinking
also breaks down at that point when each of us confesses, "It couldn't have happened,
There is no way a dead body can get up and walk, God's son or not, Death is death,
and that's that.'' Unless, of course, death is dead; but here comes that soft
laughter again and we're not quite finished with our serious thinking,

Lt always seems to me worth remembering on Easter that the friends of Jesus
had trouble believing it too, They didn't know everything we know about science and
medicine and cause and effect, They were not privy to the same technological sophis-
tication as we are, But one thing is certain; they knew that dead people stay dead,
They didn't want to believe it either, Nothing in their own religion even suggested
that it might happen, Nothing about the current hope for the Messiah remotely
approached the matter of a resurrection, ‘The Gospel accounts are embarassingly
candid: they didn't want to believe, couldn't believe, wouldn't believe, one of them
insisted, until he touched and felt the phenomenon, I think it's worth remembering
that the earliest belief in the resurrection was as reluctant as our own,

I also think it is important to remember that while our concern focuses on the
act of resurrection itself and the mystery of an empty tomb, and proceeds to build
arguments on those two premises, the New Testament is concerned mainly with another
matter altogether; namely, the experience of those early believers that they were
living in a new era, that they were now part of God's Kingdom, that they were
gloriously free and eternally safe from harm, There is a lot of that in the New
Testament and nothing at all about the kinds of questions we love to ask,

And so we may have to deal with the suggestion that our way of seeing, per-
ceiving and knowing may not be adequate. It may not even be relevant, Wolfhart
Pannenberg, another one of those scholarly German theologians, not given to
romanticism or mysticism, wrote: "Up to a recent date it has been repeatediy said
that (the resurrection) would violate the laws of nature, But contemporary
physicists have become much more careful before making such statements, not because
of microphysical results but because of a more precise consciousness of the fact
that general iaws do not make possible an absolutely certain prediction about the
possibility of single events," (Christianity Today, April 6, 1979, p.16). What chat
means is that science is no longer claiming that what it knows for sure is the only
thing there is to know,

Interestingly, you don't have to hide your convictions about the mysteries of
religion: the profound mystery of God, life, Christ, resurrection from scientists
any more, They are among the first to suggest that the world we see, touch and feel
may mot be the whole of reality, In fact,the more we know and discover about this
incredible physical scheme of things, the more the scientists start sounding Like
theologians, Einstein himself, while no traditional pietist, to be sure, wrote that
serious science leads inevitably to the conclusion that there is a higher wisdom;
that we are not alone. And, as any schooi boy knows, that is really the fundamental
matter; once you allow room in your scheme of things for God, all sorts of things
become possibilities,

-~ 36

Somewhere we got the idea that it is smarter to be a skeptic, That intelligence
and atheism go together, That logic is on the side of death, That religion is iid
stuff, How odd that science is asking us to think that one through again,

One thing of which we should not be guilty on this day, and that is to try
to have our Christianity without resurrection, My first teacher of theology - my
first encounter with a world-class theological intellect was a charming Englishman
by the name of Whale; J,S,Whale, He looked like every caricature of an English
gentleman I had ever seen, He spoke and wrote beautifully and every Easter I get our
his little volume on Christian Doctrine and read again what he says about the
resurrection, “Belief in the Resurrection is not an appendage to the Christian faith:
it is the Christian faith,.,It is not tacked on to the Gospel story to make a happy
ending, or to hide what, without it, would be the supreme tragedy of history; it is
implicit in the story from the beginning, It is from the foundation of the world,"

(p. 73),

Yet the questions were raised early in the story, Thomas was the first, but
certainly not the last person to stumble over the resurrection, St, Paul doesn't
bother to tell us what was going on in Corinth: he thought, after all, that he was
writing a letter, not a book of the Bible, Hut apparently some of those first
Christians were having trouble with the resurrection, trouble believing it, trouble
understanding what it meant, and most of all trouble with ite centrality for Paul,
"Can't we have the Gospel without this part?" they asked, And so the Apostle wrote
it all down, and it isn’t terribly logical and it isn't sequential and it gives one
a headache to vork with it for very long, But the 15th chapter of his first Letter
to the Corinthians is the very fixvst Christian writing about the resurrection, The
conclusion, the Post Script, I think, is the best part; the most provocative,

"Lo, I tell you a mystery," Not, "I'm going to explain it to you" - but "tell
you a mystery," The very last words reveal the problem the Corinthians were having
and that we continue to have, It's like that Little game Johnny Carson and Ed
McMahon play on the Tonight Show, Carson has the answers sealed in envelopes; and
must deduce what the questions are, Paul's answer is,"Be steadfast, immovable...
knowing that your work is not in vain,"

The question the Corinthian Christians asked was about the meaning of Life in
light of death, The simple, timeless truth of the matter is that death always has
called into question human hopes, dreams, loves, aspirations, accomplishments, All
of it is swallowed up. In fact, our work is in vain, or so it seems, Everything
we do is going to end up in the same condition that waits for us - death,

The simple, timeless truth is that we ask the same question those brothers
and sisters in the first century asked, Is there any hope? Is this life of ours
going to amount to a thing? Is there anything permanent about it? Anything
lastingly significant about ut?

We ask that question on two levels, I believe, On the broad, historical
level, we catch ourselves wondering whether there will be a future for the human
race, The Three Mile Island nuclear accident illustrated the tentative hold we
have on our situation; how actually close we are to poisoning ourselves out of
existence, Gecrge Gallup found recently that most Americans look to the immediate
future with fear,

-4&-

We ask the question of life and death on the broad, historical level, Is
there any hope? Is there anything enduring and lasting about our civilization? More
poignantly, however, we ask that same question personally, about ourselves, but
mostly about ourselves in relation le people we love. Is there anything enduring
here? Or is this, too, swallowed up in death?

Tt received a letter seyeral months age that put it as plainly as possible. It
was from a youn woman whose grandmother had died. She has given me permission to
quote her letter, She wrote: "Since her death I have been struggling with a
question, Maybe you can help, Grandmother's death has hit me hard, She was very
special to me, OQutside of the mere shock and sadness I have felt, her death has
shaken me to a realization first of man's mortality and the preciousness of life,
and then, through that, the realization of a bigger world beyond,,,Grandmother is
sO permanent to me,"

The writer of that letter put in words both the honest despair, but undying
hope of the human heart, She felt drawn to faith, not by fear, She did not use
religion as a crutch to guarantee her own immortality as the skeptic always suggests,
Instead, the death of someone she loved compelled her to rethink the whole matter,

It wasn't philosophy that precipitated her thinking, but a relationship, a good,
loving, healing human relationship,

fhe resurrection of Jesus Christ is the bold suggestion that the best about
us does not die: that our work is not in vain, our dearest loves, our noblest dreams,
our significant accomplishments, The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the bold shout
of victory: death itself is swalloved up, gone, Life is more poverful, more real,
more fundamental, The enduring realities are God's own. ‘fe can be ~ steadfast,
immovable,.,confident, strong - laughing softly ..23.. death is dead,

The enemy has no power, and there is nothing funnier than that, The threat
of death is always the oppressor. Dictators know that, Caligula said to Lazarus,
"Lazarus, you have killed my dearest friend." Hitler orchestrated fear like a
master, All human oppression is grounded in the fear of death and the power of
the oppressor to kill, But there are other forms as well, The threat of death
makes us vulnerable to the oppression we call security, We will do anything to
guarantee it, which is another way of trying to nail down our immortality, We will
spend a life trying to make a name, or climb a ladder or build an estate, And what
it all amounts to is the oppression of the threat of our own death,

"We hope", someone wrote recently, "because we believe in our own resurrection,"
A child said it profoundiy, but simply, in a bit of graffiti scribbled on a colored
egg - "If Jesus can do it, so can you!" O'Neill said it dramatically, "Death
is dead, Caligula, Death is dead," laughing softly like a man in love with God,

And Malcolm Musgeridze, elegantly, in his oid age, meandering through the
graveyard in Sussex where his father lies, leaning on the very stone and thinking
out Loud,..

-~5-

"From my earliest years I've been much given to thinkines about death,,,This
might seem in contemporary terms a melancholy, if not unmentionable case to be
in,.,I, on the contrary, find it very uplifting, like the close of a June day, a
distillation as it were, of everything most beautiful and most loving in what has
gone before, Death is a. beginning, not an end,,,E say over to myself John Donne's
splendid words: ‘Death, thou shalt die, In the graveyard, the dust settles; in
the city of God, eternity begins'." (A Twentieth Century Testimony),

St, Paul would like that way of saying it, St, Paul, who with a twinkle in
his eye, dashed off that Post Seript which is the first and best of all Easter
messages +

"OQ death, where is thy victory?
O death, where is thy sting?
Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory in our Lord Jesus Christ,
Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, ’
immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord,
kmoving that in the Lord your labor is not in vain,"
Amen,

God our Father, our minds stretch to comprehend the meaning of thia day,
Give us moments of laughter, Deliver us frote working sc hard at believing and
grant us courapfe to embrace it, and weep in joy about it, and sins it, O God,
hear our praise and our gratitude for Jesus Christ who was dead, but is alive

forever,
Amen,