BE IMMOVABLE
March 30, 1986, 11:00 a.m. Worship
John M. Buchanan
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

"Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable..."
--I Corinthians 15:58 (RSV)

Scripture
I Corinthians 15:51-58

One of the ambigious privileges of living in the television era is
that personal tragedy and private grief are brought regularly into our
living room. When a public figure dies, the world is invited to witness
the grief and to attend the ceremonies. Presbyterian Journalist Hugh T.
Kerr, observed one of these events recently and wrote: “Watching the
distraught and strained figure standing faithfully beside the casket,
listening or not listening to the words of Biblical faith, one must surely
say this of the religious service, that here, after all, is what religion
is about. It provides the word of hope when everything else keeps
silence." [Theology Today, January, 1983]

That is why we are here this morning - all of us and each. of us.
That is why churches all over the world are crowded today. Most of us
would not say it this way: most would be embarrassed to admit it. After
all, it is spring time, and the flowers are colorful and it is a most
amazing bright day and everyone looks so nice and it's a bit of a family
ritual, and all of that is true but what is, I think, more true is that
when everything else keeps silence, when life and death intersect with
sudden and brutal finality, there is here a word of hope. Some come to
celebrate it and sing about it. Some come to speculate, to toy with the
possibility. Each of us comes to hear it.

There is nothing the preacher can say to make you believe that the
resurrection of Jesus happened. It is, literally, beyond belief, if belief
has to do with things we know to be true, can document, verify. Oh, we can
- and have - spun out the possibilities. We are learning, for instance,
that what we thought we had pinned down about how this world operates isn't
pinned down at all, that the unknown is infinite and that the appropriate
_ scientific posture is modesty before the vastness of the unknown if not

outright reverence. But we are not much convinced by argument today, by
slick efforts to make the event “fit" into our conception of how things are
in this world.

John Updike, in a poem, “Seven Stanzas for Easter," expressed it for
those who preach and those who listen to Easter Sermons:

"Let us not mock God with metaphor,

Analogy, sidestepping transcendence;

Making of the event a parable, a sign

Painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages."

; We are not persuaded by much arguing. We seem to know that if there
is evidence here it will be found in some place other than books and
scholarly argument. I think we are here this morning because we have seen
something of the resurrection in life. We may not have recognized it
entirely - but we are stopped in our tracks by heroism that fairly shouts
that there is something more important, more real, more powerful than
death.

We catch our breath when a dear one, dying, squeezes our hand and
comforts us, the living, and says the word of hope: “It will be all right.
Everything is going to be all right." We are stunned by the resurrection
when we encounter it in life. And the truth is, that life is the only
place it has ever been seen. The life of the world bears the truth of the
resurrection as a blessed secret.

Martin Marty wrote an Easter essay one time that is a favorite of
mine. In it he addressed Jewish friends and said: "Yawn, please, whenever
a preacher tries to ‘prove’ the resurrection. Your boredom will help us
face the issue of faith. Silly putty proofs and reasonings insult you and
thoughtful Christians. They convince only the convinced. Nervous
apologists have to use logic and history to prove that a tomb was empty.
But Easter rises from the experience of faith - then and now."

The Gospels do not spend time arguing the case. In fact, when it
comes to describing what happened in the early hours of the first day of
the week they are historical and literary disasters. Parentheticaily, I
have always thought one of the more persuasive arguments for the
authenticity of the Biblical record is that the writers and the editors had
every opportunity to polish these accounts and at least make them
consistent. But they didn't do it. In fact, none of the four Gospels even
attempts to describe what actually happened at the tomb. “The New
Testament babbles about the resurrection"... someone wrote recently. There
are major descrepencies in the narratives: different characters are
running back and forth, literally bumping into each other, mistaking
identities, stumbling around in the dark whispering, some speechless with
fright, others sensibly doubting itij,) stillilothers conspicuously untouched by
it all - heading out for dinner in the next town.

“Language reaches its limits here," Hans Kung says about the
resurrection. Certainly the language of the New Testament does. Even the
resurrection appearances are veiled, muted, unclear. Henri Nouwen wrote

“the most helpful description I have ever read: “How intimate these events
really are," he wrote. "They are like special favors to dear friends. They
were not done to impress or overwhelm anyone, but simply to show that
(Christ's) love is stronger than death." [A Cry for Mercy, p. 87]

The Easter morning account in Luke which we read concludes with the
three women, having found the tomb empty, running back to where the
disciples were hiding, trying to tell them what had happened - without much
success and then this remarkable understatement “but these words seemed to
them an idle tale, and they did not believe them." [Luke 24:12]

They didn't believe it! That's wonderful! It took weeks, months,

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maybe years, for the people on the spot to assimilate what had happened,
even to begin to understand it. Maybe they never did. Maybe they never.
developed an adequate theology of resurrection. What they most certainly
did, almost immediately, is to begin to live differently: confidently,
victoriously, sometimes almost brashly - without fear, - because of the
power of the resurrection.

The arguments come from a lawyer. Saul of Tarsus was a Pharisee.
That was a lawyer of sorts. After his conversion to Christianity he
changed his name to Paul but kept thinking like a lawyer, and even though
he never saw Jesus, and even though the Gospels don't try, Paul could not
resist having a go at it. He presents the resurrection as a proposition to-
his friends in the Corinthian Church who were Greeks and skeptical and
appreciated a well structured argument.

The 15th Chapter of First Corinthians is classic. Paul marshalls
every polemic and persuasive resource at his disposal and vigorously
prosecutes the case.

..1f there is no resurrection, Christ is not raised -

...AS in Adam all die, so in Christ all shall be made alive -
..What you sow does not come to life unless it dies -

etc., etc., ad infinitum

And then, as his argument winds down, Paul becomes an artist. “Lo, I
tell you a mystery...0 death, where is thy victory?...Thanks be to God!"
That's poetry...music. The argument is over for Paul. It is time for the
singing. But then, abruptly, a complete change. The prosecutor becomes
poet, now becomes a behaviorist, almost a cheerleader. "Thanks be to God
who gives us the victory... Therefore, my beloved brothers and. sisters, be
steadfast, immovabte...'

The climax is not a flash of theological brilliance, the unspeakable
mystery once and for all reduced to a sentence. It surely isn't
physiological. Instead, it is existential, practical, almost mundane. It
has to do, not with what people believe, but how they are living their
lives... “Be immovable."

The deep question has haunted us from the beginning: “Why must we
die?" Why must our humanity disintegrate in front of our eyes? Why this
‘double insult of mortality and awareness of mortality? Alone in creation
we know about death. Human philosophy's greatest challenge is to come out
any place other than a grim pessimism of emptiness and despair, or a brave
but essentially futile defiance in the face of death. The literature of
the race is full of it. From Shakespear's "Out, out brief candle" to Emily
Dickinson's infatuation with the grave, the poets have been embarrassingly
candid about what we've been secretly thinking all these years. Sometimes
they have said it elegantly. Thus Edna St. Vincent Milay, on death: "T do
not approve." And sometimes they have gathered up our anger with great
beauty. Thus Dylan Thomas at the death of his father: “Do not go gently
into that good night! Rage, rage, against the dimming of the light."

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Now an interesting thing begins to happen to some of us, at least, the
more we think about it. Slowly but surely we come to see that our
mortality is not the issue: that death may be the ultimate insuit but the
world would get pretty crowded without it. Slowly but surely we learn a
very lovely lesson and it is that without death all the beauty and nobility
would go out of our humanity. The Greeks understood that. Immortals can't
be noble. In fact, they can't love. The Greek gods are trivial because
they don't die; they don't ever have to risk anything. We learn, in time,
God's wisdom which is expressed in human mortality. The issue is not living
forever. The point is a yearning in our souls which nothing in this life
can satisfy, a spiritual reach which exceeds our grasp. German theologian
Hans Kung has written eloquently, but simply about his own dying: “I have
confidence God will have something further to say, that he has the last
word as well as the first, that he is the God of the end as well as the
beginning... The resurrecrtion of Jesus Christ, says Kung, means that
Jesus - (and we) - do not die into nothingness, but into that absolutely
first and final reality we designate as God. "Death is a passing into
God... a homecoming into God's mystery, assumption into God's glory.”
fexternal Life, pp. 113-114]

The resurrection means that an ultimate issue about us has been
resolved; that we can entrust our future to the loving and just God who
created us. That having been resolved, we are left with the yearning in
our souls. What we need is some sense that what we are now, in this life,
matters, counts for something: that in St. Paul's words - our work is not
-in vain. That's really it, isn't it? That our work - our labor, our
creativity, our love, our dreams, simply do not evaporate with us. That our
work - the essence of who we are - has something more than our own
mortality going for it. We need some sense of that in order to live, in
order to laugh and sing and rejoice.

For twenty centuries his followers have been shouting about it. A
battle has been won. It jis not about a heavenly diety who transcends the
dirt and sweat of humanity to repose somewhere in celestial glory. We have
watched this week, horrified, as God lived within creation, taking on our
humanity, becoming vulnerable. We have watched as our humanness was
embraced and affirmed in that man's life. We have seen the radical
incarnation of the occasional senselessness, ever the unfairness and
cruelty and meaningless suffering. We have seen all of it gathered in the
strong embrace of a Lord who became one of us.

Of course, crucifixion is real. Of course, suffering and injustice
and sickness and crulty are real. But these are not the final reality.
Because Jesus Christ is risen the rules are changed. Life and hope and joy
and love are the final realities in this world. Fear - has no more
substance. There is no darkness into which our Lord has not walked.
Hatred - has been shown to be ultimately harmless. Integrity and justice
and kindness and compassion are shown this day to be the foundations upon
which God's creation rests. And battles waged for life are worth fighting
because the ultimate battle has been won.

Four days ago a visitor to my office apologized for taking my time
from the more pressing requirements of Holy Week. He was there to talk

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about a housing project in which this church has an interest and the
difficult political realities of zoning and city approval and the financial
package and I thought to myself that the apology was unnecessary -
inappropriate: that this is what the resurrection of Jesus is about: that
it is not a philosophic abstraction or a physiological side show - but a
celebration of the victory of life over death, love over hatred, justice
over injustice, and an invitation to join the fight.

It is news each of us needs, personally. Life, for some of us, is a
series of skirmishes which will begin anew tomorrow morning. For others,
life is a sequence of major and critical battles...to find strength to go
on loving and caring in the midst of deep and desparate hurt... to
resist the temptation to throw in the towel, to accept the end of the dream
and compromise both hope and conviction. For some of us life is a battle
against the relentless, gnawing compulsion of addicition... For some it is
the struggle to be vulnerable again at the end of a relationship so
powerful it feels like death or simply to live with a numbing grief over the
loss of a dear one, which feels more powerful than anything else at the
moment. For some life is the battle against the quiet humiliation of
aging, and the loss of strength and stamina which keeps feeling like the
loss of significance. For some it is the temptation to give in to the
sickness we must battle daily - to surrender to death instead of battling
for life. For all of us it is the temptation to begin dying by ceasing
to care - about marriage, or the economy, or the nuclear arms race, or
justice in the Third World, or integrity in City Hall.

However modest or dramatic, each of us is engaged in a struggle.
You, alone perhaps, know what it is for you. You alone know where life and
death are intersecting... Each of us needs, more than anything else in the
world, for the sake of life, God's gift of resurrection.

"Don't budge" Paul said. Stay with it. Be brave. Your struggle is
worth it. An ultimate victory has been won. You are worth something
eternal. For you God's love has lived and died. For you God's love lives
again. "Be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord,
knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain."

Jesus Christ is not dead.
He is Risen...

and he shall reign...forever. Amen.

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