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 Matthew 28:1-10
I have a question. How many of you are living the lives you're intended to live? Is the life that you're supposed to be living, the real you, covered over, contained, asleep or dead? I wonder if Henry Thoreau had you in mind when he said that most people are living lives of quiet desperation. My sense is that if we were to take a count, there would be more people living the desperate life than not.
When you were born, genius was put at the center of your being. If this genius was put into you, if this real self was there, what's happened?
When we are born, we are literally a bundle of energy. We are who we are. When we hurt, we let people know. When we are hungry, we cry. When we want to play, we play. We're just very natural, spontaneous and wonderful.
And then something begins to happen, and it starts with our parents. Sometimes they do a good job, sometimes they don't. We are affected by the way our parents interact with us. We are influenced by their values. We are affected by their expectations of us. From very early on in life parents will say, "You ought to do this, you should become that." They affect us.
And then we're affected by our playmates, our peers, our siblings. The interaction we have with other children has an influence and helps to mold who we become. Later, when we go to school, we meet teachers, and there's a formal class, and the teachers convey their values to us. They convey their goodness or their badness, their strengths or their weaknesses, and we're affected by it, they influence us.
Then we go out into the world. We interact with our culture, which has a tremendous influence on us. Our culture has its own expectations and demands, and also tells us what's good and what's bad.
In this mix the real you, the real me, the real person is trying to express itself. It gets to be very, very difficult. Too much of the time the real person is covered over. It's contained, it's asleep, or it might even be dead.
Dr. Bernie Siegel speaks about this is his book, How to Live Between Office Visits:
Life is a labor pain, and it's worthwhile if we can give birth to ourselves. But I see people who in a sense have died to stay alive. I'm talking about your becoming who you didn't want to be, because of pressure from parents or other authority figures -- you become the doctor, the teacher, the plumber, the housewife, even if the work and role are meaningless to you. And then one day you are told you have a year to live. For some of you, learning that you are mortal finally gives you permission to live your life. And so the teacher quits his job and moves to the seashore, the doctor picks up a flute, the housewife goes back to college, the plumber becomes a sculptor. They let the untrue self die and give birth to their true selves.
Then he says something very interesting:
You can commit suicide without hurting your body.
Psychological or spiritual suicide occurs when, through a series of defeats or compromises, we end by killing whatever is authentic inside us. Often it will take a truly horrific life event for us to decide to resurrect our authentic selves. It is as if we feel the crisis has given us permission to finally live. But, says Bernie Seigel:
You don't have to have permission to do this. We are all mortal. Don't wait until someone tells you that you have cancer or AIDS. Start living. Give yourself a new date of birth.
I challenge you to do this right now. Give yourself a new date of birth: Easter Sunday. My sermon title is "Another Chance." Easter is another chance. God is always in process with us, always trying to see that we come back to life, that our lives no longer are covered over, contained, asleep or dead. God is the God of another chance, taking us from tragedy into possibility, darkness into light, failure into success, death into life.
As you are aware, each of the four Gospels -- Matthew, Mark, Luke and John -- has a slightly different angle on the resurrection story. In the Gospel of Matthew, the 28th chapter, it says that early on that Sunday morning the two Marys went to the tomb to pay their respects to Jesus. They weren't there very long before there was a tremendous earthquake. Then an angel descended from heaven, rolled the stone away from the tomb, and showed it was empty.
Rolling away the stone is a wonderful metaphor for life. We must move away the stones that prevent people from coming out of their tombs. How many of us still are in some kind of entombment?
You may say, "I can't roll it away by myself. It's too heavy." You don't have to do it by yourself. I believe that every single one of us has a guardian angel. You might feel you do not know your angel, that you've never had contact. But think about it -- times when you had a near miss, times when there was an unusual coincidence, or a blessing. Those times when something wonderfully unusual happened and you couldn't figure out why, these could have been times when your angel acted in your life.
Get into conversation with the angel. Ask the angel to help you move the stone which prevents the real you from living. Of course, moving the stone will feel too difficult at times, but what's new? Life is hard. We've got to get rid of the idea that it is not. There's nothing in Scripture, anywhere, which says it's going to be easy. But Scripture does tell us there's help, power, all the assistance that is needed.
If you feel that it is too late, you're too old, that you can't change now, I'm going to challenge that. You've got time to roll back that stone, do the work, and get to where you want to go. Don't just say, "I can't."
Let me tell you something about "I can't." In graduate school I had a professor who said to the students, "I can't means I won't." I don't think that this is applicable all of the time, but I bet we all have times where we've said "I can't" when we really meant "I won't." Think about it.
George Bernard Shaw, the great English writer, was a very caustic, up-front man. I like his spirit and his attitude. He complained about people who say, "I can't do this because" "I can't do that because," blaming the circumstances in life which prevent them from being the person they say they want to be. He said, "I don't believe in circumstances." Of course there are obstacles, losses, things that work against us. But Shaw says, "I don't believe in circumstances." If you're going to do it, just go ahead and do it. Life is tough. It's complicated. It's going to be that way. But just go ahead anyway. Set your mind to it.
We have a wonderful facility, the power of choice. There's so much in our life that we can choose. We can choose attitude, direction and determination. What I'm saying now is, choose. Roll away the stone. Let the angel help you. Go forth. Choose that you are going to be the person you are intended to be.
Let me come at this from another angle. Rabbi William Silverman, a number of years ago, told this rabbinic story about the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, where they spent several hundred years in slavery. As they were making the exodus, they found themselves in a desperate situation: they were startled by the Pharaoh and his army racing after them. In front of them was the turbulent water of the Red Sea. They were trapped.
They stopped to decide what to do. Four groups offered counsel. The first said, "Well, we did the best we could. But there's no hope. Let us plunge into the sea and die."
The second group had different advice. They said, "Let's go back into slavery. Maybe the Egyptians will take us back and allow us to live."
The third group said, "I think we need to protest to God and say, 'God, why are You allowing this to happen to us?"
And there was a fourth group. The fourth group said, "We will not plunge into the sea and die. We will not return into slavery. We will not waste our energy in a protest to God. What we will do is, with faith, proceed toward the Promised Land."
God favored the counsel of the fourth group, and said, "Go forth to the Promised Land." And they went forward. We know the rest of the story. When they got to the Red Sea, God parted the waters and they went forward to freedom and the Promised Land.
We are also people of faith. There is no circumstance that's going to stop you if you don't want it to. Proceed forward to your Promised Land, letting the real you finally, finally exist.
When the two Marys were at the empty tomb, and they asked the angel, "Where is Jesus? Where's our Lord?" And the angel replied, "He has gone ahead of you into Galilee. Go there and you will meet Him."
Send Jesus ahead of you as well. This is a suggestion I often give people facing difficult situations who ask me to pray for them. "Yes," I'll say, "I'll pray for you, but I'm going to ask you to do something for yourself. Send Jesus into that room ahead of you." And time and again they'll say afterwards, "Arthur, I did that. It works. It really makes a difference."
Send Jesus ahead into that room. Nobody has yet said to me it hasn't made a difference. Think about it.
Thirty years ago I was a very young minister, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, my predecessor, was still in the prime of his ministry and career, and he was probably one of the five or six great orators of the twentieth century, a phenomenal communicator. He was preaching the second service - we had two services at the time -- and I was preaching the first service.
That Easter Sunday morning, the ministers gathered in his office, as was our custom to do, we talked a little bit, and we had a prayer, and then Dr. Peale said, "Art, I'm coming to church today to hear you preach."
"No, you're not," I protested.
"Yes, I am," he replied.
"Dr. Peale, I'm nervous enough the way it is. If you are in the congregation I'm not going to be able to handle myself."
But he continued to insist.
Just before I went in to the service, one of the ministers, the late Don Ostroth, seeing how nervous I was, came over and, looking me straight in the eye, said, "Arthur, don't think Peale, think Jesus." That was very profound, and it penetrated, and I sent Jesus on ahead of me. I don't remember anything else about that Easter Sunday sermon, but I'm still here.
One last thing: In a moment, you'll be done reading this sermon. You're going to go one about your life. Imagine yourself entering into a new world, so that the new you - the real you - will be lived, then you'll be able to say, "Easter is my new date of birth." I challenge you to do it. Let us pray.
For the gift, for the miracle, for the wonder, for the excitement of the Resurrection, for what Jesus did, for what You did through Jesus, we celebrate and give You thanks. We're asking today that we too, in our own lives, will experience a resurrection. AMEN |
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