Nothing New but the Good News

As you are well aware today is Easter Sunday, and if you aren’t well aware that it’s Easter Sunday, well…now you are. And this morning I don’t have an awful lot that’s new or uniquely insightful to say. In fact, I don’t think that a single thing I’m going to say this morning is new or will be uniquely insightful. And the reason is because I think that it’s silly and frankly stupid and possibly bordering on the sinful to believe that we need to come up with a “new take” on Easter every year. There’s this pressure that pastors and preachers feel that they have to come up with something, some new insight, some unique spin or approach so that their congregation or in this case you my beloved audience can have a fresh take on Easter.

But that’s wrong.

Now, certainly there’s nothing wrong with learning new and deeper things about Christ and His Word. If you HAVE a new and true thing to say about the Resurrection, then, please, by all means share it. There’s more truth in the Word of God than I will mine in a thousand lifetimes. So, I’m not saying that there’s nothing new and good and preach-worthy about Easter that I’m unaware of.

What I AM, in fact, saying is that the pressure to have some new thing to give new insight or to offer people a new experience is not always a good thing. It’s not a good thing to constantly need novelty, because, the fact of the matter is, most of life is lacking in novelty. And that’s part of the tragedy of so many people’s lives. There are so many who feel cheated if they leave a single wine untasted, if they fail to experience some romantic encounter. It’s the same anthropological itch that causes people to go skydiving or bungee jumping.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not preaching against trying new things, and I’m not preaching against seeking a thrill every now and again. What I AM saying is that building an entire life and existence off of thrill seeking and the constant need to validate one’s own personality through newer and ever more extreme adrenaline rushes is not healthy. The need to try exotic dishes; the unshakeable desire to fall in love again and again; the addiction to danger—all these things are chasing a feeling and worse than chasing a feeling. Not because feelings are bad—they aren’t. And not because feelings are unreliable—I think that’s overplayed and people fail to understand what feelings are for. But the life lived in enslavement to novelty is a life that can never really begin. Because the reality is that life is not about the new and novel, it’s about Christ; and Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Christ is always the same, but because He’s an infinite person we never grow tired of Him.

But back to the point about a life of novelty seeking not really beginning, I want to emphasize this because I think it’s deeply important. Life, real life, meaningful life cannot be lived chasing after the wind. If you want to live a life that matters you have to settle down into the rhythms of life. You have to settle in to the repetition. If you want to have children you have to settle in for repeating yourself a million times; for cleaning up other people’s messes a million times. Being a parent isn’t changing a diaper once and saying, “welp, I’m glad that’s over!” No, it’s not about changing a diaper once it’s about changing diapers until there are no more diapers to change. It isn’t about making up a bedtime story for the novelty of the experience, it’s about coming up with a thousand stories and falling asleep in the middle and talking gibberish in your sleep and telling stories until the kids don’t want ‘em anymore. It’s the same thing with work. A carpenter doesn’t learn how to build a set of stairs of how to cut and frame rafters and then just quit because he’s “done carpentry” and can now move on to something else. You pound nails till your hand aches and you do it over and over and over and you repeat the same skills until you retire.

And lest you think that because Christianity is spiritual that our faith somehow escapes the reality of repetition let me say that living the Christ-life is a life of repetition. Unfortunately, and for understandable reasons, but unfortunately all the same, many if not most contemporary evangelical Christians have internalized the notion that if something is extemporaneous and unplanned that it’s spiritual and that if anything is prewritten or ritualistic that it’s dead orthodoxy. We’ve somehow, and I’m pretty sure I know how, but we’ve somehow drawn the conclusion that if something is new that it’s spiritual and something that’s old is just dead-letter Pharisaism.

Now, look, I’m all for new wine in new wineskins. I get it. But something being new doesn’t mean that it’s good. In the same way in very conservative times in history, and even in very conservative groups and institutions today, being OLD doesn’t make something good. Sometimes a tradition is nothing more than a group of people who’ve been subjected to a misery insisting that because they suffered through it that everyone else oughta too!

But that’s not the point. The point is that there is a lot of stuff that’s repetitive that’s good. Spiritual disciplines are this way—most things that are pedagogical are, in fact, repetitive. And the incessant need for new experiences does not, to me, signify a deep and thoroughgoing spirituality, but actually a deep spiritual immaturity. Children are the ones who kick against the pricks and hate the slow painful disciplining practices that form excellence. Mature people know how to practice the fundamentals to maintain excellence.

If you’ll forgive the analogy, if you watch a major league baseball game, those are the best players in the world and they take ground balls between innings just the same as the 7 year olds in little league. They show up to batting practice and they take grounders and do long-toss and they work hard at it to achieve excellence. They don’t complain about taking grounders or working on the repetitive drills of backhanding a onehopper. They do the fundamentals to maintain excellence.

But little kids whine and complain—all they want to do is go up to bat and swing for the fences. But you can’t go from a kid who never practices to someone who hits major league homers without endless hours of practicing the fundamentals. Everybody wants to be the guy who strikes out the side to win the World Series, only serious people are willing to spend thousands of hours working on the spin of their curveball.

Everybody wants to have a deep, lifechanging, and entirely new Spiritual experience. Everybody wants to have perpetual novelty. Everyone wants freshness and newness.

And those things aren’t bad. In fact, they’re good, when they come organically. But the problem is not that we want something good, it’s a problem with prioritization. There is nothing wrong with wanting deep, lifechanging, entirely new, fresh, novel, Spiritual experiences. We should want them. Morning by morning we should see new mercies. We should desire that. The problem is not desiring Spiritual experiences, the problem is chasing Spiritual experiences and new Spiritual experiences to the detriment of our relationship with Christ and obedience to him. Because the simple fact of the matter is that nobody becomes a mature Christian without a lot of repetition. Nobody develops a deep faith in Christ without a lot of saying the same old prayers and reading the same old verses and asking forgiveness for the same old sins and seeking grace to do the same old righteous deeds.

A truly deep relationship with God CAN and often DOES involve a desire for more of Him and great visitation of the Spirit in power upon us. Absolutely. Paul commands us to earnestly desire the greater gifts. We are supposed to fix our gaze on Christ. Closeness and the experience of closeness to God is a wonderful blessing and we should desire it. But that doesn’t come by chasing novelty.

If you seek Christ and attempt to live a life in careful obedience to Him the spiritual experiences will come and you won’t have to work yourself up into an emotional or psycho-somatic frenzy to get ‘em. They’ll come of themselves. That’s because chasing a Spiritual experience is the least efficient means of getting a Spiritual experience that’s possible. Constantly trying to conjure up some dizzying Christian transport is the worst way of achieving powerful intimacy with Christ.

Again, I’m not saying to not desire powerful, experiential intimacy with Christ—you’d have to be dead inside to NOT desire that! What I’m saying is don’t substitute Christ and obedience and love for Him with the sensory and/ or Spiritual experience of closeness to Him.

In the Christian life, it seems that the fastest way is always the long way.

Again, I say all this because this is Easter and instead of giving us some new, novel, fresh, never-before heard take on the Resurrection I want to simply retell the story of the Resurrection. It’s a pretty simple story. Let’s read Mark’s version.

16:1 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. 2 Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb 3 and they asked each other, “Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb?”

4 But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed.

6 “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’ ”

8 Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

And there you have it. A simple story, and rather an incomplete. Mark simply tells us that an angel told the women that Jesus had risen. We don’t get an inside look in the tomb; we don’t get any details about HOW the Resurrection occurred. We don’t get the skies parting. We don’t get drama and fanfare. We get an angel, which, to be fair is pretty exciting, but he doesn’t dazzle everyone with his power and might. He simply tells them a straightforward account and sends them on their way.

Let me reread the angel’s words:

Friends the Easter story, and there are legitimately an awful lot of ways to preach this, but it is a simple story. Jesus was dead and then he wasn’t. And at its core that’s the Easter story. Jesus was dead, but He’s not anymore.

Mark’s gospel doesn’t go into details about how or why Jesus rose—or even who raised Him!—the women are simply told to get a move on. And they did.

And friends, at its core, the Christian story is not a complex story, at least not in its broad outlines. God made people; God loved people; people loved themselves more than God; people’s self-love separates them from God; God comes in the flesh; God loves people more than He loves Himself; God in the flesh dies; God in the flesh stops being dead and starts being alive again; people who trust in Him will be able to love God more than they love themselves.

That’s the story. And you might tell if differently, indeed, you almost certainly wouldn’t use the same words and wording that I did. And that’s OK. But the fact is that it’s a simple story. It’s not complicated. It’s a story so simple a child can understand it. We deserved punishment and Jesus was punished for us. We deserved death and He died for us.

But He didn’t stay dead.

And that’s the core of the Christian message. That’s the kicker, the crux, Jesus didn’t stay dead! Most people who die stay dead. In fact, I’ve done a fair number of funerals in my years as a pastor. Not one of those people ever stopped being dead. I’ve had a good number of family members and friends die over the years—they’re all still dead. None of them stopped being dead. And, apart from a few miracles in the old and new testaments, everyone who’s ever died has stayed dead.

But not Jesus.

Jesus didn’t stay dead.

And there are two questions that naturally follow from this statement. These questions are implied in the Gospel of Mark, but I think they’re implied strongly enough that we can say ‘em out loud, so I’m gonna say ‘em out loud.

The first question is simply this: do you believe it? Do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead on Easter morning two thousand years ago? Do you believe it? It’s a simple question, maybe a difficult one to answer, but I think those are the kind worth asking…and answering. Do you believe that He rose from the dead? I’m not asking you to doubt yourself or to look deep inside. Just answer the question. Did Jesus stop being dead?

The second question is: what’re you gonna do about it? Now this second part applies nomatter how you answer. If you say “no” I don’t believe he rose from the dead, then you really ought ask yourself if you want to believe it and to ask yourself why you don’t, and then if you want to believe and you just don’t then come see ole Lukey poo and we’ll talk. And if you don’t believe and you don’t wanna, then I’d ask you to be honest about it and don’t call yourself a Christian and don’t pretend. And if you do believe then let me ask again, what are you gonna do about it? What are you gonna do with the faith that God granted you?

Friends He either rose or He didn’t and you either believe it or you don’t and you either live by your belief or you don’t. I pray you’ll believe and I pray you’ll live in accordance with that faith.