Pastor John Bell's Easter Sermon

Below is a repost of Wellshire Presbyterian Church Pastor John Bell's Easter sermon. I usually use baseball analogies to describe sermons (you struck out, or you hit it out of the park.) I even keep "batting averages" for pastors and their sermons, which will no doubt haunt me some day. My baseball analogies are especially fitting as you read below. This sermon was a home run!

Easter Sermon 2010: Back to the Garden

Read: John 20_1-18

The late comedian George Carlin, who has probably never been quoted in an Easter sermon, rightly recognized that baseball has spiritual value. This becomes clear when baseball is compared to football. He observed that:

Baseball begins in the spring, the season of new life; Football begins in the fall, when everything’s dying. Football has clipping, spearing, piling on, personal fouls, late hitting and unnecessary roughness; Baseball has the sacrifice. In football, the clock is often considered to be: the enemy; Baseball has no clock and no time limit! The game theoretically could go on for … eternity!

And finally, the objectives of the two games are very different:

In football, you want the field general to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz — even if he has to use shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing the air assault with a sustained ground attack until they arrive at the … end zone. In baseball the main objective is to go home, and, when you arrive at home, you want to be safe! You want to be home and be safe.

Now, it is not a stretch to say that the main concern of God-fearing, faith-seeking people, our chief objective, is – like baseball – to return home and be safe. The Psalmist writes, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in God.”

Bishop and former Dean of the Duke Chapel, Will Willimon, suggests that human beings “sigh for Eden” and want to go back to that peaceful and prosperous place where it all began — before sin and evil entered the world. We all have a deep desire for things to be placid and perfect, free and fruitful — the way we believe things should be — with no bullies, homework or over-draft fees — the way we imagine it was in the Garden of Eden when it was said by God to be “all good.” Some say that deep within every human heart there is some faint memory of Eden and a deep and abiding desire to re-wind the clock and return there.

As an oft recorded, popular song (Joni Mitchell, Woodstock) declares:

We are stardust.
We are golden.
And we’ve got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.

We wonder: How are we going to get back to the Garden?

*****

News flash: the resurrection of Jesus Christ takes place in a garden!

If you go to Jerusalem today, you may go visit the so-called “Garden Tomb.” It is probably not the actual tomb of Jesus, but many believe that it probably looks most like what scholars believe the tomb of Jesus looked like. It is located just outside the city wall of Jerusalem. The Bible says that Jesus was crucified at Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, and very nearby the Garden Tomb there is a high rock formation which does look like a skull. The tomb is nice and large, and we know from Scripture that Jesus was placed in the tomb of a wealthy man. There is a large stone, which has been rolled away. However, the Garden Tomb is best known for – guess what? – its Garden! The tomb is located in the middle of a lovely, mature, fragrant, green Garden. The tomb is surrounded by trees and shrubs and flowers, chirping birds and buzzing bees. The courtyard is dotted with benches and well-raked, pebble paths and pools of living water. When Jesus came out of the tomb, he set foot in a lush garden …which probably looked something a bit like the garden, which now surrounds the Garden Tomb – minus the gift shop. Mary actually mistook Jesus for the gardener.

[By the way, this mistaken identity was actually reversed in Peter Seller’s hysterical movie, Being There, in which a would-be savior actually turned out to be only a simple gardener who only knew about plants and weather.]

The symbolism is clear: in the resurrection, which took place in “a garden,” Jesus is on his way back to “The Garden.” Easter morning represents the dawn of a new creation!

*****

It is a spiritual necessity to have a clear vision of Paradise, to use your imagination to envision with the eyes of your heart what life in the Garden will be like. Imagination is extremely powerful: Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard and best-selling author, claims that human beings are the only animals that possess the ability to think about the future. He writes, “To see is to experience the world as it is, to remember is to experience the world as it was, but to imagine – ah, to imagine is to experience the world as it isn’t and has never been, but as it might be. … As one philosopher noted, the human brain is ‘an anticipation machine’ and ‘making future’ is the most important thing it does.” [Stumbling on Happiness, p. 5]

The Hebrew prophets were an imaginative lot: the prophets of Yahweh speak of a place where there will be no more death, tears or pain, where each person can sit out in the open under his own fig tree trees and not worry about violence or vandalism, a place where justice will roll down like waters and righteousness shall flow like a swift-moving stream, a place where we will all know the Lord and God’s law will be written on our hearts, a place of perfect peace where we will not teach our children war anymore for implements of war – spears and swords – will be turned into plows and pruning hooks. In that place:

The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them. [Isaiah 11:6]

And, in the New Testament, the last couple of chapters of the Book of Revelation offer John’s imaginative vision of a new heaven and a new earth, centered in a New Jerusalem, in which is found the Tree of Life, sitting of the banks of the River of Life, which flows from underneath the throne of God. There will be no night, because God’s glory will shine around the clock and angels will surround the throne, singing beautiful songs of God’s glory. What a glorious vision?

*****

It is natural to imagine what Heaven looks like or wonder where Heaven is located or who will be there to greet us when we arrive. BUT it is even MORE beneficial – to use your imagination to ponder: what spiritual condition exists in Heaven? What does Heaven feel like? What quality of life do people in Heaven experience?

You may come to a different conclusion, but, as I read and understand the Bible, Heaven is primarily a place of peace. I imagine that people in Heaven are perfectly at peace. In the Bible, “peace” [shalom] is descriptive of what people experience when things are the way God wants them to be. Peace means – not just the absence of unpleasant things like war, terrorists, talk radio and dishonest politicians, but the presence of all good things, such as healthy food, people to love, justice, equal rights, quality health care, affordable housing and baseball. I imagine that people in Heaven are perfectly at peace. Another way to say the say same thing is that people in Heaven will feel blessed – richly blessed, which is can also be translated in English: HAPPY!

“Happy” may be a seemingly trivial or small word. “Happy” is a word and an experience which is actually very hard to define. The Greek word “makaros” can be translated blessed or happy, suggesting those two words are virtually synonymous in Christian thought. “To be happy” is to feel richly loved and blessed by God. It may be helpful to think of peace as the condition that creates the feeling of happiness. People in Heaven are at peace, blessed, serene, content, HAPPY. People in Heaven will sport a grin.

It is spiritually beneficial to think of Heaven – not so much as a physical place to which you are transported after you die, but as a spiritual condition, because – listen up: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL YOU DIE TO EXPERIENCE HAPPINESS! The resurrection took place in a garden on the same globe that your feet are resting on now. Jesus taught that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand! It is near. It is right here, right now. The Good News of Easter is that you are invited to taste the Kingdom of Heaven now, you are welcome to experience it today! When you are at peace, perfectly happy, doing exactly what God created you to be, what Jesus taught you to do, it is not too strong to say: you are experiencing a little slice of Paradise, a little foretaste of the Kingdom of Heaven. You are the first fruits of a renewed, very happy humanity.

*****

… That’s good, because there are a whole lot of unhappy people on earth – and a high percentage of those people live in America. In fact, the happiness industry is big business. You can go to any bookstore and pick up hundreds of books with pictures on the cover of beautiful, rich people, with expensive smiles and fabulous hair, telling you how you can be happy – like they are. Don’t do it! Some of the books might be a helpful if you have a specific problem, but after you read most of those books you will probably be less happy because you are not as rich and beautiful as the author.

Actual research on happiness is fairly interesting. The most interesting thing to me is that human beings are remarkably poor at predicting what will make us happy. Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard, writes in a new book, “People are surprisingly bad judges of what will make them happy. In particular, they seem unable to predict the duration of the happiness or unhappiness brought on by many common events or changes in their lives. Instead, they attach too much importance to the immediate effects of a happy or unhappy experience without realizing how quickly they will adapt and grow to what has occurred.” [Politics of Happiness, pp. 5-6]

Daniel Gilbert, the psychologist that I quoted early in the sermon, says that most happy people simply stumble on happiness; they get lucky. He opens his book with a quotation from a play written in 1902, which summarizes his research: “One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour …” [Stumbling on Happiness, p. 1]

David Brooks wrote a piece for the New York Times which was picked up by the Denver Post on Thursday. If you were Sandra Bullock would you choose between an Academy Award, which brings riches and fame and celebrity, or a happy marriage? David Brooks wrote, “If you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, you are absolutely crazy,” because marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining happiness – and everybody knows it, but we seem to ignore the truth.

Human beings are surprisingly bad judges of what will make us happy. Left alone in this world, it is all too easy to become lost and make bad choices … which is precisely why Jesus came to save us from ourselves and lead us back to the Garden! He came to tell us of God’s love and teach us how to find true, lasting peace and happiness.

*****

The problem is – and this is a very serious problem – that the advice that Jesus gives seems to do and be in contrast with that the world tells you to do and be.

The great author and Bible translator, J.B. Philips, wrote [I am not sure where this can be found. It has floated in my files for eons. I believe that it was published in his great little book, Your God Is Too Small.] the world is clear about how to be happy:

Happy are the “pushers”: for they get on in the world.

Happy are the hard-boiled: for they never let life hurt them.

Happy are they who complain:

for they get their own way in the end.

Happy are the blasé: for they never worry over their sins.

Happy are the slave-drivers: for they get results.

Happy are the knowledgeable men of the world:

for they know their way around.

Happy are the troublemakers:

for they make people take notice of them.

In contrast, Jesus says that there is a different way to be happy in Matthew 5:

3 ‘Happy are the poor in spirit,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

4 ‘Happy are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

5 ‘Happy are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

6 ‘Happy are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,

for they will be filled.

7 ‘Happy are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.

8 ‘Happy are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

9 ‘Happy are the peacemakers,

for they will be called children of God.

10 ‘Happy are those who are persecuted for righteousness’

sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

The difference from what the world tells you will make you happy and what Jesus tells you is almost as great as the difference … between football and baseball. It would be harder, I imagine, to convince you of the truth in Jesus’ teaching on happiness than to try to convince you that he rose from the dead, setting foot in a garden.