He Was Dead

Luke 24:1-12

1 On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. 2 They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. 4 While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. 5 In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? 6 He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: 7 ‘The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.’” 8 Then they remembered his words.

9 When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others. 10 It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles. 11 But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense. 12 Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. Bending over, he saw the strips of linen lying by themselves, and he went away, wondering to himself what had happened.

He is risen! He is risen, indeed! We aren’t the most liturgical congregation in the world, but every Easter, we break that one out and everyone knows what to do. This got me thinking about our Easter traditions. In this church, we always begin with a big Easter breakfast and follow that up with a lot of singing. After church, we will gather with my in-laws and hunt for Easter eggs. Other than that, our Easter traditions are pretty limited.

Christmas, on the other hand is filled with traditions. We open stockings and presents at a certain time, read certain scriptures, and eat certain foods. And for the last decade or so, my family has been attending a show at the Blackfriars Playhouse here in beautiful Staunton, VA. Each year we attend Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. I’m not a good memorizer, but I’ve seen that play enough to know the opening lines:

Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.

Dickens wants to make absolutely sure that you know two things: Marley is dead, and Scrooge is very aware that Marley is dead. On this Easter morning, I too want to make sure you know Marley is dead. And on the Friday that we call “Good,” the disciples were in the same position as Ebenezer Scrooge. Jesus was dead, and his disciples knew it.

Today I want to talk about dead things. There have been some stories in the news the last few weeks that I think help us connect to this Easter season, and I want to walk through them with you this morning. I know not everyone will connect with each story, but hopefully one will help you better understand the resurrection of our Lord and Savior. For now, I want you to remember those first three words from A Christmas Carol, “Marley was dead.”

The first story I want to share is now almost two weeks old, but to really understand the power of this story, you need to go back to March of 2018. The University of Virginia men’s basketball team entered the NCAA tournament as the number one overall seed. If you aren’t familiar with the tournament format, there are four quadrants, each quadrant has teams ranked 1-16. Then, out of the four teams ranked #1 in their division, one is determined to be the best of the best. In 2018, that was UVA.

Last year’s round of 64 featured the matchup of the #1 overall seed, UVA Cavaliers against the perennial powerhouse, the feared, the mighty…University of Maryland, Baltimore County Golden Retrievers. If that doesn’t strike fear into the heart of the masses, I don’t know what will.

No number 16 seed had ever defeated a number 1 in the history of the men’s tournament, which expanded to a 64-team format in 1985. To put that in perspective, 16 seeds were 0-135 all-time against 1 seeds. UVA was favored by over 20 points in that game.

As you may know, that game didn’t go as planned, and UVA lost by 20. That sticks with a person, including the many players and the coach who returned to play again this year. Marley was dead, and so was the basketball season for the Hoos. But one of the interesting things about this season is that coach Tony Bennett and the players didn’t shy away from talking about making history for all of the wrong reasons. Bennett at times even seemed to be the one who brought it up in interviews, saying how they were using this as motivation.

Throughout the season, the UVA players received taunts from fans and opposing players. The Duke fans went as far as to invite the former point guard from UMBC to the Duke/UVA game, offering him courtside tickets. UVA was down, they were broken, they were the laughing stock of college basketball.

So what did they do this year, one season removed from one of the most embarrassing moments in all of college basketball? They won the whole stinkin’ thing. UVA won the 2019 NCAA Men’s Tournament (though it wasn’t without controversy).

What once seemed dead, was now alive and well.

One week after UVA’s historic victory, an iconic structure made the news, again for reasons nobody would desire. Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, a 12^th-century structure, caught fire, and burned for 15 hours. They first broke ground on this cathedral in 1163, and the structure exhibited some of the most-advanced architecture of the time. But 800-year-old wood burns quickly, and all we could do was watch as the iconic spire toppled to the ground.

I don’t know how to explain what I felt as I watched videos of Notre Dame burning. On one hand, it is a building, a building I’ve never seen and really have no attachment to. And, as a bit of a pyromaniac, I am drawn to fire. But my dominant feeling was of grief and sadness. I was watching history burn before my eyes. I thought of the many baptisms performed at Notre Dame, the weddings, the coronations of kings.

Marley was dead, and Notre Dame lay in ashes.

It was obvious that I wasn’t the only person who felt some kind of connection to this building. Within 24 hours, millions of dollars had been donated or pledged to repair the portions damaged by the fire. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, vowed to rebuild Notre Dame. And as of the time when I wrote this sermon, total fundraising efforts for Notre Dame were near 1 billion dollars. On this Easter Sunday, Notre Dame is a reminder that there can be new life among the ashes.

But many people rightly criticized the way so many people lined up to donate money for Notre Dame, while recent church fires in the United States were being ignored. During the final week of March and the first week of April, three historically black churches in Louisiana were intentionally burned in an act of arson. The suspect has been charged with three counts of committing a hate crime.

People started asking, Why has so much been given to Notre Dame, while these churches in our own backyard continue to struggle? Last Tuesday, when those questions started circulating on social media, a total of $150,000 had been raised to support the churches of Louisiana in the rebuilding efforts. On Wednesday, the complete $1.8 million needed to rebuild those three churches had been raised, and as of midday Friday, about $2.1 million had been donated to these churches.

Sometimes fires start by accident, sometimes people cause them on purpose. But when we work together, we can build again.

A basketball team experiences redemption. Four churches, ravished by fire, experience renewed life. These are good stories of bad situations turning around. These are stories of resurrection. And I could have told so many more. A down-and-out golfer comes back to win the Masters. I even read a book this week about a sloth sanctuary in Costa Rica that takes in orphaned and injured sloths. There is so much wrong in our world, but there are also so many stories of things that are going right, stories of good things coming out of bad situations.

But none of these events come close to the experiences of the disciples and the women on that first Easter Sunday. We are talking about sports. We are talking about buildings. Do you remember those first three words from A Christmas Carol? Marley was dead. And likewise, Jesus was dead. These are great stories, but our God can do more.

The Gospels are clear, just as Dickens was clear: Jesus was dead. It was the third day; Jesus died on a Friday and was laid in the tomb. Saturday came and went. Nothing. He wasn’t just knocked out cold or sleeping. He wasn’t in a comma. Jesus was dead. Luke’s version tells us that on Sunday morning, some women arrived at the tomb with spices to anoint the body of Jesus, but the tomb had been opened, and it is empty.

Luke tells us that two men in gleaming clothes ask the women, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen!”

I believe that because Jesus lived, we too will be raised to new life. Death has lost its sting for those who love the Lord. But the resurrection of Jesus isn’t just a promise of life after death, though it is indeed that. The resurrection of Jesus is the proof that there is new life all around us.

We live in a Good Friday world. We live in a world where there is pain, where there is suffering. And yes, there will continue to be pain and suffering until Jesus comes back to set things right. But the resurrection of Jesus says that we can experience resurrection here and now. Mini resurrections, perhaps. But resurrections, nonetheless. Whether it is a basketball team or a golfer who has been defeated and forgotten, a large cathedral, or a small church in Louisiana, resurrection surrounds us. Every year when the grass turns green, and the birds return, we experience mini resurrections. Where there had been despair, there is hope. Where there was darkness, now there is light. Where there had been death, there is life.