Below is a sermon from Rev’d Fleming Rutledge in which she addresses the elephant in the room for many Christians, especially those who live in the West, who are ashamed of the gospel. Maddeningly, many of the Church’s teachers, preachers, and leaders are likewise ashamed of the gospel, especially when it comes to preaching and teaching about Christ’s Resurrection! Rev’d Rutledge is not one of those teachers, preachers, and leaders, thanks be to Christ. Christians have the best game in town, the ONLY game in town, and yet many do not realize the pearl of greatest value that is theirs for the taking (because it is offered freely to them by God their Father.
Lord Jesus Christ, be pleased to bless your Body, the Church, with a new generation of teachers preachers, and leaders, especially bishops, who are not ashamed of the gospel and who are willing and able to preach and teach the gospel faithfully with all boldness, that your people too may become bold for the gospel in their speaking, thinking, and living. Forgive those leaders, teachers, and preachers, who are ashamed of the gospel and who have led your people likewise to be ashamed of the gospel. Forgive them, risen Savior. Heal them. Bring them to true repentance for their wickedness, for your tender mercy’s sake, and for the sake of your beloved Body, the Church. In your Powerful Name we pray, and for your sake. Amen.
For those with ears to hear, listen and understand (and then pick up the book and read the rest of it).
Beyond Possibility
With God, all things are possible. (Saint Mark 10:27)
There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven. Going to the tomb, he rolled back the stone and sat upon it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing was white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men. The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he is risen.…” (Saint Matthew 28:2–6)
The Easter greeting that we have just exchanged is very ancient. It goes back to the first centuries of the Christian church. As I’m sure you know, the Greek Orthodox people, to this day, say Christos anesti! Alethos anesti! (“Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!”) to each other during Easter Week. What a wonderful custom.
Well, we have said it. Now let me ask you a question. Do you believe what you have said?
A great many churchgoers have gotten the idea that you can’t believe in the Resurrection if you want to be a sophisticated person. In the midst of all the articles about the mass suicide of cult members in Rancho Santa Fe, there have been many sneering comments about religion. One writer said that religion led to bizarre cultic behavior because it thrived on “repression, exclusion, and control.” These messages, heard over and over, have their effect. The cumulative result is to make Christians feel sheepish about their faith. St. Paul was not immune to this effect in his own time; that’s why he wrote to the Roman Christians, “I am not ashamed of the gospel” (Romans 1:16).
It is a feature of our time that preachers in the mainline churches, if not ashamed exactly, are embarrassed to say anything straightforward about the Resurrection. I went to hear a sermon preached in an Ivy League chapel by a Ph.D. student whom I knew to be a believer. You wouldn’t have known it from his sermon. I asked him afterward why he had been so timid, and he murmured something about the congregation being “very skeptical and urbane.” Well, indeed: the “uneducated, common men” (Acts 4:13) who became apostles after the Resurrection might have been similarly intimidated. If they had, however, you and I would never have heard the name of Jesus Christ.
I have heard and read many Easter sermons in my day and I have a lot of them in my files. Here are some actual quotes:
“On Easter Day, the world takes a turn for the better.”
“The Resurrection is the divine inspiration for us, giving us the strength and courage to emulate Jesus.”
“Peter is a symbol of human weakness; his discovery of acceptance and forgiveness is personified in the idea of the risen Jesus.”
“In their table fellowship after the Crucifixion, the heartbroken disciples gradually came to sense that Jesus was still with them.”
“The early Christians came to believe that love is stronger than death.”
“The disciples came to believe that Jesus lives forever in the faith of those who trust his message.”
Over and over in these sermons, the same words appear: the disciples “came to believe” something about Jesus. In other words, the impulse for belief arose out of themselves. The New Testament says something quite different. The words of the angel announce something completely foreign to human possibility: “He is not here. He is risen.” On the road to Emmaus, the two disciples did not recognize Jesus until “their eyes were opened.” The syntax clearly indicates that their recognition of the risen Christ was initiated by God. Think about this: in the quotations from the sermons I just read, God is not the acting subject of any of the sentences. A large number of Easter sermons today seem timid because the speakers do not seem confident that God can, or that God did, do anything outside of human capacity.
In one sermon that I heard myself, the preacher said that Easter is about “the enduring symbols of ultimate truth.” But you could hear that message anywhere; it is no different from any number of sayings having only the most tenuous connection, or no connection, to the Christian faith. It does not seem likely to me that anything so abstract as an enduring symbol of ultimate truth could have galvanized, virtually overnight, a tiny band of scruffy fishermen and other assorted nonentities, all of them completely discredited in the eyes of the world because they were disciples of a man who had been gruesomely and publicly executed by the highest authorities of church and state. Do you think that commonly held but nature-bound ideas about life after death could have been the motivating force that took hold of those men and women and transformed them into an unstoppable force that within a few years was setting the whole Mediterranean world ablaze?
A world-famous figure of our own day, a woman nurtured in the church, was widely quoted at the time of her husband’s death; she said, “All the world’s religions teach that there is some sort of life after death. I cling to that hope.”
Many people are comforted by thoughts such as this. Apparently it was enough for her. Maybe it is enough for you. I confess that it is not enough for me. More important, such reflections fall far short of the New Testament message. In my ministry I have learned to recognize the look, the feel, and the smell of death. I have been present with people at the time of death many times and I have never become immune to the change that comes over the body. The New Testament refers to death as an enemy (1 Corinthians 15:26). Even in the case of what we call a merciful death, there is still a horrible indignity, a fearsome intrusiveness about death that causes us to feel its presence as a hostile, invading Power that robs the human being of everything it was ever meant to be. I keep thinking about an inconsolably bereaved husband I knew, a prominent and vigorous man in his early sixties who was looking forward to a happy twenty-year retirement in a new house he and his wife had just built. A hit-and-run driver has robbed him of his companion. Death has destroyed their hopes. He is one who can testify that nothing can ever replace a uniquely loved person. Nebulous messages about some sort of religious hope for an afterlife simply do not have the power to stare down the stark ugliness of death. Such messages sound too much like wishful thinking to me. We cannot seriously imagine that, after watching their Master pinned up to die like an insect, an object of utmost contempt and public disgust, the disciples would suddenly be transformed by being reminded that there was always a hope for some sort of life after death.
We owe it to those first Christian disciples to do our very best to understand the utter hopelessness of their situation after the Crucifixion. They had invested their whole lives in what appeared to be a diabolical joke. They had seen their beloved Master scourged almost to death, dragged through the streets, nailed to a cross and abandoned to suffer public agony in the face of the obscene mockery of everybody in Jerusalem. Once they had basked in the reflected status of a celebrity who had been mobbed by large crowds; now he had been judged a nonperson, fit only for the most degrading and sadistic death that the human mind was capable of devising. If there had been any solidarity among his followers, it had vanished; not one person had dared to come forward in the Master’s defense, and their supposed leader, Peter, had cravenly denied Jesus three times. There was nothing left. It is preposterous to think of them pulling themselves together with the sorts of thoughts available to them from the mystery religions surrounding them. Frankly, their Jewish faith, based in the utterly realistic and unromantic Hebrew scriptures, would not have allowed any such vague and generic hopes. The Messiah was supposed to usher in the kingdom of God; for those disciples who had staked their lives on Jesus being that Messiah, it cannot be stated too strongly: there was no hope.
Everyone who has studied the New Testament agrees that something happened to change the situation. Even the skeptics who seem determined to demystify the Resurrection into something bland and predictable will agree that something happened.
But what was it? If it wasn’t an experience of personal forgiveness or renewed hopefulness or positive thinking, what was it?
Imagine that you are one of the women going to the tomb in the early hours of the morning. We do have a way of going to visit graves, don’t we? But why do we go? Isn’t it because we want to try to hold on to some kind of shred of closeness to the dead person? There were flowers here in our local cemetery on Easter Day; this is a way we have of saying we haven’t forgotten, we miss you, we love you, we wish you had not gone away. We most definitely do not visit a grave because we expect to see somebody rise out of it.
The women were not going to Jesus’ grave with any sort of expectation whatsoever. The New Testament is quite clear about that. They set out for the tomb because they felt a longing to have some sort of contact with what was left of their dead Master. They were hoping for no miracle. Dead people don’t come back. In fact, so little did they expect a miracle that the sole subject of discussion was who was going to roll away the stone. If they didn’t think that the power of God could roll away the stone, they most assuredly did not think the power of God would raise Jesus from the grave.
St. Matthew explains that the tomb of Jesus had been sealed by an express order of Pontius Pilate, and that a guard of Roman soldiers had been posted. At dawn on the first day of the week, the women came to the tomb. As they approached, St. Matthew tells us,
There was a violent earthquake, for an angel of the Lord came down from heaven. Going to the tomb, he rolled back the stone and sat upon it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing was white as snow. The guards were so afraid of him that they shook and became like dead men. The angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid, for I know that you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified. He is not here; he is risen.…”
If that doesn’t make your hair stand on end, I have not read it right. Matthew means for it to strike us with utter, dumbfounded, stupefied awe. Perhaps this retelling gives you at least some sense of the unprecedented, unlooked-for, unimaginable nature of the event. Note the action of the angel. Why does he roll away the stone? To let Jesus out? No indeed; Jesus is already gone. Why does the angel roll away the stone then? He does it to let the women look in, to see that the tomb is empty. Jesus was raised out of death into life during the night, before the women got there.
I can feel the goosebumps on the back of my neck as I say this. Yes, I know all the objections: I know that the Gospel accounts seem to contradict each other; I know that the Roman soldiers never wrote up a report; I know that medical science scoffs at this; I know that none of it can be proved; I know it isn’t possible as we understand possibility. But I also know that this is a message that would explain everything that happened afterward. He is not here; he is risen. That, truly, is a piece of news to shake the foundations of the Roman Empire and the stronghold of death itself.
“Go quickly,” said the angel to the women in Matthew’s account, “Go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has risen from the dead and is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him.’ ” What other message on earth or in heaven could reverse the effect of a crucifixion? I do not believe that there is any news ever uttered by human tongue equal to the announcement that the citadel of Death had been stormed by the only Power capable of bearing away its standard.
The battle imagery is right. The New Testament is pervaded by battle imagery. In the words of the well-loved Easter hymn: “The strife is o’er, the battle done; the victory of life is won.… The powers of death have done their worst; but Christ their legions hath dispersed.” Can there be anyone who has not thrilled to a victory parade? Well, this is the greatest triumphal parade of all time; Jesus has beaten down death, routed the hosts of Satan, and driven the enemy into full flight. As we read in Colossians: “He [God the Father] disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in him [Jesus]” (Colossians 2:15). This is no time for wishy-washy sentiments about springtime in the heart; this is a time for fanfares and drum rolls and choruses from the book of Revelation:
Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. (19:6)
The kingdom of this world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign for ever and ever. (11:15)
We give thanks to thee, Lord God Almighty, who art and who wast, that thou hast taken thy great power and begun to reign. (11:17)
The salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brethren has been thrown down.… Rejoice then, O heaven and you that dwell therein! (12:10, 12)
I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! He who sat upon it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war. His eyes are like a flame of fire, and on his head are many diadems; and he has a name inscribed which no one knows but himself … and the name by which he is called is The Word of God. And the armies of heaven, arrayed in fine linen, white and pure, followed him on white horses.… On his robe and on his thigh he has a name inscribed, King of kings and Lord of lords. (19:11–16)
Now that is dynamite; dynamite enough to strengthen these apostles that you see around you in stained glass to defy the Roman Empire and go to exile, prison, or death so that you and I might say to one another two thousand years later, “The Lord is risen! He is risen indeed!”
May we all rejoice together on this snowy New England day, knowing that his Resurrection is not dependent on the weather. “O ye ice and snow, O ye frost and cold, bless ye the Lord; praise him and magnify him forever.” Spring will come. Spring will come, not because it is in nature, but because God has raised his Son from the dead. May God confirm this miracle in our lives, now and in the hour of our death, so that we may remember the angel who descends like lightning from heaven, who rolls the stone of doubt and fear from our hearts, who invites us into the very bastion of Death to show us that the tomb is empty, that the Enemy has been routed, that the unthinkable and the impossible has happened: He is risen; he goes before us; we will see him. May this incredible message give you joy today and always, and may the God of Jesus Christ our Lord be praised for ever and ever.
Fleming Rutledge, “Beyond Possibility (Monday in Easter Week),” in The Undoing of Death: Sermons for Holy Week and Easter (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005), 251–259.
