Easter Sunday Sermon

Matthew 28:1-10

28After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb. ²And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it.³His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. ⁴For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men.

⁵But the angel said to the women, “Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. ⁶He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay. ⁷Then go quickly and tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’ This is my message for you.”


⁸So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples. ⁹Suddenly Jesus met them and said, “Greetings!” And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him. ¹⁰Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.”

You may have heard about the playing of a little basketball game on Monday night. The University of Kentucky Wildcats managed to win six games in a row and in doing so captured college basketball's national championship. The Jones household celebrated accordingly.

You may have also heard some disturbing stories of rioting in Lexington—couches burned, cars flipped, and other assorted mayhem spread across the city with the Wildcats last two victories. Most sensible people look at this and wonder why people were rioting and burning things if UK was winning. To that I reply, 'great question.'

We have two things that don't seem to fit together—celebrations and riots. Joy and anger. Happiness and destruction.

But isn't life filled with these types of discordant notes crammed together onto the same page? How often do you find yourself celebrating one thing in a part of life while at the same time you're stressing out over something else? How many of you go to work and have to be professional, put together, while the reality of your home life is tearing you apart inside? How many of us come to church and tell everyone we are doing fine, doing great, while the reality is that we can barely keep our head above water?

We're used to contradictions—the world is filled with them, and we try to keep life in the balance, while the reality is that we often find ourselves walking the tightrope of life, bar in our hand, swaying wildly from side to side and praying that God will keep us from toppling over.

Life is messy, and so it should be no surprise that we find the first Easter morning crammed full of clashing realities. Just look at them--

We have the women, society's least, remaining faithful while all the men, the supposed pillars of the church, have fled.

We have the darkness of the tomb contrasting with the angel, an appearance like lightning and clothing like snow.

We have the guards, who live and yet become like dead men, contrasted with Jesus, the dead man who becomes alive.

We have the mourning and fear of the women turning into joy at the Easter message.

We have the finality of death colliding with the triumph of life.

We have the violence of the Romans meeting the love and peace of God.

We have good and evil, two worlds colliding.

This is the world into which resurrection happens. It's a messy world, filled with good and evil, with violence and peace, with faithful and unfaithful people, with disciples and Pharisees. It's a messy world, and the people within it have messy hearts—from Pontius Pilate, the one who had the power to release Jesus but not the strength to do so, to Peter, the disciple who had a passion for Jesus but an inability to think clearly at the right times. People were filled with fear and faith, with hope and doubt, with certainty and questions. This was the the world into which resurrection happened on the first Easter morning.

Tell me—does that sound so different than our world today? Does a world in which good and evil both abound, a world in which there are cries for justice to match the violent oppression of many, a world in which we have hope and doubt, fear and faith, sound so different than the one in which we find ourselves? Chattanooga, over the last year, has been filled with wonderful moments and terrible ones—it was this past week that we remembered the violence with which Sgt. Tim Chapin was torn from this life, and yet are there not still festivals and baseball games and fireworks downtown? Is not your own life filled with good and evil, with faith and fear, with hope and doubt?

None of this means that our faith is weak, for our lives are the same as the first disciples—we long for good and yet find ourselves falling short. Ours is a world in which resurrection happens. Christ didn't rise because 1^st century Jerusalem was a perfect world of perfect people. Christ rose from the dead because humanity was sinful and in need of a Savior, in need of a champion to heal our brokenness, our sinfulness, and only the perfect Son of God could do it. Just as Christ rose in a broken world two thousand years ago, Christ's resurrection is still our source of hope today. Christ comes to a broken world filled with imperfect people and promises that in the end, we will be perfect. He doesn't promise that our lives will be easy, that the contradictions will fade—He promises that His love will win in the end, that it will all be resolved in God's time if we trust in Him. He invites us into a life more abundant than we can imagine and promises to be with us every step of the way, through every dark valley and to every high mountaintop. He doesn't promise us that we won't confront death, that we won't struggle—but he promises that His love will win, that the Easter message of victory over death will triumph, and that he will make us perfect in the end, casting out and destroying everything that is not life.

This is the world in which resurrection happened. Let our lives be a place of resurrection, of new life, and may we journey forward with the hope of Christ's resurrection and final victory secure in our hearts.

Let us pray.