"The Resurrection as an Act of Love"

Preached by John DeBevoise
At Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church
 On March 31, 2002

At that time, says the Lord, I will be the God of all the families of Israel, and they shall be my people.
Thus says the Lord: The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness; when Israel sought for rest, the Lord appeared to him from far away. And the Lord said, I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. Again I will build you, and you shall be built, O virgin Israel! Again you shall take your tambourines, and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers. Again you shall plant vineyards on the mountains of Samaria; the planters shall plant, and shall enjoy the fruit. For there shall be a day when sentinels will call in the hill country of Ephraim: “Come, let us go up to Zion, let us go up to the Lord our God.   
 
 Jeremiah 31: 1-6

Oh, I am having such a good time! It may not sound like it, but I am really enjoying myself! This is just a preachers delight, to be here preaching before a crowd like this. I just feel like I’ve died and gone to heaven! You may be thinking, If I have to sit in church for eternity listening to you, John, I’ll feel like I’ve died and gone to hell. But for me, I’ve just died and gone to heaven.

The first service I had brought to church with me a rubber Easter egg. It just looked like the real thing – I found it in my Easter basket this morning. I brought it because I was having fun joking with the tenors with it, tossing it to them before church. There was a baby who was crying during the sermon. I like babies in church. This congregation has been blessed with babies. Jesus said suffer the little children to come unto me, so I like having babies in church. Bring them on! They are part of the resurrection, too.

Well this baby decided that he was supposed to be the preacher, and we were just going at it, dueling, kind of. About a third of the way through, he was beginning to get the edge on me. So I pulled out this rubber egg and I just threw it at him! Bingo! It was so much fun that I did it at the second service, and an eight-year-old kid jumped up and grabbed it and ran out with it. I thought I had lost it, but lo and behold! All things come to those who wait on the Lord!

Do you know what the longest recorded, in a live audience, the longest recorded episode of sustained laughter from the audience is? You can look this up in the Almanac. It was in 1979. A Methodist minister named James Covere, a retired Methodist minister, was preaching in a pulpit in California, urban California. In the middle of his sermon, in a real exclamatory phrase, his dentures flew out! And (this is true – you can look it up) he grabbed them! He caught them! This is true! He put them back in his mouth and he turned to the congregation and he said, “I should play for the Dodgers! They laughed for thirty-eight sustained minutes.

It’s a good thing to laugh on Easter! You ought to laugh on Easter. Easter is a time for great joy. There ought to be a whole lot of laughter Easter.

My family is a family that is divided into two groups: those in the family who believe that the Academy Awards (which were on last Sunday evening) are the height of the social season, and they believe that the Academy Awards were meant for the rest of the nation to turn and to watch The Beautiful People as they receive the Oscars, in suspense, the Oscars which they had so richly earned. They pull the whole evening around being available to watch the full show.

The other group in the family, believes that the Academy Awards are self-congratulatory publicity stunt and that some kind of definitive statement needs to be made about that. I belong to the latter group.

So Sunday night, as the vagrants in the family set in to take part in the hedonism of the Academy Awards, I stood up and made my dramatic statement that I was going to go off and read a good book, and exit out of the room. But I came back in to get a drink, I think. I was walking through the room when Jennifer Conley was getting the award for being the best supporting actress in "A Beautiful Mind". She was saying, “… I thank the cameramen, and I thank Russell Crowe, and I thank the producer, and I thank my agent…." And then she said, (and this just caught my attention as I was walking through the room– I wasn’t really watching), she said, “I believe that love is the most powerful force in the universe."

I thought, “Wow! She’s gone to preaching. “I believe that love is the most powerful force in the universe."  Do you believe that? There are a lot of powerful forces in the universe. Apache helicopter. Is love more powerful than an Apache helicopter? Nuclear generator – that’s a powerful force. Terrorism. Powerful antibiotic. A black hole. Do you believe that love is the most powerful force in the universe?

You may remember from your high school physics that a force is any influence that moves something. Force equals a physical influence that tends to cause an object to change its position. A force is an influence that moves something, that effects change. Do you believe that love is a force that can create change?

Can love create change? Or is love just sort of a warm, romantic feeling that we get, maybe at the movies. Is love a force? Or maybe just a feeling.

Love, I think (that’s why it caught my attention when she said it) that love has the capacity to effect change. I think love is a powerful force. Maybe she’s right, I thought. Love is the most powerful force in the universe. And if that’s so, just how powerful a change can love affect? How much change can it make?

I have seen love raise a lot of money. I saw love raise enough money to make the changes in this church facility. I’ve seen love raise enough money to built a Habitat for Humanity house. I’ve seen love get people out on their Saturdays over and over again, so that Tequila Wheeler has a roof over her head this Easter morning. I’ve seen love open a Faith Café, I’ve seen it feed forty people a day out of love. It’s powerful enough to make that kind of a change. I’ve seen it.

I heard a story back in January by my pastor friend Jody Welker, and he heard it from another pastor named Amy Buchanan, who was preaching. She was talking about an elegant high school English teacher she had. This teacher, she said, was trying to teach her class how to parse sentences. They were working, week after week, on parsing sentences. They had some students in the class who didn’t like it, and they had one fellow in the class in particular, who simply would not do his homework. He would just show up in class day after day without it being done. One day during the school week, she confronted him with it, in class. She said to him, “I’m tired of you coming in here, never having these sentences done. Why aren’t you doing this parsing homework?"

He looked at her and he said, “I have not done it, and I cannot do it, and I am not going to do it."

Amy Buchanan said that the teacher got up and she walked down the aisle of the classroom and leaned over him and she said, “You tell me something that you enjoy doing."

He said, “I like to fix car engines. I like to work on old car engines." She said, “Do you have a car engine that you are working on that has a problem?" He said, “Yes, I have my grandfather’s old car, and it has an alternator that just won’t go." The teacher said, “Alright, here’s the deal. You bring me that alternator tomorrow, on Friday, and I will fix it over the weekend. You do ten sentences of parsing, and show back up here with them on Monday."

It got to Monday, and they had a hundred percent participation in class. All the students were there, and some students who were in the algebra class had snuck in and were sitting in the back of the class. Right at the hour, the teacher walks in, an elegant woman, and she is carrying in her hand a Coach shopping bag. She went over to her desk and she pulled out a white linen tablecloth, and she spread it out on the table. Then she reached in and she pulled out some mechanic’s tools and set them on the linen cloth, like a surgeon setting up for surgery. She took the alternator, without saying anything, she took the alternator apart, obviously having practiced on it. She pulled out a little piece in the middle. She lifted it up and she turned to the fellow and she said, “This is the broken piece in this alternator. See? It’s broken right here. If you take this, this afternoon, to Big A Auto Parts, they are holding a replacement piece for you, in your name. If you put that in, just like I’ve taken it apart, this alternator will go. Now, where are your sentences?"

He pulled them out of his notebook. Ten parsed sentences. She sat down at her desk and checked each one. She said, “Good." Then she got back up and walked across the room. She stood in front of him again and she said, “I want to tell you something. I will never, ever, give up on you."

Boy, that’s a powerful story for me! It catches me, still. It’s been living with me since January, and that story has been so powerful for me, it has affected change within me. That story has helped me walk through some doors that I wasn’t brave enough to walk through, except that that story was in me.

That’s not even the power of love. That’s a story about the power of a story about love. What Jennifer Conley said was that love is the most powerful force in the universe. You may say, like Tina Turner, What’s love got to do with it? Or you may say, You know, I love and I know that love is a strong power. But sometimes my love is strong and sometimes it’s flimsy. Sometimes it’s a force and other times it’s just a weakness. Sometimes my love is so weak it cannot even help me resist temptation. Sometimes my love is so weak, especially if it’s like after ten-thirty p.m., it can't even get me up off the couch to help finish the dishes. It’s true. Sometimes it’s a powerful force, but sometimes my love is just weak. Right.

See, that’s just your love. But the story Kathy read from the Gospel of Matthew, the story that Jeremiah is telling, that’s a story about God’s love. And Jeremiah is telling us that God’s love is the most powerful force in the universe. And it’s chief character trait is this: It is steadfast faithfulness. My love is marked by its faithfulness to you, says the Lord. “I will never, ever, give up on you." Thus says the Lord.

Easter is a story about the power of God’s love. Now if resurrection is possible, and in my heart I believe that it is, if resurrection is possible then it is only possible because there is in the universe some force that is more powerful than death. If resurrection is possible, it’s only because there is a force loose in the universe that is able to go through death, to go past death, to take something that has died, even a human being, and bring it to life, to recreate it. To make it new again.

If resurrection is possible, it’s only because there is a force in the universe that is more powerful than death. Do you believe that? You’ve seen powerful forces at work in the universe. You know they’re out there. And you are here this morning. You are a testimony to the fact that there are powerful forces at work in the universe. Your life itself, as many of us have witnessed the miracle of birth, there is a some kind of force at birth, and you are all witnesses to it, just in your own lives. There is some kind of force at work at birth that’s bringing life into creation. Something is happening there. You may decide that it’s biology. You may decide that it’s random biology. But it is a force. You are a witness to the fact there is a force powerful enough in the universe to create life, at least.

The Bible is telling us that the resurrection is the testimony that there is another force, a force more powerful than death. That is the power of God’s love. Do you really, do you really think, that death is the most powerful force in the universe? …………You don’t believe that. You do not believe that! And that is not the witness of the community of faith to you. It is not the witness of the scriptures to you. The Bible is telling us that resurrection, the power of God’s love as seen in resurrection is the most powerful force in the universe. And it is unimaginable to us, and we are familiar with it, and so it is frightening to us. So all of the resurrection stories out of the Gospels report that they are afraid. It is good news. They are joyful, but they are frightened at the same time.

I’ve been reading about eagles, and there is a metaphor, I think, that helps me here. When eagles build their nests, they use a lot of thorny branches in it. The mother eagle covers it with moss. Then, when it is time for the eagles to fly (which they don’t know how to do because they have never done it and they don’t believe they could do it), the mother eagle pulls all the moss out of the nest. So these eagles are being poked by these thorns. It’s uncomfortable for them. In their discomfort, they climb up on the mother eagle. When they are up there, then she takes off out of the nest, with them hanging on to her back. After she’s out in the sky for a bit, all of a sudden she flies upside-down, and they fall off! It’s a terrifying experience for them, and in their fear, they spread their wings, and suddenly they discover that they can soar! That they are flying!

I think the Bible is telling us that resurrection is like that. It’s hard for us to believe it’s possible. It’s scary for us to believe it’s so, but it’s the most powerful force in the universe. Sometimes in fear of that moment, we’d rather go back to the nest, even with the thorns there. We’d rather do that than to learn a new way of living. But there’s no future there.

God will resurrect us. Resurrection power is amazing, and it can give us the courage and the hope to live not only in the future, but even now in this moment. The truth of the resurrection, the power of the resurrection, gets in my own life and starts working now, and enables me to do some things that I would not be able to do at other times. It enables me sometimes to offer myself up for public service. It enables me at times to be willing to give away some of my resources, some of my money. It enables me at times to be willing to stand up and say I think this is wrong. It enables me sometimes to sit in a dark corner and hold someone’s hand. It’s not me. It’s resurrection power.

The text from Jeremiah is full of celebration. O Israel, get our your tambourines, it says. You’re going to be going up the mountain. You are going to plant vineyards and you are going to eat grapes again. And you will go up the mountain. You will go up and you will see the house of the living God.

Jeremiah remembers, Thus says the Lord. My love is steadfast. It is faithful. I will never, ever, give up on you. I have loved you with an everlasting love.

I saw that movie, “A Beautiful Mind." I don’t see a lot of movies. I’d like to, but I fall asleep before it’s time to go see them. But I saw that one. There’s a great line in this movie. Some of you may remember it. For me it was a great line. It intersected with my life. It’s that line where she (Jennifer is playing the spouse of the lead character in the movie), and they are in a desperate point. They are at the end of their resources. In her desperation, she reaches out and with one finger, touches her husband on the chest and she says, “I need to believe that something extraordinary is possible."

I’ve been in places like that before. I’ve been where I’ve needed to believe that something extraordinary was possible. We were at that place, late on Good Friday, at All Children’s Hospital.

So the news of the resurrection is this: That God has done the extraordinary thing, and that through the power of the love of God, which is the most powerful force in the whole universe, the extraordinary is not only possible, but it is coming to pass.

Thus says the Lord. My love is steadfast. I will never, ever give up on you, not even in the experience of death. My love is stronger than that, says the Lord. Resurrection is the extraordinary expression that God’s love is the most powerful force in the universe. And the Bible tells us that under its power, God is going to raise us up, and it will surprise us! God is going to raise us up and going to build us up, and is going to, like with wings like eagles, help us to soar! We will soar!

Nothing and no one is more powerful than the love of God. It will not be contained. It bursts forth from the grave and rises again on the third day! He has risen! He has risen, indeed!

©  John T. DeBevoise, 2002