Sermon Title: "The Best Is Yet To Be!"
Date: April 4, 2010
Minister:  Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson:  John 20:1-18

My sermon today is not intended to be a historical study that reconciles the slight differences in the accounts of the Resurrection.  I cannot explain how in three gospels multiple women showed up at the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body; whereas in John’s account Mary Magdalene came alone.  Three gospels say the stone was already rolled away; Mark says a great earthquake occurred; an angel arrived and rolled the stone away.  I am not even going to have Patrick replicate the sound of the stone being rolled away as he did on his timpani several Easters ago!  In Matthew, the women run to tell the disciples the angel’s message and Jesus appears to them on the way.  Only in John does Jesus make his appearance first to Mary Magdalene as she weeps in the garden alone.

None of the differing details of those accounts matter, for what really matters is what difference the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead has made in the world in the two thousand years since, and in our lives.  Easter is not just about what happened on that first Easter morning so long ago, but what we make of all that follows.  And in so believing, we might come to believe that the best is yet to be.

Gospel songwriters Bill and Gloria Gaither, in the celebrative hymn we just sang, remind Christians today of why the empty tomb is still at the heart of their faith.  They begin the refrain with “Because he lives…”  Everything flows from the premise that Jesus is a figure of the present, not simply of the past.

For the Gaithers, this song was a personal testament of faith.  To a hymnal editor they explained:  “Because He Lives was written in the midst of social upheaval, threats of war, and betrayals of national and personal trust.  It was into the world at such a time that we were bringing our third little baby.  Assassinations, riots, drug traffic, and war monopolized the headlines [in the late 1960s].  It was in the midst of this kind of uncertainty that the assurance of the lordship of the risen Christ blew across our troubled minds like a cooling breeze in the parched desert.” 

The Gaithers’ son Benjamin was born in 1970.  Inspired by his birth, their grateful hearts poured out their song, named “Best Gospel Song of the Year” in 1974.  The Gaithers were able to look beyond the present chaos of the nation and world and believe that things would be better.  The refrain affirms that we can face tomorrow, with all its uncertainty, as long as we realize that God holds the future and makes life worth living.

Mark Thallander is a nationally recognized concert organist.  He was formerly organist at the Crystal Cathedral and Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena.  Alicia has played a number of his hymn arrangements.  In 2003, he was on a concert tour in New England, and after playing in a church in Massachusetts he drove two states north to a friend’s home, where he was staying.  At the interstate exit, in the dark and on rain-slickened roads, the car spun off the road and rolled over several times.  When the paramedics arrived, the car was so crushed they had to pull Mark out through the sunroof.  The trauma of the accident was so severe that the shoulder belt nearly cut off his left arm at the shoulder.  Sadly, it was so badly mangled that the surgeons were unable to save it, and had to amputate.  Now you’ve seen Alicia play the organ, with her right hand frequently playing the melody, her left hand an accompaniment, and with her feet on the pedals filling in the harmony with the accompaniment.  Can you imagine a concert organist who lost an arm?

It was a devastating accident with lots of dark moments in Mark’s recovery, except for two things:  his tremendous Christian faith, and the support of devoted friends.  Even in the hospital, Mark began to mentally rearrange his concert pieces so they could be played without a left hand accompaniment.  Today, seven years later, the Mark Thallander Foundation puts on a number of choral and organ concerts throughout the nation, including one at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels in Los Angeles every February.  Several of us go, and a highlight that always draws the most applause is when Mark plays a solo organ piece, with Fred Swann sitting on the bench to turn pages.

Mark Thallander turned the result of a horrible accident into a positive, doing something entirely new as his foundation brings sacred choral and organ music to thousands of children and adults from New England to Hawaii throughout the year.  It is doubtful that he could see it at first from the haze of Demerol while laying in a hospital bed, but it turned out that the best was yet to be, for him, and for us.

In the past year or two, many of you have suffered financial set-backs as the result of the banking crisis and the downturn in the economic market.  Some of you have faced the serious illness or death of a parent, spouse, sibling or child.  Others have lost jobs or been placed on furlough with a reduction in work time and salary.  Some owe more on their houses than they are worth, and some former two-income families struggle to meet expenses on one salary.

It may be hard for you to hear me pontificate up here that the best is yet to be.  But the example of Christ’s resurrection is an assurance that it is possible for two reasons.

The first lies in the story of Mary.  When others ran off from the empty tomb, in fear or disbelief, Mary stayed.  And as a result of her faithfulness, the risen Christ appeared to her.  He called her by name.  He cared about her.  He asked why she was weeping, just as he had compassion on so many wounded, neglected and outcast people throughout his ministry.

The word of his resurrection spread, the disciples came to believe and were energized, and within fifty days from Easter, three thousand persons were baptized and the church began to grow.  Today, I believe there is no institution that covers more of the planet Earth than the Christian Church.

Certainly the church over its two thousand years has had its less glorious moments, as we have witnessed in recent decades.  But overall, I believe the church has done more good in the world than bad.  And I don’t mean just in worship and faith.  Think of all the religious institutions—schools, colleges, hospitals, orphanages—founded by the church.  Millions of people have been affected by them.  The hungry folks to whom we feed dinner at Christian Outreach in Action downtown once a month are affected by the outreach of the people of this church, even if they do not know most of you, nor you them unless you go down to serve.

All of this because Jesus was raised from the dead and the church began.

The second reason that the best is yet to be are the promises of Jesus made earlier in John’s gospel.  To Mary and Martha, weeping over the death of their brother Lazarus, Jesus proclaimed, “I am the resurrection and the life.  Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”  (11:25-26)  And to his disciples, preparing them for his own death, he declared, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.  If it were not so, would I have told you I go to prepare a place for you?  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”  (14:2-3)  This is the hope of Christian resurrection and the promise of Eternal Life that we are assured of by Jesus himself. 

You have heard it said, especially after someone dies at old age or of a particularly painful death, “They’re now in a better place.”  It may sound trite, or too quick to dismiss our grieving at our loss.  But that is the promise:  the best is yet to be.

In her sermon on this text, Episcopal preacher Barbara Brown Taylor writes that Mary Magdalene calls Jesus ‘Rabbouni!’, “but that was his Friday name, and here it was Sunday—an entirely new day in an entirely new life.  He was not on his way back to her and the others.  He was on his way to God, and he was taking the whole world with him.”  Taylor goes on to claim that the resurrection was unnatural, and so is the truth that it reveals to us this “happy morning”:  the new life within us, planted by God, new life that “cannot be killed, and if we can remember that, then there is nothing we cannot do:  move mountains, banish fear, love our enemies, change the world.  The only thing we cannot do is hold on to [Jesus]…all in all we would rather keep him with us where we are than let him take us where he is going…let him take us into the white hot presence of God, who is not behind us but ahead of us, every step of the way.”  (Home By Another Way)