This is a sermon that was preached on Sunday, February 25, 2018 at United Presbyterian Church, Sterling, KS.[1]
Listen to the audio here.
Read Mark 16 and Psalm 16 here.
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How many of you love a good surprise? There are good surprises and bad
surprises.
·
Finding $20 in the pocket of the coat you haven’t worn
since last winter. Good surprise or bad surprise?
·
Coming home to find that someone has broken in to your
house and taken all your stuff. Good
surprise or bad surprise?
·
Coming to a grave and finding it empty. Good surprise or bad surprise?
Good surprises bring smiles and laughter. Bad surprises bring sadness and anger and
fear. In today’s gospel reading from Mark about the women finding Jesus’ tomb
empty, there are no smiles on these women’s faces. There is no laughter. There is terror, and amazement, and fear. So when they found the tomb empty, was it a
good surprise or a bad surprise?
These women coming to the tomb were there at the cross a few
days before and had watched Jesus die. The
last thing they expect is to find the tomb empty because it was sealed with a
giant stone. They’d been worried about
how they were even going to get into the tomb to anoint the body with the
spices they’ve brought. There’s no doubt
in their minds that what they’re going to find in that tomb is a dead
body.
They are shocked and surprised to find the stone has already
been moved, and to hear the angel’s news, “He isn’t here. He’s been raised.”
Good surprises don’t always bring good responses. The
resurrection is a good surprise, an amazingly fantastic surprise, actually, but
it’s so surprising that the women don’t really know how to respond. I think it’s the same with us. When God does something amazing, something
totally unexpected, how do we respond? God brings new life to places and
situations all the time, often in unexpected ways. When God surprises us, sometimes our response
is like those women – amazement and fear. Maybe one reason for that is that God often brings us
surprising hope in the midst of even the darkest wilderness.
Wilderness
stories are stories of resurrection hope.
This week some of you have been talking about wilderness
stories in your small groups. Those
stories have happy endings, and often those happy endings were a surprise. Part of what makes the wilderness the
wilderness is that we don’t know how it’s going to end, and in the midst of it
a happy ending seems unlikely or maybe even impossible.
One time Rob and I were literally in the
wilderness. We were driving from west
Texas into southern New Mexico where there is a lot of nothing. Lots of flat dirt, hardly any vegetation, an occasional
oil well, no cell phone service, and many many miles between towns. We didn’t have a map because there was no
cell service and we hadn’t brought a paper map.
There hadn’t been many road signs, so we didn’t know how far we had to
go. And I had to go to the bathroom.
Argh! So I was excited when we
finally saw a sign that said we were coming into a town, and even more excited
to see a gas station . . . but it was closed.
And that’s all there was . . . a few houses and an empty gas
station. Can you guess what this town
was called? Hope, NM! Most. Ironic. Name. Ever.
But hope kept us going, and we got through the wilderness the
way we all get through the wilderness, we just keep moving forward, trusting
that eventually we’ll get somewhere. And
eventually we do, holding on to hope as we go.
One verse has kept me going through a lot of wildernesses is Galatians 6:9:
Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.
Don’t give up.
For fans of the movie Finding Nemo,
we could say, “Just keep swimming,” because that is Dory the fish’s solution
for getting through trouble. Just keep
swimming. She even has a song about it.
“Just keep swimming, just keep swimming, what do we do? We swim!”
When I was at the grade school this week reading to
the first graders, we were reading books about the Olympics. Not giving up was
the theme of one of the books we read, Max and Marla. Max and Marla are trying to ride their sled
down the big hill by their house, but they keep running into trouble. They keep looking for ways to solve the
problem, and, inspired by the Olympics, they keep saying, “Olympians don’t give
up.”[2]
When we’re in “just keep moving forward” mode, we tend to be
like the women in our gospel reading – walking along with our heads down,
focused on just taking the next step, and the next one. When they did finally look up, that’s when
they were surprised that they didn’t find what they’d expected.
Resurrection
hope means we can expect the unexpected.
We get this backwards, though. Often we are surprised when we run into
problems. We get the idea that if we’re
being faithful and following Jesus that everything will be easy and
smooth. God does promise that he’ll be
with us and help us through whatever difficulties we face, but Jesus told us to
expect trouble.
In this world you will find trouble, but take heart for I have overcome the world. John 16:33
We can expect trouble, but we can also expect God to help us
overcome trouble.
Expecting trouble and trusting God for the outcome can
make for some interesting situations . . .and surprises. Like playing golf in India.
As you can imagine, this could make for a very frustrating
game. A beautiful drive to the green
could suddenly become a ball in the rough.
On the other hand, a ball in the sand pit might get picked up and
dropped next to the hole. Whatever
happened, they had to go with it. They
had to expect the unexpected, and be thankful.
They couldn’t control the outcome of the game, just like we cannot
always control outcomes in our lives.[3]
All we can control is our response. We keep moving forward trusting in the
goodness of God or we give up and give in to despair. Remembering God’s goodness helps us to hold
on to hope. That’s what we see the
psalmist doing in Psalm 16, our Old Testament reading today. The psalmist says,
“Protect me, O God, for in you I take refuge.” (Psalm 16:1)
In other words, I’m trusting you, God. Help me play the ball where the monkey drops
it.
Resurrection
hope is trusting in God’s goodness.
Remembering the resurrection helps us remember God’s
goodness. It is because of the
resurrection that Paul can assure us in Romans 8:38-39 that nothing, not even death, can separate us
from God’s love. Raising Jesus from
the dead shows us that God’s power is
greater than death. Sometimes we
forget God’s goodness, though, and get focused on just putting one foot in
front of the other. We get bogged down
in the wilderness. I can remember being
in a wilderness season like this. I was
trudging along, tired and frustrated, and it seemed like all I was finding
along the way was more trouble. I kept
seeking God, kept reading the Bible, but I was having trouble finding the joy
in God’s presence that Psalm 16 talks about.
I was too focused on the difficulties.
One day, reading through Isaiah, I was startled by a verse:
“Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you.” Isaiah 30:18
That day my plan was to read until something stopped me, and
that verse jumped out at me and made me stop and ponder and pray, and realize
that I had forgotten God’s goodness. I
was seeing only bad and missing out on the good.
That was the beginning of learning how to take time to be
thankful, and to make thankfulness a discipline, because when we’re trudging
through the wilderness it’s easy to forget to see the good that God is doing, to forget that God’s with us even in the wilderness, and to forget that God keeps giving us blessings and
grace.
Psalm 16:11 says “In
his presence is fullness of joy.” So
often we forget to notice God’s presence and be thankful, and we miss out on
the joy that can be ours even in the wilderness.
Resurrection
hope surprises us because God’s timing is not our timing
Sometimes things take longer than we would like them to. In the Bible, there’s a big wilderness story
in the books of Exodus and Numbers – the nation of Israel escapes from slavery
in Egypt and is headed for the Promised Land.
Their journey leads across a big desert, literally through the
wilderness. But the journey that would
normally take eleven days ends up taking them 40 years (Deut. 1:2-3) God’s timing was far from what they would
have liked.
Another great example of God’s surprising timing in the Bible
is the story of Sarah. We talk about her
a lot because she is such a great example of resurrection hope. She was eighty years old when God told
Abraham that she was going to have a son, her first child. Hearing this, she laughed. It was too good to be true.
Sarah’s story, like the story of Jesus’ resurrection, reminds
us that God DOES long to bless us. God
likes to give us good surprises, and he blesses us at unexpected times and in
unexpected ways, often in situations that seem impossible.
There are so many examples of this that I struggled this week
deciding which ones to talk about today.
Those of you watching the winter Olympics this week saw a miracle on the
ice when the USA women’s hockey team beat Canada. It was their first gold medal
since women’s hockey made its Olympic debut at the Winter Olympics in Nagano,
Japan in 1998.[4] The game was tied as the time was running
out, and the outcome could easily have gone either way. At the last minute, the USA scored and won
the game. We have a friend who didn’t
quite know what to think when she saw her little daughter suddenly crying at
the end of the game. Her daughter plays
ice hockey in the children’s league. She
said, “They’re tears of joy, mom.”
Sometimes God’s blessings bring instant, unstoppable joy, but
sometimes they are so unexpected that it takes time for the realization to sink
in. I think that’s what we’re seeing in
our gospel reading today. The news that
Jesus has been raised is so unexpected, so beyond their understanding, that the
women are afraid. Can this really be
true? What does this mean?
We have the benefit of looking back over time. We know it’s true, and we have seen what it
means.
It means that while we were still dead in our sins, Christ
died for us (Eph 2:1,Rom 5:8) and was raised from the dead for us, so that we
too might be raised and have new life in him.
This is the joyful news of the gospel, the good news we have to share
with the world.
In the book Easter Earthquake, James Harnish
tells us what it means.
“The Resurrection means that we no longer need to settle for
this old world the way it has been. The same power that raised Jesus from the
dead can energize us to be part of this world’s becoming what God intends it to
be. Evil, injustice, suffering, and death may have their day, but the victory
has already been won in the risen Christ.”[5]
That resurrection
hope is what carries us through the troubles we inevitably encounter in
life. Its strength and resilience can
surprise us, just as God’s blessings can surprise us when they come in ways and
at times we weren’t expecting.
But we know
they will come, just as we know that Jesus
was raised.
And just like the angel told the
women, God sends us out to go and tell,
Because God’s
surprising resurrection hope is for everyone.
[1]A sermon by Rev. Melissa
Krabbe preached on Sunday, February 25, 2018 at United Presbyterian Church in
Sterling, KS.
[2]
Alexandra Boiger, Max and Marla (G.P.
Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, 2015) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00R3GARPC/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
[3] Gregory Knox Jones, Play the Ball Where the Monkey Drops It: Why
We Suffer and How We Can Hope (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2001) pgs.
3-4. Jones heard the story in a sermon
by Dr. Richard Hershberger at Westminster Presbyterian Church, Oklahoma City,
OK, in 1994.
[5] Harnish,
James A.. Easter Earthquake: How
Resurrection Shakes Our World (Kindle Locations 387-390). Upper Room.
Kindle Edition.
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