Our Sunday Message

From Despair to Resurrection Faith: Job 14:14-17, Mark 16:1-8
Rev. Dr. Kenneth A. Corr
April 16, 2006
Easter Sunday

  Easter is a day of celebration, the holiest day in the Christian year. It is the day that we celebrate God’s triumph of life over death, light over darkness, grace over law, and the kingdom of God over the kingdoms of this world.
  But that first Easter morning began in uncertainty and despair. Our Easter hymn says, “The morning dawned in deepest dark, the darkness of despair and grief.” It is where a lot of people are this morning.
  John sat by the hospital bedside of his ailing father and thought how strange all of this felt. The doctors had told him that it could be any day now. The monitors, the IV’s, the antiseptic smell, the incessant noise coming from the hallways seemed so foreign to John and so incongruent with the life that his father had lived. The man who had been so vibrant, so strong, so stable, now lingered somewhere between life and death and it all felt so strange to John.
He had never been religious, but as he sat in this hospital room, he found himself wondering about life and death. Was there an after-life? Would death simply be the end of his father? There was something in him that recoiled at that thought. But was it just wishful thinking on his part to believe? John wished that he had more faith, the kind of faith that believed in heaven, but he refused to believe just to make himself feel better or ease his grief. If only there was some reason to believe, some proof, he thought. Just then the door swung open and the nurse came in to check the IV.
  There are times in all of our lives when we are confronted with the reality of life and death. Aside from all the church talk, aside from all the religious clichés, what do we really believe about death and why? Grief confronts us with our truest thoughts and beliefs. “The morning dawned in deepest dark, the darkness of despair and grief.”
  It’s where some of you are this morning. It’s where Job was. If you are a member of our adult Sunday School, you are familiar with the story of Job because it is the subject of our current study.   Confronted with the loss of his children, the loss of his property, the loss of his wealth, and the loss of his health, Job asked the question, “If I die, will I live again?” This was not the philosophical musing of a man with too much leisure. This was an existential question of a man in profound grief. It’s the kind of question that you ask when you are staring death in the eye, yours or your loved ones’.
Job’s religion didn’t give him much hope that there was anything after death. Ancient Jewish faith believed in a vague, shadowy place for the dead called “Sheol.” But there was no real hope for a resurrection. But that just didn’t seem right to Job. There ought to be more, he thought. Trees are cut down, but they spout again; he said. Its stump dies in the ground,But at the scent of water, it will bud and put forth branches.1
  But with humans, he noticed, it is different. But mortals die, and are laid low; humans expire, and where are they. . . . Mortals lie down and do not rise again.2
  That is all that his religious faith taught him to believe. It is not very different from a lot of people in our post-modern world. They have no religious faith that sustains any other hope.
  But Job imagined something very different. Job imagined that if he died, after a while, God would miss him. You would call and I would answer you; Job thought. You would long for the work of your hands. For then you would not number my steps, You would not keep watch over my sin, my transgression would be sealed in a bag, and you would cover over my iniquity.3
  Job was just imagining, but death couldn’t be the end. There must be more to life than this transient moment, he thought. If I die, God will miss me, he said. God will look for me, like a parent looking for a lost child, he said. God will call out my name, he said. And God will be so glad when I answer, so happy when I am found, that God will forgive my sin. Wow! Where did Job get that? That is a profound theological reflection.
  The nurse came into the room and made her cursory check of the patient. She asked if John needed anything and he assured her that he was fine and she quickly left. He was glad when she left. He wanted whatever time he had left with his dad to be private. John went quickly back to his reverie. This life that lay motionless on the bed was too precious, too loved, to simply end. There had to be more and for the first time, John broke into a flood of tears.
  “The morning dawned in deepest dark, the darkness of despair and grief.”
  It’s where a lot of people are this morning. It’s where the disciples began the day that first Easter morning. Some went to the tomb to provide the last rites of burial. Some started the long journey home after an exhausting and disappointing week. Some gathered behind locked doors in fear that they would be the next to be rounded up and executed. Their hope for a new kingdom, their longing for a new beginning, their belief in a new messiah, had died with Jesus on the cross on Friday. There was no belief in a resurrection on that first Easter morning. There was no reason to believe that there was anything beyond death. They could imagine, like Job, that this life was too precious to end so tragically; they could argue that it was not fair, but other than wishful thinking, there was no reason to believe. “The morning dawned in deepest dark, the darkness of despair and grief.”
  But then something happened that changed everything. The ones who went to the tomb to perform the last rites of burial found the tomb empty and an angel that announced that Jesus had risen. The ones who traveled home met a stranger who traveled with them. It was only later that they realized that it was the resurrected Jesus. The ones gathered behind locked doors were surprised when the resurrected Jesus stood in their midst and showed them his scarred hands and side. The morning that had dawned in the despair of death had now become a day of celebrating life.
  For these first disciples, belief in the resurrection was not the result of wishful thinking, philosophical musing, theological reflection, or an overactive imagination. It was instead, the result of a divine encounter. The Christian faith never asks us to simply believe the unbelievable. It asks us to believe the testimony of those who have met this resurrected Jesus.
  The tears kept coming as John grieved the expected loss of his father. Again, he wished that he had some reason to believe that life was continuous.
  He looked up through his tears and saw the blurry outline of a cross. He wiped his eyes and looked again and on the wall in the room there was a framed cross. He remembered all that he had been taught in Sunday School those many years ago and he wondered, “Could it be true?”
  Job wondered. Job imagined. And Job said, If I die, God will miss me. God will look for me, like a parent looking for a lost child. God will call out my name. And God will be so glad when I answer, so happy when I am found, that God will forgive my sin.
  Where are you this Easter morning? If you are you in despair, the invitation of the Christian faith is to discover something more than wishful thinking. We call it grace. We call it hope. We call it resurrection.

1 Job 14:7-8.
2 Job 14:12a.
3 Job 14:16-17.