THE POWER OF DEATH IS BROKEN!

(Preached on Sunday, April 3, 2005)

But God raised him up, having freed him from death, because it was impossible for him to be held in its power.                     -Acts 2:24

 

Vera was a woman of faith.

She had been ill for most of her adult life.

She had developed diabetes when she was in her late 20s.

Around that same time, her kidneys started to fail.

After seven years on dialysis, she received a kidney transplant.  Then, when she was in her early 40s, her eyesight started to fail.  By the time Vera was 50, she was legally blind.  But in spite of it all, Vera managed to live a full, joyful and faith-filled life.

Then things changed.  Vera’s kidney was failing once again.

The only treatment that would significantly prolong her life was dialysis and her doctors wanted to start treating her immediately.  But Vera wouldn’t hear of it.  Vera’s doctors didn’t understand her.  She was only 58 years old and yet she was refusing the only treatment that offered any hope of living.  In their minds, Vera was giving up, turning her back on life and focusing on death.

But Vera saw it differently.  In her mind she was turning toward life and focusing on hope.

 

What a contrasting approach to the questions of life, death, and the end of life and time for death from the approaches we have publicly witnessed in the last few weeks.

(Let me say right up front, my intent is not to judge anybody.  These are difficult decisions, always, and no one but possibly the closest confidants can begin to know what someone else is going through at this most difficult of times.   Part of the great tragedy for the Schindler and Schiavo families is the way their very personal tragedy, sorrow, and decisions has been played out on the public stage.  Let me also add that I have refrained from commenting on this situation until now because I wasn’t quite sure what to say that would be helpful to us as we all observed and then reflected on this difficult situation.  But I felt moved, and finally received what I feel is some guidance from God, as we went through Easter last week and remembered again the message of the resurrection and at the same time were witnessing two very public spectacles of people clinging to biological life at all costs.  I refer, of course, those desiring to keep Terri Schiavo alive and those striving to keep the Pope alive as well.)

 

As followers of Jesus, as people of faith, we serve a God who upholds life in this world as a wonderful, beautiful, and valuable creation and gift and we know that Jesus in his lifetime worked for abundant life and fought the powers of disease, death, and oppression.

At the same time, the prophet Isaiah reminds us that “the grass withers, the flower fades ... surely the people is grass” and the Teacher in Ecclesiastes stated that “For everything there is a season, and a time for ever matter under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die...”

With all that what we have witnessed these past few weeks one might have begun to wonder was Easter all a dream?

Did God really defeat death in the resurrection of Jesus? 

Is God’s love stronger than the forces of despair?

 

What I actually think we have been witness to has been the incredible, overwhelming power of death. 

No pun intended, but death scares us to death.

That is the power death holds over us.

It is unknown, and thus extremely frightening. 

It is a power that grabs us, takes hold of our very psyche.  Even the most faithful among us, when face to face with death, often experience our knees buckling, our stomachs churning, and grow faint with fear.

 

In Jesus the Christ, God has changed all this. 

By raising Jesus from the dead God has broken the power of death over us.

We no longer need fear death, for in Jesus God has shown us that death cannot separate us from God.

Death does not have the last word, God has the last word, and that word is life, life abundant, life eternal, life bathed in the love of God.

 

A Christian is someone who believes that God raised Jesus from the dead.  No historian or theologian or biblical scholar doubts this: without belief in the resurrection there would be no gospel, no Christianity.

Yet, in every age, and with each and every one of us, belief in the resurrection of Jesus must overcome a strong prior prejudice against the possibility of such a thing happening, because it runs counter to our expectation based on everyday experience.  And because we eventually must face the reality of the power of death.

Part of our struggle with this is that in breaking the power of death, God has not done away with death. 

Death is still a part of life and I would suggest that in God’s infinite wisdom, death has a role to play in the scheme of the universe that we do not fully understand.

But what Peter and all the witnesses to the risen Christ proclaim loudly and continually is that death no longer has power; it is no longer to be feared.

 

Easter is about the power of God in Christ to defeat death and despair, to break the power of death. 

It is also about our powerlessness, our vulnerability in the face of death and despair, in the face of the power of death.  We really do need God to do for us that which we can never do for ourselves.

This is very close to the understanding expressed in the “Twelve Steps” of Alcoholics Anonymous.

If I can do some rewriting this might become more clear.

Step 1: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable” becomes “We admitted we were powerless over death — that our fear of death had taken control of our lives.”

Step 2: “Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity” becomes “Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves had broken the power of death and restores us to life.”

Step 3: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him” becomes “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care and love of God who raised Jesus from the dead and thus broke the power of death.”

 

Those steps are the beginning steps to embracing the power of the resurrection to break us lose from the power of death.

But there is one last thing I want to remind us of this morning: we cannot complete those steps alone.

Charles Spurgeon was a Baptist pulpit giant of the latter part of the nineteenth century.  He writes of going to live in Newcastle, England, which at that time was a very dirty industrial town.  As he was looking around the house that he was thinking about renting, the landlord took him to the uppermost room and took him over to a window.

There, he said as he pointed out the window, over there you can see Durham Cathedral on a Sunday.

“Sunday?”, Spurgeon questioned.  “Why on a Sunday?”

“Because,” said the landlord, “the furnaces are not working on Sunday and there is no smoke and you can therefore see farther.”

You know, when we come to worship on Sunday morning we come to see farther, we come to see into the heart of God.