Dying So That We MIght Live: An Easter Sermon

Here is my sermon for Easter 2007. Special thanks to Dying Church for all the resources I “borrowed.”

While preaching a minister asked his church, “Who wants to go to heaven?”
Everyone held up their hands except one young boy.
“Son, don’t you want to go to heaven when you die?”
“Yes sir, when I die, but I thought you was gettin’ up a load to go now.”

In a similar vein,
a Sunday school teacher once asked her class,
“If I sold my house and my car,
had a big garage sale and gave all my money to the church,
would that get me into Heaven?”
“NO!” the children all answered.
“If I cleaned the church every day, mowed the yard,
and kept everything neat and tidy,
would that get me into Heaven?”
Again, the answer was, “NO!”

“Well, then, if I was kind to animals and gave candy to all the children,
and loved my wife, would that get me into Heaven?”
Again, they all answered, “NO!”
“Well,” he continued, “then how can I get into Heaven?”
A five-year-old boy shouted out, “YOU GOTTA BE DEAD!”

Out of the mouths of babes, so the saying goes.
But lest you think I take death too lightly this morning,
let me also quote you a sentences from Annie Dillard’s novel, “The Living.”
In it Dillard describes a scene from a funeral:

“Hugh stood with stiff Lulu and supple Bert at the graveside.
The Nooksacks stood together with their preacher.
“Before the funeral, in mourning for his father,
they had shrieked and pounded on boards…

“At last big-faced Norval Tawes read Scripture and prayed.
‘O Death, where is they sting?’ Norval Tawes called out,
and his little black eyes glittered on Hugh.
“And Hugh thought, ‘Just about everywhere, since you ask.’”

And so it does.
Death stings just about everywhere.
Including, of course, the church.
In preparation for my message today,
I looked over the names of First Church members who have died since my arrival here a little under six years ago.
The list of names is long: over 70 names in total.
From Timothy Kulp, one of my first funerals here
to Jeanne Lepperd a couple of weeks ago
to Suzanne Brown this past Good Friday.
A lot of death and sorrow and mourning are represented by those names.
People who have been instrumental in the life of this church,
from Bob McCollough to Nancy Baily
from Abram Ecker to Dora Toh,
I could read you all the names,
but it would take at least 10 minutes to give them at least some of the respect and consideration they deserve,
but I bet you can see many of these people in your mind,
and I’ll bet many of you hold many of them in your hearts even still.

Death is always with us.
And death in all its power and might was there on Good Friday as well.
Jesus, rabbi, teacher, son of Mary, the Messiah, even the Son of God,
Tasted the bitter dregs of death,
and in his anguish, he had cried out,
“My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?”

And just moments later, as the texts tell us, at around noon,
darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon,
and the sun’s light failed;
and the curtain of the temple was torn in two.
Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said,
`Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’
Having said this, he breathed his last.
He died. Jesus, the Lord of Life, died.

In a way, it is a tragic story,
and if the life of Jesus of Nazareth ended once and for all on Good Friday,
none of us would be here today.
After all, history is filled with the deaths of good men or women,
and yet no one creates a entire religion in their memory.
But Jesus’ life did not end on that dark day.
We are here today as living testimonials to this,
and we worship him and praise him because he lives.
As Paul stated in our reading from 1 Corinthians,
“But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead,
the first fruits of those who have died. “

And if we believe this to be true,
then this is truly a day to rejoice.
But, there is a problem.
Just like a person has to die to “get to heaven.”
So too, a person must die to experience resurrection and new life,
and I’m not talking just about physical death either or the new life that will be ours when we die.
I am talking about the new life that can be ours now if we die to ourselves in the life we now live.
Jesus’ teaching is quite clear on this.
In Mark 8, Jesus says to his disciples and to us:
“If anyone would come after me,
he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.
For whoever wants to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.”

I read about a minister yesterday who has an religious icon hanging on the wall just above a little table that he uses as a prayer table.
It is basically a picture of Jesus on the cross. He wrote,
“When I’m trying to pray or meditate and am having a hard time focusing,
I’ll take a minute just to look at the face of Christ on the cross, dying.
A couple of weeks ago, as I was staring at his face,
and I thought about his example,
and I said out loud, “How can I be more like you?”
And [almost immediately] this thought entered my head:
“It’s easy. Just do what I did. Drop dead.”

Now that, my friends, is something to ponder.
My death. Your death.
And again, I’m not talking about the end of physical life.
I am talking about another kind of death altogether.
A death where you and I die to ourselves.

Now though I don’t admit it often, overall, I’ve got it pretty good.
I have a beautiful and loving daughter.
I live in a nice home,
and I have pretty much everything I need to live a comfortable life.
And when I hear the words of Jesus from Mark 8,
I began to ask myself, “Would I follow Jesus away from my current comfortable situation into something more uncomfortable?”
I mean places in which my pay might be cut, or I may not get paid at all; places which have fewer resources, less to offer me in return.
If God wanted me to do something new,
something that would involve more risks and less safety.
Would I be willing to follow him then? Would you?

You can easily see, I hope, how quickly this becomes uncomfortable for us.
We begin to see how much “we” are the focus of our relationships with God?
For instance, when I read the Bible,
it is often to find passages that will help me.
When I pray to God, it is often prayers for my welfare.
When I sing songs to God,
it almost always about which songs I like and which songs I didn’t care for.

But Jesus tells us in his teaching and in his life and death,
that a relationship with him is all about dying to self.
Jesus tells us, that
“If you’re going to follow me, you’re following a dead man walking.
You’ve got to pick up your cross daily.”
As Fellow minister Darryl Dash says,
“The image is of a person who’s been condemned to die,
and who’s carrying the instrument of execution with them,
because they’re about to be killed.
Jesus says that’s what it means to follow him.
It means we stop living for ourselves and our concerns.”
Dash goes on to say, “Jesus also talked about denying ourselves.
I wish that he meant that we should deny ourselves something.
That would mean that all I would have to do is to give up chocolate for Lent, or to give up watching TV for the coming year.
But Jesus wasn’t talking about giving something up.
He talked about denying ourselves -
to stop making ourselves the center of our lives.
This is what it means to follow Jesus.”

If this scares us - and it should, because it’s going to cost us -
Jesus also gives the other side.
He says that only in dying to ourselves do we discover true life.
As Erwin McManus once put it:
“Jesus wants to take us places only dead people can go.”
Or as one of my favorite writers, Robert Capon says,
“Jesus solves the world’s problems by dying.
And unless we are willing to see our own death as the one thing necessary for our salvation, we will never be able to enjoy the resurrection,
even though Jesus hands it to us on a silver platter.
If we refuse to die,
we will cut ourselves off from ever knowing the joy of his grace in us.

And what would this kind of death mean for us?
It means that I’m no longer the center of my life.
It means that I follow Jesus, no matter where he leads,
and no matter what it costs.
It means that we’re willing to die for Christ,
knowing that it’s the only way that we discover true life.

Now I could stop here this morning and it would be enough for us to digest for quite a while,
but do so would be a disservice to you since God doesn’t stop with our solitary lives and deaths.
You see, it’s not enough to die to self and follow him,
because we don’t follow God in isolation.
There’s something else that we call the church.
And what is applicable to us as individuals is also applicable to the church.
So, what about this . . .
What about a church that is willing to die to its own interests and welfare,
to pick up its cross, and follow Jesus?
What about a church that, if faced with a choice between following Jesus into unknown and dangerous territory,
and taking a safe route that would lead to growth and health -
what about a church that would willingly take the dangerous route in order to follow Jesus?

Darryl Dash, from whom I quoted a moment ago,
has a web site called “Dying Church,”
and on it he states that a dying church is one in which:
Its own growth and health is not as important as its willingness to follow Jesus wherever he goes, whatever it costs.
It is willing to turn its back on everything - its building, programs, staff, everything - in order to follow Jesus.
Institutional advancement is not as important as Kingdom advancement.
The church is not concerned with its own institutional survival.
Pastors are not CEOs managing/leading people toward a goal,
and plans/goals/numbers/budgets are not the main thing.
Following Jesus is the main thing.
In fact, it is the only thing.

Dash goes on to say that every church is a dying church.
In fact he describes three types of dying churches.
One is the church that is literally dying. Its membership is declining.
It’s probably not going to survive much longer.
The second type of dying church is glitzy and successful.
It’s maybe got a big building and programs every day of the week.
It looks alive, but in reality it’s never died to itself.
It’s trying to maintain its own life.
That church doesn’t look like it’s dying,
but in trying to save its own life it’s actually losing it.
The third type of church is one which says to God,
“We will follow Jesus no matter where he leads and what it costs.
We will gladly lay down our institution and our building and our survival to follow him.”
This church may be small and overlooked, or big and well-known.
But it doesn’t care about that.
It only cares about following Jesus.

Every church is a dying church.
But only the last type of church will experience a resurrection.
Only that church will experience the life that comes on the other side of death to itself.
To paraphrase Erwin McManus,
Jesus wants to take our church places that only dead churches can go.
And in the same vein, if Jesus had addressed his words in Mark 8 to First UMC, they would sound something like this:
If any church would come after me,
it must deny itself and take up its cross and follow me.
For the church that wants to save its life will lose it,
but whatever church loses its life for me and for the gospel will save it.”

And this brings us back to Easter,
because Easter is central to what it means to be a dying church.
If it wasn’t for Easter, it would make no sense for a church to die to itself.
All organizations live for their own survival.
It makes complete sense to do so,
as long as one doesn’t believe in the resurrection.
But Holy Week and Easter remind us that the pathway to true life goes through death.
Henri Nouwen once said,
“The resurrection is God’s way of revealing to us that nothing that belongs to God will ever go to waste.
What belongs to God will never get lost.”
A church that chooses to die to itself chooses the hard way
(After all, what is harder to choose than death?),
but it also trusts God that there is life on the other side.
The church that tries to hold on to life, forfeits life.

James Forbes, former pastor of Riverside Church in NYC, once spent three days at a conference trying to hammer this point home:
The church can’t rise because it refuses to drop dead.
The fact that it’s dying, he said, is of no use to it whatsoever:
dying is simply the world’s most uncomfortable way of remaining alive.
If you are to be raised from the dead,
the only thing that can make you a candidate is to go all the way into death. Death, not life, is God’s recipe for fixing up the world.
And we, as individuals and as church can choose to die,
because we believe that Jesus specializes in bringing the dead to life again.

Will Willimon, current UMC Bishop and former campus pastor at Duke University, tells the story of a young guy, a student who was hanging around after the chapel services at Duke,
the way people sometimes do,
as folks are saying goodbye and commenting about the sermon or the service in some way and shaking hands.
He had not seen the young man before but reached out to shake his hand. The young man said to him, “I would really like to talk with you some day”. They made an appointment to have lunch,
and a few days later they were talking together,
in an out of the way place on campus.

The young man said, “I’ve really done some bad things in my life”.
Will thought, “you can’t imagine how many times I have heard that one from college students”.
The young man said, “no, I really have.
I grew up in Michigan, as a teenager I got into drugs, pretty seriously,
and it was all down hill from there.
I would do pretty much anything to get the next score.
I’ve stolen from family and friends,
and it got so bad that I became a male prostitute.
Finally, I was caught using the credit card numbers of my clients,
and I was put in prison.

“They put me in a cell with a man who could barely read,
who was teaching himself to read by going through the New Testament. There is a lot of time, in prison, and so I would listen to him and I would occasionally help him read it and then in time we would read it together.

We came to that story in the New Testament about the lost Son and the Father who welcomes him home from the far country,
and the young man quoted the text:
But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.
Then the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.”
But the father said to his slaves, “Quickly, bring out a robe-the best one-and put it on him; put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet.
And get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!”
And then it hit me—this was it, this was true, this was my story.
You see, I knew that I had been dead, and now I was alive, for some reason”.

“Well, later I got out of prison, I went back to school,
I got into Michigan and then I transferred here.
I come to Chapel most every week.
I just wanted to have lunch with you and tell you this because I figure we’ve got Easter coming up in a few weeks,
and you preachers are always scrounging around for stories.
“I just wanted to tell you that, this year, I’m your Easter Story.
I’m your proof - I was dead, but now I’m alive.

Paul the apostle would concur with this young man.
Albeit from a totally opposite position.
Paul had everything.
He was well-educated and respected by the religious leaders.
He was a man of importance,
and when he spoke, people listened.
But Paul gave this all up in order to follow Jesus:

But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ.
Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, -
that I may know him and the power of his resurrection,
and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death,
that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
(Philippians 3)

Dying, so that he might live?
Will we do the same?
As Capon said and I once again quote:
“Jesus solves the world’s problems by dying.
And unless we are willing to see our own death as the one thing necessary for our salvation, we will never be able to enjoy the resurrection,
even though Jesus hands it to us on a silver platter.
Follow me, Jesus says, follow me into my death,
because it is only in my death and resurrection that the kingdom comes.
Follow me, Jesus says.
And in the end these two simple words are all that matter.

———-

I would encourage anyone who hasn’t done to pick up a book or two by Robert Farrar Capon. Below are a few to consider.