Easter's Coming!

[This was shared earlier today during the funeral for Phyllis, a disciple from the Living Water Lutheran Church family.]

Job 19:23-27a
Romans 8:31b-39
John 11:21-27

As Phyllis' family, friends, and fellow Christian disciples gather to honor her memory, to grieve together, to laugh together, and to draw strength, hope, and encouragement from the God we know in Jesus Christ, it’s good to remember that today is Holy Saturday...and Easter is coming!

On the first Holy Saturday, you know, Jesus’ lifeless body lay in a tomb. Jesus' first disciples were left with their grieving thoughts.

What would they do now?

How would they cope with the void?

For those first disciples, Saturday was hard and sad.

And no matter how grateful you may be that Phyllis’ battle with an implacable enemy has ended and that her suffering has ended, for you, in many ways, you experience this Saturday much of what the first disciples experienced on that first Holy Saturday. It’s a day that’s hard and sad.

There is a void in the lives of those who called Phyllis mom, grandma, great-grandma, aunt, sister, friend, fellow believer. The love, the infectious laugh, the good story, the unshakeable devotion to family: all of these things are irreplaceable. Phyllis is irreplaceable.

But take heart, though it’s Saturday now, Easter is coming!

In the eleventh chapter of John’s Gospel in the Bible’s New Testament, we’re told about the reception Jesus received in Bethany from his friend, Martha.

Martha’s brother Lazarus, also a friend of Jesus, had died. Martha was upset that the One they had come to see as Lord, Jesus, hadn’t been there when Lazarus was suffering. Jesus hadn’t been there at the moment of Lazarus’ death.

Martha was disappointed and angry that Jesus, in Whom she had reposed so much trust, hadn’t been there for Lazarus. “‘Lord,’ Martha said to Jesus, ‘if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’”

But then, Martha said something remarkable to Jesus. “But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.”

It’s not clear what Martha believed exactly when she made that statement. What is clear from the rest of her conversation with Jesus is that she had no idea that Jesus was about to raise Lazarus from the dead.

Despite her grief over her brother’s suffering and death, despite her anger and frustration with Jesus that Jesus had not come sooner, and despite not knowing what might happen next in her life, Martha still trusted in Jesus.

And this, when I think about it, was one of Phyllis’ remarkable qualities.

At the end, she didn’t deny the frustration or the pain of her circumstances. (She told me last week that the morphine took "some of the pain away.") Yet she kept going in faith.

Last Saturday when I visited her, I told her, “Phyllis, you have one of the most remarkably positive attitudes I’ve ever encountered.” She simply said, “Well, I always try to have a positive attitude.”

And, she didn’t make the mistake of blaming God for having a disease that exists because we live in a fallen and imperfect world--a Holy Saturday world. She still trusted in the God we meet in Jesus.

That’s why she listened to Luke’s account of Palm Sunday as I read it to her and talked about it with me for a few minutes, as we always talked about Scripture when we met. It’s why she gladly received Holy Communion.

Phyllis knew the truth of what Jesus told Martha later in their conversation at Bethany: “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die.” Then, Jesus asked Martha: “Do you believe this?” And Martha, as well as she was able to at that moment, confessed her faith in God the Son: “Yes, Lord...I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, who is to come into the world.”

Earlier in His ministry, Jesus had told an old teacher of the Jews, Nicodemus: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Martha believed in Jesus. In purely human terms, that must have been pretty hard at that moment. But the Spirit of God stirred her to entrust her life and all of her hope in Jesus.

Today, two thousand years later, we have far more reason to believe in Jesus than Martha did at that moment. That’s because, shortly after Jesus’ conversation with Martha, though He was sinless, Jesus voluntarily took the punishment for sin you and I deserve, by dying on a cross, killing off the power of sin and death over the lives of those who like Martha, and like Phyllis, believe in Jesus.

You can trust a God Who dies for you because He loves you.

But, we have even more reason to believe in Jesus.

Things didn’t end on Good Friday, when Jesus died. They didn’t end on Holy Saturday, when His flesh and bones lay in a tomb. They didn’t even end on Easter Sunday, when God the Father raised Jesus from death.

And today, Jesus, Who raised His friend Lazarus from the dead that day in Bethany, can raise anyone out of the prison of sin and death. Jesus can give eternal life with God that begins here and now as we trust in Jesus to be our God, King, Savior, and Best Friend.

The promise of Easter belongs to all who turn from sin and the ways of this world and turn instead in faith to Jesus Christ.

It’s a promise fulfilled for Phyllis that she will enjoy for all eternity. She is now in the presence of the One in Whom she believed, free from the confinements of age and disease, free from grief, walking and laughing and celebrating at the great heavenly feast with all the saints who have gone before, including the mother she lost when she was just a baby and the husband she adored.

As I was walking out of the door to Phyllis’ hospital room last Saturday, I stopped, turned to her, and said, “I’ll see you soon, Phyllis.”

After I walked into the hallway, I wondered whether I should have said that. I knew that her condition was worsening, maybe I wouldn’t see her soon.

But then I smiled and thought, “If Phyllis is as close to death as her doctors seem to think, I will see her soon, at least in eternal terms, in the twinkling of an eye. I will see her beyond the gates of death when all who have trusted in Christ will begin a new chapter in our lives--an eternal chapter--bathed in the love of God, perfected by His grace and ready to laugh again, to love more, to be more than we can even ask or imagine on this earth.”

Let the thought of Phyllis resurrected bring you comfort today.

Let the example of her faith in Christ spur you to faith in Christ and to ever-deepening faith in Christ so that you too will know the resurrection with God.

Today, it’s Holy Saturday. But in Christ, Easter Sunday has invaded this darkened world.

Let Christ take you captive for the eternal kingdom of God by trusting in Him and so that, like Phyllis, you can be assured of an eternity of Easter Sundays. Amen

A Pass at Luke 20:27-38

[My wife, son, and I have just moved to Logan, Ohio, where I will be serving as pastor of Saint Matthew Lutheran Church. Here, I hope to continue to write and post "passes" at the Bible lessons appointed for the Sundays ahead. They're designed to help the people of Saint Matthew to prepare for worship. But they may also be useful to others, since we follow the Church Year used by most Christians each week. Because until Friday, my access to the Internet results only from my walking to the Logan Library and using their free WiFi access, there will only be one pass at the lesson.]

1. The appointed lessons for the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost are: Job 19:23-27a; 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; and Luke 20:27-38. The Psalm is Psalm 17:1-9.

2. All three of the lessons for this week share several common themes:

• Resurrection
• Human obsessions v. God's ways

3. In the first lesson, Job, a man dealing with multiple tragedies responds most immediately to his friends, who are bent on blaming Job for all of his troubles.

This is a common--and wrongheaded--human response to the tragedies of others. It no doubt stems in part for our very human desire to make sense of things. But not everything that happens in our fallen world "makes sense." Our alienation from God, a condition the Bible calls sin, means that inexplicable things happen in our world. Bad things do happen to all people.

Job doesn't exempt God from blame either. That's okay. As I often tell people who confide that they sometimes get mad at God, only people who believe that God is real, present, and caring get angry with Him. If we didn't believe in God's existence, we wouldn't be angry with Him. The Psalms are replete with examples of people shaking their fist at or bellyaching to God.

We get angry at the tragedies of life because, deep in our DNA, we know that tragedy and death were never meant to be part of the human experience. See here for a discussion of these issues.

Looking back to vv. 19-22, just before this lesson, we see that Job is not only wearied by grief, pain, and his sudden poverty, he also feels persecuted by his friends. He feels that both God and the world are against him. Throughout that section just before our lesson for this week, Job makes references to his flesh, saying that his bones are clinging to his flesh and that he has escaped death himself by the skin of his teeth, wondering why his friends, "like God, are never satisfied with my flesh?" All of this lay in Job's triumphant affirmation of the resurrection of all who believe in the God revealed, first to Israel, and definitively, in Jesus Christ:

For I know that my Redeemer lives,
and that at the last he will stand upon the earth;
and after my skin has been thus destroyed,
then in my flesh I shall see God...

4. In the 2 Thessalonians passage, the apostle Paul confronts the tendency of the Christians in the Greek city of Thessalonica, to believe reports that Jesus had already returned. Paul asserts that Jesus, God in the flesh, did in fact rise from the dead and that through His resurrection and our faith in Him, we too will experience resurrection. Until Jesus does return or until we leave this earth, we are to be faithful in following Him.

Paul's words upbraid modern Christians in two different camps:

• Those obsessed with Jesus' return with little thought to actually living in daily repentance and renewal, daily seeking God's help to love God and love neighbor or to make disciples.
• Those who dismiss the reality of Jesus' resurrection and turn their faith into a kind of "feel good" elixir for their troubles. To them, Paul would say, as he did to the church at Corinth, "If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied" (1 Corinthians 15:19).

5. The Gospel lesson records the only mention that Luke makes of the Sadducees. The Sadducees, it's believed, traced their movement to the ancient priest, Zadok. They comprised a smaller, but more influential, movement than that of the more frequently mentioned Pharisees.

Jesus, in fact, had more in common with the Pharisees than with the Sadducees. The Pharisees, although guilty of legalism that obscured the grace and love of God, believed, like Jesus, in a resurrection and that the entire Old Testament was the Word of God.

The Sadducees repudiated the entire notion of a resurrection and believed that only the first five books of the Old Testament, which make up what the scholars refer to as the Pentateuch, were "canonical." (See point 6, here.) The Pentateuch was also called "the books of Moses."

This is why Jesus reference to Moses toward the end of our lesson is so clever, claiming, as He does, that Moses affirmed the reality of the resurrection by referring to the Lord as "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob."

6. The "question" of the Sadducees is really designed to trip Jesus up, anger Him, or ridicule Him. The fictional case study they present to Jesus is rooted in what's called "levirate law." (The word levir is a Latin term, meaning husband's brother.) In most circumstances, it was considered wrong for a woman to marry her husband. (See Leviticus 18:16; 20:21) There were several apparent purposes behind levirate marriage: to maintain the continuation of a family line and to protect women who otherwise were without rights. The refusal of brothers to fulfill their duty under this law, while momentarily embarrassing to the man (check out Deuteronomy 25:5-10, linked below) had an even graver consequence. Women widowed without heirs were often forced into a life of prostitution.

But if a woman was widowed and childless and a brother of her late husband is unmarried, it was his duty to marry the widow. Their first male child--only males had property rights, would be considered the heir of the deceased husband. Levirate marriage is discussed in Genesis 38:8 and Deuteronomy 25:5-10.

7. The Sadducees, more concerned with religious propriety than with faith in God, were also obsessed with money, being members of the wealthiest classes. For them, "this life" was all there was. So, their "question" springs directly from their beliefs.

8. Jesus responds in two different ways to the Sadducees, as pointed out by Fred Craddock:

• a. In vv. 34-36, Jesus answers with reason. In the resurrected state, all of what Martin Luther would call "emergency" measures, things like marriage and governments and such, will go by the board. Nobody will be widowed or orphaned. All will have God as Father and, as the New Testament puts it occasionally, husband. It isn't that we won't know or love those with whom we've shared this life. It's just that the old measures will be both unnecessary and defunct.
• b. In vv. 37-38, Jesus responds by alluding to Scripture. As pointed out above, He does so very cleverly, invoking the faith of the very person the Sadducees claimed to be the author of the only books they deemed holy, Moses.