[While King Duncan is enjoying a well deserved retirement we are going back to his earliest sermons and renewing them. The newly modernized sermon is shown first and below, for reference sake, is the old sermon. We will continue this updating throughout the year bringing fresh takes on King's best sermons.]
Original Title: Death Has Been Conquered
New Title: Look Up, Not Down
The Rev. Gary Paterson, a pastor in British Columbia, talks about the first worship service he led in his first pastoral charge. He was young and very green. It was the first Sunday in August a hot summer day in a small country church, some sixty odd people gathered for worship. Wanting very badly to impress his new congregation, naturally he gave it his all. At the end of the sermon, he thought to himself, “Well, not bad.” But just before could catch his breath, a woman sprang up from a pew, and began screaming.
Paterson froze in place. His first thought was, “No, no, the sermon wasn’t that bad, was it?” His second thought was, “Oh God, they’ve sent me to a charismatic congregation, and she’s speaking in tongues or something.” But then, the woman began to get words out, in full panic, “My mother,” she cried, “my mother is dead!”
The place erupted. Paterson confesses that he was gripped by terror himself. “I killed someone with my very first sermon,” he thought, and then, “Please God, don’t let it be so. I’ve never done a funeral ever. This is not a good beginning.”
Now, this was a country church and there are no phones on the premises, so a couple of people ran out the front door, down the block to the corner store to phone for an ambulance. But then, in the midst of the panic, suddenly a strange voice was heard. It was the woman who was allegedly dead. Her eyes were open, and she was obviously puzzled and annoyed. She looked at her daughter with great concern. “Hush now,” she said, “you’re making a lot of noise!” Well, there was certainly a hush, says Rev. Paterson. It was more like shocked silence. He began to wonder about the power of the preached Word to both kill and resurrect. But no, there was a simple explanation. It was August in a little country church, and it was stifling. The woman had simply been overcome by the heat a little snooze during the sermon. Her daughter had evidently jumped to conclusions and overreacted. (1)
Strange things happen in small country churches.
But it reminds me of Max Lucado story about a physician in Arkansas who misdiagnosed a patient. He declared the woman to be dead. The family was informed, and the husband was grief-stricken.
Imagine the surprise of the nurse when she discovered that the woman had a slight pulse. She was not dead, but alive! “You better tell the family,” she urged the doctor.
The embarrassed physician phoned the husband and said, “I need to talk to you about the condition of your wife.”
“The condition of my wife?” he asked. “She’s dead.”
“Well,” the doctor mumbled with embarrassment, “she’s seen a slight improvement.” (2)
A slight improvement? Talk about an understatement! The truth of the matter is that once a person has been declared dead, if they revive, they really were not dead at all. There was, instead, a tragic mistake. When a person dies, they really die. That’s it. Finis! Except, of course, in one notable exception.
That exception took place at a tomb just outside of Jerusalem. The accounts differ in the various Gospels, as befits an eye-witness account. It is the first day of the week. The Sabbath has passed. Three women are there, according to Mark’s account Mary Magdalene, Mary the Mother of James, and Salome. They have brought spices that they might anoint the body of their close friend, a man who had been crucified on the preceding Friday on the cross of Calvary. Two days have passed, but their hearts are still heavy with grief. As they come closer to his tomb they wonder, “Who shall roll away the stone?” The stone that sealed the tomb was very large and would not give way easily. But to their amazement the stone had already rolled away. Distressed, they enter the tomb, discovering a young man dressed all in white. Now they’re frightened. The young man said to them, “Don’t be afraid. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He is risen. He is not here. Go tell his disciples and Peter that he goes before you into Galilee. There shall you see him, as he said to you.”
Thus, was fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah who wrote hundreds of years before: “He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces . . .” (Isaiah 25:8)
Death has been swallowed up in victory. That is the one essential message of Easter Sunday. That is the Word that you have filled this church to hear. Death has been defeated. Christ is alive. The final enemy has been conquered.
Of course, you realize that the message of Christ’s victory over death probably does not have the same emotional impact on us that it did on our fathers and mothers. Death was a very near companion to persons in generations past. The average life span was very short. Fatal diseases were often epidemic. Many, if not most, families would lose at least one child while still an infant. People died at home and not hidden away in a hospital. Death was very real, much more real for them than for us. Today we are experts at both denying and delaying our mortality. Children born this year will probably have a life expectancy of over 100 years. With recent developments such as the Human Genome Project, one hundred years may be a conservative estimate. We are delaying dying. Now, if we could just solve the problem of aging.
You may have heard about the man who was arrested for selling eternal youth pills. He promised his customers that they would never grow old. When he was booked at the police station, they checked his record and found that he had been arrested on the same charge in 1776, 1812 and 1903! Just kidding, of course.
In a hedonistic culture such as ours, many people dread aging more than death. And yet science is rapidly placing upon us the intolerable burden of Tithonus. Do you remember that tale from Greek mythology?
Aurora, the goddess of dawn, fell in love with Tithonus who was a mortal youth. In other words, he would die like all other humans. Zeus, the king of gods, offered Aurora any gift she might choose for Tithonus. Naturally she chose that he might live forever. However, she forgot to ask that he be forever young. And so Tithonus grew older and older and older, and could never die, and the gift became a curse!
Jonathan Swift in his marvelous satire, Gulliver’s Travels, deals with very much the same dilemma. In Swift’s fantasy, it happened once or twice in a generation that a child was born with a circular red spot on its forehead, signifying that it would never die. Gulliver imagines these children to be the most fortunate of all people, in his words, “born exempt from that universal calamity of human nature,” death. But as he comes to meet them, he realizes that they are in fact the most miserable and pitiable of creatures. They grow old and feeble. Their friends and contemporaries die off. At the age of eighty, their property is taken from them and given to their children, who would otherwise never inherit from them. Their bodies contract various ailments, they accumulate grudges and grievances, they grow weary of the struggle of life, and they can never look forward to being released from the pain of living. (2)
Thus there may be many things in life we dread more than physical death. For many of us death is something far removed from our daily lives. It has no biting reality unless and until we are confronted with it personally or until someone we love is claimed by the Grim Reaper.
So we may not think about death in the same way our ancestors did. Still there is something about Easter that makes our hearts beat faster. Perhaps it is not an avoidance of the reality of death at all, as our critics would charge. Perhaps, rather, it is because Easter represents hope, hope not only for us as we deal with death but also as we deal with our everyday living. Because Christ lives, we can live! What great good news that is!
Easter is tonic for the soul. It helps us lift our eyes from our problems to our possibilities. I love the way writer Jerome K. Jerome once put it: “Look up,” he said, “Don’t look down. When you look down you see so much of yourself and so little of the other things that God made. For instance,” he writes, “one day I had a finger that ached in the joint and I decided promptly that I had arthritis. So, I went over to the public library and got a medical book and looked up arthritis. By the time I got through reading two pages, I had arthritis in every joint in my hands and my knees besides. It scared me and I turned the pages and there was leukemia, and I read everything about it. Before I had finished, I knew I had leukemia. I turned the page to ulcers and I said, ‘So now I know what causes those pains in my stomach I’ve wondered about. I’ve got ulcers.’
“I turned to pellagra, and I just knew I had pellagra. The only thing I found in that medical book that I didn’t have was housemaid’s knee, and I wondered why I didn’t have that. I went straight to the doctor who had examined me lots of times and had always told me there wasn’t anything wrong. When I got there I said, `I’m a hospital myself, Doctor.’ I told him about all of these things I knew I had.
“The doctor sat there for a long time before he said, `Yes, you’re in a bad way. You really are in a bad way. Now that you’ve diagnosed your case so well, I’m going to give you a prescription. I haven’t given you any medicine before, but I’m going to give you a prescription this time and you can take it to the drugstore and get it filled.’
“He wrote it out and folded it up, and I headed for the drugstore. The druggist took the prescription and looked at it. He frowned and made out like he was scratching his head, then he folded it back up and said, `You know, I’m sorry, but I don’t have any of this in my drugstore.’
“I said, `What? Don’t you have the biggest drugstore in this part of the city?’
“`Yes,’ he said, `but the things the doctor has prescribed for you don’t come in a bottle,’ He handed it back to me and said, `You take it and read it for yourself.’
“I opened it and this is what it said, `Walk eight miles every day, come home and eat a beef steak for supper, and stop reading things you’ve got no business reading.’ It is a dangerous thing to look down at yourself. You get to feeling sorry for yourself.” (3)
Isn’t that part of the joy of Easter? It helps us lift our eyes from our problems to our possibilities. Look up, not down. `Because he lives, I can live.’ For you see, life is not always roses and sunshine. There are also thorns and thunder clouds. Easter is God’s promise to us, however, that neither life nor death can conquer us. Easter is hope. Easter is an affirmation of God’s goodness and grace.
But one thing more needs to be said. Easter is an affirmation of Christ’s presence in our lives today. It is so good to know that Christ does live. We share in the joy of Mary Magdalene and Peter and all those disciples and devoted followers to whom the risen Christ appeared when death could no longer contain him. For you see, he lives in our hearts as well.
There is a story told by a nun. She says that a few weeks before Easter there was a horrible accident in her community. While burning some branches in his garden the father of one of her pupils at her convent accidentally set fire to himself. He died as a result of his burns.
Naturally his family went into deep shock. The nun, as well as other members of the community sought to minister to the family, but they were too deeply hurt to respond very positively.
The fact that the tragedy happened at home made it even worse. The man’s wife was so distraught that she couldn’t go out into the garden where the accident had happened. Indeed, she found it difficult even to look out of the window that faced onto the garden in case it brought the whole thing back to her. However, the days went by, and Easter came around.
On Easter Sunday afternoon the nun visited the family again. She was expecting to find them still grief-stricken. But she got a very pleasant surprise. As soon as she stepped into the house, she sensed that the gloom had lifted, and she got a feeling of peace, even of joy. “Something has happened here,” she said to the mother. “I can sense it.”
To which the mother replied, “This morning my sister and a neighbor came to visit me. They asked me to go out into the garden to get some fresh air. I became almost hysterical at the thought of going into that garden. But convinced that it would help me, they insisted, so eventually I went out with them. Slowly we walked down to the place where the fire had happened. As we approached the spot my whole body began to shake. But suddenly, I don’t know how or from where, the words of the gospel came to me: “Why do look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen.” At that moment it was as if a heavy load was lifted off my back, and I felt a great sense of peace and joy.” (4)
And that, of course, is the meaning of Easter. Death has been conquered! We can lift our eyes from our problems to our possibilities! Christ is alive, and because he lives we also can live! No wonder Easter is so special. It is not a denial of the power of death but a marvelous, victorious affirmation of life and of God.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. http://www.standrewswesleychurch.bc.ca/sermons/sept252005.htm.
2. A Love Worth Giving Living In The Overflow Of God’s Love (Nashville, TN: Publishing Group, 2002), p. 68.
3. Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen To Good People (NY: Schocker Books).
4. Contributed. Source unknown.
5. http://www.stjeromecroatian.org/eng/March%2027,%202005.pdf.
[ORIGINAL SERMON]
The Rev. Gary Paterson, a pastor in British Columbia, tells about the first worship service he led in his first pastoral charge. He was young and very green. It was the first Sunday in August a hot summer day in a small country church, some sixty odd people gathered for worship. Wanting very badly to impress his new congregation, naturally he gave it his all. At the end of the sermon, he thought to himself, “Well, not bad.” But just before could catch his breath, a woman sprang up from a pew, and began screaming.
Paterson froze in place. His first thought was, “No, no, the sermon wasn’t that bad, was it?” His second thought was, “Oh God, they’ve sent me to a charismatic congregation, and she’s speaking in tongues or something.” But then, the woman began to get words out, in full panic, “My mother,” she cried, “my mother is dead!”
The place erupted. Paterson confesses that he was gripped by terror himself. “I killed someone with my very first sermon,” he thought, and then, “Please God, don’t let it be so. I’ve never done a funeral ever. This is not a good beginning.”
Now, this was a country church and there are no phones on the premises, so a couple of people ran out the front door, down the block to the corner store to phone for an ambulance. But then, in the midst of the panic, suddenly a strange voice was heard. It was the woman who was allegedly dead. Her eyes were open, and she was obviously puzzled and annoyed. She looked at her daughter with great concern. “Hush now,” she said, “you’re making a lot of noise!” Well, there was certainly a hush, says Rev. Paterson. It was more like shocked silence. He began to wonder about the power of the preached Word to both kill and resurrect. But no, there was a simple explanation. It was August in a little country church and it was stifling. The woman had simply been overcome by the heat a little snooze during the sermon. Her daughter had evidently jumped to conclusions and over-reacted. (1)
Strange things happen in small country churches.
But it reminds me of Max Lucado story about a physician in Arkansas who misdiagnosed a patient. He declared the woman to be dead. The family was informed, and the husband was grief‑stricken.
Imagine the surprise of the nurse when she discovered that the woman was not dead, but alive! “You better tell the family,” she urged the doctor.
The embarrassed physician phoned the husband and said, “I need to talk to you about the condition of your wife.”
“The condition of my wife?” he asked. “She’s dead.”
“Well,” the doctor mumbled with embarrassment, “she’s seen a slight improvement.” (2)
A slight improvement? Talk about an understatement! The truth of the matter is that once a person has been declared dead, if they revive, they really were not dead at all. There was, instead, a tragic mistake. When a person dies, they really die. That’s it. Finis! Except, of course, in one notable exception.
That exception took place at a tomb just outside of Jerusalem. The accounts differ in the various Gospels, as befits an eye-witness account. It is the first day of the week. The Sabbath has passed. Three women are there, according to Mark’s account Mary Magdalene, Mary the Mother of James, and Salome. They have brought spices that they might anoint the body of their close friend a man who had been crucified on the preceding Friday on the cross of Calvary. Two days have passed, but their hearts are still heavy with grief. As they come closer to his tomb they wonder, “Who shall roll away the stone?” The stone that sealed the tomb was very large and would not give way easily. But to their amazement the stone was already rolled away. Entering the tomb they discovered a young man dressed all in white. They were frightened. The young man said to them, “Don’t be afraid. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was crucified. He is risen. He is not here. Go tell his disciples and Peter that he goes before you into Galilee. There shall you see him, as he said unto you.”
Thus was fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah who wrote hundreds of years before: “He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces . . . .” (Isaiah 25:8)
Death has been swallowed up in victory. That is the one essential message of Easter Sunday. That is the Word that you have filled this church to hear. Death has been defeated. Christ is alive. The final enemy has been conquered.
Of course, you realize that the message of Christ’s victory over death probably does not have the same emotional impact on us that it did on our fathers and mothers. Death was a very near companion to persons in generations past. The average life span was very short. Fatal diseases were often epidemic. Many, if not most, families would lose at least one child while still an infant. People died at home and not hidden away in a hospital. Death was very real much more real for them than for us. Today we are experts at both denying and delaying our mortality. Children born this year will probably have a life expectancy of over 100 years. With recent developments such as the Human Genome Project, one hundred years may be a conservative estimate. We are delaying dying. Now, if we could just solve the problem of aging.
You may have heard about the man who was arrested for selling eternal youth pills. He promised to his customers that they would never grow old. When he was booked at the police station, they checked his record and found that he had been arrested on the same charge in 1776, 1812 and 1903! Just kidding, of course.
In a hedonistic culture such as ours, many people dread aging more than death. And yet science is rapidly placing upon us the intolerable burden of Tithonus. Do you remember that tale from Greek mythology?
Aurora, the goddess of dawn, fell in love with Tithonus who was a mortal youth. In other words, he would die like all other humans. Zeus, the king of gods, offered Aurora any gift she might choose for Tithonus. Naturally she chose that he might live forever. However, she forgot to ask that he be forever young. And so Tithonus grew older and older and older, and could never die, and the gift became a curse!
Jonathan Swift in his marvelous satire, Gulliver’s Travels, deals with very much the same dilemma. In Swift’s fantasy, it happened once or twice in a generation that a child was born with a circular red spot on its forehead, signifying that it would never die. Gulliver imagines these children to be the most fortunate of all people, in his words, “born exempt from that universal calamity of human nature,” death. But as he comes to meet them, he realizes that they are in fact the most miserable and pitiable of creatures. They grow old and feeble. Their friends and contemporaries die off. At the age of eighty, their property is taken from them and given to their children, who would otherwise never inherit from them. Their bodies contract various ailments, they accumulate grudges and grievances, they grow weary of the struggle of life, and they can never look forward to being released from the pain of living. (2)
Thus there may be many things in life we dread more than physical death. For many of us death is something far removed from our daily lives. It has no biting reality unless and until we are confronted with it personally or until someone we love is claimed by the Grim Reaper.
So we may not think about death in the same way our ancestors did. Still there is something about Easter that makes our hearts beat faster. Perhaps it is not an avoidance of the reality of death at all, as our critics would charge. Perhaps, rather, it is because Easter represents hope hope not only for us as we deal with death but also as we deal with our everyday living. Because Christ lives, we can live! What great good news that is!
Easter is tonic for the soul. It helps us lift our eyes from our problems to our possibilities. I love the way writer Jerome K. Jerome once put it: “Look up,” he said, “Don’t look down. When you look down you see so much of yourself and so little of the other things that God made. For instance,” he writes, “one day I had a finger that ached in the joint and I decided promptly that I had arthritis. So, I went over to the public library and got a medical book and looked up arthritis. By the time I got through reading two pages, I had arthritis in every joint in my hands and my knees besides. It scared me and I turned the pages and there was leukemia, and I read everything about it. Before I had finished, I knew I had leukemia. I turned the page to ulcers and I said, ‘So now I know what causes those pains in my stomach I’ve wondered about. I’ve got ulcers.’
“I turned to pellagra, and I just knew I had pellagra. The only thing I found in that medical book that I didn’t have was housemaid’s knee, and I wondered why I didn’t have that. I went straight to the doctor who had examined me lots of times and had always told me there wasn’t anything wrong. When I got there I said, `I’m a hospital myself, Doctor.’ I told him about all of these things I knew I had.
“The doctor sat there for a long time before he said, `Yes, you’re in a bad way. You really are in a bad way. Now that you’ve diagnosed your case so well, I’m going to give you a prescription. I haven’t given you any medicine before, but I’m going to give you a prescription this time and you can take it to the drugstore and get it filled.’
“He wrote it out and folded it up, and I headed for the drugstore. The druggist took the prescription and looked at it. He frowned and made out like he was scratching his head, then he folded it back up and said, `You know, I’m sorry, but I don’t have any of this in my drugstore.’
“I said, `What? Don’t you have the biggest drugstore in this part of the city?’
“`Yes,’ he said, `but the things the doctor has prescribed for you don’t come in a bottle,’ He handed it back to me and said, `You take it and read it for yourself.’
“I opened it and this is what it said, `Walk eight miles every day, come home and eat a beef steak for supper, and stop reading things you’ve got no business reading.’ It is a dangerous thing to look down at yourself. You get to feeling sorry for yourself.” (3)
Isn’t that part of the joy of Easter? It helps us lift our eyes from our problems to our possibilities. Look up, not down. `Because he lives, I can live.’ For you see, life is not always roses and sunshine. There are also thorns and thunder clouds. Easter is God’s promise to us, however, that neither life nor death can conquer us. Easter is hope. Easter is an affirmation of God’s goodness and grace.
But one thing more needs to be said. Easter is an affirmation of Christ’s presence in our lives today. It is so good to know that Christ does live. We share in the joy of Mary Magdalene and Peter and all those disciples and devoted followers to whom the risen Christ appeared when death could no longer contain him. For you see, he lives in our hearts as well.
There is a story told by a nun. She says that a few weeks before Easter there was a horrible accident in her community. While burning some branches in his garden the father of one of her pupils at her convent accidentally set fire to himself. He died as a result of his burns.
Naturally his family went into deep shock. The nun, as well as other members of the community sought to minister to the family, but they were too deeply hurt to respond very positively.
The fact that the tragedy happened at home made it even worse. The man’s wife was so distraught that she couldn’t go out into the garden where the accident had happened. Indeed, she found it difficult even to look out of the window that faced onto the garden in case it brought the whole thing back to her. However, the days went by, and Easter came around.
On Easter Sunday afternoon the nun visited the family again. She was expecting to find them still grief‑stricken. But she got a very pleasant surprise. As soon as she stepped into the house, she sensed that the gloom had lifted, and she got a feeling of peace, even of joy. “Something has happened here,” she said to the mother. “I can sense it.”
To which the mother replied, “This morning my sister and a neighbor came to visit me. They asked me to go out into the garden to get some fresh air. I became almost hysterical at the thought of going into the garden. But convinced that it would help me, they insisted, so eventually I went out with them. Slowly we walked down to the place where the fire had happened. As we approached the spot my whole body began to shake. But suddenly, I don’t know how or from where, the words of the gospel came to me: “Why do look for the living among the dead? He is not here. He is risen.” At that moment it was as if a heavy load was lifted off my back, and I felt a great sense of peace and joy.” (4)
And that, of course, is the meaning of Easter. Death has been conquered! We can lift our eyes from our problems to our possibilities! Christ is alive, and because he lives we also can live! No wonder Easter is so special. It is not a denial of the power of death but a marvelous, victorious affirmation of life and of God.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. http://www.standrewswesleychurch.bc.ca/sermons/sept252005.htm.
2. A Love Worth Giving Living In The Overflow Of God’s Love (Nashville, TN: Publishing Group, 2002), p. 68.
3. Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen To Good People (NY: Schocker Books).
4. Contributed. Source unknown.
5. http://www.stjeromecroatian.org/eng/March%2027,%202005.pdf.