Go with me to the year 1968, to the basement of Good Shepherd United Methodist Church in Silver Spring, Maryland. I was the student assistant at that church, while attending Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. One Sunday morning, immediately following the Sunday school hour, the senior high teacher came hurrying into the fellowship hall and engaged me in an almost desperate conversation. The question had been raised in his class that morning, "How could the death of a man 2,000 years ago actually serve to do anything about the sin of someone in 1968?" The teacher had been confused and speechless before the class. Today I don't remember what I told him, but I remember clearly the question -- and I've heard it many times since. 

As we celebrate this profound watershed day in his…