The Reverend J. Howard Cepelak

Trinity Church
†
Waltham, Massachusetts

The Day of Resurrection – Easter Sunday – 8 April 2012

Isaiah 25:6-9, Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; I Corinthians 15:1-11, John 20:1-10

From the Book of the Prophet, Isaiah:
Isaiah wrote, the LORD…will swallow up death forever, and the LORD God will wipe away tears from all faces…let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

From St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians:
The apostle said, I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins…that he was buried, [and] that he was raised on the third day….

And From the Gospel According to St. John:
Mary Magdalene, heartbroken to find her Lord’s tomb empty on the morning of the third day, and thinking that the body had been stolen, wept. And Jesus asked her, Woman, why are you weeping?

Let us pray.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in thy sight, O God, our Rock and our Redeemer, our Strength and our Salvation, Amen. †
I have entitled this morning’s sermon Total Convergence because in the crucifixion and resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ all things, both material and spiritual – all hopes and fears, loves and hatreds, prides and prejudices – all natural forces and all supernatural powers – all rights and wrongs, all good and evil, all truth and falsehood – everything in all creation comes together – converges – at one moment in time – an historical moment in our time – a moment in time from beyond time – that moment when time met eternity – that moment when Jesus Christ died on the cross; a total convergence of all that was – and of all that is – and of all that ever shall be.

In that one moment in time, everything changed – forever. For at the moment, God the Father, in and through God the Son, destroyed death. All that’s good and right and true met face to face on the battlefield of God the Son and all that’s bad and wrong and false met defeat. The power of sin was broken and the hope for salvation given to all mankind. In that total convergence, the One True Holy God won – and saved all of our sin-sick souls as He also redeemed our mortal bodies.

Everything from the first moment of creation had looked forward to that moment of the cross – and everything that has happened since has looked back at it. All true prophecy like that of the great prophet, Isaiah had predicted that someday God would swallow up death. When Jesus died on the cross, that prophecy became reality.

Although we’re here this morning joining with Christians from all over the world, to celebrate the resurrection victory, we know that the work of salvation occurred on Friday – in the crucifixion. In the early hours of Sunday morning, the victory won on Friday became manifest to the world as the crucified Savior became the resurrected Lord.

St. Paul spoke – or wrote – of the resurrection as a stumbling block to the Jews and folly to the gentiles. That’s because the Jews always wanted signs form God as proof of – well just about anything. The resurrection, for whatever reason, was not the sign that they had wanted. So it became a stumbling block to their believing.

The gentiles, so highly influenced by the intellectualism of the age as practiced by generations of Greek philosophers – you know some of their names – Plato, Socrates, Epicurus, Cantor, Plutarch and Aristotle to name just a few among hundreds – wanted everything to make sense in material and rational terms – to fit into the laws of both nature and reason. Logical Greek thinking had no room for the supernatural divine miracle of resurrection. Reluctant to suspend intellect, the resurrection seemed to them a folly – foolishness in the face of reason.

They did not know – and those who worship at the altar of human intelligence in this generation – do not know – that one need not suspend one’s intellect to believe but rather allow for the possibility that all of mankind’s highest and best thoughts can be fulfilled by faith and will be fulfilled by faith in the divine Truth – capital T. Truly, we can only discover that which God has chosen to reveal.

We may think that we, by virtue of our intelligence discovered some great truth. But that discovery comes only because God has chosen, at some point in time, to reveal it. And our intelligence, inferior to His, yet comes from Him as He had created us in His image in the first place.

Suspension is not the issue. Fulfillment is. Knowing the limits of our intelligence brings us to an appreciation for the infinite intelligence of God Himself. We can gain no greater wisdom. And with that wisdom we see clearly the foolishness that we once indulged. Paraphrasing St. Paul, The foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of man.

Eventually, many did believe. St. Paul simply preached Christ crucified and risen and pointed out that their Greek rationality did indeed have room for an unknown god – He said that Jesus Christ filled that gap. Over time, most of the ancient world claimed Christ as Lord and Savior.

Faith for the intellectuals – both genuine of which there are few and pseudo of which there are many – is always a difficult proposition. But permit me an example of a man – an authentic intellectual – who just recently told me about how he came to believe in the resurrected Christ.

A physician by vocation and a philosopher by avocation, he subjects everything to careful intellectual analysis. He identifies himself as a scientist, has the best education available, reads everything that he can and both practices medicine and teaches it as well. Now in his mid 70s, he still values intellect especially as it applies to healing. Now, this is how he came to believed in the crucified and risen Lord.

About 25 years ago, his wife died from cancer at the age of 48. They had been high school sweethearts, got married right after college and together had been blessed with three children. They were the kind of couple where when one inhaled the other exhaled; they thought the same thoughts shared the same values did almost everything together.

He had been brought up a Unitarian. His wife had been an Episcopalian. But church life in either form had been very casual indeed.

For him, theology, doctrine and Bible study were an academic pursuit without significant value for living. Although he found some degree of truth in this particular field, he had missed the ultimate Truth. He was one to believe, as so many do, that truth is relative, that all religions are pretty much the same and all lead to God – God being defined – in his mind – as the impersonal source of creation.

His wife’s affliction with cancer tested him. With only the most casual belief in God and no faith in Jesus Christ other than as a great teacher, the whole issue of suffering and eventually death hit him at the very center of his being.

He saw himself as a healer. He believed only in the miracle of science. Yet, for the one whom he loved he could not heal and science had no answer. He was useless.

Her suffering seemed meaningless. Her pain torn him apart. And her death left him an empty void. Life without her was not worth living. He kept on for the sake of their children.

About eight years later, on a trip to Israel for an international medical conference, he took time to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the magnificent sanctuary built on the traditional site of the crucifixion at one end and of the resurrection at the other. He noticed an especially beautiful icon. In front of the icon was a bank of votive candles. Not one for ceremony, he nonetheless took a candle lit it and placed it in the rack. He whispered, Sweetheart, this is for you.

Standing next to him was a Greek Orthodox priest who had heard the whisper. The priest put his hand on his shoulder and said in English, You’ve lost someone you loved. With those words, he began to cry – weep actually – something he never did – and he wept to use his words, uncontrollably. Through the tears, he saw the crucifix nearby at the location of the actual crucifixion.

Literally, in that moment in time, everything in his life converged. His wife’s suffering took on the perspective of sanctification in and by Christ’s suffering. Her death fit into His. And His resurrection meant that she lived. He became powerfully peaceful – for the first time since she had died. And he knew the meaning of the peace that surpasses human understanding. Through no exercise of his own mind, the mind of God blessed him with perfect peace.

He loved his wife more than he could ever express. But he came to know that God loved her even more. And all of these thoughts and all of these feelings – everything that they had shared together and all of his life after her death – even the emptiness of life without her – converged. It all somehow made sense. It all fit.

And it was, finally, all good – not because any form of suffering, pain or death is ever, in and of itself, good – it is not – but because the suffering and the pain the sorrow and tears- even death itself – have been redeemed in the cross of Christ.

That’s how it happened for him. And in that moment, the power of the crucified and risen Savior bound up another broken heart. Convergence – total convergence.

All of us who love know that pain – the almost unbearable heartbreak of the loss of one so dearly loved. True love always suffers.

Jesus spoke to the grieving Mary and asked her, Woman, why are you weeping? In some sense, He asks each of us the same question – Why are you weeping? We know, by faith – that He fulfills everything. Even our grief manifested in our tears finds fulfillment. And in Him, we also know that although weeping may tarry for the night, joy comes with the morning.

Easter tells us that finally, goodness prevails. In the total convergence of everything that happened in the moment in time from beyond time that Jesus Christ died, the holy love of the righteous God won the victory for everyone who will simply believe – and in faith – by faith – and through faith – love Him who loved us so much as to go to the cross for us – there to die so that we could live.

By faith everything converges and makes sense. In faith, everything comes together for the good. And through faith, we win the victory that Christ won for us.

So we can say,

Alleluia!
The strife is o’er, the battle done;
The victory of life is won;
The song of triumph has begun:
Alleluia!

Let us pray.
Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of our salvation – for your Son’s death on the cross of our redemption and for His victory won for us that we might live forever. As He rose from the dead, so bless us with a full faith in Him that we may rise up victorious over all our afflictions and rejoice and be glad all the days of our lives and so live that
all that we say and
all that we do and
all that we are
will honor and glorify the same
Jesus Christ,
our crucified Redeemer,
our risen Savior –
and the only Savior of all mankind,
Amen. †