He Is Risen!

Easter, 2011

The world in which we live today is a very unsettling place. Natural disasters―earthquakes, fires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, nuclear melt-downs, as well as human threats―war, terrorists, crime in the streets, even crime within families―all contribute to a climate of constant fear. They can also lead us to give up hope and embrace despair and depression.

The prophet Jeremiah lived and wrote 2,700 years ago. In fact, biblical scholars believe that more than one person contributed to the book that bears his name. In the first part of the book, Jeremiah warns of God’s growing anger with the people, and of the dangers that they will face if they don’t return to God—including earthquake, fire, and flood. In the latter portion, from which today’s lesson is taken, a very different prophet offers the assurance that God has forgiven the people and has remained faithful to them, even though they have been punished by being taken as captives to Babylon.

It is from this hopeful section that we receive some of the most encouraging words in the Bible: “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” [Jeremiah 31:3]

“I have loved you with an everlasting love.” What does that mean for us today? As I said when I began, when we look at the world around us, it is easy to conclude that things are in a pretty awful mess. In response to our plea for help, God always replies, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”

How do we know for sure that God loves us? Actually, there are some very simple ways to see this. The first is to look around and see the magnificence of this universe that God created for us to live in.

Whether we believe the world was created in six days or in a “big bang” 13 billion years ago, we can all agree on one thing:  the universe that God created was not meant to be a bad place. At the end of every step of creation, the Bible tells us, “God saw that it was good.” Something happened to turn God’s good creation into what we have today. This world is not the way God meant it to be. How can that have happened?

Whether we know the names of the first humans, or whether they stood up one day and looked around after millions of years of evolution, there can be no doubt that, at some point in time, human beings recognized that they had two choices:  good and evil—and they chose evil. On a personal level, there was a point, early in the lives of each one of us, when we, too, decided to do what was bad instead of what was good.

One way that we know that God loves us with an everlasting love is by recognizing one of the greatest gifts that God gave us – the freedom to choose.

Just three weeks ago, our bishop stood in this church and reminded us of an important fact about God. God is all-powerful, but not all-controlling. God did not want a bunch of robots.

God loved us with an everlasting love, so God took the tremendous risk of creating us with the freedom to choose between good and evil, all the while knowing that we might make the wrong choice and suffer for it. And we did just that.

It is a sign of God’s love that we were allowed to sin, and it is also a sign of God’s love that we were then subjected to the just punishment for choosing to sin. All parents want the best for their children, and God is no different. But, like a loving parent, God also realized that it was necessary to allow us to make our own decisions and learn from the consequences of those decisions. It may be “tough love,” but there is no denying that God’s love for us is everlasting, no matter what mistakes we have made or wrongs we have committed. But God did not intend for it to end that way, no matter how bleak things may look to us.

In 1944, the French playwright and philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote a play that he called “No Exit.” The entire play takes place in a room with no windows, only one door. A man is brought into the room and the door is locked behind him. Soon, two other people are also brought in and locked in the room. All three gradually realize that they are in hell, and their punishment is that they are there to torture each other for all eternity.

As the play unfolds, they do indeed reveal all human sins: cowardice, greed, anger, jealousy, hatred. They gang up two-against-one, constantly changing sides.

They reveal each other’s most heinous sins, and the consequences that those sins have brought upon those around them.

Finally, the man has had all he can stand and he shouts for the door to be unlocked. The door flies open, but the man realizes that he cannot bring himself to leave. His weakness and attachment to the habit of his sins means that there is “no exit” from his torment. In absolute despair, he cries out, “hell is other people!”

That is surely a bleak and depressing picture, written by an atheist, offering nothing but despair, but not so unlike the warnings of prophets like Jeremiah, at least the early part of that prophet’s book.

However, we remember on this Easter morning that God loves us with an everlasting love. For us, the sins and torment of this life are real and painful. Like the man in the play, we have become so accustomed to our sins that we cannot bring ourselves to give them up. As Jesus said in the Gospel of John, we have become “slaves to sin.” [John 8:34] We have become our own accusers and our own tormenters. We make our own hell.

Hell is not other people, as the character in Sartre’s play believed. Hell is the way that you and I keep returning to sin, no matter how hard we try to do what is right—but there is an important difference between our lives as Christians and the people in the play. For us, there is an exit.

When you and I go over to that open door and peer through it, we see that God’s love for us is truly everlasting. On the other side of the door… we see… an empty tomb!

Alleluia! The Lord is risen indeed!