Easter 2014

Hey, my name is René. Good morning. I'm one of the pastors here and I want to start out with kind of the traditional Easter greeting and it goes like this. I say Christ is risen and you say he is risen indeed. So let's try it: Christ is risen.

That was pretty good, but I think you can be even more enthusiastic, especially you young gentlemen. And so let's hear you shout it out this time: Christ is risen! Amen. I want you to grab your message notes and let's talk about it. We are going to kind of look at the impact that the resurrected Christ has on people's lives—your life today and the lives of the very first disciples. But first, I want to start with a little story. It's one of my favorites. It's a true story of something that happened to me one Easter morning a few years ago.

Excuse me. I was a young pastor of a church at Lake Tahoe, and this church was starting to fill up. I was starting to get worried. What are we gonna do on Easter when a lot more people tend to come to church? The little chapel we had seated around 150 people, and it was a very conservative church, but it was kind of starting to grow a little bit. And so I thought we can't fit all the Easter people in this little facility. Up at South Lake Tahoe in those days, there was no civic auditorium or anything else that was any bigger that we could use. So I thought, what are we gonna do? This is an unsolvable problem, except God.

So I started praying, "God, give me a sign. Show me where to have Easter services." And I got a sign. Actually, I was driving through the casino corridor there in South Lake Tahoe, and literally as I was praying this in my car, I kid you not, I looked up and I saw a neon sign that said Harvey's Casino Resort. And so I thought, why not? How many of you remember when Harvey's looked like this on the screen right now with a wagon wheel and everything, right? So I thought, okay, maybe this is like God's direction. You know, who am I to say that it's not?

I sent a letter to Harvey's, and I didn't know who to even send it to, so I just wrote, "To whom it may concern. I am a local pastor, and I would like to know if we could have our Easter church services in your casino for free. Sincerely." And I just sent it off. I didn't ask our church board for permission. Better in some cases to ask for forgiveness than permission. Can I hear an amen on that?

So, I didn't hear back from Harvey's for weeks, and I figured, I know it's kind of a stupid idea. Obviously, they threw it in the wastebasket or something. But then a few weeks later, we're having a church potluck, and a guy walks up to me. You can tell he is not from the West Coast. You know what I'm talking about? You can tell he's an East coaster. You know, how do you have any people from the East Coast that are here today? Look, raise your hand. They are the ones who are dressed better than us. Look at that. Wait, wait, wait, sir. Stand up. Stand up. Look, he's wearing a suit and tie. He's the only one here.

A guy walks up to me, clearly from the East Coast, no disrespect intended. He's really, really from the East. I mean, he's wearing an expensive silk, like Italian cut tailored suit, and his cologne is wafting off of him. His black, jet-black hair is slicked back with plenty of hair products, and he's wearing expensive rings and a big gold wristwatch. His collar's open, and he's got gold chains going across his hairy chest. You get the picture here—manicured fingernails and so on. So he comes up to me and goes, "Hey, Preach," just like this. I want you to do stuff to you. My name's Bessqually. This is totally true—Bessqually Panda.

I just want to say I accepted Jesus here a few weeks back into my heart. It's made all the difference in my life. You know what I'm talking about? I said, I do know what you're talking about. Yes, Jesus is wonderful, and I'm feeling like just so uncool compared to this guy. You know, Jesus is wonderful. And then he turns to me and goes, "Hey, I just want you to know I got your letter." I thought he was talking about our new members letter, and so I said, "Oh, that's wonderful. We've got a new members potluck coming up." He said, "No, no, no, I got that letter too. I'll be there, but I'm talking about the letter you sent to Harvey's Casino and Resort. You see, I'm the administrator of said facility," just like that.

I said, "Oh, I don't want to make this awkward for you. I'll back out of that because I know that's not what you guys specialize in, and clearly you don't want to have church services on a busy spring break weekend at your hotel. So don't worry about it. We won't mess around with that. You can just say no." And he goes, "No, we'll fix you up just fine. Don't worry about it." I said, "Well, I don't think we actually have the money. We're a small church to rent your facilities." He goes, "Hey, we'll cover it. Don't worry about it." I said, "Well, I don't even think we can afford like all the union labor to run lights and sound and stuff." He goes, "Don't worry about it." And so now I'm starting to have second thoughts myself because it's like I'm going to be doing church with the Sopranos or something, you know?

But I proceeded mainly because I thought Bessqually might send the big man to my house to break my legs if we didn't. So now I get to announce this to the church in services. And just to put this into context, this is a very conservative hymns-only, piano and organ type. These people dislike me for bringing handheld microphones into the service, okay? So how am I going to announce this? Well, I try to bury it in the announcements at the end of the service. People are picking up their purses and stuff, and I go, "Well, we have a couple of announcements to share. The mother-daughter tea will be Saturday, and oh yeah, this Easter..."

And as it's coming out of my mouth, it's sounding so bad. This Easter, we're gonna—on the holiest day of the year—um, we're gonna cancel services here at church, and instead, we're gonna be meeting at Harvey's Casino. So what you'll want to do is just go past the slot machines and take a right at poker, and you'll find our church. Thank you, goodbye everyone. Hymn books are flying, you know? People are stopping in their tracks. The whole next week, I got angry letters. "We're resigning from the church. We are charter members, and we're rescinding our membership. You are ruining our sacred tradition." It was heated.

And so I knew the next week I had to try to calm everybody down. And so I tried to make a joke in the announcements. I said, "Hey, the good news about Easter is we'll put a free token for a slot pool in all the bulletins." Nobody laughed then. So we went ahead. Harvey's Casino's slogan that year was "The party's at Harvey's." Anybody remember that ad campaign? The party's at Harvey's, right? And so we put up signs all over town that said, "Jesus is risen. The party's at Harvey's," right? We just figured that we'd tie into it, right?

Easter Sunday morning, I'll never forget it. I'm sitting on the stage with my new mafia friend Bessqually, and I'm going, "Earth to René, stupidest idea ever." Because people from our church are not going to walk into a casino, especially not on Easter Sunday. And people come to a casino for spring break; they're not going to want to go to church. So this is just going to go down a flaming disaster. People start streaming in— a couple of hundred people, 300, 400, 600, 700, 900, a thousand—they keep coming. I find out it's gone viral: church services in a casino, 1100, 1200. It ends up being standing room only, packed—the largest church service in the history of the Tahoe Basin ever, and it's in a casino. Isn't that amazing?

But it gets better, or at least weirder. Because little did I know that Harvey's had employed about a six-and-a-half-foot tall juggler to completely suit up as the Easter Bunny and hand out candy to all the gamblers that morning. Now, when I say that he was suited up as the Easter Bunny, I want to show you—I mean, he didn't just wear Easter Bunny ears. He had the whole full Disney character costume head on, so you could not see his face. You just saw his bright eyes and his little goofy smile. In fact, I was visiting a friend of mine, Dan Wilvers, up in Tahoe earlier this year, and Dan said, "You would not believe what I found." Dan went to our church at the time, and before that church service, that historic service, he snapped a picture of me with the Easter Bunny. And for the first time publicly, I'm now going to show you that picture. Here it is. I'm the one on the right. The years have not been kind to one of us up there. Saw the Easter Bunny the other day; he has not aged a bit.

So this guy starts hearing about this from people coming in and asking me, "What's going on?" It's a church service. "Oh really, a church service?" I find out later he goes to his boss and he says, "I really want to go to church." His boss says, "Well, we hired you to hand out candy to the gamblers." He says, "Well, you got to give me a half an hour break." "Well, you don't have time to take off your costume in a half an hour." "I'll just take off my head." His boss says, "I don't want kids to look back there and be traumatized seeing the Easter Bunny decapitated with his head in his lap. So you can go, but you got to keep your whole costume on, and you only get a half an hour." He goes, "Fine, I'll just go for the sermon." So he does.

I get up to start my sermon, and I look back, and in the back doors, I see this character going like this, peeking in. And he's tiptoeing over to our head usher, Dave Beatty. He's an 80-year-old guy who thinks the whole church is going to heck in a hand basket with all of these changes I'm bringing in. And Dave's sitting back there really grumbly like this, and I'm watching this unfold in Panama as the Easter Bunny tips up to, of all people, Dave Beatty, taps him on the shoulder, and says, "Excuse me, may I just sit there, sir?" And Dave looks at him like this, like, "I knew it, what else is gonna go wrong in this crazy church?"

So I'm trying to preach, and I'm seeing all this. Am I hallucinating? Is this really happening? I mean, I know it's 4:20, but this is ridiculous, you know? And if you don't know what that is, that's a holiday they celebrate at UCSC. For the rest of the world, it's Easter. But anyway, so—but it gets weirder because the Easter Bunny is sitting there taking sermon notes on me while I'm preaching. And at the end of the service, as I often do, I ask people to pray with me, and then if they'd like to pray with somebody afterwards, they can come up during the closing song. I look up, and the Easter Bunny's coming forward in full costume, completely unselfconscious. He's just marching down during the closing song. He's just standing in line to pray with me like everybody else. He's third in line, he's second in line, he's next. He comes up to me on the outside, you know, he's still got his goofy grin and his googly eyes, but on the inside, he's a broken man.

I'm trying not to laugh as he puts his hand, paw, whatever, on my shoulder. That's trying to come to Christ, and he does not only that morning, but he gets super involved in our church, gets involved in our children's ministry, which he teaches Sunday school. And how cool is that? You know, to say to somebody, "Yeah, you heard of the Easter Bunny? Goes to our church. Yeah, teaches Sunday school." Isn't that an amazing story of what God can do in somebody's life?

But you know, I was thinking about this, and it occurred to me that that gentleman is far from the only person who has ever come to church wearing a mask. In fact, on holidays like this, Easter, Christmas, and so on, it's almost expected, right? You put on your Sunday best and you come smiling, greeting everybody, "Happy Easter," as you should. And you guys do look great. But sometimes you wonder whether anybody cares what's going on under the mask, whether anybody knows or sees or cares about the hurts or the worries or the wounds or the fears that you're struggling with. Well, I want you to know that God sees and God cares and God knows. And Easter is all about the fact that God came all the way to earth to not only show us how to live, but to die for our sins. And not only that, but to rise again from the dead to give you the power to live life today.

Not so as we think church is about putting on a mask. Church is about pretending. Church is about, "God bless you, brother." No, what it's about is showing God your authentic self, saying, "God, this is me." And the real living Christ comes in and gives you, changes you from the inside out and gives you the authentic life that God intends for you to live—a life of adventure and challenge and growth, what I call a resurrection-fueled life.

This morning, if you'll grab the message notes out of your bulletins, I want to talk about four characteristics of resurrection-fueled people. We see these in the very first disciples of Jesus Christ because the day after Jesus Christ is crucified, I mean, they are—talk about hiding behind a mask—they're hiding behind locked doors. They don't want to come out. Their whole life is about secrecy and hiding and fear. But then something changes, and they burst out of that room and they change history. And what changed was not that they pondered the metaphorical truth of the resurrection. What changed was they met the real living Christ. They saw a reality stronger than the realities that they were afraid of.

The very first characteristic of a resurrection-fueled person is courage. Courage. Resurrection-fueled people take God-honoring risks, don't they? I mean, you look at the changed lives of these first disciples. It says in Acts 2 that the rulers—not the exact same rulers the disciples had been just so afraid of—were greatly disturbed. Why? Because the apostles were teaching the people, proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection of the dead. And so they seized Peter and John. Now again, do you get the picture here? This is Peter and John who were hiding, who were secret, who were fearful, and now they're just on the street telling everybody about the fact that Jesus has risen. And these rulers seized them and put them in prison and basically say, "You know what? You're next. We're gonna kill you next if you don't stop." And Peter and John go—I love this line—but we can't help speaking about what we've seen and heard. They go, "What happened to us is the most incredible thing. You know, it's like it's not our fault. We saw our friend totally killed, and then he was totally alive. We can't stop talking about it." And if this happened to you, you couldn't stop talking about it either.

Give you an example. I don't know if you saw this story that was on the news a few weeks ago. True story of something truly incredible that happened to one very fortunate man. Look at the screen, and you'll see what I'm talking about. A Mississippi family is rejoicing after the apparently what they're calling a death and seemingly resurrection of a loved one. It's an incredible story. 78-year-old Walter Williams was pronounced dead by a coroner Wednesday night. They put him in a plastic bag, zipped him up, and took him away in a hearse. Two hours later, Williams' grieving relatives got a phone call from the funeral home. He was clearly alive. He started kicking the bag to get out.

I don't know how much longer he's gonna grace us and bless us with his presence, but hallelujah, we thank him right now. The funeral director said he's never seen anything like it. Even the coroner's calling it a miracle. Can you imagine meeting the coroner who's going, "What the heck's going on with that bag over there?" No, how scary but incredible for this family. And they say that he's doing just fine. They say he's full of energy. How many of you think that that is an absolutely amazing story? Isn't that amazing? Now, how many of you are afraid you're gonna have nightmares about waking up in a body bag tonight, right?

Now, I am NOT equating that guy's, you know, seeming resurrection with the actual resurrection of Christ. But still, if something like that happens to your grandpa, you're gonna have the grandpa story that trumps all grandpa stories, right? Nothing's ever gonna be able to shut you up about it, and that happened to these guys. I want you to look at this. Think of this: Jesus Christ was really dead on a cross for six hours. Roman soldiers, the world's experts in death, made sure he was dead by thrusting a spear into him, and then his dead body was sealed in a tomb until the third day. But then he was alive.

I love how first he appears to Mary and says to her, "Mary." I think that's his way of saying, "I know the real you, Mary, and it's really the real me, alive again." And to the disciples, he slips right past the locked doors and says, "Peace," and gives them the Holy Spirit inside. And suddenly they know that God is stronger than anything they will ever face. Courage is one result of being a resurrection-fueled person. The second characteristic is this: compassion. Compassion. They unleash compassion. I want you to think again to those first disciples. Suddenly, it's like they cannot give stuff away fast enough. I mean, they're so generous. Look at Acts 2:45: selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.

You know, right after the death of Christ, the disciples went into self-preservation mode, right? It was circle the wagons mode. It was huddle mode. It was, "Let's just protect us and everything we own." But after Christ is risen, it's like they're just super generous. Why? When you know that there's a better world coming, when you know that this world is not all there is, then you hold on to your stuff a lot less tightly, right? You want to give it away. And by the way, our church wants to be just like this. Literally, that's our goal because this is how the early church turned the world upside down.

And that's why we're doing what you see on screen: the world's biggest garage sale. In a few weeks, you can get details about how to donate and everything here in your bulletin. But you know, I want to make something clear. We're not doing this to raise money for the church. We're doing this literally to sell some of our possessions and goods and to give the money away to the poor—100% of it. We are giving to the poor in this case, Second Harvest Food Bank. We're not taking any money out, not even for our expenses, because this is what resurrection-fueled people do. In Acts 4, it talks about this again. It says all the believers were one in heart and mind. They shared everything they had, and watch how it's tied into the preaching of the resurrection.

With great power, the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and God's grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. And that can happen here again today and all over the world. Our Women's Ministry director, Kim Bruninger, lived in Africa for a time last year, and she became involved with this ministry called Merciful Heart—this amazing place that feeds the most needy kids in their township there in Zambia. And these are kids aged nine months to 22 years who are HIV positive.

Now here's the thing: these kids need to take antiviral meds twice a day, and they get those free through government programs. But the rub is this: you have to take that antiviral AIDS cocktail with food. And if you don't take it with food, the side effects could be potentially lethal. So they have the AIDS cocktail to take, but these HIV-positive kids, the problem is they don't have the food. Even though it only costs a dollar fifteen a day to feed them, they can't get themselves one square meal a day, let alone two. And so what Merciful Heart does is it's a group of Christians who give these kids, these most needy kids, their food so they can take their HIV AIDS cocktail. And they read them Bible stories, they do crafts with them, they let them know that they are loved.

Now last year, our Women's Ministry sponsored this ministry for ten months of the year. We want to do it for a whole year, and so I want you to know that today part of our offering is going to Merciful Heart to feed those kids and to a couple of other ministries around the world that do the same thing. Why? Because that's what resurrection-fueled people have been doing for 2,000 years. We want to bring the good news of the kingdom of God to the whole world. Amen? That's what we're all about.

Now get this detail. I talk to you about this wonderful organization. The woman who founded it is this woman in the photo in purple. She's a pastor's wife, and you want to know what her name is? Her first name is Easter. Isn't that perfect? And she says, "I was born on Easter, and I'm doing this because this is what Easter people do." And that's right. We're the Easter people, and resurrection-fueled people just unleash compassion and generosity to the world.

And then the third characteristic of resurrection-fueled people is clarity. They are known for what they're for, not for what they're against. They're known for what they're for, not for what they're against. What am I talking about? Well, there's an old joke that represents for me the opposite of this. You might have heard it. It goes like this: walking through a city late one night, I came upon a guy about to jump off a bridge. And I said, "Wait a minute. Don't you believe in God?" And he said, "Yes, I do believe in God." And I said, "Really? Are you a Christian?" He said, "Well, I'm a Christian." "Me too!" I said. "Are you Protestant or Catholic?" "Protestant," answered the guy as he peered at the dark water far below. "Me too!" I said. "What denomination?" "Baptist," he said. "Me too!"

"Northern or Southern?" "Northern." "Me too!" "Northern conservative Baptist or Northern liberal Baptist?" "Northern conservative Baptist." "Me too!" "Are you Northern conservative reform Baptist or Northern conservative fundamentalist Baptist?" "Northern conservative fundamentalist Baptist." "Me too!" "This is incredible! Are you from the Northern conservative fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes region or the Northern conservative fundamentalist Baptist Eastern region?" "Oh, the Northern conservative fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes region." "Wow, me too!" "Are you from the Northern conservative fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes region council of 1879 or are you from the Northern conservative fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes region council of 1912?" "The Northern conservative fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes region council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" and pushed him off the bridge.

Now that's a bad example. That is not what we're talking about, right? But some churches are like that. They start to think that being a church is about what you're against, not what you're for. And the early disciples came from a culture like that, right? In fact, the whole world—a pagan Jewish of all the religions at that time in the first century—really revolved around the regulations, the rules, and talking about what you could do and what you couldn't do. They argued about which rule was the most important rule. The early disciples say, "No, this is the most important thing." The book of the Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, "For what I received, I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. He was buried; he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures." That's what it's about.

It doesn't mean we don't believe other things than this, but it all comes down to this. It all centers on this because when you meet the living Jesus, that's when everything changes. When your relationship to God is really based on a relationship and not rules and regulations, then holiness becomes much more attractive. Then you want to live a holy life because you want to be in relationship with him. And so that clarity about that mission is so much a part of a resurrection-fueled person's life.

And finally, characteristic number four is confidence—confident hope—because they believe God always has better days ahead. Why? Because the resurrection's ahead. The Bible says the Spirit of God who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you. And just as God raised Christ Jesus from the dead, he will give life to your mortal bodies by the same Spirit living in you. Now that not only means when you trust in him, you too have the promise of resurrection after death, it also means that the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead lives in you now to help you live. Now that means God can resurrect a dead marriage. He can resurrect a dead career. He can resurrect a dead dream.

And you say, "I don't have a promise, René, right? You know, you don't know what I'm struggling with." I love the way my friend Ray Johnston puts it: "Resurrections work best in cemeteries." Don't you love that line? It's when things are hopeless that resurrections work best. Why? Because the resurrection shows that the worst thing is never the last thing. The absolute worst thing will never ever be the last thing—not ever. Because God will resurrect your body as he did Christ's, and he promises a new heaven.

I got to tell you something. Yesterday, I heard that a friend of mine was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Yesterday afternoon, we all stopped everything that we did and prayed for her. And there's grief and there's shock going on in our lives, but it's a different kind of grief. It's a grief that we're going through with courage, with compassion, with clarity, with confidence. Because I know I will see my friend again in the resurrection on the new heaven and the new earth. And being resurrection-fueled means you center on that truth.

I mentioned in the Crosswords book about Adam Hamilton. He's a pastor in Kansas, and once a month, they have a special service for people with memory problems—elderly people mostly with Alzheimer's. And they try to make sure the church service has a lot of familiar elements in nursing homes, busting people in from all over the place. Well, recently they had a service, and they had the kids' choir stand on stage and sing that old song, "Jesus Loves Me." And he said an amazing thing happened. All these elderly people who've been kind of slack-jawed and kind of staring at the walls perked up. And one by one, they started to sing with the kids, "Yes, Jesus loves me. Yes, Jesus loves me. The Bible tells me so."

These people couldn't even—some of them—remember their own names. These people who'd forgotten probably every word of any creed—these people who probably had long forgotten the do's and don'ts and the rules and the regulations—these people remembered the central truth of it all: that the risen living Jesus loves them. And even in their state, that fueled them with resurrection hope, and it can fuel you too.

Now listen, the last thing I want to do is to give you some kind of a pep talk, and if you go out and go, "That was awesome," and on Tuesday go, "I'm all bummed again. What did that guy say? I can't remember." And so what we want to do is we're starting a new series next week. We call it Strong Hope. There's a card in your bulletins that you can read all about it, and what this is about is a verse-by-verse study in the Bible book of 2 Timothy. It's about living like this—living with courage and clarity and compassion and confidence every single day of your life, not just like Easter's New Year's and you make resolutions and then you blow it two days later. You can have weekly, daily doses of resurrection hope in your life.

But it all starts with this: look at the very last verse on your notes. If you want to live a life like this, here's how it starts, and I'd love for us all to read this out loud together: Romans 10:9. Let me hear you: "If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." Now this is not about putting on some religious mask and pretending everything's okay. This is about opening up your true authentic self to the true authentic living God and letting him change you from the inside out and make you into a resurrection-fueled person.

Let's pray together. Heavenly Father, thank you so much that you are stronger than anything we could possibly face in this life. Thank you that the most important thing for our faith isn't a long list of rules or regulations; it's a relationship with Jesus who was crucified and rose again and can live today in us. And if you, the one who conquered death and hell, can live in us, that means that with you, we can be stronger than anything we will ever face—even stronger than death. Thank you that Easter reminds us that you love us so much. You came to seek us and save us and set us free. And Lord, I just want to pray for anybody here today who isn't sure if they've placed their trust in you, that they just do it now, saying, "God, I don't understand it all, but what I do understand I like—that you raised Jesus from the dead and can give me new life. I want to take off the old mask and really come to life. So come inside me and give me that spark I've been seeking. I trust and hope in you." In the name of the risen Jesus, we pray. Amen.