EASTER IS ALWAYS

(These thoughts are changed three times each week)

We’re moving toward half way to and half away from Easter and since questions concerning life and earth are not restricted to a particular place on the calendar, it is certainly appropriate to comment that at the back of many churches is a clock. A reminder to all of us that while we are mortal the fact of immortality is no less a reality.

And the message and the messenger? It all started with a shock treatment - Good Friday - and then a mystery – an empty tomb.

And then one thing for sure, if one knew only the beginning of the Easter story, a very bad beginning, and not the magnificent ending, it certainly wouldn’t have fostered a religion.

By way of emphasis, let me tell you about another moment in history - what happened after the Battle of Waterloo. It was a battle between the English army led by the Duke of Wellington and the French army led by the arrogant Napoleon, who wanted to rule the world. The outcome would determine the fate of Europe. When finally it was over, light signals began to send word of the victory back across the English Channel. But a heavy fog was fast rolling in and only the first two words of the message were received, “Wellington defeated…..” and then further communication was impossible. Hours later when the fog had finally lifted, the message was completed - “Wellington defeated the enemy.”
And that is how it was and is. The Lord’s story had a bad beginning, Jesus defeated….. but when the fog of fear lifted and the message was gloriously completed, it read….. Jesus defeated the enemy, death.

One does not have to be tired of life to talk about death. Men accept that flowers wither and fade yet they plant gardens. There is dawn and there is dusk. A great symphony has a final crescendo. I’d like to live to be a hundred, if I can keep my health, but I sure am curious about what it’s going to be like if I fail to reach 101.
We are all living on borrowed time. We just don’t happen to know the size of the loan. “

One Sunday morn as a minister was preaching on life after death, he looked out at his congregation and said, “What would heaven be like without my Willie?” His Willie, nine years old, all boy and rushing toward manhood, had been killed just the month before. All the faith in the world will not stop you from hurting when someone you love dies. It is a wrenching, terrible, torturous moment. You are allowed at that time to feel frustration, anger, despair - but when you believe in the Resurrection, cemeteries become cathedrals. For yes, knowing it is not the end but a beginning makes all the difference in the world. And remember, to live again is no more miraculous than the life we are experiencing at this moment.

The Apostle Paul tells us that after death we will have a new body. Do you find this difficult to comprehend? Why? Was not your present body miraculously created from a tiny sperm and egg into one or two hundred pounds of complexity? And cannot God who made a body suitable for earth make yet another one equally suitable for heaven?

There is an axiom of science that says no material object in the universe can be destroyed. That that which disappears in one form reappears in another. If it is true that even matter has a form of immortality, it stands to reason that man’s soul, infinitely more important, must have the same capability.

I don’t remember how it was the day I took my first baby steps, but I am sure it was an overwhelmingly wonderful experience. Then one day, I learned that trees were for climbing, for lifting me up and giving me a higher perspective. And it was an overwhelmingly wonderful experience.

And one day I learned to fly, piloted a plane all by myself up above the clouds, and it was an overwhelmingly wonderful experience. All these new dimensions did not diminish what had come before even though each new lifting up was bright and new and beautiful. So it will be the day I die - another expansion of perspective, a new transforming

And at that timeless moment I will know, what I have already known for such a very long, long time – that life is stronger than death. That eternity laughs in the face of clocks and calendars I am never very far away from my heavenly home.

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