Easter Sunday Sermon, Dr. McCracken, Easter and the Conquest of Death, 1965-04-18

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honar o'rقةalu i'r cyfl就到obyoth o'r Cyfytig. Cyfytig yt i'n cael i'n hwn am cyflynnu dechyd,

Someone from New Testament in Christ's victory over death they believed they had the Garenty of their own victory over it. They no longer looked on death as closing the vista of all their homes for them it had lost the character of evil. They saw it as once and for all liberating the spirit from every impediment and burden as the great transition which set free the hidden powers of the soul as the beginning of a richer, better, fuller life. Why a bewildered Roman official asked one of the

early Christian martyrs why are you so bent upon death that you make nothing of it and the answer he got was we are not bent upon death we are bent upon life but some of you may say people today are not preoccupied with thoughts about death and immortality. The best of them are concerned as to how life here and now can be bettered and there are many of them who feel that to be a worthy concern then preoccupation with their personal immortality and moreover who consider that Christians have made too much of their aspirations and hopes

in the next world and not enough of their obligations and responsibilities in this one. Religion said Karl Marx and Lenin after him is the opiate of the people. We have to admit that there is substance to the charge periodically in the church's history there has been an unhealthy concentration on heaven and an neglect, a disparagement, a belittlement of earth. This is reflected in hymns that used to be sung. I'm but a stranger here. Heaven is my home. Earth's, think of the sentiment in the springtime. Earth is a desert, drier. Heaven is my home. See how we gravel here below, fond of these earthly toys, our souls, how heavily they go to reach eternal joys. Little wonder that there were those who

protested this world is more than a waiting room for the next life. The communist protest is blunter, not so much of the mansions in the skies and more attention to the slums in the big cities. Such unhealthy preoccupation with the next world, however, is a perversion of the original gospel. For in the New Testament it is not only thinking about death and what comes after it that is radically changed. It is thinking about life here and now and what can be done with it and made of it that is radically changed. No one reading the book of acts, note the title of the book is likely to say that the Easter faith was an opiate. It is the story

of men who have taken a new lease on life, who have a new sense of identity and destiny, a new outlook on the world and a conviction about what can be done to save it, men who have a profound consciousness of mission, of their vocation as servants of God and humanity. Moreover, they have come into possession of new capacities at every level of that being physical, mental, moral, spiritual. They face life with zest, hardship with endurance and they tackle problems and solve them in the power of a new intellectual endowment. The Easter faith an opiate on the contrary. It got those timid frightened men out from behind closed doors. It made evangelists

and missionaries of them. They set out from Jerusalem numerically a small group socially insignificant, exclusive by nature and disposition. They set out from Jerusalem to carry the evangel to every land and in an astonishingly short space of time it had spread like a great prairie fire from Palestine to the furthest reaches of the then-known world. Friends, the last thing to be said about the gospel of the resurrection is that it is an anodine lulling people to sleep, so obsessing them with thoughts of heaven that they neglect their responsibilities on earth. Well, this is a first-century situation that I'm describing,

but it has a direct bearing on the world of our day. Easter Sunday confirms our faith in the life everlasting and when that happens, life here and now every aspect of it takes on new meaning for us, just as it did for the first Christians and has done for Christians in every generation. Think what the message of this day, death swallowed up in victory means for our personal lives. We are not creatures whose tenure of existence is a few short years. We are not mere mechanical organisms destined for a brief span to rise in vigor and then sink into decay. We are not such stuff

as dreams are made on. Our life is not little and it is not rounded with a sleep made by God, made for fellowship with God. We have in us the breath of a divine life and this is the day when we call to mind the trumpet-tone formulations of the Easter faith. We are children of God and if children then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ. Here and now we are God's children. What we shall be has not yet been disclosed, but we know that when it is disclosed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is everyone who has this hope before him purifies himself as Christ is pure. You see the Easter gospel supplies the setting in which the

present life acquires capture, dimension, secretness, high noble purpose. It begates a great guiding, motivating faith for everything that pertains to human existence, to human affairs, it makes character, creates moral drive and issues in the service of mankind. Many today either have lost this faith or have never had it. They have no sense of human life is invested with imperishable grandeur. In their own thought of themselves, they come from nowhere and are on their way to nowhere. I came like water and like wind I go. That sentiment runs

through the novels and plays of our generation and adopted as a credent, almost invariably it saps moral energy. The temptation is to seize upon the pleasure of the moment to regard the gratification of the senses as what matters. To say, since tomorrow we die, let us eat drink and be married, the greatest motive for living, for character, for serving the great society is the sense of having our origin and destiny in God. This is what we see in Jesus. I quote from the fourth gospel, knowing that he had come from God and was going to God, he guided

himself. Let conviction of divine origin and destiny, the master conviction of his ministry, the conviction he has inbred in his followers is at the centre of Christianity and it meets us at the point where our need is grey, this battle, that we are having to fight for the spiritual nature of human life, its permanent continuance, its infinite value, its boundless possibilities. Think also what the message of this day means for our view of the world, for our view of history. Do you know what the prevailing view was in the pre-Christian world? The universe was construed in terms of endless recurrence leading nowhere. History was a futile cycle of birth and decay.

Existence was a sorrowful wheel perpetually revolving. Civilisations like individuals were born to die and be buried. Human striving for the good of one's kind in the long run meant nothing at all. The one thing a man could do was try to maintain his integrity and praise himself against a world that was absolutely indifferent to him and didn't care whether he lived or died or what became of him. And into that old exhausted world came the apostles with the gospel, the good news of Christ and the resurrection. It transformed the outlook of people

on the whole historical process. They saw it as the sphere of the sovereign activity of God. They believed he was seeking in and through it the redemption of the race, that he was working his purpose out in history, that it wasn't a wheel, it was a mark, it was leading on to something supremely good and and beneficent, the kingdom of God they called it. His rule in the hearts of men and in the life of the world and they believed that they could be fellow workers with God, that they could move in the line of his purpose. And that they had a part in advancing that purpose. Well here again the Easter gospel meets us at a point where our need is great. The existence in our day of a view of the world and history

so bleak that everything is reduced to meaninglessness. The whole system of things about us we are often told is soulless, godless, not a cosmos, but a crazy, incoherent structure it's absurdity gathered up in the symbolical figure of Sisyphus whose task was to roll a huge stone up to the top of a hill only to see it roll down again. A German poet states the case in three lines we toil and love and live and eat and yet can never tell the purpose of it all, a melancholy creed and a grim one. Forcing on us the question is such a Sisyphian life worth living at all.

This is what accounts for the preoccupation of so many modern writers. With suicide this is the question they're asking. Is it worth living at all? Meaninglessness is an absolutely effective baseless for paralysis. Who will sacrifice time, strength, not to say life if the sacrifice is purposeless if there are no higher ends to be served, if if if nothing comes of it all, there are people who will sacrifice time and skill and strength and life, read camoos, bleed, read about the doctor. Ah but remember how bewildered he was. How he couldn't make sense of what was going on or of the toxic, terribly world. How he was without faith, kind of faith I'm talking about, I have to ask you how long will a man preserve a sense of

identity, of his personality as having intrinsic and lasting value, if asking himself what he is here for, the answer he is driven to is summissate bombs in the summing up. There is no reason for life and life has no meaning. Lowest Dickinson's prediction made years ago has proved prophetic. Western optimism is doomed unless we believe that there is more significance in individual lives than appears upon the surface, that there is a destiny reserved for them, more august than any to which they can attain in their life of three score years and ten. Some time ago a clever brilliant man died about whom an acquaintance said

he just missed greatness. But then he had little faith in unseen things. Life needs the horizons of eternity to give it greatness. Then think finally what the message of this day means for our spiritual values. Beauty, truth, goodness, love, the things in life that matter most, that far outweigh any and every material interest. What we say to ourselves today is they are not transient and a femoral. They never fail. They will never end. They will abide as long as God and the soul abide.

What is excellent as God lives is permanent. This is the certitude that the Easter Gospel undergirds and fortifies and when a person lays hold of it. He begins to understand what Paul was after when he said we do not lose heart. Though our output humanity is in decay yet day by day we are inwardly renewed. Our troubles are slight and short lived and they are out come an eternal glory which outweighs them far. Meanwhile our eyes are fixed not on the things that are seen but on the things that are unseen for what is seen passes away. What is unseen is eternal. Our attitude to life depends on the background against which we see it.

Each of us has a background of beliefs in the light of which we make our judgments. If a person has no belief in God or Christ or a future life if his view of the world is that it is a mechanical process without spiritual character or purpose. His is a melancholy cream. The dreadful thing about materialism is the pessimism. It engenders if the death of the body is also the death of the spirit what independence, validity, permanence have our highest values. If the valuators perish all those names on the church calendar today

that awaken in us when we look them over grateful and proud memories. If the valuators perish all values, truth, goodness and the rest go with them into the everlasting night. What is truth in a mindless world? What is goodness in a soulless world? The Easter Faith Anopia? We reverse the charges. It is materialism that tends to be anopia that saps moral energy but not the Easter Gospel. It is full power and inspiration for the tasks of life. It heightens the meanings of existence and pushes out all our horizons. It is the guarantee that there will never be one lost good, that all that has value in character and service and

our relationships with each other, our friendships will be preserved, that the things that are fairest and finest do not fade but are eternal as God is eternal. The Easter Gospel is no sentiment. To comfort the credulous and heartened the fearful, it is the mightiest of all moral and spiritual dynamics. So here again the affirmation that makes this day the greatest day in the entire church here and note the stirring call to action that follows the affirmation. Death is swallowed up in victory. Oh death, where is thy victory? Oh death, where is thy sting? Thanks be to God

give us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ, Lepha! My beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your labor is not in vain in the Lord. Jesus Christ, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord,

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