I have some amazing breaking news for you this morning: not all four-legged animals are dogs! Now, isn’t that a way to start a sermon on the Resurrection! You might have thought that I lost my mind beginning a sermon on the Resurrection on Easter with such a phrase, but bear with me! You see, over the winter I read a book by Harold Percy, a Toronto Anglican preacher, who twenty years ago wrote, Good News People. In it, he suggested from his days of studying philosophy at university that we don’t practice very good reasoning when it comes to the Christian faith. In fact, we follow fallacies, and many people believe these fallacies. He suggested from philosophy that one of the great fallacies is that “not all four legged animals are dogs”!
Here was his philosophical argument: You see, what is often understood as logic, sort of an inductive, informal reasoning seems to apply to many things that we think about. Think about animals and legs and dogs. If you say logically dogs are animals, and all dogs have four legs, then you would conclude that all four legged animals are dogs, and that is a form of reasoning that is erroneous, but nevertheless so easily falls into line that we don’t even know we are doing it. We fall into the error of making an association and assuming that it is absolute. We think that it applies only to the particular, but also to the general.
Let me give you a concrete example of this kind of fallacious reasoning. We do it with people of certain faiths and beliefs. We see a particular religion and a group of people who belong to that religion, and we see them doing something erroneous, violent or dangerous, and we conclude that all people of that religion must also subscribe to that behaviour. We believe that in a sense all four legged animals are dogs. We treat people on the basis of this fallacy. We treat individuals like this. We create associations between individuals and activities and we assume that those individuals are going to carry out those activities because they belong to a particular group: because they are all animals, they are going to be dogs, and they might also have four legs.
You can see why Harold Percy worries about that form of logic, and he worries about it not only in the way that we treat one another, but I would suggest this morning, how we look at the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, for we use the same logic to question the Resurrection. We say humans don’t rise from the dead, and since humans include Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, the human, did not rise from the dead. Following me? We do this all the time! We get caught up in these generalizations. We see no rules of the spectacular, no rules of something different, or an alternative. We believe in the absolute nature of the fallacy of our own logic, and our own logic is constrained by our own experience, since we do not see humans who rise from the dead, we assume that Jesus, as fully human as he was, was crucified, dead and buried, and could not rise from the dead either.
We are not alone in being faced with such cynicism and fallacious reasoning. Indeed, the Apostle Paul in the passage from the Book of Colossians is suggesting the same thing, namely that he is challenging the assumptions of the world that Jesus Christ was not raised from the dead, and what he sees happening in his Greek culture is that the congregation had started with its belief in the Crucifixion and the Resurrection of Jesus is now starting to wander away from it, to have its doubts about it, questioning it, and wondering if it really has any meaning. Rather than holding on to the faith of the death and the resurrection of Jesus, they turn to other things. For example, they turn to spirituality, or something mystical, ethereal, or esthetic, and think that they will be fulfilled with something that would make them feel good in a spiritual sense. Sounds a bit like our own era, doesn’t it? Then, there were others who turned to the elemental things of this world, to quote the Apostle Paul, who believe and would subscribe to things that they see, and worship them. Does this not sound like the materialistic culture of our era? I think so! Then, there were some others who said, let’s just believe in morals and be nice to one another, follow the law. That is all we need. We don’t need God. We don’t need Jesus. We certainly don’t need the Resurrection! We’ll just be nice to one another. That is what it is all about.” There are some, as we have heard recently, even ordained people, who have taken the Christian faith down to that.
Paul says, “Do not be deceived by hollow deceptions and philosophies!” In other words, don’t turn away from the Cross and the Resurrection, for in Jesus Christ the fullest of the deity dwelt, and from Jesus Christ and his Cross we are forgiven, and what is more, we participate in his Resurrection. For the Apostle Paul, there was no church without the Resurrection! No church without the Cross! But did he try to use logic or reasoning to convince the Colossians that this was true? No! The Apostle Paul hung everything on the fact that on the road to Damascus the Risen Christ had appeared to him, that he had heard from Mary and Peter about the empty tomb, that he had heard countless witnesses no less, witnesses who had seen the Risen Christ, and he himself, though unexpected, is confronted by this Risen Christ on the road to Damascus.
You see, for the Apostle Paul, the Christian faith wasn’t about a theory or rationality or a myth of death; it was about the presence and the power of the Risen Christ who seized him. In a brilliant move in writing to the Church in Colossae, he moves from what it known in philosophy as the indicative to the imperative. In the imperative, he suggests and calls to his people not to look at the Resurrection as something that is detached from them, but belongs to them. He says, and I quote from the bottom of our text, “God made you alive together with Him, and he forgave us all our sins, all our trespasses.” He made us alive in Him! What’s more, he says, we were baptized into death, the symbolism to dying to our old way of life, and now we live “in Him”. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ is not just about an empty tomb in time; it is about the presence of the living God in time and beyond. It is not constrained or confined to a moment in first century Palestine; it is rather an embrace for us and for those who live “in Him.” Why? It is because for Paul we participate in Christ. We live with Christ and Christ lives in us. On the road to Damascus, he knew that was true!
As many of you know, I have been on a sabbatical in the UK at Oxford for two months, and I took it upon myself to go and visit a lot of old churches. My gosh, there are a lot of old churches in Britain! I think I visited nearly all of them! My cousins took me to Gloucester Cathedral, and another took me to another place I’ll talk about later. I went to Westminster Abbey and took the tour. I went to St. Paul’s Cathedral and listened to our former organist, Rachel Mahon play in a concert on the day before I left. It was magnificent! I went to all the old churches. In one of the tours, I don’t remember which one, there was a boy on school break who was with his parents, and as we were going past the tombs and the catacombs – I know where it was, it was Westminster Abbey – he leaned over and he said to his mother, “My, there are a lot of dead people in churches!” I snickered. I thought, “The kid is right, there are a lot of people buried in churches!” It just seemed that way for a while. It seemed that all we were talking about was death everywhere.
I decided I would go to the real centre of death in London: I went to the famous Highgate Cemetery in Camden. It was built in reaction to the growth of London in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It had grown to such an extent that they didn’t know what to do with their dead. So, they would wrap them in very cheap cloth and stick them between buildings and put lime on them so that they would disappear. No wonder London had quite an aroma for a few years! It was gross what was happening! In the nineteenth century they decided that it was time to take these bodies and bury people somewhere proper. In 1839, they built the famous Highgate Cemetery. I had always wanted to go there, because of the stories and folklore of London, many movies that are ghoulish are filmed there, and the great Gothic catacombs are most morose and scary. So I took a tour of it, and indeed the catacombs are rather chilling! Then I stopped for a moment and sat on a bench outside a tomb erected in 1883, for Karl Marx. I thought how long we are dead! If there is no belief in God, how utterly helpless and hopeless our existence can become!
As I sat and looked at the catacombs, I felt for all those people who believed that the tomb is the end, and that no matter how good your life has been, no matter what you have done, that is it! It is over! It is finished! I was overwhelmed with this sense that surely the God that had and created us would not leave us to such a fate. This God who has made us and is eternal would want something more. What is more is seen in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. What is more is that not only does he because he is raised from the dead live with us, but that he will live with us. It is because of his Resurrection from the dead that we believe that there is more than the tomb. I walked away from Karl Marx with both a heavy heart, but a belief there has to be something more.
When he wrote to the Colossians, Paul knew their spirituality and nice feelings: “Your morals and your legalisms, your worship of things that you see now, they are not enough! We live in Him, and we live through Him, and we live by Him.” He goes on and says, “Having received Christ Jesus, the Lord, continue to live your lives in Him, rooted and built up in Him.” The word that is used in Greek is para lambano, which means “to perambulate” to walk – to walk with him. Not only do we live with him; we are built up by him. Not only are we built up by him; we are assured by him. We do not live this life from this faith alone. We are not abandoned to ourselves and our grief and our sorrows and our defeats and mortality. He is building us up.
The oldest church that I visited you will see on the inside cover of your Order of Service. This was a photograph I took of Llandaff Cathedral, outside of Cardiff in Wales. Llandaff is one of the great churches of Europe. Built in 1120, this incredible Norman structure was nearly destroyed by the Welsh rebel Owain Glyndwr. It was gutted. It was dedicated, I think fittingly, to St. Peter and St. Paul: St. Peter who witnessed the empty tomb; St. Paul who was met on the road to Damascus. It had survived hundreds of years as a centre for the Welsh to worship Christ, but on January 2, 1941, a Luftwaffe bomber went overhead, and after having bombed other places jettisoned one last bomb that landed on Llandaff Cathedral. Even to this day, you can see the crater, and on the day that I was there snowflakes were beginning to accumulate where it was. Llandaff Cathedral was destroyed. All that was left were walls and a few tombs and monuments. That was it!
It seemed that this terrible act of violence had crushed it and defeated it. But the people decided that they were going to make sure that this cathedral, destroyed out of anger and violence, would be rebuilt and reborn. Over the next twenty-odd years they rebuilt the cathedral. Architects told them to forget about it. People said it would cost too much money. People told them to walk away and leave it as a ruin – but not the people of Wales! You don’t tell the Welsh what not to do! My family is Welsh! I know! And they rebuilt it. In 1960, the Queen re-opened it. What is so incredibly striking is that in the middle of the cathedral, on the inside, is a huge archway. It was developed by an architect named Epstein. In this magnificent, absolutely incredible archway, at the very top, with outstretched arms is the glorified presence of Jesus Christ. What a symbol in the midst of destruction and death and decay and fear and cost and mourning. The sign of the Risen Christ being there above everything else in that cathedral. What a symbol of our lives! What a symbol of Christ’s victory over death!
As Paul says, “The enemies have been defeated. Death no longer has its hold over us. Destruction and evil do not win the day. Hatred is not the victor; God is.” God is seen as the victor in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. I love the end of that last line: “What he has established in faith may you be abounding in thanksgiving!” It is all about joy. Easter is all about victory and joy. Our faith is not a faith that based in a tomb; ours is based in a living people. Our faith is not based on death on a cross; it is based on a Christ who was raised from it. Our faith is not based on the victory of evil; it is based on the victory of good. And it is a source of thanksgiving! It is a source of thanksgiving because above all, when you actually look at our faith, and we so often forget this, when we look at our faith, it is all about having Christ with us in this life and in the life to come.
For my final few hours in Oxford, after two months of reading and scholarship and travel and preaching, I decided just to be silent – refreshing! I sat on a bench by the river at Magdalen College, I think the most beautiful college of them all. It was a sunny day, and the daffodils were out. As I sat on the bench, having walked through the beautiful sunlit cloisters and having visited the marvellous chapel at Magdalen, I thought of someone I respected all my life who was there, and who wrote there, and who became a Christian there. I thought of C. S. Lewis and something that I had read many times about the moment that Christ came to him:
You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.
I sat there as the waters went by and I thought Paul is right, and so I wrote this sermon. It is Christ who still comes to us. In the midst of our reasoning and intellect, in the midst of our business of life, in the midst of our sorrows and fears, in the midst of the destructions of the world, in the midst of our own sin and uncertainties, in the midst of the violence that is around us, in the midst of the flowers that are growing in our presence, in the midst of it all, in it all, Jesus Christ is alive, and he comes to us. This Easter, may he come to you! Amen.