Sermon of March 27, 2005 -- Easter Sunday
Presented by Rev. Chuck Ericson
Scripture lesson: Matthew 28:1-22

“Jesus Came to Bridge the Gap Between... Promise and Fulfillment”

Back in 1988 during the Presidential election, the first President Bush, the current President’s father, was running for President and made a famous statement in response to questions about raising taxes, he said, “Read my lips: no new taxes.” Midway through his administration, taxes were raised, and that was brought to his attention that he had once said “read my lips, no new taxes”. The response from either him or his Press Secretary, to the accusation that he had lied, was that he didn’t lie, he broke his word, or broke his promise. I’ve always thought about that because there is a difference there; there’s a difference in your intent. If you’re lying you’re intending to deceive. But you can also want with all your heart to do something and then find out, for one reason or another that you can’t do something, and then you end up breaking your word, or breaking your promise.

Today’s message is about how God doesn’t break promises, and how Jesus came as God’s messenger to bridge the gap between promise and actual fulfillment. The basis for this really is all through our faith-story. Our faith-story is about promises made between God and God’s people. Those promises that God makes, which generally in the early days of our faith-story is the promise that “I will be your God”, and the promise of God’s people is that “we will obey your commandments”. What often happened is that the people’s promise to God was broken, but God’s promise was always kept; God’s promise was always fulfilled. In and through it all, God continued to be the God of the people even when they broke their promises.

700 years before Jesus, one unique promise was made that came through the prophets: the promise that one day a savior, a messiah, would come to redeem people and to redeem the world. At Christmas, we celebrate the hope that in that child born in Bethlehem the promise would be fulfilled. On Easter, we celebrate the deep conviction and belief of the witnesses and the disciples that indeed the promise was fulfilled and Jesus was the messiah; the savior who had been hoped for, for 700 years. Imagine that gap of 700 years between promise and fulfillment. Jesus bridged that gap throughout holy week and especially on Easter.

Well the way he did that has great lessons for us as we live our lives today. I want to take a few moments to look at how Jesus bridged the gap between promise and fulfillment. A lot of it has to do with what happened leading up to today, but also what was ultimately fulfilled today on Easter. 

Jesus bridged the gap between promise and fulfillment, by being decisive first of all. This is something I’m not good at. I am not good at being decisive. If you know me and you’ve sat at meetings with me, you’ve watched me say one thing and then change my mind. I have trouble being decisive. Once in a while, when I decide to go visit my aunt in California , my indecisiveness really comes into play. Most people, if they’re doing that, would find a way to fly from Bradley Airport to San Francisco , and just buy the ticket and be done with it. Not me. I check that out and then I find that San Jose is $20 cheaper. And then I find out that Oakland is $45 cheaper. And then on this end I find out that Providence to Oakland is $70 cheaper, and then I don’t get anywhere. Days go by and the prices start getting higher and higher, and then I get more and more frustrated and then I don’t go at all. But if I do go, then I have the next problem which is if I stay at the Sheraton I get “Starwood” points, and if I stay at The Hampton I get free breakfast, and how do I decide which of those I really want. And don’t even get me started on the rental cars. So I can spend hours and hours of time being indecisive, second guessing, on just making a trip. It’s one of my problems. Those of you who know me also know I’m not indecisive when I’m standing in front of the freezer case in the grocery store, lately I always pick Ben and Jerry’s Vanilla Heath Bar Crunch. 

But in my life in more serious circumstances, it’s also the case sometimes. Even when there’s something really on the line, something personal, something deep, something emotional, I have trouble working it through. I have trouble being decisive and it’s a part of my faith I need to work on and grow in. We all have areas we need to grow, and that’s one for me. For Jesus it was not a problem. There is a verse in the gospel stories as he’s preparing to go to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover and face his passion, where it says “Jesus set his face to go to Jerusalem ”. It’s just a wonderful, wonderful verse about his determination and his decisiveness at that moment, that He set his face to go to Jerusalem and he went – and went through all the stages of his passion that led to his crucifixion and ultimately to his resurrection. Jesus was decisive all the way through - when faced with opposition from the crowds; when faced with the threat of the authorities of Pilate and Herod and others, Jesus was decisive.  He had that moment in the garden where he said “let this cup pass from me”. But that didn’t last. It might have been momentary indecisiveness, or it might have been just pouring out his genuine feelings for God to hear, knowing that he was going to follow through all the way on his passion anyway. Jesus was decisive, and that’s part of what helped him to bridge the gap between promise and God’s fulfillment.

A second thing is that Jesus bridged the gap between promise and fulfillment through his sacrifice. At the early morning 6 A.M. sunrise service, I said that a word that we sometimes have trouble with, especially in our free-church tradition, is ritual. Another word we have trouble with sometimes is sacrifice. A lot of us don’t like to be told to sacrifice. We don’t like to be told that we have to sacrifice our family and personal time for our jobs sometimes. We don’t like to think that maybe we should sacrifice a little more in our driving habits to make the environment better. When we hear stories about our national budget for our country and there’s a deficit and a national debt, we don’t like that – but are we all willing to sacrifice either to have higher taxes or cut programs we like. We don’t like to make sacrifices very often. 

For many of us, we know of how our parents and grandparents who lived through the Great Depression and World War II made tremendous sacrifices – rationing food and supplies…doing without many things in order to survive.  It was very difficult – but nearly everyone who went through these times became stronger because of their sacrifices – and indeed they were proud of the sacrifices they made.  

We are different today.  We would like to have it all. We would like to accumulate, very often, rather than sacrifice. The stories we hear in the news lately are great illustrations of that. If you think of our former governor’s predicament, or the CEOs of Enron and WorldCom and Tyco, it’s about people who find that their hopes and dreams in their lives are not fulfilled because their minds were on accumulation of some sort, not necessarily on money all the time, but accumulation instead of sacrifice for the greater good. Jesus was not afraid to sacrifice. Jesus was asked by God to make the greatest sacrifice of all; to sacrifice his whole life for the sake of the world, for our sakes, in all places and in all time. And Jesus made that sacrifice. That’s what we remembered this week. In spite of the threats, in spite of the opposition, in spite of everything that stood in his way, he went through and made that sacrifice of his whole life for our sakes, so that the promise of a messiah would be fulfilled in him, and we could celebrate Easter. We all know that there would be no Easter celebration with these beautiful flowers and the hymns we love to sing, had Jesus had not made that sacrifice first.  Jesus shows us that sacrifice is integral to bridging the gap between promise and fulfillment.

And one more thing that Jesus shows is in filling the gap between promise and fulfillment is being able to trust God completely. Jesus did that. Jesus in his living of his life, in his going through the period from Palm Sunday to Maundy Thursday to Good Friday, Jesus trusted God all the way through. No matter what other ideas came into his head, no matter what others told him that might have shaken his faith, he didn’t let if be shaken. He trusted that somehow if he made that sacrifice, if he was decisive, that God would see him through it and there would be an Easter. We celebrate today what Matthew’s gospel told us, is that the tomb was empty. People saw him, people experienced his rising and his new life, resurrected, all because he was willing to trust God completely and absolutely.  

So that is a message we have for Easter today. Are we willing to trust God in our lives, absolutely and completely? When we have a promise we want fulfilled in our lives, when we have a hope, a dream, a problem in our lives - can we trust that God is there all the way through for us? When we lose a job, or lose someone we love, if we find ourselves in circumstances we never could have imagined. Or on the positive side, if there’s a great change that holds great promise for us but it’s not there yet, if we have a big decision to make, can we trust God no matter other things don’t make sense; no matter what is uncertain and what isn’t rational – can we still trust God to take us all the way through.

Recently I heard someone talk about the old phrase - God closes one door but opens another. Another person commented, “yes, but it's miserable being in the hallway.” I hadn’t heard that before; I said that’s amazing. I had that image of being alone in the hallway, where one door is shut and the other isn’t opened yet. And then the next image was of not being alone in the hallway, that somehow Christ was with me in that moment, telling me that the door’s going to open, and until it does I’m there with you; I’ll be with you always until the close of the age.

The good news today is that God’s promises will always be fulfilled. We participate in that as we are able to model Christ’s living; as we are able to find it in our hearts to become more and more decisive, like I need to do. If we are willing to sacrifice for the right things in our lives, if we’re willing to trust God no matter how things aren’t going to work out - to trust that God will be there in the hallway with us taking us all the way through. In the same way, can we go forth on this Easter making our promises to God that we will fulfill as God’s servants, to live Christ like lives as we do our daily work in our church and in our daily lives and in all the days that follow this beautiful Easter day.

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