Saint Luke's Lutheran Church

In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte set out to destroy British trade in Egypt. With thirteen French ships and thousands of soldiers and civilians, he landed near Alexandria for what he thought would be only a few months. The war was fought on both land and at sea - on land the French troops defeated the British, while on the sea the British navy defeated the French. That left Napoleon and his men stranded in Egypt for what ended up to be three years.

With no way to escape, the French needed to fortify their positions. While building a fortress near the small city of Rosetta, a French officer found a block of basalt stone a little over 3 feet high and 2 feet wide. The stone was inscribed with a proclamation in both Egyptian and Greek, using three scripts: hieroglyphics, Demontics, and Greek - the three scripts that were used by Egyptians at the time the proclamation was made in 196 BC.

Hieroglyphics have been found on hundreds of ancient monuments throughout Egypt, but for 1400 years no one knew how to read them. It took more than 20 years, but eventually scholars, using the parallel scripts on the Rosetta Stone, were able to learn decipher this ancient writing. Through the Rosetta Stone mysterious secrets have been unlocked and ancient history has been opened.

From our second reading for today, we see that the resurrection of Jesus is like the Rosetta Stone. It is the key to understanding the whole Gospel story, and it unlocks the secrets of life and eternity. The resurrection of Jesus is what gives our faith and our hope its meaning and its power. Without it, we know nothing. Without it, we have nothing. Without it, we are lost, and we are pitiful.

If you read 1 Corinthians 15 carefully, however, you will see that the people in Corinth did not doubt that Jesus rose from the dead. What they questioned was the resurrection of the rest of us. They were so sure of Jesus' resurrection that Paul was able to use this premise as the basis for arguing for the resurrection of the dead. Paul carefully walks them through this line of thinking: If Christ has been raised from the dead, how can anyone say that there is no resurrection of the dead. Besides, if Christ has not been raised from the dead, then all of our preaching has been in vain and your faith is useless - and you are still dead in your sins.

Unlike the Christian community in Corinth, however, there are those today for whom the bodily resurrection of Jesus is not a given at all. There are some pastors and teachers in the church who question and even deny that Jesus physically rose from the dead. John Dominic Crossan, a former Catholic priest and professor of biblical studies at DePaul University, is the co-chair of the famed Jesus Seminar. He says that the stories of the Resurrection are myth - they never really happened. Jesus' body, he argues, was left to rot and was eventually eaten by scavenging dogs.

Of course, denial of the resurrection of Jesus is not new. It goes all the way back to the Jewish priests and elders who paid the soldiers to say that Jesus' disciples stole his body out of the tomb while they were sleeping. That is a more plausible story, because the idea of someone coming back from the dead is pretty incredible.

In the summer of 1991, a 71 year old Romanian man by the name of Neagu choked on a fish bone and collapsed. When the family doctor arrived, Neagu was not breathing and the doctor could find no pulse. Knowing Neagu's heart condition, he pronounced him dead of a heart attack. According to the custom, Neagu was buried that same day in the church cemetery. Three days later, Neagu's wife fainted when she opened her front door and found her husband standing there. Grave diggers at the cemetery had heard a sound coming from Neagu's grave. They opened the grave and the coffin to find him very much alive. It took Neagu weeks to convince authorities to cancel his death certificate.

Now, this was not a resurrection, since Neagu never really died. It was simply a case of mistaken mortality. But it illustrates how hard it is to believe that anyone can come back from the dead. This is why so many people today do not believe in the resurrection. They don't believe that Jesus rose from the dead. And they don't believe that they will rise from the dead either.

Paul addresses both issues in 1 Corinthians 15. First of all he lays out the evidence for Jesus' resurrection. We read it last week: after his death and burial, a risen, living Jesus appeared to Peter and the Twelve and to more than 500 of his disciples at one time. He also appeared to James and last of all to Paul himself. Paul believed that Jesus rose from the dead because he had met the living Lord.

In the early 20th century, a group of lawyers met in England to discuss the Biblical accounts of Jesus' resurrection. These criminal lawyers were schooled in the laws of evidence and trained to examine the evidence in order to arrive at the truth. They wanted to see if there was sufficient evidence of Jesus' resurrection to make a case that would hold up in a British court of law. They ended up concluding that Christ's resurrection was one of the most well-established events in ancient history.

The Corinthians to whom Paul wrote believed that Jesus had been raised from the dead for the same reason that Paul did. They also had met the living Lord. Last week Pastor Allen invited you to consider the difference between knowing about Jesus and knowing Jesus himself. Once you have met the living Lord and come to know him, his resurrection is not in question.

A few years ago, a Methodist pastor in South Carolina was not able to spend Easter day relaxing after an exhausting Holy Week. Instead, he had to work on yet another sermon - a funeral sermon for two teenage brothers who had been killed in an automobile accident on Good Friday. The driver of the car was also a member of his congregation - a 16 year old boy named Alex who had just gotten his driver's license. Alex had taken his two friends for a ride and decided to test the speed of his car. He lost control and hit a tree. While he walked away from the accident, the brothers were both killed.

At the funeral on Monday, the mother of the two boys got up to speak. "We have suffered a terrible loss. Our two boys are dead, and it is worse than anyone can imagine. But, we have just celebrated the resurrection, and we have hope. We thank God for the time that we had with them." Then she scanned the congregation until her eyes met Alex's. "Alex!" she said, and the congregation was dead silent. "We want you to know that we love you, and we forgive you. We also want you to forgive yourself. And we want you to know that you are always welcome at our house."

Here is a woman who believed in the resurrection - a woman who knew Jesus. This is the evidence of Christ's resurrection - that he is alive and at work in the hearts and lives of his people. This is the evidence that we too shall be raised from the dead - for Jesus is the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. Jesus' resurrection is our guarantee that we too shall be raised to live on the last day, for Jesus did not suffer and die on the cross so that we could have a better life here on earth. If that is all that God wanted for us, then he certainly could have done that an easier way. No, Jesus lived and died and rose again so that our sins might be forgiven and so that we might have eternal life.

We live in a world where the death rate is 100%. Some will die young, even as infants; some in old age. Some will die in war or violence, some from illness or accident. Some will die of natural causes and some will take their own life. But no one will escape the grave. In this world of death and despair, Jesus Christ has planted the only durable rumor of hope that we have. It is the hope of the resurrection. It is the hope of eternal life. It is the hope that is grounded in his own resurrection from the dead.

Without this hope, without the resurrection, death is the ultimate tragedy. But with this hope, death is only the door to something greater. A woman in Florida was told by her doctor that she had a malignant tumor and that the only treatments available would cause much pain and some disfigurement. These treatments did not offer a cure, but would buy her a little more time. The doctor was surprised when the woman declined the treatment. "Look," he said, "if you don't take the treatments you will die. With a smile on her face and faith in her heart, she replied, "I didn't come here to stay." Amen.