Go Tell the Message
Mark 16: 1-6
April 3, 1988
Walking into a room used by another group can be a learning experience. Several months ago, I went into a room recently vacated by a divorce recovery group. There on the blackboard was written, if you always do what you always did, you always get what you always got. Reading those words, I thought, that’s right. That is the basic problem of life.
Most of us, most of the time, always do what we’ve always done, and that’s our dilemma. Our lives play the same old tune, the same old, the same old nightmare. We make the same old mistakes in the same old way, and our lives are characterized by going round and round in a relentless rhythm, all of which reminds me of a great story I picked up in New England. It was about two old codgers who went hunting for moose in the forest surrounding Moosehead lake in the northwest part of Maine. As the pilot of the small seaplane let them off on the Lakeshore, he reminded them, like I said, I’ll be back in three days. But remember, this is a tiny plane. There’s only room for the two of you and one small moose.
Three days later, when the pilot returned and taxied to the shore, he was irritated to see between the two old boys not one, but 2 moose. Huge ones at that. Look, he said, I told you, the two of you and 1 moose. The old timers looked at each other in surprise and answered, funny. That fellow last year didn’t complain. The fear of this competition proved greater than all the other fears, and the pilot relented. Grumbling, he helped them put both moose into the little plane. The plane took forever to get off the lake, barely clearing the trees on the far shore. About 1/4 of a mile further on, it clipped a high pine and crashed, sending pieces of wings and moose antlers in all directions. Finally, one of the old codgers came to, pulled his hat out of the wreckage, spied his companion a short way off and asked, where are we? His friend replied, Ohh, about 100 yards further than last year.
If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.
I wonder if many of us here are more than 100 yards further than we were last year. If the world is much different this Easter than it was last year. I wonder if there is any less war or rumor of war, any less starvation or homelessness, this year than there was last year. It’s discouraging, debilitating, disheartening to feel that life hasn’t changed much and progress is so darn elusive. What wait. Consider the Easter message, the message which declares that within the same old story, something new can break through.
Welcome happy morning signals the dawn of a new age.
The problem is that for many people, the signals get missed. They come to church and get hung up worrying about the truth of the Easter story. The details become overly important, and suddenly they become fundamentalists overnight.
but put all that aside. You’re not here to worry about open tombs and stones that get moved. The early church never worried about those issues. They declared that after Easter, people were unable to change their way of doing life. Promise making, promise breaking Peter that fearful fellow we remembered on Good Friday, suddenly after Easter was so caught up with the faith that he became a giant.
Had there been no resurrection of Christ, there would have been no gospel, no epistles, no New Testament, no Christian Church. This very Church of yours is the living, breathing truth that new life is possible, for without Jesus Christ, the power and the love of God rising, none of us would be here this morning.
So, good people, this is not a day of argument about dead carpenters getting up and walking around. Still less is it a day of speculation about miracles, which have a tendency to become a sort of spectator sport. What is important today is that the resurrection is an event that promises the possibility of newness now. The resurrection says, demonstrates, underscores that you don’t always have to do what you’ve always done. God changes all that. The first Easter is assigned a new way of doing life
but still we ask, is this a real possibility for me? Can I receive this promise, or am I stuck with the old self? And then we would ask, Are you ready to receive this promise? Are you prepared to seek it? Are you ready to affirm it when you sense its presence? Are you ready to join others in declaring the possibility? The command from our gospel is really very simple. Go tell, share the good news, and it will become good news for you
now I recognize it is very hard to share this message, even on Easter day. Hard because in some way, we are almost embarrassed by the message of new life. Hard because we would have to relinquish our tired skepticism, our faded cynicism, our business as usual attitude. Hard because we would have to share the secret and then live the secret.
Many of us cannot tell about the secret because it has never actually appeared in our experience. But we cannot hide the possibility of new life because we are constantly hearing suggestions of it. And then he goes on to say, do you think I am trying to weave a spell by talking to you of the secret? Perhaps I am, but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well As for inducing them.
Good people, in this culture, in this society, we need to break the spell. That terrible spell of the endless pattern of life to death period of the empty round of changeless lives of just more than the same. We need to feel like Easter people. The message today is not simple. The message is of radical, revolutionary, reordering of reality. In order to hear it, you have to open up a window into your own soul. Into the way you have always believed in the world. You have to listen to the secret of a new life and then you have to share it.
So for heaven’s sake, let’s tell the world the good news. Go tell ! is our command from God. Go tell of the possibility of becoming new people go tell of the amazing possibility of beginning again. Go tell the death and taxes are not the only firm realities. Go tell that there is also the reality of new life that beckons us from beyond the grave. Go tell that he is risen, and that we can rise, with him. Go tell them we can be Easter people and live amongst eastern people. What a message. What a hope. What a possibility, Hallelujah