Rev. David Holwick Easter Sunrise
First Baptist Church
Ledgewood, New Jersey
April 11, 2004
2 Peter 1:16
WEIRD STORIES
I. Weird emails.
The invention of email has rekindled a tradition from years
gone by - the chain letter.
In the past you had to laboriously type each page out before
sending it on to your friends.
With modern technology all you need is a few clicks of your mouse
and everyone in Christendom becomes part of your chain.
I myself NEVER EVER send on chain letters (so please don't take
it personally if I sit out on yours) but I do read them.
Two examples from this week will suffice.
One of you sent me an email that contained its own slide show.
She didn't want me to pass it on, just to give my opinion.
The email raised the alarm about Mondex biochips.
Apparently the next generation of credit cards will have smart
chips that store your economic history.
Banks will require you to have the chip implanted in your hand
rather than have it on a plastic card in your wallet.
I have heard about the technology but the email warns about its
ultimate use - the antichrist will use these chips to control
the world financially (see Revelation 13:16).
I love the study of prophecy but this email is full of
inaccuracies, half-truths and outright falsehoods.
(Your grandmother in the 1930s may have thought the new Social
Security cards had an identical purpose.)
The second email was a prayer concern.
It read:
My name is Gary Hogan.
Some of you receiving this know me, some do not.
My wife, Cindy, is 32 years old and has just been diagnosed 3 days
ago with stage 4 cervical cancer.
Her chances for survival are very slim.
She was pregnant with our second child and had miscarried recently
at 3 months, and now we know why.
This is a request for you to forward this e-mail to everyone you
know asking for prayer.
The more people that pray for her to be healed, the better.
This is a sad story -- it is also bogus.
There is a kernel of truth but the name is wrong,
the disease is wrong
and the war is wrong.
There have actually been 30 variations of this email and it is
still being circulated.
The original woman was cured of her illness.
In my experience, 98% of chain letters are bogus.
Is the Easter story any different than a chain email?
Some people see parallels: the Easter story was passed on by
numerous people before it was written down.
The events are definitely incredible -- darkened skies and
earthquakes and dead bodies coming alive.
Not only that, but doubts have been raised about the story from
the very beginning.
Did you wake up at 5:30 a.m. on a drizzling morning to come hear
a made-up story?
Maybe it is just the free breakfast that entices you.
But I don't think so.
So, how can we know that Easter is not just made up?
#26640
II. Can Easter be believed?
A. Skeptics: fantastic claims require fantastic evidence.
B. Support for our claims.
1) It is part of a much older story.
a) Easter is the fulfillment of an ancient Jewish vision.
b) Hundreds of years before he was born, the prophets
predicted his origin, his message and even his
death. And yes, his resurrection, too.
2) The gospel story is consistent.
a) Each of the four accounts has differences, but they
seem to be the differences of eyewitnesses.
b) History and facts were important to the writers of
the New Testament.
c) Specific details have been corroborated.
Charles Colson has followed the debate closely.
For the past decade, public discussion on the historical Jesus has
centered on the work of a group of scholars who call themselves
"The Jesus Seminar."
This group says its mission is "to wrestle the popular perception of
Jesus from fundamentalists who control the religious airwaves..."
Their problem is that the evidence is lining up in favor of those
the Seminar dismisses as "fundamentalists." Us!
Participants in the Seminar, like John Dominic Crossan, believe
that the Gospels are propaganda written by men who never knew
Jesus.
As such, their works cannot be relied upon as history.
Crossan argues that when the Gospels describe the empty tomb of
Jesus, they aren't describing an actual event.
So what happened to Jesus' body?
Why didn't his enemies produce it after stories of the resurrection
began to spread?
According to Crossan, wild dogs probably ate it.
Especially since crucified criminals were never buried in the
manner described in the Gospels.
Rather, their bodies were thrown in common grave where animals
could get to them.
At least that's what scholars used to believe.
That is, until archaeologists recently discovered the remains of a
crucified man, dating from the time of Jesus, who had been buried
in much the same manner as the Gospels describe.
So much for wild dogs!
This isn't the only instance of the scholars' theories being
overtaken by archeological facts.
Until nine years ago, many scholars doubted the Gospels' accounts
of Jesus' trial before the Sanhedrin.
They could find no evidence outside the Bible that there had ever
been a high priest named Caiaphas.
Then, in 1995, workers excavating outside Jerusalem came across a
burial cave.
Inside the cave was a casket marked "Joseph, the son of Caiaphas."
And scholars soon concluded that the Caiaphas in the inscription
was the same one referred to in the Gospels.
Discoveries like these are a powerful rebuke of those who, like the
Jesus Seminar, maintain that the Bible sacrifices history for
the sake of proclamation.
That should not come as a surprise since the Bible makes specific
historical claims about Jesus.
For the Gospel writers, history was an inseparable part of the
Gospel -- not something they made up to suit their purposes.
So, the next time your neighbors tell you that the Scriptures
aren't trustworthy, tell them about what archeologists are
discovering.
#5057
3) The writers paid a steep price for the story.
a) Many of the early Christians were martyred.
b) You don't die for a story you made up.
III. Jesus still grabs our attention.
A. Think of all the buzz Jesus is getting this year.
1) Politicians have to say they believe in him.
2) Mel Gibson did a movie about him.
a) (That really got the ball rolling!)
3) New movies about Judas and Jesus on TV.
4) Cover stories on all the major magazines: Time, Newsweek.
5) Documentaries on several channels.
A recent one by Peter Jennings investigated the beginnings of
Christianity and the influence of the Apostle Paul in
spreading the message of Christ.
Jennings gives the Apostle Paul a lot of credit for spreading
the Christian faith in the first century.
But then he said concerning the resurrection of Christ,
"Something must have happened, otherwise it is hard to explain
how Jesus' story endured for so long."
It is a question worth considering: Why has the story of Christ
endured?
Has it survived through the centuries because of effective
preachers in antiquity?
Has it endured, as Sigmund Freud argued, because it is a story
that fulfills wishes?
Or as Friedrich Nietzche attested, because it masks and
medicates our disgust of life?
Or has the story of Christ endured because something really
happened after Jesus' body was taken down from the Cross?
#27620
B. What do YOU think about Easter?
1) The early Christians were excited about it because they
experienced it personally.
a) Several hundred of them saw the resurrected Jesus,
according to 1 Corinthians 15.
b) All of them felt the story was true enough to die for.
2) Do you believe it enough to live for it?
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SOURCES FOR ILLUSTRATIONS USED IN THIS SERMON:
# 5057 "The Rocks Cry Out: Archaeology & The Historical Jesus," Charles
Colson, BreakPoint Commentary, December 15, 1999.
#26640 "Chain Letters and the Easter Story," Rev. David Holwick, April
10, 2004. For a critique of the Mondex biochip chain-email,
see the Urban Legend reference page at:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/mondex.asp
For more on the Hogan chain-email, see:
http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_gary_hogan.htm
#27620 "And You Will See," Jill Carattini, A Slice of Infinity: Ravi
Zacharias International Ministries;
http://www.gospelcom.net/slice/
April 7, 2004.
These and 25,000 others are part of a database that can be downloaded,
absolutely free, at http://www.holwick.com/illust.html
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