Well, here’s another Easter sermon.  Easter and Christmas, those big church holidays, present a big challenge to preachers. How does one tell the same story for another year and come up with a fresh angle, a new perspective?  I looked over some of the Easter sermons I have preached over the years and noticed something disturbing.  They were all about us.

I took a good hard look at my Easter sermons and realized that they have usually emphasized how we can have a new life, how we can be raised, how the shambles of our lives can be resurrected.  Don’t get me wrong.  I still believe that God raises us to a new life in Christ.  We can begin life anew.  But the more I thought about it, the more it dawned on me that the Easter message is far more radical than that.

Starting over, new beginnings, I could go on Dr. Phil and talk about that.  Who would disagree?  Even in the first century, I imagine that there were positive thinkers who gave seminars on “Starting Over after One of Your Twenty Wives Has Left You,” or “Releasing Your Inner Emperor.”

The Easter proclamation was something more revolutionary.  It was simple.  Jesus is alive. 

Stop and think for a moment how unbelievable this really is ­ Jesus is alive.  Short and sweet, that’s Easter.  Jesus is alive.  I find that difficult to believe. When we look around we don’t see Jesus alive like other people. If he’s alive, where is he?  How in the world can you and I experience a Resurrected Jesus, a Risen Christ, if we can’t even find him?

In Luke’s version of the story three women go to Jesus’ tomb expecting to anoint his dead body with spices.  When they arrive, they find the stone covering the tomb’s entrance rolled away and inside they are greeted by two mysterious men.  They ask the women a startling question, “Why do you seek the living among the dead?”

We wonder, if Christ is alive, why can’t we find him?  Perhaps it is because we look for him among the dead instead of the living.  We are like the women at the tomb expecting to encounter a dead Jesus.  For them, and for us, Jesus is history.

Remember history class in high school?  When you think about it, what is the one thing every person you studied in history class had in common?  They were dead.  History is all about dead people.  If they were alive, they get re-categorized into current events.

There was an historical Jesus but Jesus isn’t history.  The Risen Christ is a current event.  Yet the ways we approach him and learn about him are often more reminiscent of how we study the dead than how we experience the living.

I have three elementary school age children.  So in our house we spend a lot time working on history reports.  If you or one of your children has ever had to do a report on an historical figure, a certain procedure is followed.  You do research by reading, looking on the web, maybe watching a documentary.  All the while, you take notes, jot down things like dates, key phrases, and all the conflicting theories and opinions about the person.  That historical method works great when you are writing a report on a dead person.

It doesn’t work so well if you want to date them.  If you are in a relationship right now, think back to your first date.  If you are single imagine a first date with someone to whom you are attracted.  Picture taking them out to a nice restaurant, pulling out a manila folder and announcing, ”Hey I’ve done some research on you.  I’ve read up on you, done some background checks on the web, watched a few videos, talked to people who have differing opinions about you, and here are some conclusions I have reached about you…”

I doubt there would be a second date.  There would be no reason for it.  After all, you have all your facts and research done.  There is nothing new to learn.  You have approached a living person as if they were a dead historical figure.

As ridiculous as that scenario sounds, when we seek a supposedly living Jesus, we often go about it in the same way.  Even those who go around claiming Jesus is alive, singing “He Lives” and handing out pamphlets that “prove” the resurrection, preach such rigid beliefs that he might as well be a dead figure of the past.  On the other hand, many approach Jesus as if that is all he is ­ a dead historical figure who is no different than Julius Caesar, Leonardo DaVinci, or Thomas Jefferson.

I have spent time in both camps.  During the early years of my life, I believed all the correct things about Jesus.  Like facts about a dead historical figure, those beliefs never changed, developed or grew more complex.  In history class and Bicentennial Minutes I learned that the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776.  In my youth group I learned that Jesus was God’s Son who died for my sins and rose from the dead and that if I just believed or agreed with that fact I would go to heaven someday.  In school I had a history book to prove my facts and in my church I had a Bible to prove my facts.

There was nothing inherently wrong with what I was taught, but somehow it all made Jesus seem far away in time or in another dimension.  He was like an object to be studied.  Sure we would talk about having a personal relationship with Jesus but usually that terminology was used to set ourselves apart from other Christians who we believed did not have that relationship.  Jesus was still dead.

So I took another approach that I thought would bring Jesus to life for me.  I began reading intensely about what is termed the historical Jesus.  This was a more scholarly historical critical approach that examined Jesus using the same methods historians use to learn about any other historical figure.  It was rational and scientific.  It was an approach that challenged my presuppositions about Jesus.  It deconstructed and reconstructed my beliefs.  In fact it even led me to enroll in seminary.

There was nothing wrong with what I learned, but it relegated Jesus to being a wonderful wisdom teacher of the past.  The most I could get out of it for my present life was a vague notion that I should be nice to poor people.

I share my story with you because I imagine you have experienced being in one of those approaches or in a mixture of both.  As a result, every time Easter rolls around, the words “Jesus is Alive” may have a hollow ring, whether we admit it consciously or not.  Both approaches leave us with a Jesus who is dead figure of the past, rather than a living person in the present.

That can lead us to some deep and dark spiritual places.  We come to Easter with either a condescending go-through-the-motions-for the-kids attitude or perhaps even the despair of wondering, “What if none of this is real?”

The good news is that if the words “Jesus is Alive” have a hollow ring for us, it may be because they are echoing in an empty tomb.  On Easter, a mysterious stranger meets us in that tomb and asks, why do we seek the living among the dead?

If we want to find the living Jesus, we need to get to know him the same way we get know any living person.  In my life, this is something I am still learning how to do. 

We are all familiar with situations among family friends where there is a conflict between two parties all ties are cut off.  In times like that someone will often say, “I’m not talking to them.  They’re dead to me.” 

When we don’t communicate with someone, they might as well be dead.  So when is the last time you talked to Jesus?  Don’t ask me to explain it.  I don’t know where he is exactly in the physical universe.  I don’t know if has to do with heaven, string theory or whatever.  All I can do is invite you to give it a shot and see what happens.

When you go on a date with someone, one of the first things you talk about is your own life story.  You listen as the other person tells where they grew up, where they went to school, where they work.  As they tell that story, it is probably not a good idea to ask questions like, “You went to Harvard?  I don’t believe it.  Let me see your diploma?  You don’t have it with you?  Sorry.  This relationship is over.”

In the four Gospels of the New Testament, we meet the living Jesus.  Now I’m not saying to never question or probe the Bible.  I’m not saying to take everything and interpret it literally.  However, sometimes we just need to take the stories of Jesus on their own terms, as the story is told and simply let the Living Jesus speak through them.  Put aside our hand-wringing and excuses and just open ourselves up to the Jesus we meet in those pages.

I met my wife Pam when we worked together at a production company.  From the first time I saw her, I wanted to get to know her better.  But she worked in an office at the front of our building and I was always working way in the back in a dark edit room.  Needless to say, I suddenly started hanging out in the front office a lot more than I used to.

If we want to get to know Jesus, the Living Jesus, we need to hang out in some of the places where Jesus hangs out.  Sometimes those are hard places to hang out in.  Jesus tends to hang out in places where people are hurting, where they aren’t perfect, where there aren’t that many Christians.  If we are looking to meet the Living Jesus, we must spend time in those places.

Jesus is a Living Reality of the present, not just an historical figure of the past.  But even history isn’t what it used to be.

I have a good friend who was raised going to church every Sunday.  No surprise, he never goes anymore.  He has a son who has never been in a church.  One Sunday morning, they were driving back from buying the Sunday paper and passed a church along the way.  It was a large old stone church and the people were just going inside.  My friend’s son asked him, “Daddy why are those people going into that building?  Is that a museum?”

Unfortunately, for many churches the answer to that question might as well be “yes.”  They are museums, but the kind of museum I used to go to as a kid.  When I was little museums were places where you went to see artifacts in old dusty display cases.  I remember being really scared one time at the Smithsonian because there in a glass case they had a dead person ­ a mummy.  Museums were all about preservation of the dead.

Many churches can be like the museums of my youth.  One can go there see a perfect specimen of either a 19^th century Evangelical Jesus or a 20^th century Liberal Jesus.  One can even marvel, “Wow.  Look how well they’ve preserved him.  He looks so - lifelike.”

When I bring my kids to a museum today, however, it is nothing like the museums to which I went on my field trips.  Go to a museum now and you can go on ride.  You can touch the dinosaur’s bones.  The dinosaurs move.  Dead Presidents speak.  The experience is interactive and different for each person.  What’s more, new discoveries are incorporated into the exhibits.  The story is never over.  History is alive.

The Living Jesus is just that ­ the Living Jesus.  He’s creating new churches, like this one, where people can get to know him.  These churches are as different from the ones that preceded them as animatronics are from shellac-covered fossils. 

Are you still looking for the living Jesus among the dead constructs of the past?

Jesus is alive and well and living among us today.  That is what we celebrate on Easter.  So let all of us journey with us out of the tomb, because the tomb is empty.  And instead, let us be open to all the new and exciting places where Jesus lives.  Places where we can experience his transformational power and love.  Places where we can stand and say with integrity ­ from first hand experience - Jesus is Alive!