April 4, 2021 ~ Easter Resurrection Sunday ~ Sermon & Worship Zoom Recording

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/4-HqW4PNJAiVsNpzxiQozKUgfA7uLPsLGnPSEOQDbmrBExhTk_P_9b9njiPjuGj-.BZhqHRP4XkXv4dJd

Easter                                                                                      04/04/21—Highland—Meute

“The End of Lament”

Isaiah 25: 6-10a; Revelation 21: 1-7; John 20: 1-18

Pearl: One day lamentation will end.

Function: To claim the Easter miracle of Jesus’ resurrection as a foretaste and hope for that Great Day when all will be made new by God and lamentation will once and for all become unending joy and praise.

Mary Magdalene looked into the tomb where they had placed Jesus’ body and she was weeping. She was most upset at the absence of Jesus’ body.

1. Maybe she was lamenting what she perceived as further abuse of Jesus even beyond his humiliating torture and crucifixion.
2. As she peered into the tomb, weeping, two angelic beings greeted her and questioned with perplexity in their demeanor, “Woman, why are you weeping?”
   1. She responded with her interpretation of what happened claiming that someone had stolen the body. As she was responding to them she turned around looking at the risen Jesus but she did not know it was him.
      1. He also asked the same question that the angels asked, “Woman, why are you weeping?”
   1. Jesus and the angels were glorying/reveling in the dramatic victory of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.
      1. Jesus was literally in the resurrection body and was more alive and well than he had been in 33 years!
      1. He had a horrifying end to his life but now after dying on the cross, three days later he was raised from the dead, the first and only one who was ever resurrected.
         1. Yes, Jesus revived some people bringing them back to life, but they died again, eventually. Only Jesus is in the resurrection body.
      1. The angels were in full celebration mode because of the resurrection of Jesus.
   1. So it was a fair question for them to ask Mary why, in the midst of this cosmos-changing event of Jesus’ resurrection, she was weeping.
      1. You see for Jesus, he was already in the realm where there is no more weeping, no more pain, no more suffering, and no more injustice. He was in the resurrection!
      1. Jesus knew it and the angels knew it. But Mary did not know it. So she wept.
3. Wait for it…then Jesus spoke to her in a way that she knew who was speaking. And her tears dried up! Her weeping ended. Her lament was answered and all was well! Her Lord and Teacher was no longer dead!
   1. She likely didn’t understand what was happening. She simply knew that it was Jesus, somehow…some way! And she began rejoicing!
   1. Her mourning was turned into rejoicing!

That wonderful Great Day came for Mary Magdalene and that final Great Day will come again for her and for everyone else when Jesus makes all things new and death and suffering are ended once and for all!

The dead will be raised. A new heaven and a new earth will be realized. THERE WILL COME A DAY!!!

1. Prophecies point to it!
   1. “[The Lord] will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; he will swallow up death for ever. Then the Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth. It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation” (Isaiah 25: 7-9).
2. Visions reveal it!
   1. John described his vision: “…I saw a new heaven and a new earth…I saw the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God…I heard a loud voice…saying, ‘…the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more…See, I am making all things new’” (Rev. 21: 1-5 selected verses).
3. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Because of the plan of God to make all things new the arc of the moral universe is heading toward the time when all wrongs will be made right, and there will be wholeness for all and for everything.
   1. This is God’s doing.
   1. Humanity has intuitively perceived this because humanity laments. Deep down you know that things should be better.
      1. Contained within lamentation is hope.
      1. When you lament you are crying out to God for response. You have hope that God will respond and restore.
      1. All lamentations are being gathered up, kind of creating an incredible critical mass of some kind, and those who lament will find their fulfillment when God makes all things new at that great day of resurrection when as Paul describes it,
         1. “…the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever” (I Thessalonians 4: 16-17).
         1. As you worship on this Easter morning among the graves of so many of your beloved, take comfort and be mightily encouraged by the promise that “the dead in Christ will rise first!” Just imagine that great cloud of witnesses to the glory of God who will be rising into their resurrection bodies!
4. The resurrection of Jesus was a preview; it was a glimpse of “the end of lament.”
   1. This is why on that day of his resurrection he and the angels were most genuinely perplexed and asked Mary, “Woman, why are you weeping?”
   1. Lamentation and mourning don’t mix with new earth and with new heaven.
   1. Lamentation does not compute with new earth and with new heaven.

That Great Day of no more tears is coming.

In that day God will not only be present with us, God will be everything.

1. God revealed to John in the Revelation, “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end” (Rev. 21:6).
   1. This means that God is the “end of all things.” Everything will find its fulfillment in God.
   1. God is the end of all things. And since God is “un-ending,” everything will be fulfilled in God: the un-ending end of all things.
2. What is an “un-ending end” but an era without an end; it is a reality of eternal union where all things are transformed through complete union with God?
   1. In the new earth and new heaven, in the resurrection it will be ALL PRAISE where GOD IS EVERYTHING!!!
   1. There will be no need for a temple “for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” (Rev. 21: 22).
   1. There will be “no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb” (21:23).
3. It will be, if you can imagine, a time of unending celebration as prophesied by Isaiah:
   1. “On this mountain [Zion] the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear” (Isaiah 25:6).
4. And it will be the end of lament! Because everything will finally be HOME!
5. The following hymn lyrics tell a story of lament and hope.
   1. “Lift every voice and sing till earth and heaven ring, ring with the harmonies of liberty. Let our rejoicing rise high as the listening skies; let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
   1. Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us; sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us. Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, let us march on, till victory is won.
   1. Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod, felt in the days when hope unborn had died. Yet, with a steady beat, have not our weary feet come to the place for which our parents sighed?
   1. We have come over a way that with tears has been watered; we have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered, out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
   1. God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou has brought us thus far on the way; thou who hast by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path, we pray.
   1. Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met thee; lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee; shadowed beneath Thy hand may we forever stand, true to our God, true to our native land.”
      1. Written in 1900 by poet James Weldon Johnson and put to music by his brother J. Rosamond Johnson, this hymn is “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” number 339 in our Glory to God Presbyterian hymnal.  
         1. The hymn ends “…may we forever stand, true to our God true to our native land.”
         1. What is our native land?
            1. Our “native land” is nothing less than the true “Promised Land” where:
               1. ALL WILL BE NEW,
               1. ALL WILL BE TRANSFORMED,
               1. ALL WILL BE RIGHT,
               1. ALL WILL BE HEALED AND WHOLE,
               1. ALL WILL BE FOREVER HOME IN GOD!!!