Ecclesia Princeton
Ecclesia Princeton
Easter 2025: The Resurrection of Jesus as the Theory of Everything
Pastor Ian Graham looks at how the resurrection of Jesus gives meaning, healing, and hope to our past, present, and future.
Good morning friends. Happy Easter. My name is Ian. I have the joy of being the pastor alongside a lot of these other folks that you've seen up here, so if you're new here, welcome. If you're here every week, it's a joy to celebrate the resurrection with you and friends. This is our first ever 1130 service, so the inaugural. So give yourselves a hand. Let's go Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark.
Speaker 1:Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb, so she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple the one whom Jesus loved and said to them They've taken the Lord out of the tomb and we do not know where they have laid him. Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came following him and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there and the cloth that had been on Jesus' head not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in and he saw and believed For as yet they did not understand the scripture that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes For the Jewish people, of which Jesus was a part, of which these disciples, mary Magdalene, john and Peter, are a part.
Speaker 1:The first day of the week was Sunday. John and Peter are apart. The first day of the week was Sunday, and John notes and tells us that it was very dark, echoing the first words in all of the scriptures found in Genesis 1. When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was complete chaos and darkness covered the face of the deep. John, in accounting for the resurrection of Jesus, is trying to tell us plainly there is nothing less than a whole new creation that is in view here. It's not just that things have slightly shifted, it's not just that Jesus was dead on a cross. Now reversal, he's alive. Something fundamental has changed in the order of the world.
Speaker 1:Jesus, in rising from the dead, is recreating the world, and throughout the lead up to Easter, we've been walking through seven signs in John's Gospel during the season of Lent, and these signs signify what the reign of King Jesus would look like. And we see Jesus undertaking healings he heals a man's son. We see him open the eyes of the blind. We see him feeding thousands. We see him walking on water. And the last sign, the climactic sign, is Jesus demonstrating his power over the grave. With just a word, he calls his friend from the dead Lazarus come out.
Speaker 1:And here, as we've surveyed these seven signs over the course of Lent, we arrive at Easter Sunday and in every way, we have the eighth sign. There's seven days in a week. God created the world in seven days. And in every way, as we arrive at this eighth sign, we arrive at the first day of a new week. The dawn of a new creation. Jesus's resurrection begins.
Speaker 1:The new story that God is writing as a new creation breaks forth right in the midst of this one, and the text that we just read tells us that Mary Magdalene is the first to come to the tomb and that she sees that the stone has been removed, and so she hurries to go get her friends Peter and the disciple Jesus loved. We'll call him John. Jesus had been buried in a garden tomb which was owned by a wealthy man. They rush back to this garden. It's just an amazing detail that John records for us, as he is the author of the gospel of John. He tells us plainly that when the two disciples, peter and John, were running to the tomb, one of them was faster and if you were going to tell people about news that had changed the world forever, you would make sure that they know that you could outrun your friend for all of eternity. There are good reasons why John records this, but I think it's just kind of hilarious too, on its face, that John's like. By the way, when we got to the tomb I was first.
Speaker 1:When John reaches the tomb faster than Peter, of course, he peers inside and sees the linen wrappings that would have surrounded the body of Jesus. It was Jewish burial custom to take a recently deceased body, to coat it in spices and to wrap those spices with cloth. So Peter looks and he doesn't see the body of Jesus. Peter goes all the way into the tomb and sees the linens rolled up. There's a terrible joke in here that other pastors might make that Jesus rising from the dead still takes time to make his bed. I didn't make that joke, others might. John then joins Peter in the tomb and taking in the entire scene.
Speaker 1:Verse 8 tells us that he believed. And this really is the question of Easter, and it's the question that Jesus puts forth to us today. Will we believe? It's the question that lies in the echo of all the signs in John's gospel yes, jesus can do these amazing, miraculous things, but will we believe them? Will we entrust ourselves to this one?
Speaker 1:Arthur A Allen was an oceanographer for the Coast Guard who spent years in the Long Island Sound throwing human-sized dummies off the bow of his small vessel. He would record the wind, speed, time of day, weight of the dummy, the currents, all trying to develop an algorithm that would help the Coast Guard estimate where a person or a lifeboat might drift to when trying to conduct a rescue. Alan's science became a key guide in many successful rescues. Michael Lewis, the author of many books like Moneyball and the Big Short, tracked down one of the people who had been rescued as a result of Alan's scientific theories and asked him do you know why you were rescued? Do you know all that went in to that moment where the Coast Guard was able to pinpoint where you are? And the man said confidently he said absolutely I know. When I was floating out there in the open water, I gave my life to Jesus Christ and Michael Lewis is like okay, which demands an interesting question Was the man rescued because of all of this precursory work that had been done by Arthur A Allen? Or was he rescued because, out there, floating in that watery abyss, he said Jesus, save me, you're all I have left?
Speaker 1:From the vantage point of the scriptures, the answer, of course, is yes. Today, on this Easter Sunday, I want to look at the resurrection of Jesus as a theory of everything, and my hope for those of us in the room who have already signed up for the Jesus movement, already said yes to faith in him that in telling the story, we will tell it in such a way that we encounter it with the wonder, the awe, the worship that this story demands. For those of us in here who find ourselves maybe somewhere between a kind of uncertain agnosticism or kind of outright rejection of any notion of faith that anybody could rise from the grave, I've been praying for you and I'm glad you're here. My hope is that the telling of this story will sound like an invitation, like music, like something that, even if you don't quite believe it, it's something that you hope is true. Okay, so the resurrection theory of everything, the phrase theory of everything, was made famous by the physicist and famous atheist apologist Stephen Hawking.
Speaker 1:Hawking says this. He says created the universe. I tell them, the question itself makes no sense. Time didn't exist before the Big Bang, so there is no time for God to make the universe in. There is no God. No one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization. There is probably no heaven, no afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that I'm extremely grateful. Not particularly good news I can admire his posture of like these are the things I've determined, these are the principles I stand on, so I'm just going to receive my life as a gift. When we talk about the past, we're talking about going back to the very origins of the universe when does everything come from? And we're also talking about not just the past of the world out there, but our own story, history right, what has transpired before and how it leverages and impacts my life now.
Speaker 1:Stephen Hawking describes the four pillars of a standard cosmology entailed in the Big Bang Theory, addressing the expansion effect, the origin of cosmic radiation, nucleosynthesis of light elements and the formation of galaxies, and if you'd like to know just what those are, you can attend Dr Chris Galea's class next week on faith and science. From my mind as a pastor, as somebody who thinks about these things, there's no conflict between this accounting of how the world could have been formed and come to be over the course of some 14 billion years and the Jesus story that says in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. These two things are not at odds with one another. But I also want to acknowledge that describing the how still leaves us asking questions of why. Why is there something rather than nothing? And for us as Christians, that question of why then brings us to the question of who? Who is responsible for everything? That is Saying nothing of the statistical implausibility of the earth, taking on the very exact specifics that would be required to support any kind of life, much less human life.
Speaker 1:Our guy Stephen Hawking says himself the laws of science as we know them at present contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life. I wonder why he phrased it that way. He didn't just say it just developed over time. These factors have been finely adjusted Like you can almost imagine a knob and these factors being turned, tuned in to their exact specifications. I don't know why he uses the passive voice there, but he's almost unintentionally acknowledging that for these factors the tilt of the earth's axis, the fact that the planet is just warm enough, not so cold, just the right temperature to support life and water, these factors just being dialed in To say nothing, that science has little to no plausible explanation for the cocktail of our biological makeup and how it could account for that which we experience as consciousness.
Speaker 1:Now, consciousness is just a fancy word for what all of you are experiencing right now. Have you ever stopped to think about how wondrous your brain is, how aware you are of so many things, like right now? I'm aware of the feeling of my feet. These shoes are not comfortable. I want to take them off. I'm aware that some of you are nodding, very kindly. I'm aware that some of you are nodding like you want to go to sleep. That's also okay. We at Ecclesia believe in naps, so if you need one, it's fine. I'm aware it's a little warm in here. I'm aware it looks beautiful in here. Thank you, lydia. It's like really lovely, right, right, just resurrection breaking forth all around. And just as you're aware, you're aware of the person sitting next to you. Consciousness is not just what you're thinking about, it's all the factors that your brain is aware of when you're not thinking about them. And science has no plausible explanation for how, out of the morass of chemicals and elements that could spring out of that, that which is the complexity of our mind.
Speaker 1:The Christian story again says that in the beginning, god created the heavens and the earth and that with each succeeding movement over the course of those seven days whether they were literal days or whether they were epochs, we don't know but whether God was doing in the midst of that, with each succeeding movement of creation, he pronounced his blessing over that creation. He saw that it was good. On the sixth day of that creation symphony that we find in Genesis 1, god introduced the climax of that symphony. Humans, you are the pinnacle of creation. I don't know if you woke up feeling that today, but that is what God says of you. You are made in the image of God, an icon of the maker of heaven and earth. If you want to know what the image of God looks like, simply look around. Every single person that you've ever encountered, throughout every moment of your life, bears the image of the God who made each person in delight and with purpose. You are an icon of the maker of the universe, but God didn't make us just to be subservient, just to be mindless slaves giving him our obedience. God made us to be partners with him in obedience, in a proper relation to God, but partners in this creation project. All of this as we'll see in Genesis 2, starts in a garden. All of this is going somewhere and God invites us, as those made in his image, to know him in the Hebrew yadah, to be in relationship with him and also to join him in what he's up to in the world, within the confines of that garden.
Speaker 1:If you scroll ahead to Genesis, chapter 2, you see that there's all these interesting features about that garden. The scriptures tell us that in that garden there are just trees that are just beautiful to look at, made for delight. As often as we don't think art is necessary, as we consign it to the extraneous. God says it is essential to who we are, the beauty is essential to who we are. He says you'll find some trees that are edible, good stuff to eat on those. Also, there's a bunch of trees that are just nice to look at. You're welcome. And so God creates the world with this kind of character because he's trying to tell us about the author, the narrator of the story.
Speaker 1:If you read in Genesis 2, there are all these random details. There's gold in that garden world. Gold has to be excavated, famously. So right, gold rush. You have to find it. Gold, it turns out, has all of these uses that we've discovered over the course of scientific exploration. But we wouldn't know that unless you experimented with it. What is experimentation? But a kind of play, right? Maybe this will work. Maybe an 1130 service will work, right? Experimentation is an invitation to say this might work. It might tell me what I think it's saying, or it might say something else.
Speaker 1:And within this garden, as God says, I give you all the trees, trees that are good for beauty, trees that are good for food, all for you. But there's one tree within the context of this garden that is not good for you In the day that you eat of it, you will surely die. There is one tree of prohibition and again we can see the construct here. All the trees that are awesome. One tree Don't eat from this one and the serpent in Genesis 3 will tempt the man and the woman and try to suggest that God is withholding something from us. That God knows that if we access the power of this tree, absent relationship with God, that we will be like him. And, as we know, in Genesis 3, the man and the woman take and they eat from the tree. But it turns out that the serpent's promises are empty and vapid. They have no bearing on reality, because there is no power, no life without relationship to God. There is no technology ingrained in the creation that we can somehow become like God without being with God.
Speaker 1:Psychologist Daniel Pink is the author of the book the Power of Regret. In the book he says that the second most common emotion that we experience overall, second only to love, is regret. For the book, he and his research team conducted the World Regrets Survey and received over 17,000 emails regrets or, as we call them in the church circles, confessions from over 105 countries. He and his team categorized these regrets they received into four broader categories foundational regrets, boldness regrets, moral regrets and relational regrets. He writes of these moral regrets. For many of us, these regrets moral regrets ache the most and last the longest. They are also more complex than the other core regrets.
Speaker 1:From the vantage point of the scriptures, the fundamental moral regret goes back to the garden. And it's not just that there's this mythological origin story to why the world is the way that it is. It's that we find that at root of our story is a brokenness that we can't account for. It's a brokenness that we often experience as outside of us, as systemic, but it's also, if we're honest, a brokenness that we experience inside of us. It is a brokenness that, if we're honest, we participate in. We too are broken, and just as we've suffered the shrapnel of this broken world, we have played our part.
Speaker 1:John 19, verse 41, describing the burial of Jesus, says this now there was a garden in the place where he was crucified Huh, we've got that garden language just ringing out again. And in the garden there was a new tomb in which no one had ever been laid. And so, because it was the Jewish day of preparation and the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there. Where did all this go wrong? In a garden. Where is Jesus, the crucified Lord, laid on that first Good Friday? In a garden.
Speaker 1:We all have regrets. We all have a past, we have lies that we have tried to live by, we have lies that we have loved, and what god is saying to us, in his way of masterfully narrating the story, is that where everything went awry, where where everything was broken, that's where God is starting his work of new creation. God is not throwing away all that came before. God is the creator. He takes that which is and he redeems, he puts it back together If you could think of a mosaic. God is taking those broken shards and weaving out of them something beautiful, something that we could see and admire, and so Jesus is laid in a garden tomb in the place where he was crucified. In the place of Jesus's death, there is a garden. And what this tells us about our past, about that accumulated experience of living that we all know is our history that is so often marred by our own experiences of regret, by our own shame, is that Jesus has gone to the place of shame and told the truth, that Jesus has gone to the place of death and brought life, that Jesus is not throwing away your past, but in somehow, even the stuff that we do. That is absolutely antithetical to who God is and to who his goodness in the world. He, when we entrust ourselves to him and entrust ourselves to his story, is taking all of those detours and weaving them into a testimony of who he is and what he has done. Jesus goes to the place where everything was broken and begins his work of healing, of restoration, of redeeming, of recreating. He has addressed our past, ecclesia, which brings us in our theory of everything. How does this impact our present? How does something that may or may not have happened over 2,000 years ago have anything to do with our lives right now? John 20, verse 11.
Speaker 1:But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb and she saw two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her Woman why are you weeping? Notice this, supposing him to be the what the gardener. She said to him sir, if you've carried him away, tell me where you've laid him and I will take him away. Jesus said to her verse 16 mary. She turned and said to him in hebrew rabbi. So peter and john, upon seeing the empty tomb, don't really know what to do with this information and they turn and they go home.
Speaker 1:But Mary lingers and she clearly does not believe that anything remarkable has taken place. Right, nothing is telling her. No alarm bell is going off that the world has been changed forevermore. She looks inside the tomb and she sees two people, angels dressed in white. She doesn't know they're angels, but even that is sort of unstartling and unremarkable to her. She simply starts to ask where have these people taken? Jesus, she's assuming the worst. Angels ask her woman, why are you weeping? And then Jesus echoes that question again Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for? She insists to the man. She pleads with him tell me where he is and I will go and I will take care of him.
Speaker 1:But then this one who she mistakes for the gardener is really and truly the heavenly gardener, the one who was dead and now is alive again. He says the first word of the new world. That changes everything. Look at the first word that Jesus says to her Mary. The first word of the new world is a woman's name and this changes everything. Wrapped up in that one word is the good news that death has been conquered, that he is alive forevermore, that our tears are not in vain and that we are all, just as Mary was addressed personally by the Savior, being addressed by the risen Lord. He's not just calling out Mary, he's saying, saying Tim and Paul and Samantha and Gloria, jesus is calling our names. He, by saying a woman's name, declares the whole truth of the gospel that he has overcome, the whole truth of the gospel that he has overcome. As he says our names, he reminds us that he is alive, that there's nothing in this world that will pain us, will scare us, will confuse us, will threaten to separate us from the love of God that he has not ultimately overcome. He is risen. And Jesus said to her in verse 17, do not touch me, because Jesus, as he tells her, gives her those instructions, says I'm ascending to my Father and your Father. Jesus invites us into his very special fellowship with the Father. Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples verse 18, I have seen the Lord and she told them that he had said these things to her. Mary Magdalene, the apostle to the apostles, the first person to preach the gospel in the New Testament. I have seen the Lord, verse 19,.
Speaker 1:When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were for fear of the religious leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said Peace be with you. That which was encoded in the beginning, that God blessed and called good and very good, tov and Tov Ma'od. The Hebrew people have a word for this. It is Shalom, or often what we translate as peace. And now Jesus stands among them, the risen Lord, to the place where they are hiding away, because they're worried that those same leaders that rounded up Jesus and arrested him and ultimately executed him are going to come after them. Jesus stands among them and he says to them shalom peace. After he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side.
Speaker 1:I love what Diane Langberg says. She says the only one who bears scars in heaven is Jesus and the risen Lord, his resurrected body, bears the marks of the redemption that he has won for us on the cross. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, just in case you didn't hear it the first time. Shalom, peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them Receive the Holy Spirit.
Speaker 1:In Genesis, chapter 2, as God forms the man from the dust of the earth, the Adam, he then breathes his breath of life into the man's nostrils. And here we have Jesus, the author of the new creation, as Paul calls him in Colossians 1, the firstborn of the new creation, breathing his life anew into his disciples, breathing his life anew into his disciples. And what that tells us Ecclesia is that that breathing is not just animating, it is commissioning, it is saying come partner with me in this work of new creation, come be a part of what I am doing. And then, when we look at the life of Jesus itself, what we see? The shape of that life? Yes, it involves holiness, walking before God. Yes, it involves enacting projects of justice. Yes, it involves being a people who declare the good news.
Speaker 1:But there's so much about Jesus's life that we don't know, so much about his life on earth that we have no idea about Some 30 years lived in obscurity, that we can only guess at, and that has a testimony in and of itself is that part of living a life commissioned and purposed by God is living every bit of our life as if we are standing on holy ground, as Paul says in Colossians, doing everything to the glory of God, the Father. This means, yes, the big stuff that we all can see is holy and big and important, but it also means the little stuff that feels mundane and boring or feels inconsequential, that God has infused all of it with his spirit, commissioned us to be agents of new creation, to know him, that we have a profound purpose in this life that is not just about the things that we do, but is about the person that we are becoming. The world has changed in that moment and we who have lived the last several years know so much about the world changing. The world has changed drastically over the last couple years years.
Speaker 1:The last couple of months, investor and thinker Ray Dalio has been writing of the converging cross pressures that we exist in the attention of right now. Dalio highlights several converging pressures that we are experiencing at this moment in history and traces them to other historical moments. But he writes, he says, if you're living right now, you are experiencing that the monetary economic order is breaking down because there's too much existing debt, the rates of adding to it are too fast, and existing capital markets and economies are supported by this unsustainably large debt. Okay, not a good start. There's more. The domestic political order is breaking down due to huge gaps in people's education levels, opportunity levels, productivity levels, income and wealth levels and values, and because of the ineffectiveness of the existing political order to fix things. That seems accurate. These conditions are manifest in when it all costs fit between populists of the right and populists of the left, over which side will have the power to run things?
Speaker 1:Okay, so, economic order not great. Political order not great. Oh, that's not just domestic politics. Let's do international politics. The international geopolitical world order is also breaking down because the era of one dominant power that dictates that the other countries follow is likely over. Oh, geopolitical conflict, not enough for you, let's do cosmic nature. Acts of nature, droughts, floods, pandemics are increasingly disruptive. And then he says and to top it all off, none of you learned the lessons from the Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, terminator, and you are determined to build a technology that you cannot control and don't really understand how it's going to affect you. In AI and AGI, he says that we're in a moment of crisis, and the beautiful thing about the people of God is that crisis breeds renewal. But crisis and rapid change are the story of the hour, and everyone from investors to sociologists, psychologists are struggling to guess at what comes next.
Speaker 1:If we scale this out, where is this all going? We started with cosmic origins, the story of the cosmos. Where did the universe come from? Well, where did it come from and where is it going? From a quantum cosmological standpoint, there are two divergent outcomes that are possible. Either the universe will endlessly expand. Did you know that the Milky Way galaxy, of which we are a part, is currently moving, right now, at over a million miles an hour? Where's it going? Where are we off to? I've never actually noticed this speed that apparently we are all moving at, but we are going somewhere, and so one hypothesis about where all of this ends is that the universe just endlessly expands and then the sun burns out and everybody in our galaxy is kind of out of luck. That's a sad story too.
Speaker 1:The other option, being in the realm of the Big Bang Theory, is that there will be a big crunch, that everything will be gathered together and will shrink back to the size of those atomic protons. So will the world endlessly expand as God's love, or will it be gathered? Well, the answer for the people of God is, of course, yes. The world will endlessly expand as God's love extends throughout all of eternity and fills every bit of the created universe with his presence. There will be no end and the world will be gathered. Gathered at the name of Jesus, the name that is above every name, as every knee bows and every tongue confesses. Gathered as all the tears of all the years turn out to be tributaries of the river of life that flows from the tears of all the years, turn out to be tributaries of the river of life that flows from the throne of God. Gathered around the throne of the Lamb, as every tongue, every tribe, every nation, gathered, as Ephesians 1 tells us, for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth. All things will be gathered up in him and this life will be endless, without limit, under the beautiful shalom and goodness of the Savior. The peace that he speaks to us is available to us now and available to us in the future. There will be no more tears, no more death, sin will be no more.
Speaker 1:Tim Keller, a pastor in New York, said that there were three factors in his coming to a belief in Christ. First was the plausibility of the resurrection. The historical plausibility. Again, our experience tells us that people don't get up from the dead, and so we need somewhat compelling evidence to suggest otherwise. Historians are nearly unanimous about the existence of a man called Jesus of Nazareth that existed sometime between 0 and 3 AD to sometime between 30 and 33 AD. Historians are nearly unanimous in the fact that that man was crucified under the local Roman governor named Pontius Pilate, and that something happened around 33 AD that forever changed the shape of the planet as the Christian movement took off, as we as people of faith would claim. The second thing that Keller said that had to be present for him to say yes to this faith was a community of people who made this good news believable and made it desirable, whose lives had been changed by God, who loved him, who served him and worshiped him. The third is much more nebulous a personal experience with the risen Christ. I've had many experiences in my life that I could say God was doing something. God was communicating to me much in the same way that he talked to Mary, that he was calling out my name, and if you went around the room and just found people that had been walking with Jesus, they could say the same. I'm going to put up a picture for you. This is the last picture that was ever taken of Johnny Cash. We'll dim the lights a little bit so you can see our guy, johnny, and you can't quite make it out in this photo, but if you could see the clear version, there's a picture of me in the glare of the picture frame and I'm wearing a mask and my hair hasn't been cut in probably over a year. At this point, it's because this picture was taken in December of 2020.
Speaker 1:At the end of 2020, a friend of mine, a pastor in New York, hosted a gathering for pastors in Tennessee that he called Redeeming 2020. And for many of us at the outset of 2020, if you're a visionary, you're a leader who wants to catalyze people. 2020 is just too perfect, right? Vision 2020, let's go. We're sitting there December 2019, january 2020. We're going to rally people. Our church was almost a year old at that point. It was so excited. And then some stuff happened in March of 2020. And the world fell apart and we gathered here. Some of us sequestered ourselves to some time in Tennessee. We got some COVID tests, made sure that we weren't contagious and we took some time to see what the Lord might be doing with these days. That seemed both hard and kind of wasted.
Speaker 1:On the day of our departure we went to Johnny Cash's house. It was in Hendersonville, tennessee. I grew up part of my life just down the road from Hendersonville, tennessee, in a town called Goodlettsville, tennessee. The house was previously owned by another musician named Roy Orbison. Roy Orbison was my first favorite record. As a little four-year-old I would demand this same song over and over again. The house was where they had recorded the song Pretty Woman, like literally just set up mics in the common room.
Speaker 1:There we're on the grounds of this house and they're telling us the story of this house that's on the lake Old Hickory Lake there outside of Nashville. They're telling us that Roy Orbison's two children had tragically passed away on the grounds in the 60s due to a house fire. So Roy had sold the house to Johnny Cash and just asked that the site where his children had passed away be honored in some way. Cash had turned that site into an orchard of trees, and we gathered here at the end of this kind of time, together, in the main common area of this house, this house with so much history, so much life that it had seen so many songs written there we gather for a time of worship and commissioning All of us pastors. We're about to go back to our realities, to the hard. You know, at 2020, the end of 2020, it wasn't clear that we were gonna be out of the pandemic anytime soon. There was no vaccines on the horizon. It was just like more of the same.
Speaker 1:Here we go and a guy walks into the room to lead us in worship and he's carrying this big, beautiful Martin guitar. It's like dreadnought, really beautiful, and he introduces himself as a guy named Matt Maher. I didn't know what Maher looked like, but I was familiar with his music. He sings some songs that we sing here, I think, and then he starts to talk about the guitar that he's holding. It was owned by a missionary man named Jim Elliott, who'd been killed by the people that he was sent trying to reach. This particular guitar that he's holding was the one that the missionaries had with them on the plane just before they were martyred.
Speaker 1:That pass is so heavy here and I'm seeing the strands of these kind of stories, these bigger stories than me, but I'm also seeing just my small participation in this story, my time spent in this place, these songs, this life. The present for me is buzzing. But the future, as I'm standing there, again, I'm about to get in my car and drive 12 hours because we didn't want to fly at that point because again and I'm like man, all right, going back to some hard things, reality and we started to sing. Matt Maher started to lead us in worship and I've seldom been so overcome in my life. I couldn't sing along.
Speaker 1:Because at that moment, as Tim Keller talks about just a personal encounter with the risen Christ, all my anxiety is heavy-laden about the future. Jesus is saying to me Ian, ian, I got you, I have your wife, I have your kids, I have your church. Will you trust me? And again, if the idea of Jesus is just something that we talk about, the proposition, then yeah, this is a nice gathering, we'll go and we'll eat lunch here shortly.
Speaker 1:But if the risen Christ is here, is present among us, then the question that he is putting forth to us today is will you entrust your life to this one who has given his life for you, and will you see that he has overcome all things, that he is making all things new. Christ is the Lord of all the earth. He is the cosmic king of past, present and future, and yet he can weave all of these strands of history, these broader themes, into a moment and show us that he has been with us all along. He loves you and, just as he called out Mary's name, he's calling out your name here today, that he has been with us all along. He loves you and, just as he called out Mary's name, he's calling out your name here today. He will redeem your past, he will gather up all the fragments. He has a purpose for you to know him and to make him known in the present, and he has a hope that is certain for you in your future and the future of the world. Christ is risen. I'm gonna to pray. Welcome, holy Spirit.
Speaker 1:God, would you do the part that only you can do, god? We can testify to who you are, god. We can proclaim it, but only you can make it known. But only you can make it known, god. Only you can make it true. And so, god, we ask that, as you are in this room, god, that you would do your subtle work of calling sons and daughters to yourself, calling people out by name, lord Jesus.
Speaker 1:And in that calling of their name, god, there is testimony that all our sins are forgiven, god, that all of our shame, that we carry around and think that we have to somehow detoxify ourselves from Lord, is a lie. That you have already healed God, that any sense of listlessness or that we're not here for a reason, god, is proven to be false. Lord, you have put us in this time, in this place, to know you, and that our hope is not in the direction that our world takes. God Not in the outcomes. God Not in the economy, lord, but is in you. And you put forth that question to us today, the question that is at once conviction and invitation Will we trust you, god? Give us your grace to say yes. Here in this place, we ask these things in your name, in the name of the risen King, king Jesus, who stands for all of eternity. We pray and we declare in your name Amen.