Don’t you think it would be nice
sometimes if life came with its own remote control?*
Of course, if you are anything like
our family, you would constantly be losing the thing, but still, I think the
applications would be intriguing.The
Mute button alone would have thousands of uses.Kids making too much noise?Mute.Coworker interrupting your work again?Mute.Spouse trying to get you to take out the trash?Mute.
An even better function of the Life
Remote would be the fast forward button.As a person who uses that button to get through scary, violent, or
painfully suspenseful parts of movies, I think the fast forward button would be
a wonderful feature for us to have in every day life.Papers and final exams looming?Fast forward.Monday morning of a dreadful work week?Fast forward to Friday.Living
with difficult teenagers?Fast forward
to your empty nest.Anything dreadful,
anything stressful, anything painful, we could just avoid altogether, with the
fast forward function.Or, on the
flipside, anything good that we just want to get to already – a graduation, a
wedding, the birth of a child – anything that just makes us crazy with the
waiting and the details – fast forward.
I think, perhaps, the best feature
of all, though, would be the reverse button.Some things are just so good, we’d like to be able to hang on to them
longer.Go back to those sweet, innocent
days of our children’s infancy.Or go
back to our own childhood, or our college years, or our newlywed days.There are few moments in life that are
perfectly delightful, and when they come, they are gone all too fast.Who of us hasn’t wanted to stop the flow of
time, to hang on just a few more moments to the fleeting beauty of life.
But there is a deeper, more
desperate reason for wanting to go back.There is so much back there that we would like to fix.There are awful words we cannot un-say.Terrible things we’ve done, or that have been
done to us, that cannot be set right.Things
we have left undone, that we’d given anything for the chance to do now.Words we have left unspoken, that we would
speak now, only it’s far too late.So
much wreckage in life – and the regret of it, and the guilt of it, and the
anxiety over it haunts us.
If life had a reverse button, many
of us would wear it out, trying to fix all the things that are now unfixable.
Like little children on the playground shouting “Do-over!I get a do-over!” we’d take as many second chances
as we could get.But what would we do
with them?
Of all the videos Paul and I check
out from the library for our boys, there is one in particular that sends us
scrambling for the reverse button.It is
a Winnie-the-Pooh movie that features Piglet, and the movie centers around a quest
involving a very important scrapbook that Piglet created.At one point late in the movie, Rabbit and
the others accidentally ruin the book – the pages go everywhere, some fall in
water, some blow away, and the friends can’t get them back.
No matter how many times our sons
have seen the movie, their reaction when they get to this scene is always the
same.“Back it up!Back it up, Mommy!The book is ruined!”They get so upset about hat destroyed book,
they simply must see it undone.They
want to see those pages flying back into place.So we oblige, and hit the reverse button.But you know what?No matter how many times we back it up,
eventually the same thing always happens again.That book always ends up in ruins.
I have to think it is somewhat the
same with real life.Sure, there are
some things that, if given another chance, we would set right in a big
way.But in most ways, we would be prone
to the same mistakes.Or if not those,
then there are certainly others that we’d end up making [which might possibly
be even worse].How many stories have
been written, how many films have been made, around this premise – a person
able to go back and change time fixes things in such a way that either the same
outcome inevitably occurs, or things go so horribly awry that the original
mistake is far outdone. This is the problem – we tend to make the same bad
choices repeatedly.Like a video that
turns out the same way no matter how many times you back it up, we find
ourselves locked in our realities, shackled by our own habits and compulsions,
stuck in patterns and systems that never seem to change.We cannot spring ourselves.
Still, the desire remains, the
nagging voice of regret still loops in our heads.What if I had….?What if she hadn’t….?What if ….?There is so much we’d like to reverse, to repair, to restore, but we are
not able.And so we stay caught in our inevitable
cycles of ruin and regret.
Is there anything less reversible,
less inevitable than a tombstone?It
stands there mute and solid, a silent, persistent reminder of what we cannot
change – death waits for us all.Our
lives are lived not only in the shadow of our own certain deaths, but in the
grief of so many other deaths along the way.Our inability to undo any of it is staggering, devastating,
heartbreaking.
As it is for us, so it was for
Jesus and his friends.The story was
over.Done.The darkest sentence imaginable had been
pronounced on Friday afternoon, to those who loved him:He is dead.It was finished. Done.
Some women who had seen it happen, who
had watched him die in the most gruesome way and then saw him laid in the tomb,
now made their way back to that grave, to anoint his body, give him a proper
burial.Only when they got there, the
stone that had sealed up the tomb had been rolled away.They went in, his body was not there.Two men in dazzling clothes suddenly stood
beside them, and said words the still echo through the ages:“Why do you look for the living among the
dead?He is not here, he has
risen!”The women, who remembered that
this is what Jesus had said would happen, went running to tell all the others,
who did not believe them.They thought
it was an idle tale.An empty tomb and
the testimony of a few women was not enough to make them believe.They had to experience the risen Christ for
themselves, and soon enough they did.He
showed up, he talked with them, he broke bread with them, he ate fish with them,
he showed them his wounds.It was not
his absence from the tomb that convinced them, it was his new presence in their
lives that did it.
And it did more than merely
convince them he had been raised.It
raised them, too, and set them free.All
their old fears?Undone.Guilt and shame?Undone.Sadness, regret?Undone.
And death?It was undone, too.Sure, they were all still going to die.But death’s grip was broken for them, its
sting was gone.Its victory, undone.
All this undoing was accomplished
not by some mere reversal of time.Time
has not been turned back, it has been cracked open – just like that tomb.All the old inevitables – guilt, fear, shame,
regret, death, grief – they’ve all been broken open.Everything that threatens to seal us in,
chain us up, lock us down – it has all been undone.Jesus has blasted open every door, rolled
back all the stones, smashed everything that looks like defeat.He has blown open the grave.In a way that we can barely begin to
understand, he has undone it all.We are
set free.
We can still never go back to
before – to our old innocence, our old life, the way things used to be.We can never go back – to before the
diagnosis or the divorce or the death or the lie or the betrayal or the failure
– we can never go back.But now, now, we can go forward.
Forward into freedom, new life,
grace. Forward, not on our own power,
but in the strength of his resurrection power.Forward, to try again in the face of failure, to hope again in the face
of despair, to trust again in the face of betrayal, to love again in the face
of grief.What we cannot do for
ourselves, God in Christ has already done.What we cannot undo, God has already undone.Jesus has broken loose, the system has been
sprung, death has been swallowed up.
The power of death still wants to
keep us in its grip.We will still feel
the press of sin and fear, of guilt and grief, but they have no final power
over us.That Easter morning, he strode
from his tomb, and undid them all.We
have no more need to look for life among such dead things.He is not there.He has risen.
He is risen indeed.Alleluia!Amen.
*A few days after preaching this sermon, I learned that this was actually the plot of a 2006 movie entitled "Click," starring Adam Sandler.
