Happy Easter. What a what a wonderful day to
celebrate the resurrection of our brother, our Lord, our
Savior. So good to do that together.
I'm, I'm just, you know, been, I've been, I've been celebrating
Easter all morning. I hope you have too.
And, and I'm, I'm really excited to celebrate here today as we
talk about living the Easter life.
We've been talking for weeks now about being faithful in a world
stacked against us or in a system stacked against us.
Easter, Easter is what makes that possible.
And, and starting today and for the next several weeks, we're
going to talk about what it means to live the Easter life.
But one of the things it means to live the Easter life is that
we recognize that we are living because of Easter.
We are living in a world turned upside down.
Now to talk about that and to illustrate that, I I need to
tell you a story. It's one of my favorite stories.
Does anyone here know the story of the world's greatest
cornflake? Nobody.
Good. Good.
Now I will shorten the story because it's way too long to
tell the story if I tell the whole thing.
Way too long to tell as part of a sermon.
In fact, it can be quite long. I once told this story was with
very polite friends on a car trip.
I believe it lasted 3 1/2 hours. So so I'm not going to be that
long with it today. But I do want to tell you the
story of the world's greatest cornflake.
He was, in fact, the world's first cornflake.
And as he came down to chute into the world's first cornflake
box, he landed at the bottom of that box.
And then all the other cornflakes got piled on top of
him. So he pushed and he shoved and
he shoved and he pushed and he pushed.
He shoved and he pushed till he got to the top of the box, being
the great little cornflake that he was, went down that box and
on down the conveyor belt, got to the end of the conveyor belt.
There was a bin at the end of the conveyor belt to collect the
boxes to take them to another part of the factory.
And that box fell into the bin and it landed upside down and he
was back at the bottom of the box.
So he pushed and he shoved and he shoved and he pushed and he
pushed and he shoved and he pushed till he got to the top of
the box. Being the great little cornflake
that he was. Now it was taken to another part
of the warehouse where it was placed in a crate.
That box was placed in a crate in order to be placed in a
truck, and it was placed in a crate that was on a pallet.
And when they picked that box out of the bin and placed it on
the crate, they turned it upside right side up again.
And so the cornflake was back at the bottom of the box.
So he pushed and he shoved and he shoved and he pushed and he
pushed and he shoved and he pushed till he got to the top of
the box. Being the great little cornflake
that he was. Forklift came, picked up the
pallet with the crates on it was taking it across the warehouse
to the truck loaded in the truck was late on a Friday afternoon.
The forklift driver was tired, wasn't really paying attention
thinking about the game that night.
And he had a bump and the crates fell off and that box was upside
down on the bottom of the warehouse.
So that cornflake pushed and he shoved and he shoved and he
pushed and he pushed and he shoved and he pushed till he got
to the top of the box, being the great little corn flake that he
was. Well, of course people came.
They still need to get the box of the corn flakes on the truck.
So they came and they picked them all up, put them back in
the crate, put them back on the pallet to be loaded into the
truck. And of course, when they did
that, they put the box back right side up and the corn flake
was back in the bottom box. And so he pushed and he shoved
and he shoved and he pushed and he pushed and he shoved and he
pushed till he got to the top of the box.
Being the great little corn flake that he was.
They loaded that pallet and those crates into the back of
the truck. The truck was driving down the
road. It was rough Rd.
It was bumpy Rd. There were lots of potholes on
the road. I'm not going to say where it
was, but you know, you know, with a lot of potholes on the
road and, and it was shaking and shaking and shaking.
And that shift, that corn flake right back down to the bottom
box. Well, he pushed and he shoved
and he shoved and he pushed and he pushed and he shoved and he
pushed till he got to the top of the box being the great little
cornflake that he was. Now we're stopping the story
there. I usually tell that story and
how long the ghost depends on how polite the audience is until
someone says, hey, does this story ever end?
I just told you I got 3 1/2 hours once.
Does this story ever end? To which I replied, no, it never
ends. It's a cereal.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
I'll be here all week. The corn flake, The corn flake
in that box remind me very much of the message that I believe we
have today for Easter and what it means to live the Easter life
in a world that has been turned upside down.
You see, go systems might be stacked against you, but at
Easter God has turned the world on its head.
God has turned the world on its head.
So. So the fact that the systems of
this world are stacked against you might be stacked against us,
ultimately is not relevant, ultimately doesn't matter,
because God has turned the world on its head.
When the women went to the tomb that morning, they expected to
find Jesus dead in the tomb. They had seen him on the cross,
the one they thought was the king, the one they thought was
the Messiah, the one they thought was the Savior.
They had seen him crucified, killed by the Roman Empire and
his body placed in the tomb, and they thought that was the end of
the story. But then they got to the tomb
and everything got turned upside down.
He wasn't there, the Angel said. He is not here.
He has risen just as he said. This had never happened before.
People have been raised from the dead before, but always there
was a prophet there. There was a person of great
power and and righteous standing with God there to do the
raising. There was no one there like that
for Jesus. Jesus had just risen from the
dead. And Mary, one of the folks at
the tomb, I got to think maybe she remembered something she
said all the way back before Jesus was born.
When she was pregnant, went visitor relative Elizabeth, and
inspired by the Holy Spirit, she said this of God and the baby
she was carrying. He has brought down rulers from
their Thrones and has lifted up the humble.
Jesus will take the people on top and bring them down and take
the people on the bottom and lift them up.
She prophesied that about her son before he was ever born and
then after he was born and they took Jesus to the temple to be
circumcised and they met 2 prophets there and one of them,
Simeon, had this to say about Jesus.
This child is destined to cause the rise, rising, and I'm sorry,
destined to cause the falling and rising of many.
This child is going to turn the world on its head.
The people on the bottom are going to be on the top.
The people on the top are going to be on the bottom.
And both parts of that equation are important because Jesus
isn't just taking the people on the bottom and lifting them to
the top. Jesus is taking the people on
the top and putting them on the bottom.
The first will be last as much as the last will be first in the
Kingdom of heaven. This is what Jesus came to do,
and this is what is accomplished at Easter.
The world turned on its head, and we see this at Easter in a
number of different ways. We see it first of all in that
the crucified slave triumphs over the Roman Empire and the
local authorities and religious elite.
The Romans crucified lots of people.
The Romans crucified thousands of people, and they did it for a
very specific reason. It was part of their strategic
plan. There was a lot more poor folks,
There was a lot more powerless folks out there than there were
rich and powerful folks. And the people that were rich
and powerful needed to make sure that the poor folks knew what
could happen to them if they stood up against the powerful
folks. And so when they saw fit, they
would take them and they would crucify them always for the
purpose of saying we are in charge, not you.
We have the power, not you. The Romans have almost
exclusively crucified slaves. The thing was, if someone wasn't
a slave that they wanted to crucify, they would make him a
slave. There's records of people that
that were leaders in the Roman government, senators even, that
were stripped of their position, stripped of their status,
stripped of their citizenship, turned into slaves and then
crucified so that the Roman Empire can say we own you, your
life is at our pleasure, we can take it whenever we want.
There's nothing you can do about it except Jesus said take your
best shot. Crucify me if you want crucify
me. I will not be your victim.
Ioffer my life willingly and my life will not end on your cross.
My life will end, will not end on my life will not end.
I will die on your cross, but I will rise again and live forever
in the Kingdom of my father. Jesus, the crucified slave,
triumphs over the Roman Empire, the most powerful force in the
world at that time. Instead of life ending and
death, now, death ends in life. Anyone here like clowns?
Is anyone here like clowns? You like clowns?
Awesome. I like clowns.
Anyone here hate clowns? Yeah.
OK, we got folks that hate clowns.
I got good news or bad news for you, depending on your
perspective. You might not know this, but
clowns started in the church. I don't mean that pastor's a
clown. That's not what I mean.
What I mean is that now this is hard to believe, but it's true.
There have been times in church history when pastors preached
really long, boring sermons. Really.
I'm serious. It happened.
It happened Back in the Middle Ages.
This was apparently a regular thing.
And so clowning was developed when the congregation got so
bored that they were like, you know, drifting off, not paying
attention from a door behind where the pastor was preaching.
A clown would emerge. And without speaking, they would
only do mine. They would do something to draw
the attention of the congregation back to what the
pastor was saying, not to distract, but to draw their
attention back. And in doing that, they were the
makeup that we traditionally think of as clown makeup, which
was white on 1st. White symbolized death.
White had symbolized death in ancient cultures for years and
years and years and years and years.
This was nothing new. It was nothing unique.
People, when someone died or when they wanted to remember
death or symbolize death, Everyone, everyone has skin
color. They would take ashes or some
other white substance and cover the color of their skin to say
that life ends in death, to remind folks that life ends in
death. Except the clowns and the church
put the white on, and then they put the color on top of the
white to remind the people in the church that we know life
does not end in death. Death ends in life.
And that's the origin of clowning.
That's where it came from. So the next time you're watching
it, just think of Jesus. You know, it's hard sometimes,
but clowns are there. They can remind us of Jesus,
that our life does not end to death.
Our death ends in life. And that happened at the
resurrection of Jesus Christ. And that is the promise that
stands in front of all of us who put our faith and our hope and
our trust in Jesus Christ that our life won't end to death.
Instead, our death will end in life.
Another way that the world was turned upside down was that
women were made the first apostles and evangelists.
The women, depending on which gospel we read, it's different
women. They, they, they don't all tell
the exact same story, but they all tell us that the women were
there first and that the women were first appointed as
apostles. That word apostle.
What happened? What?
Oh, was it a bug? Oh, I had, I had a ladybug
landed on my neck during the sunrise service this morning.
Yuck. So, so where was I?
Women? That word apostle, that word
apostle in the New Testament just means one who has been sent
out. And the Angel first came to
these women and sent them out. The Angel said to the women, go
quickly, tell his disciples, he has been, he has risen from the
dead. He's going ahead of you into
Galilee. There you will see him.
And what they were sent out to do was share the good news of
Jesus's resurrection, which made them not only the first
apostles, but also the first evangelists, the first sharers
of the good news. And that turned the world on its
head And Jesus's day and age and that culture and that time and
that place, women were not considered credible witnesses.
That's why one of the reasons why we can say if this whole
story was made-up and is a lie, it's a really bad lie because
people making up this lie would not put women as the first
apostles and evangelists. You would put men there because
that's more easily believed. But the story is that the women,
that God turned the world on its head from the very beginning of
the resurrection, and he sent the women as the first apostles.
To who? To the men who'd been following
him for all those years. He didn't go to them first.
He came to the women first. Jesus came to the women right
after the Angel told him. Jesus said, showed up and said
to them, do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to
Galilee. There they will see me.
So instead of sending the men, instead of the men being
appointed first, it was the women who had spent all those
years following Jesus who were first sent out as apostles and
as evangelists. Easter turning the world on its
head. And finally, the strategies of
the powerful that we see are powerless to stop the tactics of
the crucified slave. Rome crucified people
strategically to send a message. It was the part of the way that
they maintained control over a vast empire of diverse
ethnicities, religions and politics through brute force and
violent intimidation. And Jesus said I will not be
your victim Ioffer my life. I could call 10,000 angels.
They could come and set me free. But I'll die on your cross, not
because you want me to die there, but because I choose to
die there. I choose to die.
What you intend as an act of punishment and retribution and a
display of your power will instead be an act of grace and
mercy and salvation and a display of God's power over even
the Roman cross and the Roman Empire and the religious elites
that are manipulating things behind the scenes.
That's what happens at Easter. The crucified slave, his tactics
of love and mercy and compassion.
What a crazy. There's no strategy, but what a
crazy tactic. Hanging on the cross and praying
for forgiveness for the people crucifying you, explaining to
God they don't really understand what they're doing.
But that's what Jesus did from beginning to end.
Compassion, love, mercy, grace, truth, right up to the point
where he died and rose again. And those tactics overwhelmed
the might of the entire Roman Empire.
There was nothing Rome could do. Nothing Rome could do in the
face of Jesus tactics, the tactics of a crucified slave God
brings restores order to what sin has disordered.
See our our minds and our perceptions of life and the
world are so disordered that that we think of, and I've
phrased the whole title of the sermon and I repeatedly in the
message of God turning the world upside down, that at the
resurrection Jesus was turning the world upside down.
That's the most natural way to say it.
The most accurate way to say it is that at the resurrection God
turned the world right side up. It had been upside down since
Adam and Eve ate that fruit, the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil in the Garden so many years before.
And sin came into the world and death came into the world, and
now God is not turning things upside down.
Really, from our perspective, it feels that way, but He's turning
things right side up. We get it confused because our
perceptions are out of whack because we're born dead into a
dead system and we don't even really know what life is.
I have taught and said for years that when when, when God told
Adam and Eve, if you eat from the fruit of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, you will surely die.
And then they ate, but they didn't die.
But what if they really did die? And, and the problem is, is we
just don't recognize death when we see it.
And we don't recognize life when we see it because we've never
really seen someone really alive.
No one had until Jesus rose from the dead.
Here's a way of thinking about that.
Dallas Willard talks about this in his book Divine Conspiracy.
I think it's a wonderful book. And he tells the story of pilots
in the Air Force training on fighter pilots flying fighter
jets. And they were learning to fly on
instruments alone. They were, it was a night and
they were flying on no visual instruments alone, so no, no
visual reference points for them as they're practicing right now.
And then they receive the instruction to pull up and one
of the pilots pulls up, does the gesture and the move with the
stick to pull the plane up and fly straight into the ground
because she was upside down and didn't realize it.
This is how we live. This is how human beings live.
We live born upside down and and what is really up seems down to
us, and what is really down seems up to us.
And so when God puts the world right side up, it feels like
everything's being turned upside down because those on the
bottom, God is lifting to the top, and those on the top, God
is pushing to the bottom. And we can't forget that part of
the equation because that's part of it too.
Now, anyone here, MCU fan, anyone like Marvel movies,
Marvel Cinematic Universe? I love you, man, but I don't
love the MCU anymore. I used to love the MCU, but not
anymore. I think the MCU has become
boring. They've got a real problem.
And the problem is the multiverse, right?
That's it. The mall.
If you don't know, if you're not a nerd like Brenna and AJ and I,
the multiverse is this, that it's in the, in the Marvel
Cinematic Universe, loosely based on some sort of science,
that, that there are an infinite number of universes out there.
And in that infinite number of universes, everything that can
happen does happen. And what happens now in the
Marvel Cinematic Universe is if someone dies, even a really,
really important character, it doesn't matter.
They just find that same person in another universe and bring
them in. And so never whatever really
dies, there's no tension it it makes for boring storytelling.
And we're getting that. You know, they're trying to save
it with a new Avengers movie in which they're bringing back Iron
Man and they're bringing back Captain America, all these
people that had a heartbreaking death in Avengers End Game and
now they're going to come back. And but they've been doing that
for years. I just think it's boring because
there's no stakes anymore and it's boring storytelling.
However, that's the blessing of Easter, right?
The the curse of the MCU is death ends in life.
Everyone who dies comes back to life if the fans really want
them to. It's a curse for storytelling,
but in the Easter life, that's the blessing.
Death ends in life, and now there's still heartbreak,
there's still loss, there's still pain and separation.
But ultimately we know that that death will not be the end, that
life will be the end for that person.
And we have that hope and we have that confidence.
We have that blessing that our lives will not end in death.
Our death will end in life. And while it makes for Bory
storytelling, it makes for a wonderful grace and peace and
living when we can face our own cross and say, yeah, OK, kill
me, All right, God will give me my life back.
You took my family. It breaks my heart.
I lost my family. I wanted more time with my
family, but God's going to give them back to me and me back to
them. You can take the lives of
whoever you want to take, but God can give life back to
whoever God wants to give life back to.
And that's the blessing of Easter.
There's still pain, there's still death, but there is a
sequel. And we know the ending, just
like we know the ending to every Marvel movie that's been made in
the last 10 years. We know the ending.
For us, that's good death, sins,
and resurrection. One day Jesus will return.
The dead in Christ will rise, and the scripture says we'll
rise to get this. We will reign with Jesus
forever. The dead will be lifted up to
the top to live on high with Jesus.
Now, I don't mean on high in the sense of way up in the
spiritualized heavens someplace. This will happen on earth.
The dead rise on earth. We have bodies.
We're not cast for the friendly ghost, and we reign with Jesus
in the Kingdom of God, which has now come fully and completely on
earth. When that resurrection day
happens for us all, we know the ending.
If you don't know the ending in your own life, take care of that
today. The promise is most clearly and
directly for followers of Jesus. And it's this has been turned
into sort of a religious territorialism and religious
triumphalism. But if if we think of death as a
disease and Jesus is the cure, it's not about being a Christian
or being a church member. It's about turning to the one
who has life for everyone and making him the center of our
lives, saying, Jesus, I belong to you, not to me now you're
not. I don't want you to just be my
savior. I want you to be my Lord and
King. And I want to live my life your
way and in service to you because I know that you will
raise all of your servants to life in the end and all who
follow you in the end. I want to be part of your family
because your family you will raise to life in the end.
I think there's going to be a lot of people there that we
don't expect to be raised. I hope I'm one of those people.
You know, a lot of people don't think I'll be there, but you
know, I'm hoping because of the mercy of Jesus Christ.
But the clearest and surest way to have that hope is to
surrender our lives to Jesus. I'm not going to do every head
bowed, every eye closed thing. I got a lot of that preaching
when I was growing up. I found it really annoying.
I got saved like 14 times growing up.
I don't do those kinds of sermons, but take care of that.
It's not complicated. Just talk with God about it,
surrendering your life to Jesus and making Jesus your Lord and
and having that hope for yourself.
If you're uncertain about that today, look, hey, right, see it
cornflakes. Boom.
My very first gift. It's the first gift I've ever
made. So I don't take it doesn't take
me much to impress myself, but I I made that and and if you
pronounce it Jif, then then you're wrong.
But I love you anyway. It's either either way.
I call them gifts. But we the good news, really
good news for us is, is we're not the little Cornflake.
Little Cornflake had to push and shove and shove and push to get
himself to the top of the box by climbing up and over and on top
of other people to be the greatest little cornflake.
Our mission and Our Calling is exactly the opposite.
We're not in a race to the top for power and authority over
others. We are in a race to the bottom
to join Jesus in serving others. Remember, the greatest among
you, Jesus said, is the servant of all.
We're in a race to the bottom because we know that God is
turning the world upside down. We don't have to struggle to
get. We don't have to struggle.
We don't have to strive. We don't have to to get to the
top. God's turned the world upside
down. If we can get to the bottom and
serve others with love and humility and grace and
compassion in the name of Jesus, then when that turning over is
revealed for all the world to see, we have that hope that
Jesus will have us at the top of the box.
And we don't have to step on anyone to get there.
That's the hope that we have in living this Easter life.
We're going to talk more about that over the next few weeks.
But in a world that's upside down, we're not in a race to the
top. We're in a race to the bottom.
And we're trusting in Jesus to set all things right in the end.
In Jesus name, Amen. Amen.