Start Here: The Other Side
March 27, 2016
Dr. Tom Pace
Mark 15:46-16:8

Then Joseph bought a linen cloth, and taking down the body, wrapped it in the linen cloth, and laid it in a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock. He then rolled a stone against the door of the tomb.Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses saw where the body had been laid. When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him.And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb.They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us at the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back.As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed.But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him.But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

Let’s pray together as we consider God’s Word. O God, open us up. Open our eyes that we may see, our ears that we might hear. Open our hearts that we might feel. And then, O Lord, open our hands, that we might serve. Amen.
In October of 1989 I was a young pastor and had left St. Luke’s a couple of years before that. I had been the pastor of youth here from 1982 to 1987 and then I went to the City of South Houston, just by Hobby Airport. I was serving as solo pastor there – my first solo gig as they say. I had just gotten a new executive assistant, a young woman who was bright and energetic and spoke Spanish fluently. All the things I’d been anxious to have.
I think she’d been with me maybe a month or so and we received a phone call that her husband was missing. Her husband worked for Phillips 66 at the chemical plant in Pasadena. Many of you remember October of 1989 when 23 people were killed in a huge explosion there, and her husband was one of those who was killed. In that time of anguish this young woman just didn’t know what to do. She asked me questions, “What do I do now?” She called me maybe three hours after the explosion. She’d gone back to her house in Pasadena and she called me back at the church and said, “There are people here from the company and they want me to sign some things.” I said, “I don’t think you should sign anything.” I called an attorney here at St. Luke’s whom I knew and he helped her find a different attorney because it wasn’t his thing. I went with her to meet with the attorney, and I went with her to the funeral home to make arrangements for the memorial service.
She was filled with these very pragmatic and practical questions, like “How do I deal with this?” and “What do I do with this?” And we kind of struggled through those. I didn’t know a lot of answers myself and we just sort of figured it out.
But in the midst of it she asked me a question that I’ve had many people ask me since then in many different contexts. She said, “How will I ever get through this? How will I ever get through this?”
The women on the way to the tomb asked a question. It’s kind of funny because it’s stuck right there in the middle of the gospel lesson. It says, “The women asked, ‘Who will roll away the stone for us?’” They’re going to anoint the body and they want to know who will roll away the stone for them. It’s such a pragmatic question. But I think underneath that, below that was a much more fundamental question, which was “How will we ever get through this?” That’s really what’s going on when you’re coping. These were women who were saying, “We have given everything. We have given a hundred percent. We have given our all to be following Jesus – we’re all in for him! And now he’s dead – how will we get through this? What will we do now?”
I suspect that you all have had those kinds of questions at one time or another where you’ve asked the question, “How will I get through this? What will I do now?” And I want to tell you that the answer is that God will get you through. God will get you through and get you to the other side. You will get to the other side of that grief, of that challenge, of that pain.
One of the most profound images in Scripture is that of the Children of Israel wandering in the wilderness. Moses has led them, and they get to the edge of the Jordan River and Joshua is there. They can see across the river into the Promised Land, to the other side, into the land of milk and honey. And Joshua is standing on this side and his job is to lead them through the river to the other side.
One of the hymns I love the best is the American folk hymn “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand” and I’ve asked Cynthia Wilson to sing the first verse for you:
On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand,
and cast a wishful eye
To Canaan’s fair and happy land,
where my possessions lie.
I am bound for the promised land,
I am bound for the promised land;
Oh who will come and go with me?
I am bound for the Promised Land.

I was just going to read you those words when I wrote the sermon but I decided that would really be stupid with her here to sing it. “I’m standing here on this side of the river and I know that God has something over there. I’m going to have to get through the river. I’m going to have to get through this challenge. I’m going to have to get there. But I can get through whatever it is that I’ve got to get through because I know that God will take me to the other side.”
Here’s the way that the writer of Hebrews puts it: (Hebrews 12:2) “We are to look to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross.”
So the joy is ahead, but we endure the cross to get there. You can’t go around it, you can’t go under it, you can’t avoid it, you’ve got to go through it. But when you get to the other side there’s joy.
Jesus appears to his disciples and he shows them the holes in his hands and his feet. Look, we went through the cross, we’re going to have to go through it, but there’s joy on the other side. And once we get that, once we believe that, that changes everything, because then we as Christians live as Easter People. We know about Easter, so whatever comes our way we know that God will get us through to the other side.
Have you seen the movie “The Sixth Sense”? It stars Bruce Willis and it’s an old movie- maybe 20 years old almost. In fact it showed up on HBO this week, and I’d already written the sermon and thought that was one of those weird moments. So here’s the story: It’s about a guy named Malcolm Crowe who’s a psychologist and he’s working with a 9 year old boy who is having psychotic breaks, perhaps. He’s seeing dead people. That’s where the line “I see dead people” comes from.
Now by the way, if you haven’t seen the movie I’m going to spoil it for you. So he says, “I see dead people” and Malcolm Crowe, the doctor, isn’t really sure whether these are hallucinations. At first he assumes they are but then as time goes on he begins to believe maybe they are visits from spirits. But here’s how the movie ends, this is where it gets good. At the very end of the movie you realize that Dr. Crowe himself is one of those spirits, or hallucinations, or dead people.
So here’s why I like this: once you realize this, you have to go watch the whole movie again. Now you see it completely differently and every time you see Dr. Crowe you think, “He’s not really there.” So, there’s a place in there where he’s chasing a car that won’t stop while he’s yelling “Stop! Stop!” Because he’s not really there. It changes the way you look at everything.
As Easter People we’ve seen the end of the story. So we can look at our lives completely differently. We can see the presence of God in places where you might not otherwise because we’ve seen the end of the story.
My wife Dee got a sewing machine some years ago and it does embroidery, fancy embroidery stuff. It’s kind of fun. You take the computer and design whatever you want on there and then you plug it into the machine. She does some magic with the fabric first, then you put it in there and push the button and it does the embroidery. So now everything she sees she thinks, “We need a monogram on that.” Or “I think that needs to be monogrammed.”
So you take it out and when you look at one side it looks crazy. There are stitches and thread and stuff and going all different directions. It looks like it’s a mess. But you turn it over to the other side and it looks different. It’s beautiful. It’s a design.
As Easter People, as people who already know that the tomb was empty, we can look at our lives completely differently. Now we still have to go through those things, we still have to face the challenges.
In 2013 Matthew Warren, a young man who had struggled with mental illness all of his life took his own life. And it was devastating for his family. Just devastating. Just short of a year later on Easter, 2014, his father, Pastor Rick Warren, of Saddleback Community Church, preached his Easter sermon.
He preached about what it was like to go through that year since his son’s suicide. He talked about it in terms of the three days of Easter. Friday, the day of incredible loss and pain, and anguish. Pain unbearable. Pain devastating. So much pain you couldn’t see anything but the pain. And then Saturday, the day of confusion and doubt when nothing seemed to make sense. And the things that you believed you were trying to find and hold on to but you were confused. The foundation that you felt like you stood on kind of shook beneath you. Then finally to get to an Easter. The day of joy. The day of life.
Now of course those take longer than a day. Each one of those “days” takes some period of time of course. But his message was simple, that there is an Easter and you’re going to go through each of these days. And of course you’re going to. Jesus stood before Thomas and he said, “Yeah, I went to the cross,” and then he showed him his hands and his feet.
A few minutes ago we sang the last verse of “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today.” It says, “Made like him, like him we rise, ours the cross, the grave, the skies.”
It doesn’t go right to “Ours the skies.” Sometimes what we like to think is “Jesus went to the cross so I don’t have to. Jesus went to the grave so I don’t have to.”
That’s not right. The fact is that he called on his disciples saying, “You want to be like me, then you take up a cross and follow me.” Yes, there’s going to be a cross. Yes, we’re going to have challenges. Yes, we’re going to have holes in our hands and our feet. We’re going to have pain. But the message of Easter is that on the other side there’s joy. On the other side there’s life. And because we’re Easter People we can see life in that perspective. Because we know how the story ends.
So I don’t know what challenges you face. Here’s the Scripture by the way that Rick Warren used and I think it’s powerful. “Very truly I tell you, you will weep and mourn, you will grieve but your grief will turn to joy. A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come, but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of the joy that a child is born into the world. So with you. Listen, now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice and no one will take away your joy.”
He’s saying, “Look, you stand on the Easter side and you get through because God will get you through to the other side. I don’t know the rivers you will face, the challenges or the grief or a sickness, or fear or unemployment, or financial trouble. I don’t know what it is. Whether it’s a failure where you feel like you’ve failed and you don’t know how you’re going to get through it. Or maybe a divorce or a problem in a relationship, or difficulties with your children. I don’t know what that river is. But here’s what I tell you. You can’t go around it, you can’t avoid it, you’ve got to go through it. But when you go through it there’s joy on the other side that will draw you through.”
Maybe you saw the interview Matt Lauer did with the woman named Shareen Naragi who was a survivor in Brussels of the explosion that was in the airport that day. She’d evacuated and when he was talking to her (she was an American) he asked “How are you going to get home?” And here’s what she said – she was talking about the airport itself. “I don’t really ever want to set foot back in there again. But I need to get home so I’m going to do what I have to do. It’s going to be difficult but I have to be brave. I have to be strong. I just keep trying to tell myself this: don’t think of it as you’re going back to a terrible place. Think of it as your catalyst to get home. I’m going to go through this deep river, I’m going to go through a place of pain, I’m going to go through a challenge but that’s my catalyst, to get to the other side. I’m going to learn everything I can in this place but I want to get to the other side.”
There will come a day when every one of us will face one last river. One last something to get through. There will come a day for every one of us. You can’t avoid it. Death and taxes – you can’t avoid it. Every one of us.
But we’re Easter People so we know that across that place of death and pain, across the other side of the tomb there’s life. Everlasting life.
I was invited to go to lunch with a man from our church whose wife passed away in 2015. He’s in that day of doubting and confusing in the mix there. He was looking for his pastor to just give him some assurance that it’s real. I turned to Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians and here’s what he says, “We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died so that you may not grieve like others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again even so through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. God will take to him those who have died, you and me.”
I want you to listen to the last two verses of the hymn “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks I Stand.”
No chilling winds no poisonous breath
can reach that healthful shore;
Sickness and sorrow, pain and death,
are felt and feared no more.
When I shall reach that happy place,
I’ll be forever blest,
For I shall see my Savior’s face,
And in His bosom rest.
I am bound for the promised land,
I am bound for the promised land;
Oh who will come and go with me?
I am bound for the Promised Land.
O loving God, we thank you that you have made us an Easter People. That we can look at our lives and know how it ends. And know that on the other side of every challenge, of every pain, of every failure, there is joy and victory. And that you are a God who can pull us through the cross to the empty tomb. Help us, God, to claim that today. You know what’s ahead for us and what we need, and we pray that you will just help us to claim that. We pray in the name of Christ our Lord, Amen.