Easter Sunday: 1 Corinthians 15:1-8, 12-27. "Minimal Facts. Maximum Hope?"

 In this podcast episode, Tim dives into the whole idea of "minimal facts" from 1 Corinthians 15:1-8, 12-27. He kicks it off with some everyday examples, like finding your toddler in a flour mess or seeing your car with a smashed window with the glove box opened; situations where you can pretty much piece together what went down with just a few basic facts.

Basic facts such as Jesus existing, getting crucified, and his tomb turning up empty is what's addressed on Easter. 

While common objections may be Jesus not really dying on the cross, crucifixion being the final deal, or the disciples moving the body are questionable when you think about how these guys faced death themselves while sticking to their story about Jesus coming back to life.

In the end, it emphasizes the hope we get from Jesus' resurrection. Rather than just wishful thinking – it's a promise of life after death, giving us something to hold onto even in the face of loss and grief. So yeah, when Tim says, "Happy Easter, friends. He is risen, he is risen indeed!" – it's not just some old saying; it's a message of hope that still rings true today.

Join us in 1 Corinthians 15 verses 1-8, 12-27  as we discuss the savior that we have. 

This Sunday sermon, based on1 Corinthians 15 verses 1-8, 12-27, was preached at Grace of God Lutheran Church on March 31, 2024.  This sermon is preached by pastor Timothy J. Walsh, a member of WELS (Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod). Scripture selections come from the New International Version.

Our services are at 9:30am every Sunday morning, at our campus in Dix Hills on Long Island. Visit our website for more information, at www.graceofgod.church 

Intro Music "On the Way" by Vlad Gluschenko https://soundcloud.com/vgl9
Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0

Outro Music "Divenire" by Ludovico Einaudi
copyright (℗) by: Ludovico Einaudi (in 2006)  

Transcript

Christ is risen, he is risen indeed! Alleluia, brothers and sisters.

Sometimes you come across a situation that requires very little explanation. You walk into the kitchen, the pantry is open, your toddler is covered in flour. “What happened?” You come out to your car, the window is smashed in, the glove box is hanging open. “What happened?” Despite having minimal facts to work with, you can still accurately construct the sequence of events.

Here’s a situation requiring more explanation. Two thousand years after a locally popular Jewish rabbi died on a Roman cross, billions of people around the world are singing songs this weekend that praise him as both God and the defeater of death itself. How?

People who have asked that question before have invented a phrase which I want you to leave with this morning: The minimal facts approach. Here’s the minimal facts approach. First, we sum up the basic, minimal facts which everyone - even non-Christians - agree to be true about Jesus and Christianity. Then we simply ask, what would explain the situation we observe? 

Let’s establish the minimal facts. Fact one. There was a Jewish rabbi - a religious teacher - named Jesus, who taught around the years thirty to thirty-three A.D. This rabbi’s ministry ended when he was executed on a Roman cross. That’s fact two. Fact three, the tomb which his dead body had been placed in was empty three days later.

Fact four. To the end of their lives, his followers - a group which came to include people who had been his enemies! - they claimed that over the next forty days after the tomb was found to be empty, Jesus appeared to them, bodily, physically, proclaiming that he had risen from the dead. Notice, the fourth fact is that they made these claims. The fourth fact is not that their claim was true yet, just that it was their claim.

Those are the minimal facts which every serious student of history, Christian or not, acknowledges. Someone who wants to deny any one of those needs to believe that world history has been fabricated on a level rivaling The Truman Show, the 1998 movie where Jim Carrey’s character finds out that his whole life has actually taken place on an enormous TV studio set. To explain away those minimal facts about Jesus, you have to believe in a lie even bigger than that. You need an unjustified level of skepticism.

Even early non-Christian sources, ancient sources outside the Bible, attest to the facts of Jesus’ existence and his execution on a cross. The authorities who executed Jesus acknowledged that his body somehow left his tomb. They maintained that his disciples had stolen the body. But all the ancient documentation we have, Christian or not, notes that his followers maintained that they had not stolen his body. Instead they claimed, often in the face of torture and death, that their dead rabbi had risen to new life.

Objections have been raised regarding these facts, before we even get to explanations. One common objection: “Well, other religious leaders have made similarly miraculous claims. Christians just choose to believe these ones.” It’s true that others have made miraculous claims. Not even two hundred years ago, we had Joseph Smith here in America, claiming to be a teacher sent from God, who ended up killed by his opponents. We could consider Mohammed, the founder of Islam, who likewise claimed to share words from God. Shouldn’t we assess all their claims - Smith, Mohammed, Jesus’ apostles - on equal footing?

Yes, in fact. We should assess all their claims on equal footing. We can start by looking at what they all stood to gain from the claims they were making. Let’s use the same two examples, Islam and Mormonism. Muhammad and his followers made the claim that God had chosen them to punish, with military force, those who did not worship him. Smith set himself up as the head of multiple new settlements in the American frontier, and even led a paramilitary on small campaigns. In contrast, the apostles taught new Christians to submit to existing authorities. They never tried to build new kingdoms. Indeed, most of the apostles spent the rest of their lives on the road, never staying in any place long enough to profit from making converts. They planted churches, made sure that things were in order there, and then went somewhere new.

Why? We have the reason they gave in their own words. One of those apostles, Paul, wrote to a church he’d started: “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless.” The only thing these people intended to accomplish with their preaching was to make other people aware of this resurrection. They were not trying to start new utopian societies, conquer cities and kingdoms, or win political office. The only thing which could give their work purpose at all, Paul acknowledges, would be the actual physical resurrection of Jesus.

That - to be very clear - is the explanation I’ll hold out for these minimal facts. Other explanations fall short. “Jesus didn’t die on his cross.” This doesn’t deal with the nature of crucifixion. People did not survive it. “Jesus didn’t exist.” Even non-Christian scholars admit he did. “The disciples did steal the body.” So it was a lie? Then they all - not just the twelve apostles, the prominent ones, but hundreds more, as Paul mentioned in our second reading - all of them maintained, to the point of their own deaths, that they had seen Jesus alive when actually they knew they’d stolen his dead body? Not a single one of them retracted this lie, even when facing death themselves? If resurrection from death seems unlikely, so is the idea of this being the only perfectly maintained mass lie in history!

We could go beyond the minimal facts and note other data which demand explanation. Some of these early preachers, like Paul, were former opponents of Christianity. What changed them? Most of these early believers were Jews, who were strictly monotheistic - they believed in one God, and one God alone. Anyone who would claim to be God would be committing blasphemy of the highest order. Somehow, within a few years, thousands of faithful Jews were claiming that this rabbi Jesus was God. What caused that? Even if someone could come up with another satisfactory explanation to the minimal facts, they all fall apart as soon as you start trying to work with the full set of historical data.

But I’ll stick with just those minimal facts this morning. Because resolving even these minimal facts can give us maximum hope.

The claim which the apostles, and others - the women who went to the tomb that morning, the many others whom Paul mentions in our reading from First Corinthians - they all claimed that this resurrected rabbi had one particular promise for them. They would also rise one day.

They claimed that Jesus’ resurrection was not a one-and-done event. Indeed, they claimed that the resurrection of Jesus was only the first of a greater resurrection; the eventual resurrection of all people. Every person, of all history, would be raised from death one day.

That’s the claim which has captured my heart. Death is not the end. Not tragic death, like Officer Jonathan Diller in Queens last week, or the men who were lost in the bridge collapse in Baltimore. Not slow death, like a grandparent who just doesn’t wake up one morning. No matter what form death takes as when it appears, it is not the end. 

It’s still present. It still threatens us, it still takes our loved ones from us. But its own end draws nearer every day. The Bible calls it “the last enemy that will be defeated.” Death will have an end. Life will not.

That’s hope. Real hope. And we get there from these simple facts. A man who died couldn’t be found in his tomb three days later. He’d promised that this would happen. And he promises that it will happen for you. Happy Easter, friends. He is risen, he is risen indeed! Amen.