About 130 years ago, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote his seminal work, Also sprach Zarathustra, a novel condemning the nihilism of his day. The book is most famous for the phrase “God is dead” and its claim that religion and other systems of morals and ethics had driven the world to the brink of ruin.
It’s easy to see how he might have come to such a conclusion. The world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries was hardly a utopia. Capitalism, largely unchecked, had become corrupted by humanity’s greed and was grinding people into the dirt. The era of the so-called Robber Barons, the Gilded Age, when wages were low, hours long, and safety precautions non-existent. People were expendable. “Hey, boss, we had six people mangled by the #9 machine.” “So what? Hire six more. There’s money to be made and that’s all that matters.”
We had developed weapons of such immense destructive power that we could scarcely understand what death they could deliver: the tank, the machine gun, poison gas, massed artillery. One hundred years ago we found out when the world entered its first world war and viciousness of it all is still staggering. We mourn the 70,000 or so who died in the whole of the Vietnam War, but such casualty numbers would be a single battle back in WWI.
God is dead. It’s not hard to see why people thought so. We had killed him with our own brutality.
We would like to think we’ve evolved past all that, but have we truly? Greed continues to corrupt our society, buying off politicians and community leaders and compelling them to turn a blind eye when workers are again ground into dust in the unrelenting pursuit of profit for a tiny few. Our weapons of destruction are so potent now that we can annihilate all life on this planet in the blind of an eye with a single nuclear strike. Climate change now threatens our planet with a similar extinction as sea levels rise and droughts turn fertile farmland into desert. All because we can’t say no to our own selfishness and cruelty.
But you don’t need me to tell you that. You turn on the news. You see it. Terrorist bombings. School shootings. There is very little in our world to inspire hope. Nihilism and despair are, in many ways, logical responses to a world gone mad.
God is dead. Well, a lot of people still think so. They see little evidence of his influence on the world today. It’s all us and our breakneck race to self-destruction.
But we are here today to proclaim that not only is God not dead, but that he is risen. God’s not merely alive, He is risen!
That may seem like a distinction without a difference, but it makes all the difference in the world. A god that is merely alive while the evils of this world run rampant is a god of apathy, a god who doesn’t care one whit about the state of his creation.
Sorry, Newsboys, that's not good enough.
But that is not our god.
Our God put into motion a plan ages upon ages ago to set right what has gone wrong in the world. It began with a man named Abraham and God’s promise to make of him a chosen people from which would come “a blessing for all the families of the Earth.”
God nurtured these people with leaders and prophets, teachings and the law. And then when the time was right, he brought forth from them another man: Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus took those teachings and promises to a new level, showing us the true heart of God. A god who does care for this world. A god who loves this world. And he could do that with honesty and sincerity because “he and the Father were one.” He was God incarnate, and yet one of us here on Earth.
But the evils of this world were not content. They were threatened by Jesus and they sought to destroy him. We sought to destroy him. After all, he taught that people have value, that they are precious to God. But we don’t want that to be true. We want God to hate the same people we do and because Jesus refused to play along, we killed him.
That should have been the end, but it wasn’t. That should have been evil’s triumph, but it wasn’t. No, for after three days, Christ arose from the grave. Demonstrating once and for all that evil and death and sin do not have the last word. GOD DOES and his word is life.
That’s why Jesus is risen matters. Because if he is risen, then evil is defeated. Death is defeated. Sin is defeated. And all that is wrong in this world will one day be put right.
That is our faith. That is our hope. It is what we believe. It is why we are here. This day and every Sunday. It’s our message and our mission.
Which brings us back to a world that believes God is dead. Why? Why do they think that?
Could it be because we’ve given them no reason not to?
When we give into fear and despair and the nihilism of this world, why would anyone believe us when we claim Christ is risen? And yet, that is what we do so often. When you see Christians on the news, what do you see?
You see people cowering in fear over refugee children. Oh, no, they might be terrorists. But they are children of God and precious to him. And our God is greater than any terrorist, so why are we afraid?
You see people damning others for who they share their bed with. But the Bible says...Yeah, but it also says to love your neighbor and it hammers that lesson home hundreds of times more frequently than the paltry handful of verses that even allude to homosexuality. God is greater than any sin, real or invented, so why are we afraid?
When we cave into our fear and despair, we declare to the world that we are liars when we walk into this place, because we don’t believe what is proclaimed here. Not really. There is nothing to fear when you have a God who is risen and struck down the powers of death. No force on Earth trumps our God. No sin. No evil. No violence. No wrong teaching. No lifestyle. No nothing is greater than he. And he went to the cross and rose again for you and I and everyone.
That is the truth. Christ is risen. Now live like it. Amen.
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