Sermon: "Why Resurrection?"- March 22, 2026

The Fifth Sunday in Lent, Ezekiel 37:1-14; John 11:1-45

The Rev'd Cecil Patrick Perkins, The Rector 

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I speak to you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. This is one of those Sundays where you have a sermon in a book, and then you have a sermon that you want to preach, and I'm going to take the latter option. In two of our stories this morning, we hear the story of resurrection. Both the story of Ezekiel in the Valley of Dry Bones. The bones are called dry because this wants him to this is the way of saying these folks are dead, dead. The bones have already dried out. And then, of course, the story of Lazarus, Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. So we have resurrection all over these texts, and it's really good because I find as a priest that the doctrine of resurrection is one of the many doctrines that people seem to have a lot of trouble with. And so I'm going to take a few minutes this morning and notice I'm taking off my watch now. It's a completely meaningless gesture. Most of the time, people get stuck on resurrection because when they think in terms of the resurrection, they think when we're talking about resurrection, we're talking about Jesus. And of course, that's the case. We wouldn't have Easter without it. But we make a mistake when we think that Jesus' resurrection is the only resurrection in the Bible. It's a resurrection different than the others in that he brings himself back from the dead and does so in a new glorified eternal body that will never have to die again. But if you read the Bible carefully, you will find more than ten incidences of the resurrection of the dead. So if God is trying to do a singular thing simply by doing a resurrection, he really made a big mistake because by the time it got to Jesus, he had already done it a few times. What I want to suggest to you, however, is that the prevalence of resurrection in both the Old and New Testament serves another point to which Jesus focuses, Jesus' resurrection focuses as a crescendo and an arrival point of a higher degree. But more about that in a minute. When people come to the doctrine of the resurrection, I find that even folks who are willing to say I believe in God, they often have a harder time saying I believe in the resurrection of the dead. The reason for that is quite obvious. We don't see dead people come to life that often. I've never seen it, and I have served churches with lots of elderly people in them over my years. Never once have I seen it happen. There were a couple of times I was hoping it wouldn't, but that's a whole other story. Resurrection, however, is an important doctrine to understand in the church. And what we have to do as we talk to people about it is we have to remove some obstacles from believing in resurrection, but understand that we can never argue people into believing it using science or pure logic. It can't work, and I want to tell you why. Now, the first thing that I will say, this is straight up, if you can believe in God, then you have absolutely no logical reason to believe that resurrection can't happen. When you believe in God, you've already taken the step. You believe in something that is supernatural, which means above the laws of nature. And so if you believe in a God, then belief in the resurrection is not something you could say, couldn't possibly happen, because you've already committed to belief in a supernatural being. Resurrection, at least as a principle, comes along with it. The only question that's available to you is, did it really happen? And that's a much more interesting question. Now, here's the thing. Most people, when they say, I want to believe in the resurrection, but I have difficulty, they come down to the issue of evidence as well they should. Smart people always are looking for evidence. But we have to be careful when we're talking about resurrection evidence that we don't expect the wrong things or ask for more evidence than we do in other areas of our life. And let me let me tell you what I mean. I often ask people, what would you have to have for evidence to believe in the resurrection? And they said, Well, I would have had to have seen it. So it has to happen only to you, you who are the center of the world. It probably could happen in front of other people. They say, okay, okay, I believe it. But the but the I will believe other reliable evidence, reliable testimony, but it has to come from people who were reliable. And then this is where the church and the world tends to say if we're going to have evidence for the resurrection given by sources, in order for them to be reliable, we're going to have to have sources that don't believe in the possibility of the resurrection. That's what they always say. The only way that we're going to take your testimony is if you go into it not believing in it. But that's a problem because any of those people who actually saw it changed their mind. They're never going to hold that position. If you don't believe in the resurrection and you see one, guess what's going to happen? So you don't have many of those people running around. Secondly, we believe all sorts of things in life with a lot less evidence than we think that we should. How many of you, when you walked into the church this morning, took a look at the pew, got out your instruments, and started doing research to find out whether it would hold you up? I know maybe one of you, I'm not going to tell you who it is, may have may have done that. The thing, the reason that you don't is it's a properly basic belief. That's philosophical talk that says on the basis of all you know, you're almost so certain that this is going to work that you trust it without doing your own testing and research. Most of the decisions we make in life are those sorts of decisions. When you get in the car, buckle your seatbelt, go to the refrigerator, expect it to be cold. All of those are properly basic things that are based on what you already know and believe. And what I want to suggest to you in the midst of that, the doctrine of the resurrection, though it cannot be proven like you would prove one plus one is true, has enough information that with a little help, you can say that this is at least probable. And if we can get to probable, we can get to faith. Now here's the thing. I want you to understand that the best argument that can be made, to my opinion, for resurrection is an argument from logic. It's an argument that says, I can believe in this because it makes some sort of sense. It has some coherence to it. So what I want to do is to take a little bit of that on the basis of what we've already established and go at it that way. If you believe in God, and I hope that the majority of you do, you've already made a commitment to supernatural things. You've already made a commitment to an understanding that some things in Scripture have to tell us the truth, otherwise, we know nothing about God and Christ or of those sorts of things. So we're coming from that position. When we get to the matter of thinking of how the resurrection works, we have to think about what the resurrection is trying to accomplish. And to do that, I want to take you all the way back to in the beginning. In the book of Genesis, God created the heavens and the earth, all that is therein contained. He created human beings, he put them together and made a family, and of all the creation that God provided, God said, I'm going to say one thing that I don't want you to do, and that's to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and deal. For in the day that you do, you shall surely die. At the beginning of that story, the humans are told that this one step of unbelief against God will result in a death, not as a death sentence, but just as a fact. Now, knowing how God is, that God created all this, knowing that God in creating all of this had a will and a plan for all this, one can understand that God would want to see his plan and his will carried out forward. So, how does a God who created the heavens and the earth, who finds himself in a position with humans that says they will surely die, overcome that matter? It's through resurrection. Resurrection is the overcoming of human sin. It's the taking away of that death charge. It is God's saying that death is not going to have the final answer. The logic of resurrection throughout the Holy Scripture is a picture of what God is doing to overturn the fall. It's God's taking his good, good and very good creation and restoring it by taking away the thing that was going to ultimately separate it from him. That's the logic, the holy, holy logic of what is happening at resurrection. And then peppered throughout holy scriptures, we get tastes of it. We see the widow of Nain, we see Paul doing this, we see all sorts of people tasting life after death. But the sad thing about every one of those situations is that each of those people, though they were resuscitated, ultimately had to die again. They were raised from the dead to be sure, but they were not raised yet to eternal life. What Jesus did, however, in raising himself from the dead is to open up eternal life for all who are in Christ Jesus and basically says, If you are in me and I am in you, we are connected in such a way that my resurrection becomes your resurrection. So though you may drift off this mortal coil, death will not be the final answer. You will rise again. The logic of resurrection says that to believe in resurrection is not irrational because we base it not on evidence of the existence of God. You can't prove the supernatural through natural means. It's logically impossible. It's not based on eyewitness evidence because all the eyewitnesses are dead, and most people wouldn't listen to them anyway because they came to believe. Now I want to close by telling you this. If you are thinking, or if anybody thinks, that there is some sort of drop-dead argument that is going to help you go, wow, I believe in the resurrection without I have enough evidence in my heart and my mind, I fear that you will never have it, because I fear that God never wanted you to have it. If God gave us all the evidence that we needed for life, there would be no place for faith. But what God has given us is enough knowledge of who God is so that when we look at something like resurrection, we can say, though we have issues with evidence, it's still nevertheless coherent on the basis of who God is. Never will forget. I had the opportunity once to sit at the feet of Sarah Coakley, one of the most remarkable Christian theologians in the world today. She's held tenure track positions at Harvard, Cambridge, and Oxford, and I'm not talking about the one up the road. This woman has forgotten more than anyone would ever know. And I remember some at a at a meeting once, someone asked her the question, Do you believe in the resurrection? Because in her day it was kind of sexy not to. And she said, Yes, I do. And they said, What is the thing that made the difference? She said, Well, I looked at the evidence, I looked at the coherence of the thing, and that pushed me in the direction. But at the end of the day, the thing that made me believe in the resurrection ultimately and truly, and to the extent that I would rest my life upon it, is that when I started praying about it, God communicated to me in a way that was beyond evidence and beyond coherent, that wasn't unscientific and wasn't incoherent, but it solidified it to such an extent that I was able to take the step. Now, my friends, my hope for you is that through the midst of all of this you will be able to take the step. But don't think for a second that a magnifying glass and a slide rule will do it for you. It's impossible. You're asking for spiritual information through natural means, and it doesn't work that way. What I do hope is that you will leave this place today saying it's not irrational. There is evidence if we're willing to see it. But we see a church now that has rested upon this truth for years and years, proclaiming a God that is Himself trying to bring life out of death. I'm willing to take whatever risk is necessary to say that not only do I think this may be true, but I'm going to live my life as though it were. Amen.