We hear Good News this morning that Christ is risen; Christ is resurrected. And we respond the only way we know how on Easter Sunday. We say, “Hallelujah!” Well, what are we saying? ‘Hallelujah’ comes from two Hebrew words that unite to mean ‘the Lord be praised,’ ‘Praise the Lord!’ Hallelujah!

We talk about how we love because God first loved us and we serve because Christ first served us, and today we sing and shout ‘hallelujah’ because God says something first. Easter is about God saying ‘yes’ to Jesus Christ. And God’s grand ‘yes’ is the pronouncement of the resurrection. So, we hear, “Jesus is risen,” and our response is, “Hallelujah!”

But why does a message that is so hard to understand have to be crucial to the Christian faith? Why the resurrection, Lord? You could argue that the resurrection is the cornerstone of Christianity. Paul writes in his first letter to the Corinthians, “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is in vain.” No resurrection, no Christianity.

Anyone of any religion or anyone of no religion can say that Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem. That’s what we celebrate during Advent, so how does that distinguish us as Christians? Anyone can say that Jesus of Nazareth died on a cross; he was crucified. We observe the crucifixion of Jesus during Holy Week, so how does that distinguish us as Christians?

Well, we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and that’s a hard message for any human being to understand, be they religious or not, Christian or not. You may believe that Christ visited the disciples in human form and with nail-scarred hands and a wound in his side, walking through walls and eating food with them through his human mouth that went to his human body. And then Paul turns around and tells us that the body is not resurrected, only the spirit. Thanks, Paul.

Thanks for making things more difficult for us well-intentioned Easter people who just want to follow Christ. We just want to celebrate our Christian faith, but as we sit in our chairs this morning we might be forced to ask a question that we may have asked many times before: “How do we reconcile our difficulty, if not our inability, to understand the resurrection of Jesus with our desire to be Christian?”

There were a lot of summers when I would take the middle schoolers of our church’s youth group in Austin on a mission trip to Arlington where we would provide onsite Vacation Bible Schools for children living in low-income housing complexes throughout the city. And one of the main attractions of the VBS was the puppet show.

Kids loved the puppet shows. If middle schoolers are offering a puppet show outdoors, you can imagine how difficult it would be for children to hear what was being said. So, instead of relying on these teens to come up with skits that they would use these puppets for, Mission Arlington – the good evangelical folks that they were – provided us with music the puppets could dance and sing to. They took popular songs that the children might know, and they changed the words to reflect a more gospel-oriented message. For instance, instead of the The Beatles’ "She Loves You," it was "He Loves You" for God. Instead of "Hey, Hey, We're the Monkees!" it was "Hey, Hey, We're the Christians – the Romans try to push us around..."

They had some more modern tunes, too. One of my favorites was C&C Music Factory's "Everybody Dance Now." They changed that to "Everybody Praise Now!" It was good stuff! My favorite was from the 1985 soundtrack to Back to the Future – "The Power of Love" by Huey Lewis and the News. It became "The Power of God:"

Don't take money, don't take fame;

Don't need no credit card to praise His name...

But when it was time to do the puppet shows, we would never let the children see behind the cardboard puppet stage. We even had two of our kids guard the stage so no children would come back there and see what we were up to; as if these children had no idea that it was indeed us with our hands in these puppets moving their mouths with our hands. Why didn’t we just let them see?

Marcus Borg is a professor at Oregon State University, and he’s written a lot of books that delve into the history of Jesus and our interpretations of Jesus. I think our adult Sunday School class has read just about everything he’s ever produced. Borg talks about how he attended Easter services every year like a good Lutheran throughout his childhood and adolescence. And he says that he was very familiar with the Easter story, but that he heard it as fact. He thought to himself, “If I were alive 2000 years ago, then I could have seen those angels that appeared in dazzling white to the women at the tomb. If I had been there I could have seen Jesus walk through that wall and invite Thomas to put his hand in the wound in Jesus’ side.” Borg heard the stories as if they were facts that could have been videotaped if we had the technology.

But then he got older and started doing some research, and he was dismayed to find different interpretations of the resurrection story and conflicting dates as to when those accounts were written and so on and so forth. So based on the inconsistencies he discovered about the facts, his Christianity was shattered.

But it finally hit him. All this time he had been confusing fact with truth. He had allowed himself to become a factually fundamental Christian, and that caused a problem for him when the bubbles in the wallpaper of his faith started to become too much of an eyesore. He’d mistaken truth for mere facts, and his faith had paid the price. Now it was time for Borg, as he explains it, to understand truth as more than just facts. He sums it up in the words of a native-American story teller who tells his tribe’s story of creation by saying, “I don’t know if it happened this way, but I know this story is true.”

Here’s an example: This Bible is a collection of stories, letters, prophecies, parables and miracles, but it is not a textbook of facts. It’s the Word of God. It’s truth. And we shouldn’t be afraid of that. We should embrace that, because its in that faithful embrace that we can come to appreciate others’ viewpoints. We can come to love our shared understanding of truth.

My father-in-law, Randy, is a handyman among handymen. He makes Tim Allen on Home Improvement look like Mr. Bean. He likes to do different home projects around my house, which is fine. His latest project was building window benches over the air conditioning tubes in our attic. He brought his plywood, his electric saw, and his toolkit. While he unloaded all his stuff, Stacy and I sat Mac down and explained to him, "Pa Pa is here to make you something. He is making you a gift. Pa Pa is making you window benches."

Randy went upstairs and started to saw the wood, move the pieces around, and hammer it all together. Toward the end of the day, I picked Mac up and walked him down the hall. Randy met us at the bottom of the stairs, excited and out of breath. He asked Mac, "Hey, Mac! What am I making? What is Pa Pa making?" Mac said, "Noise!" That’s true.

We can teach kids how to get from point ‘a’ to point ‘b,’ but if they hear what we say and somehow learn from our words how to get from point ‘a’ to point ‘z,’ does that make what we teach any less truthful? We can put all of our efforts into achieving one specific goal, but the realization of that goal is in how the world understands it. That’s truth.

A doctor gives the facts to a cancer patient, “The chances of the chemo treatments working are slim to none,” and the cancer patient hears that and says, “I can do it.” That is truth. Somewhere this morning in a church filled with hundreds if not thousands of people, a preacher stands up in an authoritative pulpit and says that the Bible declares that homosexuals are condemned by God. And some of the minds and hearts in that congregation begin to percolate and they think, “That can’t be true. Not the God of love that I worship. It’s hard enough for me to accept me, and I know that God accepts me and loves me. If God can do that for me, why can’t God do that for everyone? What that preacher is saying can’t be true.”

The old Marcus Borg would look at the story of the two disciples’ walk to Emmaus and think, “If I were alive then, I could be walking with them, and I could see Jesus walking next to us. And when we had supper together, I could pull my video camera out and I could film Jesus breaking the bread and then disappearing into thin air.”

But would the facts make it true? Would the facts make our hearts burn at the presence of Christ as the disciples’ hearts burned on that Emmaus road? The story isn’t an account of something in history that happened on a particular day, but it’s true. So, Borg says, Emmaus didn’t happen. Emmaus always happens. That’s truth.

So here is how we answer our difficult question today, sisters and brothers: “How do we reconcile our difficulty, if not our inability, to understand the resurrection of Jesus with our desire to be Christian?” If we try to grope at the facts of the resurrection, then the resurrection never happened. If we try to piece together the evidence to find out exactly what happened in those 36 hours between when Jesus was laid in the tomb and when the tomb was discovered empty, then the resurrection never happened.

But if we seek the living Christ that lives in our hearts and works through our hands, then the resurrection always happens. And if we are as faithful to the truth as the women at the tomb were that first Easter morning, and we share the news of Christ alive and Christ with us, then the resurrection always happens.

The resurrection always happens. It’s when we’re so quick to defend the factual details of the events from 2000 years ago that the resurrection dies. If we’re afraid of the facts being inconsistent when it comes to the account of the resurrection, then we might never experience the truth of the resurrection.

Think about this recap of Jesus’ life:

Christ called a number of disciples to follow him

These disciples regard Jesus as a rabbi and a prophet

As they follow him, step by step they become aware of his spiritual depth

Peter confesses Jesus is the Christ, not having any idea the magnitude of what he’s saying

The transfiguration happens, where the disciples see the presence of God evident in this man

Then there is the climax at Calvary and the disciples’ shock at witnessing the death of this Jesus Christ

He was killed so that everyone would scatter and disappear, all his disciples. That was usually how you got rid of any rebellious problem in antiquity. But the disciples kept coming back not because they were drawn to the physical facts of an empty tomb. They were drawn back to the reality that this Jesus was the decisive disclosure of what God is like, and of the life which is full of God. They kept coming back because of the resurrection of Christ, and here we are: proof that the resurrection always happens. That’s truth.

So, I take you back to the puppet show. At the end of the week, what was the message that we shared with the kids? The Easter story. We had our song down, the kids were ready. They had their parts. They had their puppets. We had our youth at the side of the puppet backdrop so that no kid would get behind there to see what we were doing. We didn't want them to see the facts. All week long we had been fighting them off – "You can't come back here!" But we couldn't hold them off any longer. They started to peek behind that cardboard and we finally gave in. They walked behind and said, "Oh! I see what you're doing!" Then, when the puppet show was over, they asked, “Can I do it?” They put their hands in the puppets, held the puppets up high and started talking and laughing. The kids on the other side knew what their friends were doing and started to cheer them on and laugh. It was an empowering moment. It was a truthful moment. It was a moment of resurrection. That's what the Easter message is.

Sisters and brothers, when God looks at the world and sees us sharing knowledge and resources with each other, forgiving one another, breaking down barriers between each other, empowering one another, serving one another, loving one another and always offering our fellow humanity a second chance, then the resurrection of Christ happens and God’s truth is glorified.

Christ is risen…hallelujah!