The Beatles and Christ

Palm Sunday 2018

       Fifty-five years ago this week the Beatles released their first album. It included hits like “Please, Please me," “I Saw Her Standing There,” and “Do You want to Know a Secret.” I loved that album then. I still do. Last summer, my daughter asked me to choose a song for her and me to dance to at her wedding reception. “That’s easy” I said, “Let’s dance to John Lennon’s version of Twist and Shout," which I consider to be the best song on that first album. My daughter was thrilled with my choice, “That’s cool, Dad,” she said. I mention that because I was ten years old when the Beatles came on the scene. I fell in love with them quickly and for about the next decade of my life I, along with everyone else in my generation who did not idolize the Rolling Stones, idolized them. I had a happy case of Beatlemania. I eventually grew out of that state of semi-idolotry but I still do love the Beatles' music, especially that first album. I always will.

       But my love for the Beatles is not unconditional. As great as their music was, Beatlemania led many, including the Beatles themselves into a dark place. The Beatles music at first was relatively innocent. They sang about experiences that were important to teenagers at the time. They had a hit song called, “I want to hold your hand”. It doesn’t get more innocent or sweet than that. But gradually they lost their innocence. The Beatles began to smoke pot and their music reflected it. Then they moved on to doing LSD and to glamorizing that experience. Then they went to India and got into transcendental meditation, openly embracing pseudo-eastern mysticism. Then they began to write angry songs about "revolution." The revolution they advocated was less political than it was cultural and sexual. Their own personal life styles of sexual promiscuity and drug use set bad examples for the millions of teens who saw them as cutting edge icons defining what it is to be cool. The message sent by their music and lifestyle was not lost on their adoring fans: cool people are liberated—liberated from the taboos and old-fashioned morality of a tired and out-of-touch Christianity; cool people are open-minded to finding new ways of being in the world un-bound by the prejudices and superstitions of Christian orthodoxy. The end result of this counter-cultural movement—a movement that would have gone nowhere nearly as fast without the Beatles and their music—was that millions of young people lost their faith and forever lost interest in the Faith ( Jude 3). And a whole generation of kids who might have become Christian apologists became agnostic hippies and drop outs rejecting the Faith before they ever had a chance to even understand it. That’s no small thing. It was major cultural tragedy the effects of which we are still feeling today.

       How different might our social history have been and how different might we as a people be today had the Beatles been faithful Catholics who went to mass every Sunday or born-again Christians who went to Bible Study on Wednesday night? What if they had not been sexually promiscuous and rejected pot and other drugs? Might they have defined cool for our generation in other terms? Could it ever be cool to be Christian? What if John Lennon instead of writing a song called “Imagine," a sad paean to his pathetic atheism, had written a reverent hymn to Jesus? We might be singing a Beatles hymn today in church. Is it so hard to imagine? Was Jesus really so un-cool?

        After church today someone will ask you what the sermon was about and some of you will say, “He preached about the Beatles and said he didn’t like them.” Be kind. That isn’t fair. I love the Beatles. But I regret what has happened to our society in the last fifty–five years since the Beatles came along, and I regret the advent of what’s become a universal and ubiquitous pop culture, born of Beatlemania that is, at its core, dogmatically secular and anti-Christian. You might argue in rebuttal that I have no cause to be so critical. Jesus taught that love is the aim of life and the Beatles music celebrates love. After all one of their best songs has the refrain, “All you need is love.” What could be more Christ-like than that?

      All right, you make a point. There’s no denying that Jesus taught us before and above all things to love one another (Mt.22.34-40; Lk.10.29-37). And every Sunday before the offering I quote the words of Saint Paul to the church in Ephesus, “Let us walk in love as Christ loved us.” ( Eph.5.1-2) I think we all agree that Jesus stood for love. And so did the Beatles. So does the Pop Culture, or so they think. So what’s the problem?

       The problem is that when the Beatles sing “All you need is love” they are defining love in wholly humanistic terms. “The love you take is equal to the love you make," whatever that means, is how John Lennon put it in another lyric. The significance of Jesus, by contrast, is that his love for us was more than human. He revealed to evil and selfish men and women by his sinless life, his prophetic death and his inspired resurrection, the very nature of divine love. “No greater love has a man than this “he said, “that he lay down his life for his friends” (John 15.13) True love is sacrificial. And no one has ever made a greater sacrifice for more undeserving and largely ungrateful people than that which Jesus Christ made for the whole world by his willingness to accept torture at the hands of Pontius Pilate and death by crucifixion.

       That’s why we’re here today: to remember what he did for us by his suffering and death on a cross and to know what it means.

       There are many in the world today who would say that his death doesn’t mean anything special. It just means that one day long ago on a hill in Jerusalem a very good man was unjustly executed by religious bigots and was bullied to death by a tyrant. It just means that nothing in this world will ever change until people learn to beat their swords into plowshares and love one another. It’s the oldest story in the history of humankind: good guys finish last.

      There’s only problem with that interpretation of the story of Jesus’ death. Jesus was many things, a humble man who lived at home with his mother until age thirty, a prophet who put his life on the line to proclaim the word of God; a king come down from Heaven to rule Israel in peace. But the one thing he was not was just a good man. A good man is the one thing he could not have been.

   “ For heaven’s sake”, some are thinking, “how can you stand in the pulpit of a church on Palm Sunday and say that Jesus was not a good man?” I say that out of respect for him because anyone who honestly examines his life and takes him at his word sees that Jesus did not leave us the option of regarding him as just another good man. He was and could only have been one of two things. He was either the “righteous one” of whom Isaiah spoke: the sinless, sacrificial victim who would by his death “make many righteous” (Is.53.4-12), the Savior to whose coming among us to stay all the prophecies of the Old Testament point (Mt.13.16-17). Or he was a bad man, a liar, deceiver and blasphemer who pulled the wool over the eyes of his disciples and to this day continues to sew religious discord and controversy wherever his name is mentioned. Either way he was not just a good man. He was either much more than that or much less than that. He either was who he claimed to be: the Christ and eternal king of Israel whose rule, he said to Pilate, “is not of this world” (John 18.36). Or he was, as his accusers said, a magician whose occult powers to work so-called “miracles” came not from God, whom he blasphemously called “my Father,” (John 5.17-18) but from Satan (Mt.12.24). In other words he left us no choice but to either worship him as God’s Son or reject him as an impostor. But to marginalize him as a good man is not an option. He ruled that out the day he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey.

        What does a donkey have to do with it? It was not by accident that Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey. His choice of vehicle for this triumphant parade may have seemed foolish to some but it was deliberate on his part. Remember what he said in the Sermon on the Mount: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them”(Mt.5.17). One of the prophecies that he had to fulfill was the word spoken by Zechariah, “Your king will come to you humbly and riding on a donkey” (Zech.9.9). By doing this, Jesus publicly identified himself as the humble king of Zechariah’s prophecy. If it was just a random act of foolishness, Jesus had every opportunity to tell the crowd that he was not really a divine king and that they shouldn’t be waving palm branches and welcoming him as the Savior. But he did not do that. He let the crowd think what they were thinking, that their long awaited king had come at last. So you see, after he did what he did on that fateful Palm Sunday there was no going back. There was no retreating after that into the safe space of saying, “Hey man, I’m just like you. I just want love and peace to rule the world. That’s all I’m trying to say, man. All you need is love.” No. He presented himself to Israel as their king. After that, he would either prove to them that his rule was eternal or they would hang him for blasphemy. The irony of the story is that in order to prove himself the eternal king, they had to first hang him for blasphemy.

       In a few minutes from now, before the offertory, I will once again say to you, “Let us walk in love as Christ loved us”. But that is not all of it. The full quote is this: “Let us walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Eph.5.1-2).  The reason Jesus surrendered himself to death and allowed himself to be tortured and crucified by men from whom he could easily have escaped had he wished, was that he came to earth to die for us. He who was sinless came among us as one of us to be the perfect sacrifice for our sins. This was something, an eternal redemption that he alone being, by virtue of his divine nature, God’s only begotten Son could accomplish. And it had to be accomplished because we need more than love. Our salvation depends in part on our commitment to a life of good works (Titus 2.11-14), “do everything in love”, the apostles said repeatedly (1Cor.16.14). But for there to be any hope of salvation in the first place, we need our sins forgiven, we need the curse of eternal alienation from God set upon our race by God as the punishment for Adam’s original sin, to be lifted. That is what Christ accomplished for us by his death on the cross. That’s what he meant when he uttered with his last breath, “It is finished”(John19.30).

       By his death, he established for us all the means by which we might be in full communion once again with God (Jer.31.31-34). That is why it is misleading to say, “All you need is love” when what we need most of all and first of all is what Jesus Christ gives us: baptism for the remission of original sin and Holy Communion for the forgiveness of our actual sins. That’s the food and drink of our soul’s salvation; that is the sure foundation of world peace; that is where eternal hope and true love is to be found: in the blood of Christ shed for the sins of the whole world on a cross (1 Pt.1.17-19; 1 John 2.1-2).

Remembering Billy Graham

I remember from my youth that there were two outstanding preachers on television. Bishop Fulton J. Sheen had a weekly program in the 1950s called "Life is Worth Living." And in the 1960s right up to the dawn of the new century, Billy Graham would appear on television three or four times a year preaching to stadiums full of people in what he called “a crusade” for Christ. The two men could not have been more different. The one was a Catholic. The other was a Southern Baptist. The one had a PhD in philosophy having studied at the Sorbonne and taught at Oxford. The other was just a common man from North Carolina with a common public school education. One wore the purple vestments befitting a prince of the Church ordained in the apostolic succession. The other wore a modest suit and tie and was, as he said, simply answering the call God had given him.

        But for all the differences between these two men, they had one thing in common. In an age of liberalism which has dismissed the supernatural and miraculous elements of the Gospel as nothing but superstition and legend, these two men spoke with authority affirming with certainty beyond doubt the absolute truth of the word of God. In an age of agnostic unbelief, they believed. They believed the Bible, which tells us that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins. And their message to America, though delivered in very different ways, was essentially the same. It was the timeless message of the New Testament: that the same Jesus Christ who died in Jerusalem accursed on a cross for our sins will one day come again on the clouds in glory to judge the living and the dead. And on that day when he judges the world there will be a stiff penalty to be paid by all who have not believed in Him.

         But why him? Why is it so important that we believe in Jesus Christ? Why won’t faith in Moses or Buddha or Mohammed or any one from a myriad of old souls and gurus do? They won’t do, because not a one of them has the power to save us from our sins. Christ alone, having risen from the dead, can rescue us from the curse of death that God put upon Adam’s descendants because of Adam’s sin. For as the Bible says, “There is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Tim.2.5). The world has known many religious leaders, prophets true and false, and our age is full of fortune tellers and spiritual guides. But Jesus Christ alone came to earth from heaven to sacrifice himself for our sins. By raising Jesus from the dead, after he faithfully suffered torture and crucifixion in accordance with the scriptures, God revealed that Jesus was more than a prophet or a wise and righteous man. He was the only begotten Son of God.

       This is a mystery hard to understand.  He who had the power to exorcize demons, heal the blind and raise the dead to life again willingly underwent torture and gruesome death by crucifixion; why? While he was dying on the cross, his merciless tormentors taunted him by saying, “He could save others, why doesn’t he now save himself? Come down from the cross and we’ll believe in you” they laughed. Why didn’t he come down from the cross? Was he powerless? No. He who created the universe by the power of his word was all powerful. But in his human nature the Son of God was entirely committed to one thing: obedience to God. That he was God’s son made it no easier for him to do what he did. Foreseeing all that he would be required to endure to redeem humankind from sin, Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Father let this cup pass from me, nevertheless not my will but thine be done.” Had he come down from the cross there would be no Gospel to proclaim, no sermon today to preach, because the scriptures would have gone unfulfilled. Had he not died on the cross, he would have failed to make atonement for our sins, and Satan, who defeated Adam in the beginning, would have won again. That is why, after he told his disciples that the Christ must suffer and die, Jesus was furious with Peter when his disciple said to him, “No way Lord, you must not do this.” Our Lord reprimanded him harshly, saying to him, “Get the behind me Satan, for you are not on the side of God but of men.” Christ became our savior by dying for us. And by taking all the sin of humanity upon himself—which he alone could do, being fully divine—he abolished those sins by putting them to death in himself. “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do,” he prayed as he took his last breath. What he prayed for us, he accomplished by his perfect faithfulness to God, faithful even unto death.  St. John, who alone among the chosen twelve stood faithfully at the foot of the cross with Mary, summed up the significance of this event in these immortal words: “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son to the end that all who believe in him may not perish but will have eternal life.” ( John 3.16).

        In an age when preachers everywhere are wasting precious time advocating for marriage equality, gun control, black lives matter, and hundreds of other political causes adored by politically correct progressives, while men and women everywhere are losing their souls to sin, giving themselves over to unspeakable promiscuity, these men kept the focus of their preaching and teaching where it belongs: on the precious blood of Christ shed on the cross which alone has the power to save our souls.

      At the end of each sermon, Billy Graham would offer, as is the custom in the Southern Baptist church, an altar call. He would invite those in the congregation to come forward and receive Christ he would say, “as your personal Lord and Savior.” It was always impressive to see hundreds of people come forward in response to his preaching, many of them in tears and all of them wanting to repent of sin and begin a new life following the commandments of God. And as the people responded faithfully after hearing Billy Graham preach, the choir would sing the hymn "Just as I Am"—"Just as I am without one plea but that thy blood was shed for me, and that thou biddest me come to thee, O lamb of God I come, I come."

       Some may wonder, why don’t we ever have an altar call? If we did, maybe we could get some of the sinners in this congregation converted. But if you think we don’t have an altar call, look again. What do we do at the end of each service after we have preached the word and lifted up Christ to God in the Blessed Sacrament consecrated on the altar? We pray to him who takes away our sin by taking it upon himself: O Lamb of God who takest away the sins of the world have mercy upon us. And then the priest invites us to come forward and receive Christ who humbly comes to us disguised under the forms of bread and wine. We kneel at his altar rail and we humbly offer our souls to him as he imparts the divine sanctity to us forgiving our sins. That’s an altar call, my friends. Whether you’re worshipping in a Protestant church or Catholic, that’s what it’s all about, you give your soul to Jesus Christ who gave his life for you or 'you got nothin'.' But when you have Christ in you the hope of glory you have everything. For he who rose from the dead after having died on the cross as he said he would, will keep his promise and his word is sure: “all who see the Son and  believe in him will have eternal life,” he said, “ and I will raise you up on the last day.”

         Many will say that Protestants and Catholics are so different, they have nothing in common. But not really. All of us who are Christian believe that Jesus is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. As soon as I say that I know that there are many here today who wonder: Lamb of God? What is that? Well, the answer is in the Bible. Go back to the story of Abraham and Isaac. God tested Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his son. Abraham did not rebel but obeyed God. He led Isaac to a mountain to sacrifice him to kill him. Like Jesus would centuries later, Isaac carried the wood on which he was to be sacrificed up the mountain. And like Jesus would, Isaac obediently did what his father asked of him and laid on the wood. But as he lay on the wood he asked Abraham, “My Father, where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’ And Abraham said “God will provide the lamb.” At that moment God provided a ram. Abraham took the ram and offered it to God, God then accepted the ram and spared Isaac.

       But unless Abraham was a liar, and not a righteous man, God had still to provide a lamb. The absence of that lamb is mystery hovering over the whole Old Testament. Abraham, whom God declared to be a righteous man, could not have been a liar. Therefore, there had to be a lamb yet to come. A greater sacrifice than Abraham would have made of Isaac was still to come. But what would it be; when and where? No one knew.  The answer would come two thousand years after the events related in Genesis 22.  Jesus appeared on the banks of the Jordan River and John the Baptist, prophetically moved by the Spirit, proclaimed upon seeing him, “Behold the lamb of God, behold him who takes away the sin of the world!” Jesus is that lamb. And what God would not let Abraham do, sacrifice his only son, God himself would do. God, the Father of us all made the ultimate sacrifice for us by offering his Son on a cross on our behalf. To be Christian is to believe that. To be saved is to know that Jesus Christ has fulfilled the scriptures he is the answer to the mystery that hovered over the Old Testament. He is the ultimate sacrifice, the one in whom the love of God for fallen humanity is perfectly revealed.

       And so Catholics and Protestants may have separate traditions that hopefully will be reconciled one day but we all have the same Savior and our singular hope is in him. Billy Graham preached consistently with conviction the message of that savior. That’s what made him effective just as it made Bishop Sheen effective. And those churches that will be effective in the future are the ones that deliver that message faithfully for God. The handwriting is on the wall. Churches that sell out to the liberal progressive culture and devote their resources exclusively to promoting what they call social justice are nothing but socialist wolves in disguise and at best a waste of everyone’s time. And there are so many of them now, Protestant and Catholic alike that America is starving for lack of authentic gospel preaching.

       Who is going to take Billy Graham’s place? They called him America’s pastor. Who is America’s pastor now? And what would he say to our previous President who at a national prayer breakfast called Jesus “a son of God”? And to our present one whose daughter left the faith to become a Jew? And what would he say to the American people who greet all of this with a yawn? We are a nation of sheep without a shepherd. I would not dare to predict the future. It remains to be seen whom God will raise up or if he will raise up anyone to take Rev. Graham’s place as America’s pastor. He may punish us and raise up no one. But that’s a sermon for another day. The message for this day is the one that Billy Graham hammered home time and time again; it’s the timeless message of the Gospel: believe in what the Bible says and believe in Jesus Christ. Accept him today as your personal Lord and Savior. For he is the sole mediator between God and humankind ; and his blood, shed on the cross, has the singular power to save us all from our sins.

The Truth Never Changes

Easter Sunday 2017

     Lately, I’m becoming more aware of my age. I feel my trousers (that used to fit neatly around a 33-inch waist) falling down. I tighten my 42-inch belt another notch in hopes of holding on, but the exercise in belt tightening proves useless. What I really need are suspenders. No, what I really need is to lose thirty pounds. No, it’s not that either. What I really need is to be thirty-five again. If I were thirty-five again, only with the benefit of sixty–five years experience, I would use the added wisdom gained from having made a thousand-and-one mistakes to new advantage. I’d do things differently. I would eat less pizza and drink less wine. I see my body changing and I feel like I’m treading water in a whirling sea trying to stay afloat against the odds that maybe, somehow, I’ll be young again and as fit as I once was. Oh well, it’s the common inheritance of humankind; the world keeps moving on, and the further it goes, the younger everyone else becomes. Change, like death and taxes, is an intrinsic feature of life. Like the weather about which we can do nothing, you either accept change or you’re miserable on this planet.

      On the other hand, some things never change. God visited this earth, incarnate in a man. We found his presence among us objectionable so we hung him on a cross making us guilty of deicide. You’d think for that crime he’d punish us, but he did not. To the contrary and beyond our wildest expectations, he rewarded us for it. He raised himself from the tomb in which we laid him, and then he set out the terms by which we too might share in his divine life, an immortal life more powerful than death. “Be baptized everyone of you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of your sins and you shall be saved” (Mt. 28.19; Acts 2.38; Mk.16.16), he said. “Saved” means that we will receive a reward from God, that when we die, rather than leave us to perish in a grave, God will do for us what he did for Jesus (Ps.16.9-10). He will raise us up immortal in a new and glorious body, a body free from the limits of time and space; in other words, a body that does not age or bulge in all the wrong places, a body that is tailored made for life in heaven. Christians call that promise “the gospel” because that is what Jesus called his message: “the good news” (Mk.1.15). That has not changed. That was the message he delivered to Israel when he first emerged from the waters of baptism in the Jordan River filled with the Holy Spirit; that was the message that Saint Peter preached on the day of Pentecost in his first sermon; that is the message I delivered to you last Easter Sunday from this pulpit. The message is the same today, as it was then. And if you return next Easter, it will be the same message: all who believe and are baptized will be saved and all this is from Jesus Christ who won our salvation by dying for us on a cross and by raising himself afterwards from the grave revealing his divine nature and leaving no doubt about it in the mind of his chosen witnesses: God really did this.

      I can see by the wizened expression on some of your faces that you’re disgruntled. You’re thinking, “That settles it. You won’t see me here next Easter, if that’s how it’s gonna be. Why don’t you try something new? That’s what’s wrong with this church; you serve up the same old dish over and over again and people don’t buy it. You have to innovate; you have to change with the times. Get with it.” “Get with it” is essentially what Peter said to Jesus after Jesus told him that “the Son of man must suffer many things, be rejected by the chief priests and the scribes, be killed, and on the third day rise again”(Mt.16.21). After hearing that, Peter said to Jesus, “Don’t say that. No one wants to hear about your death and resurrection. Preach about “the lilies of the valley” and “do not judge.” That’s what people want to hear. You gotta meet people where they are. Come on. Get with it.”

To which Christ said, “Get behind me Satan! You are a hindrance to me, for you are not on the side of God but of men” (Mt.16.23). In other words, Jesus said to Peter—and through him to the Church and to us today—that some things must never and can never change. The Gospel is what God has made it. Christ has died and he is risen, and all who are baptized in his name have died to sin and are risen with him. The Gospel is from God and therefore the truth of Christ’s message does not change.

        You would think that a world weary of violent revolution and soulless evolution would be grateful for the gospel of God (Rom.1.1–4), and yet, the world remains ungrateful. The world rejected Christ then. The world rejects him still. Like His mother and the other women and Saint John who followed him to the cross, and like his disciples after seeing him resurrected and eating a meal with him and touching the wound in his side, there are some here and there who believe. But the majority of humankind has an attitude toward Jesus like that of Pilate. Pontius Pilate, after interviewing Jesus, was thoroughly unimpressed. Pilate knew he was an innocent man, undeserving of death, but he had Jesus flogged anyway just for good measure, just to show him who was boss. The world, like Pilate, just doesn’t get it. Pilate said to Jesus, “So, I hear you’re a king?” And Jesus replied “I am, and for this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice.” “Imagine that,” Pilate must have thought to himself, “A king of truth leading an army of truth seekers.” Pilate’s response was to shake his head, condescendingly smile, and ask Jesus, “What is truth?”(John 18.36–38). He meant, “What is truth worth? Where’s that gonna get you. A king needs power, real power. Truth is for philosophers.” Worldly people like Pilate are contemptuous of Jesus, they may not think he’s a bad man but he seems to them irrelevant. He offers nothing of substance for people trying to survive and thrive in the real world. Who needs truth? A king needs power. Pilate rejected Jesus because he looked at a broken and, seemingly, impotent man wearing a crown of thorns and he thought Jesus was a joke. And so do most of the people in the world today—think Jesus is a joke. Very few take him seriously. Why respect a “king” who allowed his enemies to torture and kill him? They do not understand either the scriptures that foretold his death or the power of grace by which he was able to roll away the stone and break free from the tomb. God’s grace is the greatest power in the universe. Christ’s resurrection from the dead showed that God’s grace belongs to him. The Word by which God created the universe became flesh and dwelt among us. Now that’s power. Go on believing that Jesus Christ is irrelevant, my friends, and you’ll remain as clueless as Pontius Pilate.

       Some things like our frail bodies change with age, scandals rock the church, new sects sprout up like spring weeds, elections bring in new politicians with new ways of doing the same old things, the government grows bigger, the weapons of war improve, life is what it is; there’s not much we can do about it. But the most important things in life remain the same. The most important thing in life is not a thing but a person: Jesus Christ. And he is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Heb.13.8). What he accomplished by his sacrificial death and resurrection is permanent. Nothing can ever change that.

        But what about you? Everyone in this world is defined by where he or she chooses to stand in relation to Jesus Christ. Do you stand with him or do you stand with Pilate, thinking of him as a joke? Are you like Nicodemus who sort of believed in Jesus but only came out to see him at night because he was embarrassed to be seen with him in daylight? He was afraid of what other people would think, if they knew he was Christian. Are you like the rich young ruler who praised Jesus and wanted to follow him, until Jesus asked too much of him? He turned away and went home. Are you like Peter on the night of Jesus’s arrest, afraid to admit that you love him? Or are you like the men who stood at the foot of the cross and made fun of him? Or worst of all, are you like the temple priests who believed he had risen from the dead but who paid the guards off to spread the rumor that his disciples had come in the night and stolen the body? Are you among those who simply are not going to believe him no matter what? If you are, I have good news for you. You’re among the majority. The world is on your side.

       I was speaking to a person recently about Our Lord. She did not attend this church and said that she would not be attending any church on Easter. With her it was a matter of principal. When I asked her why, she said, “Because the church is filled with hypocrites. I have my own beliefs,” she said. She didn’t mean this parish in particular is corrupt, just the church in general. Her attitude seemed to be, “Who needs organized religion? I have my own ideas about God. That’s enough for me.” Her criticisms of the church and of the Gospel reminded me of something Fr. Andrew Greely, a Catholic priest, wrote in a book called Why Catholic?. He addressed a Catholic readership, but his comments apply to all Christians. He said this: “The reader can make up his own litany of injuries the Church has done to him. I do not care how horrendous the litany may be, it does not provide a valid excuse for disengaging from the church and from the faith. Indeed it is irrelevant. I attempt no justification and offer no excuse for what the Church may have done to you: I simply assert that the failures of Christians and the failure of Christian leadership have nothing to do with the validity of the faith. If you use those failures as an excuse for not facing the essential religious demands of the catholic and apostolic faith to which we pledge our souls in baptism, you are engaged in an anti-intellectual dishonest cop-out. The question is not whether Christian leadership is enlightened but whether the catholic faith is true. A whole College of Cardinals filled with psychopaths provides no answer one way or another to that question.  Search for the perfect church if you will; when you find it, join it. And realize that on that day it becomes something less than perfect.”

       The world is forever looking for reasons to deny Jesus Christ. There are millions of them. If you want to find one, you will. But I’ll give you one good reason to believe in him, one good reason to be baptized in his name and to make it your priority to keep your baptismal vows. It is this: because he and he alone can change you and make you what you’re not. Because of sin, neither you nor I am acceptable to God. We are imperfect. He alone is perfect; his resurrection from the dead is revelation of his integrity as a man in full possession of the divine nature.  And he has promised to infuse his perfection into our souls in baptism making us as acceptable to God as he is. “He is the perfect offering for our sins.” Saint John said, “and not our only but for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2.1–2). In other words, what we lack, he supplies. That is why everyone needs him. That is a fact of life that will never change. Why should we belong to his church and believe in him? Because he is God and his Gospel is the truth: that’s why. You can have all the beliefs you want, but there is only one belief that counts. Faith accepts Jesus Christ for who he is, stands by Him, doesn’t waver, doesn’t falter, and does not change.

       In a moment we are going to receive a child into the church through the sacrament of baptism. From the beginning, the church has welcomed the newly baptized on Easter Sunday, the day of Christ’s resurrection. As part of this service I will ask you who are Christians to renew your own baptismal vows. As we stand here today, Christians around the world from India to Egypt to England to Nigeria, to the Central African Republic to Virginia have recently paid for their faith with their lives. This is serious business. There is a spirit in this world that hates Jesus Christ, hates his church and everything about him (John 15.18–19). If you stand up for him you become as he is, a target. But if you receive his baptism you also become as he is, a child of God as much a son or daughter of the Father as is Jesus who alone was privileged to call God “my Father.”(John 5.17–18). In baptism the only Son of God, unites us to himself in his Spirit, thereby giving us the right and privilege to call God “Our Father” also (John 20.17; Mt.6.9). And that, my friends, is why we stand with him, and will always stand with him, because through him we have full and unfettered access to God, Our Father, and that privilege is worth everything (ITim.2.5).