Last Sunday, on Palm Sunday, some friends from Abilene joined us for worship.  Their daughter moved to Dallas a couple of years ago after finishing Baylor.  When they come to visit her they usually drop by for worship.  Dennis and Pam and I go all the way back to Hardin-Simmons just after we graduated from high school and now, watching Elizabeth grow up, we spend a lot of time having those conversations we used to laugh at our parents for having about how old we feel.  It’s like how young we were when we first met is still our primary point of reference for everything that’s happened since.  Dennis’ parents are well into their 70’s now and they joined us for worship last week, too.  After church, we all went to lunch at La Calle Doce where Dennis’ mom shared her own stories about getting older.  She said that what she enjoys most about Easter at her age is that she gets to hide her own eggs now and then enjoy trying to find them later, too.

Age has a way of resetting the clock as we go along.  In life’s early morning hours, Easter meant hunting for eggs the bunny left and standing on the front porch in our Sunday best, sweating and squinting in the hot sun while grandmom tried to remember exactly which button took the picture.  Eventually, life’s sun rises high toward early afternoon, the clock gets reset and we find ourselves trying to get the kids to stand still while we look for the right button to push. 

Over and over again, life’s clock gets reset, in ways both tragic and good.  Some say that 9/11 reset America’s clock, that it marked the transition from the modern to the postmodern era.  We’ve crossed a line, or been dragged across a line, we can never cross back over again.  There are moments in time so formative it is impossible to enter them and come out on the other side ever to be the same again.  For millions that is 9/11; for yet other millions it will always be December 7, 1941 or October 24, 1929.  A line was crossed, the clock was reset, and life will never again be the same.  When I moved to Dallas over ten years ago and first attended worship at Wilshire Baptist Church, a woman deacon served me the Lord’s Supper and I knew I’d crossed yet another point of no return.  I’d never again be able or willing to go back to a time and place where, in the churches I served, women were only allowed to serve punch and cookies.  Over and over again, life’s clock gets reset and we know we’ve passed a critical juncture, a new starting point, a new point of reference for everything that happens afterwards. 

Many years after it happened, the apostle Paul was reflecting on the meaning of Christ’s resurrection and wrote these words.  “For we walk by faith, not by sight.  For the love of Christ urges us on, because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died.  And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.  From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.  So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new (2 Corinthians 5:7, 14-17)!”

The critical words that mark the resetting of the clock for all mankind for all time, when a line was crossed never again to be crossed back over are those three simple words, “from now on.”  Just as there was a pre-9/11 America and there is now a post-9/11 America, there was a pre-resurrection world, a world that is no more and never can be again.  From now on, now that Christ has been raised from the dead, things will never, ever be the same again.  Life’s clock has been reset, never to run down again.

For some three years, the disciples had walked with Jesus.  They’d heard him teach and preach.  They’d seen him perform miracle after miracle as he responded with compassion to virtually every kind of human need known to man.  They’d heard him speak of having to go to Jerusalem to suffer and die.  Day in and day out, they walked with Jesus.  It must have been a life-changing experience, a point of no return time in their lives.  But, none of it could have possibly compared to what was about to happen next, when Mary Magdalene went to the tomb that morning to prepare Jesus’ dead body, only to find the tomb empty and Jesus standing outside of it, ready to pick up the conversation right where he’d left off.  Can you imagine?  What would that be like?  Even the disciples couldn’t get their minds around it when she ran back to them and said, “‘I have seen the Lord.’”  Luke records that, at first, the disciples didn’t believe Mary, that she was just telling them “an idle tale (Luke 24:11).”  But, Mary knew what she’d seen.  Things would never again be the same.

Some years ago, Sandi Patti and Larnelle Harris tried to capture in song what Mary must have felt like when she went to the tomb early that morning to prepare Jesus body.  I think they got pretty close to describing what she was feeling when she ran back to tell the disciples what she’d seen instead.  I’ve just seen Jesus!  I tell you he’s alive!  I’ve just seen Jesus, our precious Lord alive!  And I knew he really saw me, too!  As if ‘til now, I’d never lived; all that I’d done before won’t matter anymore!  I’ve just seen Jesus!  And, I’ll never be the same again!  The clock had been reset.  Scripture promises that has meaning for both what has been and what will yet be.

From now on, all that we’ve done before doesn’t matter anymore. “One has died for all.”  For years, I looked back on that day when I pulled my 1988 Honda Civic off of Central Expressway onto University drive on August 10, 1993 as the day my life’s clock had been reset.  All my dreams had gone up in smoke.  I couldn’t help but think of all my failures and my sin and my stupidity as having forever reset my life’s clock and altered my course in ways I wouldn’t want to go.  I kept using that one moment in time as the point of reference for everything that happened in my family and my career and my life since.

Maybe you have a memory like that.  What if you’d taken this road instead of that, turned that corner instead of going straight?  How much different would your life be if you married someone else, or gone to another school or gotten that degree that was just a little harder instead of taking the easy way?  We all have those failures in our past that stand out as turning point moments.

Yet, the truly greatest mistake is to forget that what we celebrate here this morning, and every Sunday, is that what God has done is greater than what we have done.  In terms of God’s ultimate dream for us, our failures don’t matter any more; they’re forever reframed in the outline of an empty tomb.  We may have to pay the temporary price for some of our bad choices.  But, Christ paid the ultimate price for all bad choices.  This is the gospel, “one has died for all; therefore all have died.  And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves, but for him who died and was raised for them.”  

My life, your life, all of our lives are no longer timed by what we’ve done before but by what Christ did before we did what we’ve done before.  Our lives are no longer just days on the calendar to mark off as we serve out the sentence of our stupidity or willful disobedience, the consequences of our worst choices.  The day Jesus walked out of that tomb, the clock was reset, for everyone, forever!  From now on, he is risen!  He is risen, indeed!

From now on, we don’t have to stare at ourselves in the mirror wondering why we see our fathers and mothers staring back at us and how it is that, even though we know better, one generation after another keeps handing down the sins of the past to our children and grandchildren.  Uninterrupted, that would be a hopeless way to see ourselves and others.  From now on, we can see ourselves in a different Light!  We are even promised that, someday, we will see the risen Lord ourselves and it will be a transforming experience.  “We know that when he appears we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is (1 John 3:2).”  Already, that process has begun in us.  Hear the gospel, not just of something Jesus did that reset the clock of our past, but of our future as well!  “From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.  So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new (2 Corinthians 5:7, 14-17)!”

One of my very favorite movies is Fried Green Tomatoes.  Set both in modern times as well as back in the 30’s, it’s a story of two women, Idgy and Ruth, who struggle to survive the Depression and the racial prejudice of the deep South and become life-long friends in the process.  Ruth gets cancer and is about die.  Idgy tries to comfort Buddy, Ruth’s young son.  She takes him out to one of her favorite places, where’s she always told him stories to help make life make sense when life didn’t make sense, like when he lost one of his arms in a train accident.  They’re sitting atop a dam on a slow moving river.  It’s there that she says things to remind him of how wonderful his mother is, so he’ll have the courage to face her impending death.  Idgy says of Ruth, “There are angels masquerading as people all over this planet and your mother is one of the bravest.”  Angels masquerading as people, she said.  I can’t get that line out of my head. 

What if we could see people like Idgy did, not for what they looked like on the outside but what they were becoming on the inside?  Not as objects of uncontrolled sexual passion, but as brothers and sisters.  Not as targets for manipulating to make money in business but as fellow strugglers in this life’s journey.  Not as Democrats or Republicans, or black and white, or gay and straight or, well, you name it, but as fellow human beings just trying to find a way. 

This past week, I visited one of our bedridden homebound folks.  As I stood over Jerry Evetts’ bed I knew, this resurrection week, that what I saw is not all there is.  There was an angel there, masquerading as a very sick man, an angel someday to be given wings to fly away from all that breaks and burdens him and those he loves.  From now on, because of what Jesus did on the cross and what God did in raising him from the dead, we no longer look at one another in terms of what we have done but what God is doing new in us.  Old things are passed away, the new has come.  If you keep staring at the empty tomb, the Light coming from it will transform the way you look at others, even those who have wounded or betrayed you.

John Claypool once told the story of a little boy who’d worked all week at Bible school making a clay dish of some kind for his father.  The day of graduation came and it was time for show and tell.  The little boy scooped up his dish and ran down the hall to meet his parents.  Just before he reached them, he tripped and fell and the dish hit the floor, breaking into dozens of pieces.  The little boy was devastated and began to weep.  His dad said, “that’s OK, son.  It doesn’t matter.”  He meant well but his wife knew better.  It did matter.  This was his son’s gift to him; he poured himself into making it just right so his dad would be proud when the big day came.  Now it was broken, ruined.  So, his mom leaned down and began to pick up the broken pieces and said, “Come on son, let’s go see what we can make of what’s left.”

In case you missed the first part of the gospel story, the one we’ve been reflecting on for several weeks now, it doesn’t say that our sin doesn’t matter.  It mattered so much that Jesus had do to die.  But, what the gospel also tells us is that we matter more than our sin.  So, after he died, God raised Jesus from the dead.  God is not measuring the significance of our lives by what we’ve made of them, but by the significance of what he can make of what’s left of them.  God no longer looks at us through in terms of our failures, but in the Light coming from the empty tomb and what we can grow to be in that Light.

One day, Jesus died.  Three days later, God raised him from the dead.  From now on, God will never see us the same.  And, if we will keep looking into that Light, we’ll never see ourselves or each other the same, either.

From now on, we’ll never be the same, ever again, forever and forever, amen!