If you go back to the day you first held your first-born in your arms wouldn’t you like to have that chance over again, parents? Grandparents? Would you like one more shot? Doesn’t it seem that everything you know about parenting you learned as you went along, and you weren’t ready for the final exam until after they were already gone, and it was too late?

It’s something that most parents don’t realize until they are looking back. It’s something most children don’t know until they are looking back from the perspective of adulthood, perhaps when they are parents themselves. About this particular power parents have in the lives of their children while they’re being raised. It’s very subtle. But, of all the powers parents have, none is greater. The power to shape the way in which they shape their child’s vision of the world.

It’s something more caught than taught. Caught by children who are incredibly brilliant observers, though not as good at interpreting what they see. Observing their parents and how those parents respond to life’s everyday mysteries and challenges. Parents can teach their children to see the world as a safe, hopeful, adventurous place to explore and to learn and to grow and to reach their God-given potential, a place in which they have an opportunity to make a contribution like no other in all of human history. They can teach them to see the world as the place where the greatest mistake they could ever make would be to define the value of their life and gift by comparing it to anyone else’s instead of to the grace of God who created them and redeemed them. They can teach them to see that that their unique beauty and power is the gift of God to be returned to him through a lifetime of personal service, meeting the needs of others.

Or, parents teach their children to see the world as a very scary place. Where everyone around them has a hidden agenda. Where the weak are always trampled for no good reason. Where they better get while the getting’s good, because no one will be looking out for them. Life’s main agenda for them becomes proving how much better they are than anyone else, by any means necessary, and to make certain to hoard as much as they can before they die because, despite what we say at church, it really is true that he who dies with the most toys wins.

So it is that some children are sent out into life regardless of their racial or socioeconomic or educational status, seeing the world as bright and promising and full of hope, while other children, regardless of their racial, socioeconomic or education status, go out into the world seeing it as nothing more than one great big black hole of despair and hopelessness and themselves victims of it.

Mine and Nancy’s upbringings were virtually the same. We’ve compared little details, even to the kind of bologna and cheese sandwiches they used to serve us on Sunday night between training union and choir. It seems everything was virtually the same. Yet, though Nancy’s parents struggled, as many do, to make ends meet, they never once fretted in the presence of their children that they wouldn’t make it. Having caught that kind of hope, caught it, more than being taught it, Nancy came out of the family chute believing that there would always be a way to make it, even enough to share with others. In my case, we never went without any of life’s basic necessities. I never missed a meal. I never went without clothes or medical care or educational opportunity. But, the atmosphere in my family was colored daily by the fear that, no matter how much we had, it might not be enough. I was sent out into the world believing that life was full of one opportunity after another to do nothing but fail.

How were you sent out into the world? Do you see your life and the world around you as full of hope and opportunity, or just one more chance to lose? For that matter, parents and grandparents, how are you sending your children out into the world? Will they leave your home someday, seeing the world as a safe place, or a place full of danger, and just one big black hole of despair in which, no matter how hard they try, they will still end up losing?

Reading from 1 Corinthians, it seems that the church was in its infancy, probably less than half a century old, when Paul penned these words. In a sense, Paul had fallen into the role of being the parent of the very church he had once persecuted, even to the point of helping murder some of the first Christians. His role was changed. He seems to know by this time, as he nears the end of his life, that what he says will shape the church’s vision forever as it sends some of its first grandchildren out into the world, in terms of how it will see the world as God sees it or not.

So, he wrote, "For I handed on to you as of first importance" first importance, none higher, "what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins." It really is true. Because of what Christ did, all I have done before, and all you have done before, doesn’t matter anymore. "Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures." Our sins have been forgiven. Death has been conquered. There is nothing to fear about our past, and we can go freely into the world God has given us without looking back over our shoulder at the ghosts of the past that come to haunt.

Because Christ was raised from the dead, there is nothing so horrific in the future, nothing, that trumps what happened that day when God raised Jesus from the dead. "Go freely," Paul was saying to the church. "Go freely, not fearing anything in your past or anything in your future, nor anything any man or woman or anything can do to you. For nothing in all of God’s creation can separate you from God’s loving purpose for you." Do you believe that? Really?

There’s a sense, if you look at it this way, in which Paul is saying that the gravitational center of all hope is not man-centered, or what man can pull off on his own. The gravitational center of all hope is God-centered. It is God-centered, specifically at the point at what God has done through Christ. He has conquered death and sin forever and forever, amen. That is the gospel.

There was suffering. Horrible suffering. Suffering only unspeakable sin could imagine creating. There was death. Horrible death. Lingering death. "Then," Paul writes, "when all that was done, then he appeared." At least four times in this text, the Apostle celebrates the risen Savior’s appearance with those words. "Then he appeared." There was sin, there was suffering, there was death, a stone. Then he appeared. After sin and death had done their part, then he appeared. Jesus, the risen Son of God. "And all of this," the father of the New Testament Church writes as he tries to set the vision of his children’s faith future, "all of this in which you stand, through which also you are being saved."

Here’s is the grammar of the resurrection. There is a past-tense event, a resurrection, presently redeeming us for all of the future that will ever be. Yet, the resurrection is also a present, past and future for all time event. The resurrection of Jesus Christ, despite what we may read in the headlines, despite what life may look like in this given moment or how others are relating to us, the resurrection of Jesus Christ was not only the pivotal moment in all of human history, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, past, present, and future, is the operating principle of all reality around which all of eternity gravitates.

We think of time as linear. We draw timelines and place events on them, B.C. and A.D., and so forth. Events as having happened once at some point in time before this one. The gospel defines the resurrection truth, not on a timeline, a linear description, beginning-to-end flowchart, but as the spiritual sun around which all of reality, regardless of when it happened or happens, constantly gravitates.

There was a time when people believed the world was flat and that the sun orbited around the earth. People were actually afraid to sail too far out to sea, because they were afraid they might actually come to the end of the world somewhere, perhaps, out around Brownfield, and just fall off. So strongly held was this belief, so deeply ingrained into the human experience, that it transcended socioeconomic, political, and religious boundaries.

"The world is flat" was even held as sacred truth by the church and those who questioned it thought of as blasphemers. Some people actually paid with their lives for suggesting the possibility that mankind might not be the center of all reality he thought he was. Some still pay with their lives, or their careers or their families, because others believe they should be the center of all power, no matter what it costs anyone else. Dictators come and go. If it had not been for the contributions of Copernicus and Galileo and Columbus, even this very morning, we might still believe the world is flat and that man is the gravitational center of the universe. It is also true that if it had not been for Jesus’ resurrection, our sin and death -- our sin and death -- would be the gravitational center of our being that we sometimes allow it to be.

Then he appeared. Because the resurrection is at the center of that one truth around which all other truth gravitates, a future for us that might have been nothing more than a black hole despair is now one full of hope.

So, again, how do you see the world? Do you see it as a world full of people looking for one opportunity after another to take you down? Or, do you see it as a world full of people who need the same hope upon which we have come to celebrate this very morning? People without hope break my heart. Many times, though their behavior seems bizarre to us and sometimes crosses lines of immorality and illegality, down inside, they are simply acting out the bitterness, selfishness, and self-centeredness that someone else taught them to believe was the only way they could survive.

I’ve been captivated by the story of In Cold Blood, in part because Truman Capote’s life was made into a movie, Capote. Truman Capote was the award-winning author who wrote the story of two men who, in November of 1959, broke into a western Kansas farmhouse looking for money and brutally murdered the Clutter family, a mother and father and their two teenage children. Capote spent six years researching the lives of those two men, particularly the life of Perry Smith, the triggerman. These two men were eventually convicted in court and hanged for their crime. The more I read the story of Perry Smith, though the crime he committed was beyond horrific, the more I read his story, the more I am amazed that what they did doesn’t happen more often.

Here was a man who was so brutalized by everyone who should have just given him one chance, that by the time he was eight, he’d already spent time in prison. His vision of the world was shaped by alcoholic parents who literally nearly beat each other to death in front of him on a regular basis, by a mother who abandoned him and a father who did the same. Some people who took care of him in orphanages physically and sexually abused him. So profoundly altered his view of the world that, by the time he was walking into that Kansas farmhouse one dark night in November of 1959, what happened was as predictable as lightning in a late summer thunderstorm.

People whose lives have been filled with despair become self-fulfilling prophecies of destruction. Those who are recruited as suicide bombers today in the Middle East come out of hovels of poverty and despair so dark that the thought of strapping a bomb to their chest fills them with more hope than living one more day. They live now in places none of us would let our dogs sleep at night. The suicide and prostitution rates among third-world orphans, and there are now 143,000,000 and counting, are astronomical. Children who have no hope, no families, no resources, no education, no skills, are sent out into the world and have to make it on their own, with less than you and I had by the time we finished first grade.

So, what do we do? We say, "Well, that’s just the way the world is," and we give up in despair. Or, we say, "No! That may be the way the world is. Then he appeared!" We take that "then he appeared" message out into this world, and, one life at a time, try to give the world one more human being who can also know that on the great truth of Christ’s death and resurrection they can also stand and also be saved. Do you believe that, or do you just like the preacher to say that on Easter Sunday?

Here’s the scary part. Any single one of us in this room could have been raised a Christian and still gone out into the world a bitter, fearful person. Even if your parents took you to church, where Sunday school teachers taught you the Bible, and you heard the preacher preach the Easter message year after year, but at home, around you was created an atmosphere of fear about money, about power, about control, about whatever, about the world in general, a cynical, everyone’s-out-to-get-you way of thinking, you have lived your whole life as though hell is your real destiny and pretty much making it hell for everyone else around you is your life’s mission.

Is it possible to be a Christian, to be saved, but at the very same time to live without any part of our being truly converted by the resurrection hope, then he appeared? The times I am least pleasant to be around are those moments when I forget the resurrection and think it’s all about me and all up to me. With the risen Christ at the center, daily reminding us of his resurrection hope and love, my worldview takes a sharp turn toward hope. We can say resurrection hope about things past. "They mocked him, they beat him, they crucified him and buried him. Then he appeared." Because nothing any one man nor all of one mankind can put together can move Jesus from the gravitational center of his lordship of all creation, anymore than all of humanity screaming at once could make the sun move one inch from its position in the solar system.

Because of resurrection hope, we can also say future tense things. Like the sun in our solar system, the resurrection of Jesus almost 2000 years ago is that one event around which all of time and truth gravitates, like the moon around the earth, like the earth the sun. The resurrection is like the eye of a holy needle through which all of human history must and will pass and to which it will answer. Even if that history that’s happening now or 2000 years from now, nothing changes.

The Crusades, when one nation thought it had the right to impose its religious beliefs on others, even if that meant murdering millions of innocents. Past tense. Present tense. Future tense. The final word about those events will be "Then he appeared." The Holocaust, where millions of Jews died. Millions of innocent children slaughtered. Then he appeared! September 11, 2001. Terrorists did what they did. Then he appeared! $3.00 gasoline. Then he appeared! A weapon of mass destruction in downtown Dallas at a date unknown in the future. If so, the next word, the final word, will be, "Then he appeared!" The doctor says the cancer is terminal. That’s not the last word. The last word will be, "Then he appeared!" Your husband or wife walks out on you and leaves you all alone. That’s not the last word. The last word will be the first and the last word! Then he appeared!

This is what the scriptures would do to shape our vision of the world we live in. There has never been a moment in time since Adam and Eve took their first bite, nor never will be one moment of time that drops like a grain of sand through an hourglass, never in all the scope of human history, never one thing that did or will happen but that the next thing that has been said, is being said and will be said, "Then he appeared!"

Thanks be to God.