This past week, Les Ingle and I kept a long-desired appointment to get together and just share stories. We had passed each other in the hallways scores of times over the past few years, shaken hands, and exchanged greetings, but we had never once just sat down and told each other our life stories. This past week, Les came by and we had the most delightful conversation. I asked his permission to tell one little snippet of his life experience that, to me, is a resurrection Easter story, if I ever heard one.

Les told me that, back in the 1970s, there was a time when he lost his job, and was out of work for nine months at one stretch. With a wife and two children, he said they actually became all but destitute. He became fearful, almost desperate. Day after day, he would go looking for a job, only to be turned away. Tears began to form in Les’ eyes as he began to tell me the rest of the story, about a day when, at the end of that nine-month stretch, he got in his car and just drove around, looking for whatever he could find. He happened to drive by Laurel Land Cemetery. He drove into the cemetery, and there in the cemetery found a statue of Jesus with his hands outstretched. He parked his car, got out, and had a conversation with Jesus. All he said to Jesus was, "I can’t do this anymore. You take it."

He got in his car and began to drive away and, by the time he reached the exit of the cemetery, this warm blanket of peace and tranquility literally engulfed him. One week later, a potential employer who had earlier rebuffed him offered him what turned out to be the best-paying job Les ever had. Les points it all back to that moment when he stopped by the cemetery and had a conversation with Jesus.

Now, I am not telling this story as a prescription for you. In other words, I am not saying that if you find yourself in a desperate situation this morning that the solution to that desperate situation is to leave this service, drive to Laurel Land Cemetery, find the statue of Jesus, and have a conversation with him. That might not necessarily be a bad idea. I’m just not telling you that if you do that your experience will be like Les’. I am only describing for you what Les described to me as having happened in the darkest moment of his life when he stopped by a cemetery and had a conversation with the Christ he met there. Some three decades later, Les still points to that conversation as one of the most, if not the most, significant turning points in his life. The day he met the risen Christ in, of all places, a cemetery!

Just like everything that ever influenced Les’ life, from the place he was born, to his education, to his socioeconomic background, all of that combined and then some, what we would probably call under an umbrella term, the "culture" of Les’ life, that conversation with Jesus was woven into the fabric, the culture, of his life, even to the point of becoming one of the most formative factors in his definition of himself as a human being.

He is now a man whose life was changed, shaped, and forged, not just by having been born and raised in South Dallas, not just by marrying what he still believes is the most wonderful woman on the planet, not just by the birth of his two children or his service to his country in the United States Marine Corps in the Southeast Pacific during World War II, but, of all things, an encounter with Christ he met one dark day in Laurel Land Cemetery. Just as all of those human experiences shape the way Les Ingle would be culturally defined, so did that spiritual encounter with Jesus profoundly, overwhelmingly, literally shape his cultural identity.

So it was for the early disciples. There was their pre-resurrection life, culture, even encounter with Jesus, if you will. Until Mary went to the cemetery and met Jesus there, those disciples were all that it meant to be Jewish, nationally, religiously, all that it meant to be what we would now call first-century Middle-Eastern. But, when Mary went and found Jesus standing outside the empty tomb, and that same Jesus walked out of the cemetery and found the disciples in hiding for fear of the Jews, their cultural identity from that day forward would forever be more about the resurrection than any other culturally formative experience in their lives. It transformed everything. They were never again the same.

Listen again as we replay some of these thoughts from the book of Acts for just a moment. This is perhaps the best description of this new resurrection culture taking shape in the ancient world. Just a quick run-down of four things that jump out of the book of Acts very quickly that define that resurrection for us.

The culture of the resurrection is a culture of confession. "With great power," Acts records, "the apostles gave their testimony [gave their testimony, confessed their faith] to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus." What is your confession? We ask people that when they are baptized here. What is your confession 20, 30, 40, 50 years out from your first encounter with the risen Christ? What is it today?

We’ve been poignantly reminded of how much culture matters recently. What else did one-half million predominantly Hispanic marchers in downtown Dallas a few weeks ago, in the greatest outpouring of protest since the Vietnam War, protesting and demonstrating for immigration reform, mean? While we were worshiping three weeks ago, they were giving public confession in the streets of downtown Dallas. They were confessing a number of things. But many, if not all of them, were saying, "We want to be Americans without having to sacrifice our cultural identity." Like some people who landed on the shores of what is now the United States centuries ago.

Samuel Huntington has written, in a groundbreaking book published just about three years before 9/11, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order, that the wars of the future are not going to be so much clashes of nation against nation as culture against culture. He postulates that, as this world grows smaller and smaller, physical boundaries are going to mean less and less, cultural identity more and more.

And if, as Seymour Hersch hypothesizes in a recent article, if America chooses, having apparently not learned from history, to unilaterally destroy Iran’s nuclear capability by the first use of pre-emptive tactical nuclear weapons in history, for which Hersch says there is strong evidence such plans are already in the making, Hersch says we will likely discover what it means not just to be at war with Iran but some 1.2 billion Muslims worldwide whose cultural identity means more to them than their nationality (Seymour M. Hersch, "The Iran Plans," The New Yorker on line, April 14, 2006).

When you and I are dead and gone, will we be remembered most by our national, cultural, Dallas, middle-American identity, or by our resurrection cultural identity? We get to choose. The resurrection culture transcends all other boundaries, trumps all other values and bridges otherwise impossible language barriers to speak a common language of confession in Jesus as Lord. The apostles, with great power, gave confession to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.

Last year in Eastern Europe, in Latvia and Russia, Nancy and I discovered that first-hand. I had never experienced it quite like that. Even since we have been back, we have been sharing, by email, mostly, faith and prayer concerns, common among those who are committed to working with orphans. As though these people were cousins living in Ft. Worth, 30 miles away, instead of people who speak another language, seven time zones from here, whose fathers and grandfathers once served in a Soviet army bent on our destruction.

What we have discovered in that whole conversation is that a Christian, a true Christian, is a follower of Jesus first and whatever else second. I was raised in West Texas. I will never get away from that. I have tried sometimes, and then been ashamed that I tried. I have discovered that you can take the boy out of West Texas, but you can’t take the sand out of his craw. It’s there for a lifetime, like the sand in your shorts at the beach. You just live with it. At varying times I’ve tried to shake that and then embrace it, depending on whether I was preaching a revival in Albany, Texas, or hanging out with a bunch of east-of-the-Mississippi preachers too full of their PhD selves until I decided that happiness sure better be more than Lubbock in your rear-view mirror. Until I decided that, whether you’re from Albany, Texas, or Albany, New York, if you are a follower of Jesus, that trumps mesquite beans and apple trees, sand dunes and skyscrapers, a West Texas drawl or that funny way of talking people up there tend to do.

Culture is a funny, fascinating thing, isn’t it? I was talking with a man in our church this week who went to a NASCAR race. I don’t get NASCAR. I cannot, for the life of me, fathom sitting in a parking lot and trying to find a place for four and a half hours to watch cars go in a circle, over and over and over, to get back in the car for four and a half hours, trying to find a way out of the parking lot. But, I don’t have to get NASCAR. Because he and I both call Jesus Lord. And, we worship in this room together on Sundays.

I don’t get the culture of shopping. I’m not talking about grocery shopping, where you actually go and get something. I’m talking about that subculture where women find something they need but then spend hours looking at other options, only to come back and then spend hours talking about the options they discovered when they had found it the first time all along. I don’t get it. Nancy recently informed me, yet again, that I don’t have to get it. But, I worship in this place every Sunday with women who are part of that culture. And, I live with one. And, I love her, first and foremost because she loves the Lord and finds in that love something to love me with.

If the first disciples of the ancient church could come back, we would find that we have many differences. They don’t know what email is. They would think blackberries are a fruit, not a machine. Internet would have something to do with fishing gear getting tangled, not a means of communicating instantly around the world that was much larger than they could imagine. Chariots would not be museum pieces but modern modes of transportation. But, give those ancient disciples and us one hour, just one hour in the same place, singing "Amazing Grace," and what we would discover is that we had one thing in common, even transcending twenty centuries of time that trumped everything else we did, our common confession in Christ as Lord. The risen Lord. What is your confession?

The culture of the resurrection is a culture of generous community. Acts 4 says, "Those who believed were of one heart and soul. And no one claimed private ownership of any possession, but everything they owned was held in common. There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need." We say, "Yeah, but that was back then." Why do we pole-vault over that text as irrelevant to our day?

I will never in my life feel comfortable with that text. What I do know it teaches me is that the one thing that is absolutely essential to the community of the resurrection is a place to belong. A place where you know if you’re in trouble, you can know someone cares, and you won’t be left twisting in the wind. Just as Claudia prayed so beautifully a while ago, those of you who have been in this church a long time know what it means to have a story of how this church was there for you at a time of crisis. Not some other church. This community of faith. When you talk about how the Lord walked you through a time of crisis and used the people in this church to do it, you are describing community.

Nancy and I have come to that time in our lives where, because we have kept our promise to our children to stay put until they graduated from high school, we are now finally going to be able to purchase a home and move into North Oak Cliff. We have wanted to do that for a long, long time, for a number of reasons. Believe it or not, the price of gas is not the only one. But, do you know what we want most? We want to live where our church and friends are. When we leave Rockwall, there are only two people we can identify we will have to say good-bye to, because we don’t live there. We change clothes and eat dinner before we fall in bed at night. We want to live someplace where we feel a part of a community.

In the scripture, specifically, the community of the resurrection was described as one in which the standard of significance was not how much one held, but how much one gave. We spend most of our time trying to be like everyone else in America. Which means we spend most of our time trying to see how much we can get under the title of our name. When we do that, we are letting ourselves be defined more by American culture than by resurrection culture.

Just two weeks ago in Rockwall, a young lady took a gun and took her own life while talking to her mother on the telephone, just a few weeks from graduation from high school. The question I will always wonder about, as I’m sure her family will, is, what was she comparing herself to in that moment? By what standard in her mind did she come up so short that she concluded that her unique life was not worth living anymore? What a tragedy!

If there is one thing that pervades American culture, with which the culture of the resurrection will be more in conflict than any other, this is it. Whether we will choose to seek the temporary rewards that come only to those who hoard more than they could ever possibly need in twenty lifetimes, or whether they seek to build for themselves treasures in heaven that are purchased only by the faith that causes them to be more concerned about how much they let go of than how much they hold onto. What really frightens me, good people, is how some of us can sit in church 40, 50, 60, 70 years and hear Jesus say that very thing, and never let it once compel us to drop one dollar in the offering plate.

In seminary, it used to bother me deeply, and I told my professors about it to no avail. "Why is it," I asked, "that when I go to chapel, the only people I ever see on the platform are the pastors from what you guys describe as ‘strategic’ churches? Which means big, prominent, well-known, sizable. Why is it that you guys only have those folks preaching on the platform when fully 85%-90% of us will never once set foot in a pulpit of that magnitude? By so doing, you model for us that the church has in fact baptized the American cultural definition of success, ‘big is better,’ instead of the biblical definition of success, which is not how much you own, but how much you give." My question still goes begging for an answer. If you don’t think that’s an issue, believe you me, virtually every preacher who goes through that kind of training shaped by that culture goes out into pulpits of our churches to replicate it, so much so that it even profoundly affected the psychology of churches like ours, who after years and years of faithful service, equated numeric decline with spiritual insignificance instead of redefining it as the work of the Holy Spirit, pruning the branch for greater fruitfulness. They set a standard of comparison by which many churches determined, like the young lady, that self-destruction was the better choice.

The resurrection culture is one of confession. It’s one of community. And last of all, it’s a culture of grace. Did you hear the words? "And great grace," the scripture says, "was upon them all." Grace means more than that we believe God forgives the sinner. It’s not a question of whether or not God forgives the sinner, is it? God’s done quite well with that part. He’s done his job well. The question is, how are we doing with forgiving sinners? Not third-world terrorists, but the people who live next door to us, and across the street, and sitting in the pew next to us. When the scripture says that great grace was upon them all, it means that the atmosphere that pervaded the church was one of compassion and understanding. They didn’t kick each other when they were down. They looked for ways to encourage each other.

My first Easter, I told you the story of a father jumping into a pit one day when a big boulder had fallen on his son. I met this man; he told me the story himself. He had been working on his ranch one day, and this big boulder had fallen on his son. He jumped into the pit and suddenly found that he had the strength of ten men.

I’ve thought about that image over and over again. It seems to me that we have these choices in terms of being a culture of grace. We can be the ones who lay the boulder on the lives of others, if we choose. I’m in conversation with a young man even now who is struggling with his homosexuality. He won’t come to church, and he’s clinging by his fingertips to any faith at all in God. He says it’s because he came to church, having been told that down there at the church, they sing about amazing grace. Then someone there at the church found out about his sexual orientation and exploited it and humiliated him. He was, in a sense, stoned for it.

In a community of grace, people do more to build each other up than tear each other down. Since love does not rejoice in evil and rejoices in the truth, what that means in practical application is that we look for ways to praise each other for our strengths rather than put each other down for our infirmities. That counts for everyone. For the first-time visitor who is gay, and for the elder who has given fully of himself for half a century to both his church and his marriage. Robin sang it just now. "Come to Jesus however you are." God forbid I would step between Jesus and anybody!

We can be the one who lays the boulder. Or, we can just ignore the boulders others have laid, walk by the pit. Like the priest who passed by the beaten man on the roadside, or like the Apostle Paul, we can empower others to throw stones by just being silent when we should have spoken up. In God’s eyes, there is no difference between those who throw the stones and those who make it possible for others to do so.

Or, we can roll the stone back. Which of those enterprises would you say God is in? Go back to the empty tomb. Easter. Simple question. Simple answer. Boulders are put in place. What does God tend to do with boulders? Stones that entomb? Just like it was on Resurrection Sunday, just like it was for Les that day at Laurel Land, this is a day where anyone who wants to could have a conversation with Jesus that changes their life. All you have to say is something like this to Jesus. "I can’t do it anymore. Here. You take it." I dare you to have that conversation and see what happens next.

Would you? Would you have that conversation with Jesus right now?