It would be hard to miss, if you've been listening to the scriptures and to the singing this morning, that we are called to think about the resurrection of Christ. Indeed, our calling is from the resurrection and it is to a new resurrection. It is also true that we must learn to define our salvation as far more than just being saved from hell and to heaven. It is to all of this that the prophet Jeremiah calls us. Though his words were spoken and written centuries before Jesus' life, they come to us in this moment to call us from one resurrection and to the next.

Perhaps you remember the story I told you about three years ago, about finding myself one morning following what I believed to be a drunk driver on I-30. I called 9-1-1 and was transferred from one 9-1-1 jurisdiction to the next as I followed this driver weaving dangerously through traffic and on and off of the road over some twenty miles of Interstate highway. After he was stopped, the young man, who was probably no more than about twenty, wasn't drunk. There was far more to the story.

As it turns out, he was a young man who was trying to work a very difficult job and had one night to move from one place to the next. He had gone home from work the day before and spent all night moving without any sleep, gotten in the car and gone to work the next day. Because he was sleep deprived he was driving as though he were drunk. I had judged him one way when there was another story. There was a story behind the drama that was being played out before my eyes and everyone else's eyes that gave the drama we saw an entirely different meaning than we had originally assigned to it. I felt the terrible shame that always comes with passing judgment on someone before you know the whole story.

It was difficult not to think of that young man this week, when two highly-publicized, made-for-TV movie plots played themselves out before our very eyes in the real and tragic lives of two women, Anna Nicole Smith and Lisa Nowak, a space shuttle astronaut.

Anna Nicole, it turns out, was from the little town of Mexia, just about forty-five miles south of Dallas. Those who saw her grow up there remember her as a young lady who worked at a fried chicken restaurant when she had brown hair, not blond hair, and a rather normal figure. She rose to some social prominence by becoming a Playboy playmate after dyeing her hair blond and making some other physiological adjustments and becoming something of a Marilyn Monroe wannabe. Her own twenty-year-old son died some five months ago in the very same hospital and on the very same day she gave birth to a little girl. Anna Nicole died this week under some very mysterious circumstances in a Florida hotel room at the ripe old age of thirty-nine.

Then there was Lisa Nowak. A Naval Academy graduate, a space shuttle astronaut, a married mother of three, she drove nine-hundred miles wearing adult diapers to confront the other woman in a love triangle with another astronaut. In a matter of seconds, she threw away everything she had ever dreamed of and worked for all of her life.

Why do people with so much promise and possibility live and die like that? Why do we? There's got to be a story behind the story. The question for you and for me, from scripture, is, "What is the story behind your story and mine?" The story behind the story of the way our lives are now playing themselves out. There is what others see, and there is what we see, the fruit of our life's efforts that's most apparent. What's at the root of our life story? There is our joy and our happiness, there's our anger and our prejudice, our self-centeredness and our strange generosities, all bundled up in one person.

The ancient scriptures we've read this morning, both from Jeremiah and 1 Corinthians, call us, if nothing else, to live more than superficial, unexamined lives. To look for and to live out of the story that is behind the story. They call us to examine that question of the story behind the way we are now living out our own lives. They call us to trace back our lives to their very roots and to see what we find there. Even if we don't want to know what's at the root of our lives, God is very, very interested in us knowing that and walking with us in discovering it for ourselves.

At first, that divine curiosity seems a little threatening, even frightening. Jeremiah's text actually seems and sounds quite harsh at first glance. "The heart," he said, "is devious above all else. It is perverse. Who can understand it? I, the Lord, test the mind and search the heart to give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings." That doesn't sound very hopeful to me.

God sees what we do, not just what we say. God wants to know what's at the root, at the heart of all that we do and say. Not just the evil, but even the good that we do. Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher who lived almost 500 years before the time of Christ, was the one who said that the "unexamined life is not worth living." Before Socrates said it, God determined it by the way he created us, to live in relationship with him and even in his plans for the redemption of all humanity. By the creative and the redemptive work of God in Christ, to simply go from one day to the next without asking ourselves why we do what we do is, according to scripture, to not really live at all, but just merely exist.

Judgment, the kind of judgment of which Jeremiah speaks, seems threatening and frightening. In fact, it is truly the source of our salvation. Divine judgment is simply God telling us the truth about ourselves and saving us from living in ignorance and maybe dying in ignorance and therefore dying without ever having really lived, even if we claim to be Christians. The kind of judgment where God exposes us, questions us about why we do what we do, who we are at the core, is the only hope of saving us from eventually becoming helpless victims of the sort of demons that drove Anna Nicole and Lisa Nowak to live the way they did.

The other day in the grocery store, I found myself strangely attracted to some chocolate covered peanuts. I bought just a few of them, not as many as I used to, just a few. When I got in the car, Nancy asked, "What's this?" I told her about how, when I was a little boy my parents would take me to Sears on Saturdays. Sears always had a candy counter. Do you remember? They always had chocolate covered peanuts. My treat was to get some chocolate covered peanuts in one of those little plastic bags. The other day, when I was at the grocery store, in a sentimental moment (food and I have this long history of sentimental moments), buying the candy was a trip back in time, making me feel close again to people I still love, who aren't here anymore.

Chocolate covered peanuts are one thing. Now you know why I bought them. What about the more substantive things we do? Why do we spend money the way we do? Why do we live where we live? Why do we do the jobs we do? Why do we treat people the way we do, good or bad? Why do we get angry about rather insignificant things, like someone cutting us off in traffic, yet turn a blind eye to whole suburbs of social injustice as we drive by? Why or how can we drive the roads we do without ever asking ourselves where those roads might actually be taking us? There's what we do and there is where we go and there is our God who would call us to understand the roots of our journey.

Specifically, why do certain routines of worship still hold prominence with us, even when we don't know why we do them anymore? Do we even know why we have songs and sermons and rituals and routines in worship or do we just buy into them, like chocolate covered peanuts, because they bring us comfort? Why do certain songs mean something to us and others mean nothing at all? Why do we hold some things with such sacred regard and yet make fun of the way others worship? Why do we budget the way we do at church? Why do we spend money here and not there, or there and not here? Do we even know where the money we send to "do missions" even ends up, or do we just give, not caring? I used to. Not anymore. I have come to conclude that unexamined worship is worship without meaning.

Which brings us to the text we read this morning from 1 Corinthians, where Paul says, "If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain, and your faith has been in vain." If all we are doing does not have at its root our calling from and to the resurrection of Christ, then all we are doing, Paul says, is absolutely meaningless. A farce! The saddest joke ever played out in human history! So much so that, if there is no resurrection of Jesus, and that is not the root of our calling for all that we do, then those of us who regularly proclaim the resurrection have lied about God.

Beyond that, if there is no resurrection to which we are called, then it doesn't really matter where we are on the road today, because our lives have no meaning. Our lives have meaning because our call has been in the resurrection of Christ and to our resurrection in Christ. Paul goes on to say that the fact Christ has been raised from the dead means that he is the first fruits of those who have died, which means that what happened to Jesus, past tense, in his resurrection is just the beginning of what God intends to do for all humanity, future tense.

Do you believe that, really believe that? Do you really believe that? Is it shaping the way you spend your money, spend your time and how you treat people? If we don't stay close to our resurrection roots, past and future, we lose our hope. We lose our reason for living and we begin to drift off in whatever direction the darker demons of our souls choose to take us.

As Joe sang so beautifully a moment ago, were it not for grace, I wonder how many miles I might have driven and what I might have done when I got there. Were it not for grace, represented in resurrection past, present and future, I can tell you where I would be. On a road that leads to nowhere, believing salvation is strictly up to me.

Did you ever play church when you were growing up? I'd play preacher. I'd make my sisters sit and listen to me. My dad remembers peeking in through the door and my little sister saying, "Glen, keep it short today." I have no memory of preaching too long. I do remember playing church.

Some of you who think you are just going to church every week, especially among our children and youth, may look back on this very day and discover that, in the middle of all of this "just going to church," God was actually in the process of calling you to some form of resurrection ministry. I played church and then, at some point, I discovered that I was actually re-enacting through play, as children do, what I really believed to be important.

Today, it would be impossible to say for certain where the playing became the serious business of sensing the call of God. I do remember climbing into our 1957 blue and white fantail Ford Fairlane, probably all of ten years of age, asking my parents one day if it would be okay with them if I became a preacher. Six years later, God asked me the same question. How can I look back on all of that now and say what was part of God's call on my life and what was not?

We are at one and the same time psychological, intellectual, physical and spiritual creations by the design of God. At our roots, we are also, by the redemptive work of God, resurrection people. We cannot talk about any part of our being, physical, psychological, intellectual or whatever, without also discussing the resurrection part. As well, I cannot talk about any part of the influence any one of those played in my life, without talking about a part of myself that God created and reshaped by the resurrection of Jesus. At first, I thought I was playing church, but maybe I wasn't playing so much.

Do you remember the very first time you ever saw the Mississippi River? I don't remember for certain but I think it was probably driving across one of those great bridges that spans the Mississippi somewhere in Mississippi. I remember being awed by it. Some people are satisfied to drive across that river, even to this day, and say, "Wow! What a big river!" and never stop to think about where it came from or where it's going. Others, including myself, upon seeing the big river, just have to know. Where did the third-largest named river system on the planet come from? Where is the first trickle that becomes the stream that ultimately becomes that mighty river? If we sailed up the Mississippi River to its source, what would we find?

I can't tell you for sure when I stopped just playing church and actually started doing church. I can tell you that I'm not playing now and I have to know why I'm doing this, more now than ever. I have to know where this is going, now more than ever. I have to know who this is about, now more than ever. I've got to trace this resurrection river back to its source and see where it leads me. Why do I sing what I sing, pray what I pray, preach what I preach and believe what I believe? Why do I do those things? Am I just playing church? Am I just crossing the river again? Am I just buying some more chocolate covered peanuts this morning? Is there eternal substance to what I'm doing? Where did this river that became me come from and where is it leading? Will this river that became me eventually spill out into a sea of eternal hope and grace. Indeed, even now, am I in the river of eternal hope and is the river in me? I have to know if what I now do has something to do with the day that Jesus walked away from an empty tomb! Really? Me? You? Did it? Will it?

The only people who live lives worth living and, beyond that, the only people who ultimately make a difference in this world, are the people who, somewhere along the way, stop and ask, "Why? Where did I come from, and where am I going?"

Are you one of those people?