All Scriptures quoted are from The New Revised Standard Version unless otherwise quoted.

It is finished! Jesus cried. When was the last time you were able to say those words about anything in your life? Jesus said those words as he was dying on the cross, finishing, completing the work of our redemption. I wonder what that must feel like, to be able to say those three simple words about anything. It is finished.

Maybe that’s the thing about sports that so appeals to us. First, there’s the unscripted drama of the game. Even though we know that scripts guide every word and step and movement in plays and movies, if the script is good, then just for a little while, our belief is suspended, and at least it seems real. In sports, the script is written as the game is being played, right before our eyes.

The one thing that really distinguishes sports from so many other things is the intrigue of the clock. Once it starts, we know it will finish its work and the game will be over. All of the tension and the excitement of the game are really built around the seconds ticking down to when, of that game, it can be said, “It is finished.”

We can even bear sitting through a boring and over-priced movie, because we know it will be finished. Even though we may have traded two unredeemable hours of our lives and filled our minds with nonsense and our laps with extremely, overly-trans-fatted popcorn and have to wear the stains on our new khaki slacks for everyone to see. Sin can be like that. We can’t take it back; there’s always a stain.

When was the last time you were able to say of the most meaningful things you do, or of the most meaningful things in your life, even the stain of your sin, “It is finished. It’s no more!”? Is your work ever finished? Did you leave it all done Friday or yesterday? Will there be a stack on your desk tomorrow morning, waiting for you when you get there? Is your love for your wife or your husband finished? Or, your children? Or, is that love work just begun? Is your love for God a finished work you can set up on the mantel and admire and point to others or is your love for God more like a raw, unfinished sculpture, the complete shape of which has yet to be discovered, because even loving God is an unscripted drama? Don’t we write it as we go along?

Just about the time I think I’ve got Nancy figured out, a new day is born and the golden rays of the rising sun cut through the silvery fog of the morning, revealing whole new vistas of beauty in her yet-to-be discovered, experienced, and, most of all, loved. I have found God to be much the same way.

Most of what Jesus said on the cross I can’t imagine ever saying, anyway. It is finished is just one of many things he said that I can’t imagine. Can you? Can you imagine saying, of those who hurt you most deeply, “Father forgive them, for they are doing to me what they’re doing to me, although they ought to know better.” Or, can you imagine saying, “Friend, take care of my mother. I have to go away. I can’t be responsible anymore.” Or, could you imagine maybe saying, “God, why have you abandoned me? Where are you? Have you left me alone for real?” Most of all, I cannot imagine ever coming to a place of rest in my life and in my soul where I could look out on the world, and look into the face of God and say to others and to him, “I have finished my work.”

It wasn’t a pretty finish for Jesus, either. It was a flesh-ripping, gut-busting, bone-breaking, R-rated finish. It was the kind of finish people like to bury and forget about, like all the things we’ve done because we didn’t know better, or, worse, we did know better and we did them anyway. So, these folks buried their sin. Then, everyone went home to finish the Sabbath banquet. There must have been some Baptist blood in that crowd, because who else could have watched all the horror of that day and then gone and bellied up to a religious buffet?

It’s really amazing how quickly we can rush to worship after finishing our last sin without giving it a thought. They did, and we would have, too, because with God, all time is the present. The sins we committed years ago or just this morning, or the sins that are on this afternoon’s moral docket, all of them, were there that day, as though that day were today, or any day, and we had just committed those sins. We were the ones who cried, “Crucify him!” We were the ones who helped push the stone over the tomb. It is finished, Jesus said nonetheless. It’s done. Everything we ever did to God or to others or to ourselves, every act of betrayal, cruelty, injustice, every act of insensitivity, unkindness, selfishness, greed, lust, whatever. All that had to be done to accomplish the work of taking care of all that guilt is finished. I am convinced that most of the sins we now commit, we now commit because we don’t realize the work of our guilt is finished.

Here’s the most remarkable part. Having said it was finished, the world was without Jesus for three whole days. At least from Friday night until sometime Sunday morning, Jesus was dead. As dead as anyone at Laureland, buried six feet in the ground. Can you imagine five minutes of this world without Jesus in it, much less three days? No wonder the sun refused to shine and the earth quaked. How dark is the darkness caused by the absence of Jesus? Maybe you know. Or, maybe I should say, don’t we all? How dark is our world when Jesus seems to be gone?

Then, the scripture says, While it was still dark. While it was still dark, on the third day of Jesus’ absence from the earth, while it was still dark, Mary went to the tomb. Those are intriguing words. Intriguing! Listen carefully to the power of them.

We are the ones who tend to define the validity of religious experience by the immediacy and then depth, or the apparent immediacy and depth, of happiness, by the effervescence of a worship service or a person’s spirit. Listen to these words from the Isaiah prophecy about the person whose life we celebrate today, Jesus. From Isaiah 53,He has no stately form or majesty, that we should look upon him, nor appearance, that we should be attracted to him. He was despised and forsaken of men. A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And like one from whom men hide their face, he was despised, and we did not esteem him. The higher the joy, the deeper the faith? Really?

Jesus did promise his disciples, as recorded in John 16, that there would come a time when no one would be able to rob their joy. In the meantime, he assured them, while the world rejoiced at his departure, while it was still dark, he promised them that those who followed him would weep and lament. The finishing of Jesus’ work of bearing our sin demanded his death, his going away. The world was a dark and sad place for people of faith while it was still dark. Is it dark in your soul today? Is there a sadness of soul that haunts your every step? Jesus knows exactly how you feel.

Fred Craddock is, I think, one of the best preachers I’ve ever heard. I don’t know if he’s even five feet tall. He’s well into his 70s. He says of his own voice that, when he preaches, he sounds like wind whistling through a splinter in a post. Unimpressive looks and voice aside, I’ve never heard anybody open the word of God in a better way than Fred Craddock. He tells the story of a pastor he met once who had been born without either arm. This man told Fred Craddock that when he was a little boy, his mother walked into his bedroom one day and laid all of his clothes on the floor and said to him, “If you’re going to wear clothes today, you’re going to have to figure out some way to get these clothes on yourself. I’m not doing it for you anymore.” Then she left the room, closed the door and went away.

The little boy kicked and screamed, as you can imagine, for hours, until he finally realized his mother had been telling the truth, that if he was going to have clothes on him that day, it was going to be because he put them on himself. After hours of kicking and screaming, he finally lay down on the floor and, some way or another, with what he had, he worked his way into his clothes. When he finally got dressed, he opened the door and went down the hall to his mother’s room where he found her sitting on bed, weeping. Craddock then asked a question: “Does God sometimes leave us alone for a while” (Fred Craddock, Craddock Stories)?

Does he? Ask Jesus. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Ask the disciples, who knew what it was like to be in the darkness for three days while Jesus was gone. There are times when at least it seems that God has turned his back on us. That may be because he knows about us, that it’s what we do while it is still dark in our souls that is evidence of our true faith. Faith is what happens while it’s still dark and we go looking for Jesus, anyway, in the last place we found him.

One of the most amazing lines found in all of scripture, to me, is from the 20th chapter of John. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet . . .. As yet! Up until that moment, having actually gone into the empty tomb, even up until that moment, the scripture says, they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. They’d been with Jesus all this time, and, as yet, they did not understand. Faith, belief, happened to them while they still did not have everything figured out.

Isn’t that the way of faith? It’s what we believe while it’s still dark, and we don’t understand, that we really believe. Faith is not found in the answers to our questions but in our willingness to keep moving toward our fears even while it is still dark. Faith is found in our questioning not in arriving at all the answers. Faith is what happens when, though we can’t even begin to understand why it’s so dark, we accept what the writer of Hebrews said, that we have been saved, recreated, through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.

What that means is, whether you believe it or not, whether you accept it or not, whether you trust it or not, the day Jesus died and said, It is finished. All the guilt work that ever had to be done, for every sin you ever have committed or ever will commit, is already finished. Done!

That’s raw grace. It’s grace with a long leash. It’s grace that gives us room to keep asking questions while it’s still dark. Even the one who betrayed Jesus three times, Peter, whose manuscript of his life experience with Jesus made the final cut for biblical publication. The one who said of Jesus three times, “I don’t know this guy,” later wrote of him, Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that he might bring us to God. One death for three betrayals? Not bad.

Just last Sunday, at this door, a woman came through and took me by the hand. A woman that I consider to be a person of very deep, life-long faith. If I named her, nearly everyone in this room would know her and you might be shocked that she asked this question. I told her I wouldn’t name her. But, she asked me, “Why did Jesus have to die?” Is she an unbelieving person because she doesn’t know the logical answer to that question at this moment? Or, is her faith seen in the fact that it keeps pushing her toward the hard, sometimes illogical, things of which faith is made. Questions for which faith has left us wide open. It’s what we believe while it’s still dark that matters most.

Just yesterday, about this time, we conducted the funeral for Peggy Martin in this room. Peggy was too young to die. She was only in her mid-50s. Pulmonary fibrosis finally had its way. She was fairly healthy three weeks ago and we buried her at Laurel Land yesterday. Peggy had a difficult life. Those of you who knew her when she was still a member here years ago, and even since then, knew that her husband, Steve, died a tragic death in his mid-30s, twenty-two years ago. She was left to raise her two sons, who still attend here, Matt and Marcus, by herself. They call her a double parent, because she was both mother and father.

Peggy talked about Steve every day, her friends say. I was incredibly touched by the way her current pastor, at another church, said of her that her life would always be defined by the way her faith kept encountering conflict. Isn’t that something? He didn’t say her life would be defined by her always-victorious experiences. The death of a husband at a young age, raising two boys alone, a debilitating illness. It wasn’t a life of always reaching the summit of victory. It was a life that will always be defined by the way her faith kept encountering conflict.

How about yours? Jesus said, without debate, without time for discussion, “It’s finished.” Then it got dark, real dark. While it was still dark, while it was impossible to see, a new kingdom was being born right here on earth, just as it is in heaven. When the disciples went looking for Jesus where they had last seen him, well, that was the day they discovered what faith really was.