Easter 2026 | What if?

Good morning everybody, happy Easter.

I'm going to not make you keep saying he is risen.

He is risen indeed. Even though it's so much fun.

You can say it if you want. You can say it if you want.

Man, I am excited today to be here together to celebrate the

resurrection of Jesus, the new life which is taking up

residence in you and me and change the world in my life.

And today is a day we get to rejoice, we get to celebrate, we

get to remember and even to experience afresh.

So as Ali already said, thank you for being here.

What a joy to be able to celebrate the resurrection of

our Lord together today. If we haven't met.

My name is Josh. I have the joy of serving as

pastor here at the Garden Inn today.

It's my job to briefly recount for you the greatest story ever

told, the story that we find here in First Corinthians 15,

where we'll be today named as the gospel, The gospel story.

And Paul here in First Corinthians chapter 15 and verse

1 Corinthians 15 · chapter mention

3 says that this story was delivered into you of first

importance. Like there's nothing more

important than this story in this message, which we know as

the gospel. It's the bedrock claim upon

which our entire faith rests. In Paul's own words, it is the

claim that Christ died for our sins according to the

Scriptures, that he was buried, and that he was raised again on

the third day. Most of you in this room have

been to a sporting event of one kind or another.

A couple weeks ago, I had the chance to take my daughter to a

Boston Legacy match to see our new pro women's soccer team.

We had a lot of fun and, and before that match, just like

probably most of the matches that we've attended here in this

country at least, there's a tradition, right?

Every time everybody gets up, there's some local artist who

comes to center stage or to the field and, and belts out to the

best of their ability, the song, the Star Spangled Banner, our

national anthem, right? And everybody, when we hear that

song, at least if if you're an American citizen, right, we'll

stand, we'll honor kind of the singing of the flag.

We might put our hand over our heart.

We're respectful. We listen, we pay attention to

that song, to that moment. And then the moment passes.

There's the tip off or the kickoff and, and before you know

it, you know Jaylen Brown is, is driving the lane right or, or

all of a sudden Drake May is, is trying to find a receiver

downfield and scrambling out of the pocket.

And what I want you to notice this morning about this practice

of singing the anthem before our games is that it has basically

no relationship to anything that happens on the field immediately

thereafter, right? We, we, we have this, we have

this moment, we have this tradition, we have this space

where we, where we sing and we do this thing.

And then as soon as the game, like the whistle blows and the

game kicks off, we all forget completely about it, right?

Because it's in no way actually connected to the playing of the

game. I'll share this with you because

I think it's, I think it's an interesting question.

What is Easter for you and for me?

Is it like the national anthem that we sing before the sporting

match? Is it one of these, these, these

moments where we come, you know, we get dressed up, we wear our

pastels, we get to have a doughnut, maybe we have some,

some nice photos. We have some brunch plans.

Well, we have a great time. It's a tradition.

We love it. The kids get to do their Easter

egg hunts. Everybody has a blast.

And then we go back to Monday morning.

Like, does it, does it, does it make a difference past the

whistle? Does it connect to the rest of

our lives in some meaningful way?

And I want to invite you to consider the claim this morning

that comes in two parts, really, the claim that Paul makes here

in First Corinthians chapter 15. And it's very simply this.

1 Corinthians 15 · chapter mention

It's first that the resurrection really happened, that that three

days after Jesus was murdered, that he got up physically from

the grave. And the second piece to that

claim is radical, as the first is perhaps even more so, that

this historical reality of Jesus resurrection matters in some way

for your life and my life, for how we actually go about our

day-to-day today, that the life that Jesus achieved then matters

for me and you. Now, Paul, of course, it says

here in in First Corinthians 15, he, he talks about this story,

this story that he describes as of first importance.

I think that this is although the greatest story ever told.

It it's a bit challenging to tell this story in a way that

hooks because like like a joke where everybody has heard it

before and knows the punchline. It's easy for us to kind of be

like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know this one, right, for the

significance to kind of drain out because of the familiarity

that exists. But Paul says no, no, no.

This is so important for us. And as a way of attempting to

invite us back into the significance of the resurrection

this morning, I want to, I want to do a little thought

experiment. It's the same thought experiment

that Paul actually takes us through here in First

Corinthians 15. Paul plays a little game, if you

will, of what if, of what if. A few of you out there are

Marvel nerds. I think many of us have probably

seen a Marvel movie at one time or another.

I see some some knowing looks out there.

And yeah, like 60 something percent of Americans have been

at least to one movie. But, but if you're an OG, which

I am not, you go back to the comics, right?

And, and during the days of the comics, there was a, a, a lesser

known series that was titled What If.

And the what if series of comics basically did the same thing

that Paul is doing here this morning, right?

They laid out an alternative, like what if spider man's true

identity was released into the world and everybody knew he was

Peter Parker. Like what if if Cap didn't give

away his shield? What if, what if things had

played out differently? And that's exactly what Paul

does here in first Corinthians 15.

Beginning in verse 12, he begins to to make an argument for make

a case for what if the resurrection didn't happen.

And essentially he's responding to some challenges, some

skeptics in the Corinthian community who doubted the

resurrection just like so many people do today.

I mean, after all, like, even though they were ancient people,

even though they did not have smartphones or telescopes,

right? They couldn't go to the moon,

but they weren't stupid, right? They knew just then, just like

we know now that the death has like a pretty consistent record.

Normally when we bury people, they don't get back up.

You don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand that

fact. And people in the Corinthian

community were like, ah, no, no, no.

I don't know if Jesus really rose from the dead.

Maybe maybe he didn't really resurrect.

But Paul says here in verse 14, he says, hey, if Christ has not

been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.

There would be those today who would suggest to you that you

can be a Christian without believing in the resurrection,

that somehow we can construct some form of faith that doesn't

actually take the bodily resurrection of Jesus seriously.

But Paul is very clear. He says no.

He says your faith is is pointless and powerless if Jesus

did not literally get up from the grave.

Not only that, he goes on in verse 15 to say that that that

we would be found to be false witnesses of God.

Paul says not only would it be fruitless to believe in a

Christianity without the resurrection, but it would also

be fraudulent. Like if, if, if what we are

purporting to you happened did not happened, then this is a

conspiracy. This is false advertising.

It's amazing when we look here at First Corinthians 15, you may

know this First Corinthians is one of the earliest

chronological letters in the New Testament.

Scholars believe that First Corinthians was written to the

church at Corinth somewhere between 53 and 55 AD.

Now I'm not much of A mathematician, but you may know,

right, Jesus died at what age? Around 33, right?

OK. And and we mark AD for after

death, right? The common era starts right from

his birth. So what that means is

chronologically, what we're talking about is a document that

was written within 20 years of Jesus death.

That's the letter that we're looking at today.

It was, it was just a couple of decades.

It was a a few years. And Paul earlier in first

Corinthians 15 goes on to explain that this was witnessed,

right? Jesus resurrection really

happened. And, and, and he goes on to name

names. He says this person saw it and

that person saw it and then they saw it.

He, he says over 500 people saw this guy alive at one time.

And then he said something remarkable.

He says some of those people have died, but most of them are

still here. OK, now, obviously this isn't

true for us, but at the time that Paul is making this claim,

there were dozens, even hundreds of people who had witnessed, who

had physically seen and spent time with the resurrected Jesus

that you could go and ask about it like they had been with him.

They were witnesses to his resurrection.

So when Paul here is saying that the resurrection is the core to

our faith, he's saying like, hey, to deny this, it means that

we have this massive conspiracy going on.

We all got together. And for some reason, which

doesn't make a lot of sense because most of what we're

getting out of this is persecution, But but for some

reason, we all just decided that martyrdom seemed fun and we were

all going to get together and lie about this.

Chuck Coulson famously said after he went to prison for

Watergate and then was converted, He he said, I know

for a fact that Watergate proved to me that the resurrection of

Jesus is real. He says, because there is no way

that 12 dudes can keep a secret for three weeks, much less 40

years under penalty of death, right?

There's no motivation for it. But these guys were convinced

that something dramatic had happened, something that had

changed their lives. It's something that had set them

down a new path. See, prior to the resurrection,

we see the apostles and, and what are they doing?

They're locked up in a room. They're afraid of the Jewish

leaders. They're, they're cowering and

timid, right? There's no way that they want to

go into the courts in the temple and, and proclaim the message of

Jesus. They've been taken by surprise.

They were expecting not a, a savior to die and resurrect, but

a, a political savior who would come and overthrow the empire,

somebody who would come in and, and seize control and seize

power. This is why they're all

jockeying, if we read the history, for a place in the new

administration, right? They wanted a cabinet seat when

Jesus comes to power. They weren't ready for death and

resurrection. And so when the events of Holy

Week play out, when Jesus dies and then rises, the disciples

are distraught, They are confused, they are lost.

If Jesus did not rise, this is what we would have, right?

No Christian movement, no thousands of conversions in

Jerusalem, no church planting movement across the

Mediterranean world that we wouldn't have the, the, the

hospitals in the orphanages, in the elder care, in the, the

social programs that that come from this mandate to love our

neighbor, right? We would not have this radical

ethic of Jesus that calls us towards forgiving our enemies,

right? For for giving away our money to

other people and then not telling anyone about it.

Right To forgiving again and again.

There are so many things about the way of Jesus that if Jesus

goes into the grave on Good Friday and then doesn't

resurrect are done right. The ethics of that day suggested

to people that might makes right that you would honor.

You should extend honor to the people who are powerful, right?

Do good to the people who do good to you, and then try to

harm your enemies. And this was the morality of the

day. When Jesus comes on, he points

people in a radically different direction.

But Can you imagine what the story would have been if Jesus

goes to the drave and never gets up?

Man, that guy's an idiot, right? That's silly.

How foolish is this? Like a little tiny sect within

Judaism? A rabbi with some harebrained

ideas who got himself and a bunch of his followers killed.

And that was the end of it. It would be the end of it that I

I am confident that you don't know the name of the many

additional Jewish rabbis in the centuries since then that came

and proclaimed I am the Messiah attracted a crowd of people,

right? People began to follow them, and

then they were killed and their movement dispersed and that was

the end of it. And so too, it would be with

Jesus of Nazareth without the resurrection.

Without the resurrection, Jesus doesn't alter the course of

history. He doesn't alter the fabric of

morality, giving us a different vision.

But maybe most importantly, for me and for you, if Jesus doesn't

rise from the dead, then the life that we have available

through him is not available, right?

Because I know that this question of resurrection, this

question of hope this morning, it doesn't just meet people in

some kind of theological or abstract way.

Like we're real people with lives out in the world.

We read the news, we have relationships with other people.

And I know that that means that very often we're carrying a

weight, a burden. Maybe that's a burden of grief

because that you lost somebody and, and every time you get to a

certain time of year, the memories are evoked and there's

this longing, this emptiness, this hollowness that you feel

month after month and year after year.

Maybe it's the burden of, of stuckness that you're carrying

this morning. You come in today and, and your

life, honestly, if you look at it, hasn't gone the way that you

hoped. Maybe it's your career, maybe

it's your relationships, it's your finances, maybe it's your

mental health. You look at things and and

things are not what you longed for them to be.

You carry a weight, a grief, A longing that comes into spaces

even like this today. Maybe it's not just out there,

but but in here this morning, you sit with the reality and the

realization that like I get that the world is broken, but but

something with me is not working either.

All of my willpower, all of my coping mechanisms, all of my

attempts to to to to self help myself or to strategize myself

into a different way of life. And I keep flying off the

handle. I keep finding that it's just

easier to lie about what's going on than to tell the truth.

I keep finding myself compulsively avoiding

situations. Maybe you know these things that

the Bible calls sin? You might refer to them as as

brokenness or effects of trauma, or coping mechanisms.

But the reality is, according to Scripture, that we have gone our

own way in one way or another. Every one of us has attempted to

manage the world, to control the world on our own terms.

For some of us, it might be going better than others at the

moment, but it never works out for very long.

We find that these self help mechanisms, these ways of trying

to be our own masters, to be our own gods, to control things and

Orient the world according to our own preferences and desires,

ultimately ends up falling flat, causing pain and harm for

ourself and other people. And if Jesus didn't rise from

the dead, I don't know what to tell you.

Like, honestly, if Jesus didn't get up from the grave, keep

trying. I guess do your best.

Like, you know, have some conversations with like, what is

the advice that we have? What is the solution that we

have if the answer is always just to, to try harder, to do

more, to to take things into our own hands?

This is a way that is ultimately doomed.

And Paul speaks to this here in First Corinthians 15 when he

talks about how futile the relationship or or our life

would be without Christ. He says if Christ was not raised

from the dead, not only would we be false witnesses, not only

would there be no hope for life after death, but you, he says in

verse 17, you are still in your sins.

Paul is saying like if Jesus is not alive, you're on your own.

You're stuck not only under God's judgement, but but the

trap of your own making, like something that we can't work our

way out of. Friends, where do you feel that

stuckness this morning, that darkness this morning, The place

where life is not working in the way that you want it to, where

things feel too heavy to bear, where you keep cycling through

the same patterns, the same anger, the same avoidance, the

same numbing, the same people pleasing?

If that's you this morning, I think the Holy Week is such a

beautiful answer. Because the gospel story doesn't

minimize the weight of sin. It doesn't minimize the weight

of our sickness. It doesn't minimize how broken

and and damaged the world is. It's able to acknowledge a world

where Jesus is murdered by a violent and oppressive empire,

Something that is helpful to remember in a world where we

continue to bomb one another, where pedophiles get off.

Where every day more corruption and despair and pain seems to

pop up on our news feeds. But the sin is also personal.

It's also individual. It's also that which me and you

carry are places of stuckness and hopelessness and brokenness.

And that the problem that we're faced in this story, in this

alternate reality, is that if Jesus wasn't resurrected, as

Paul says, that we don't have hope.

Our faith is pointless. Our faith is powerless.

The the witnesses to Jesus are a fraud.

If Jesus didn't raise from the sins, our faith is futile and

you are still stuck in your sins as he says in verse 17.

He concludes with this downer of a line.

If only for this life we have hope in Christ.

We are of all people most to be pitied.

Like if Jesus didn't rise from the dead, then man, we are going

the wrong way. You might as well eat, drink and

be happy. Make the most of it while you

got it. Because at the end of the day,

we die and that's it. And then there is perhaps the

most important conjunction in all of Scripture.

We get to verse 20. And Paul starts with but BUT

like, but he says like, yeah, this reality looks pretty dark.

It looks pretty grim. It looks pretty messed up, but

he says but Christ has indeed been raised.

Thank God. Like thank God Christ has indeed

been raised, Paul says. He says he got up from the grave

and what this means is that Jesus has won the victory.

See, on the cross what happened is that God himself came to do

what we could not do for ourselves.

The infection of our sin that had had grown deep into the

hearts of each one of us. It wasn't just a problem that

could be amputated, it was an antidote that needed to be

found. Like as Solzhenitsyn said, it

wasn't that God could just, you know, judge those bad people

over there and then free the rest of us up, right?

The the problem was, is that we too are part of the problem.

The dividing line between good and evil runs not through

political parties or nations, but right down the center of

each human heart. Like we needed not just to be

rescued from them, we need to be rescued from us.

And so Jesus, when he goes to the cross, he takes on sin in

its most potent form, the deep, the depth of evil on every

dimension we can imagine it. He's murdered by the might of

systemic structures and empire. He's betrayed relationally and

interpersonally by a close friend.

He takes on the alienation even from God and and he takes on the

weight of the world. As Isaiah says, by his stripes

we are healed. Jesus took into his own body

sin. But unlike every other time in

all of history where sin has inevitably produced death, this

time that death was not the end. See, sin killed Jesus.

But this is a bit like a rocky fight, right?

He got knocked down, He got knocked out.

He went into the grave. He took on all of the evil, all

of the sin, all of the the the punishment and the consequences

of that. But then he rose again,

victorious. Like death was not the end of

the story for Jesus and that means that death is not the end

of the story for us. See, if sin and death and hell

had one with Jesus, if he had just gone to the cross as some

sacrificial lamb and and then it had defeated him, we would have

no hope that we would still be stuck.

But Scripture says that on that third day that Jesus got up, he

rose from the dead. And because of that, that means

that a cure has been found. The antidote is available, a new

life has been born and is available through him.

For you and for me, because of Jesus, this way of life.

That seems radical, that feels silly, that seems honestly

bizarre. If you don't believe in life

after death becomes not only plausible but but almost

necessary, we can look at things that otherwise would would seem

absurd. Things like loving your enemies,

forgiving unconditionally, responding with generosity when

somebody takes advantage of you, praying and trusting God.

Things that that don't make sense if we're confined to the

scope of this life. Because when we look at life

after death, when we look at the power of the resurrection, we

can say that this is in fact the only rational move.

The year I was born, there was a kid named Michael who was a

freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, and he was

wrestling with questions about his future, as so many freshmen

are. His parents had a very strong

vision for his life. He was going to be a doctor.

That was their commitment. And Michael was kind of on board

with this, at least for the moment.

He was studying pre Med classes, but he wasn't really content.

He wasn't that excited about it. In fact he was really

fascinating by all this emerging technology with computers and

every moment that he could get away from his classes he was he

was buying computer parts and and tinkering with special

custom builds in his dorm room. And so much so that one day his

parents showed up unexpectedly and he panicked.

Like he he he took all the stuff and got his roommates to help

and moved everything into an adjacent room.

Like he didn't want them to know that he wasn't taking his pre

Med degree seriously enough. But yet he was so drawn to this

alternative he kept chasing it. And to the point where he began

to struggle even just to like, show up for classes, to want to

do all the work to prepare for finals.

Honestly, his heart was somewhere else.

So as he approached the end of that first year, he he called

his parents and he said, hey, I've made the decision to drop

out of college. And his parents did.

Probably what the parents in the room, like instinctively are

like, what? What do you mean?

Absolutely not. In fact, they were so panicked

that they flew to Austin. They were like, you can't do

this. You can't throw your life away

like this. What are you thinking?

This doesn't make any sense to his parents.

Michael looked like, you know, a young, naive college kid who

just doesn't really understand who the world works like.

They knew he needed to keep pressing ahead into to finish

his degree. Man, what are you going to do on

that GED? Life is hard out there.

They wanted him to stay the course and finish what he had

started. But Michael saw things

differently. Like for Michael, he knew like,

I'm in a window of time right now, all the computer parts are

being sold by these middle men's.

There's this opportunity to step in and to carve out a space in

the market. If I go another three years,

that window will close. It won't make sense.

So Michael did in fact drop out of college.

He took the $1000 that he had saved from various odd jobs and

hired a few friends. They began assembling custom

computers around some 6 foot folding tables, at first in the

dorm room and then in another space.

By the end of his freshman year, he was earning $80,000 a month.

He went, of course, on to found Dell.

Michael Dell, who became one of the Forbes richest people and

founded one of the most significant technology companies

in the world. My point here is not that you

should drop out of college. What I'm trying to say in this

story is that Michael Dell saw something that other people did

not, and that shift in perspective changed what made

sense from the perspective of his parents.

He was on a great track. There was no reason for the

risk. Like, don't throw things away.

Just do what everybody else is doing.

This is the proven track. It's the one that makes sense.

Keep going in this direction. But Dell saw another reality.

He was compelled by it. He was confident in it.

He knew that there was an opportunity.

And so he seized it and of course changed his history as

well as that of the world. And friends, my point here this

morning is that that's a lot like following Jesus.

Not the making $1,000,000 part, probably, but when we make the

decision to follow after Jesus, we, we, we Orient ourselves, we

Orient our lives according to a different reality, a reality

that honestly, if you're just looking at how things make sense

according to the terms of the world, is a fool's errand.

It's probably not a great move if the resurrection didn't

happen. But if Jesus got up from the

grave, if there is life after death, if Jesus is alive, then

what seems foolish is in fact essential.

It's necessary. It's the smartest thing that you

could possibly do. As Frederick Beekner said

beautifully, here's the world. Beautiful things and terrible

things will happen. Don't be afraid.

Resurrection means that the worst thing is never the last

thing. See, because of Jesus, because

of the life that he won over death, because the antidote is

available, we know that we can live courageously, bravely,

beautifully, for the sake of love, and that it does, in fact,

make sense. Friends, this morning I also

want to invite you to reckon with whether or not you believe

Jesus, whether you have not just been somebody who has listened

to the anthem, if you will, and then gone about your life.

But if you are living in light of the resurrection this

morning, see the message of Jesus means for me and you that

those dark places, those stuck places, those hopeless places,

those places where you feel trapped and bound don't have to

be the end of the story. Because even though you may not

have the strategy, even though you may not have the willpower,

even though you may not be able to solve it on its own.

An alien life, the life of God himself has sprung up from the

ground, bringing resurrected life even here even now

available for you today. So the worst thing that has

happened in your life, that place where you feel shame, that

place where you feel helpless, that place where you feel

trapped or stuck, it doesn't have to define your story.

It doesn't have to be the final chapter.

Jesus has made a way through his resurrection for life, for hope,

for faith, for love to take root in you.

Today, maybe this morning, you're sitting on the precipice

of this as you reflect on your own life.

You look out and you're like, I think I'm an observer in the

stands rather than a player on the field when it comes to this

Christianity stuff. Like, I know about it.

I grew up around it. The story is familiar, sure, but

I'm not sure there's ever been a moment where I said, Jesus, I

trust you, Jesus. I want that new life to live in

me. I want to trust you to to, to

break these chains, to make a way to forgive me, to heal me.

I, I need the antidote. I see that that can't come from

my own resources. Will you forgive me?

Will you heal me? Will you save me?

Friends, if you haven't made that step of faith this before,

this morning is your moment. It's your time.

It's your opportunity to say yes to Jesus, to take a step of

faith that to go from the stands to the arena to, to become a

follower of Jesus. Maybe you look at your life and

you say, you know, I've been, I've been following Jesus for

decades. I know Jesus, I've grown up

around Jesus, I've followed Jesus.

But I know this is true because it's true for me.

There's still that area of my life, you know, there's that

still that area where I'm not really experiencing the new life

of Christ, where I still have this stuckness, this, this

anxiety, this difficulty, this despair.

And I need that healing. I need that life on Easter

Sunday and every Sunday there's an opportunity for you to say,

Jesus, would you meet me in this place of darkness?

Would you meet me in this place of brokenness?

And that's the great thing about Jesus, like the cross itself, a

a symbol of execution and death, dismemberment and torture

becomes the thing that we look to as a source of hope and life.

Because Jesus can take those broken places, those those

places that are shattered, those places that that feel empty,

that feel hopeless for you, and he can bring them back together,

stitch them back together like a beautiful mosaic.