✠ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit ✠

I’m sure there are some folks in the world who might wonder why it is that we would desire to meet together like this today.  Why go through all the hassle and strangeness of trying to worship in a parking lot?  Why not just stay home and pray and read the Bible individually?  And why during these last few weeks have many of you who can safely do so, why have you been coming here to meet in our groups of 10 or less to receive the Lord’s Supper inside the church?  What is it that compels us to gather like this in person, bodily, in the flesh?  

The answer very simply is Easter.  The answer is the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead.  For Jesus’ rising was not just a virtual thing, a spiritual matter.  It wasn’t a ghost or a hologram that came out of the tomb and appeared to the disciples.  Notice what the Easter Gospel says.  When the women went to the tomb, “they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus.”  They didn’t find a body, because Jesus’ dead corpse was raised and glorified!  Jesus’ resurrection wasn’t merely spiritual, it was physical.  The same body that was born of the blessed Virgin Mary, the same body of the man who lived a holy life on our behalf, the same body that suffered and bled and died on the cross to pay for our sins–that body of the eternal Son of God was raised from death in victory over the grave for us.  The Christian faith is a bodily thing.

The Scriptures make it clear that this same risen Jesus is truly present among His gathered people.  For Jesus said, “Where two or three [or 10 or 100] are gathered together in My name [around My preaching and My supper] there I am in the midst of them.”  The church by its very nature is the bodily gathering of God’s people around His words and His supper, where He is bodily present for us.  The Biblical word for church means those who have been called out of this world and gathered together in His saving presence.  And so, here we are–not gathered in the way we would prefer to be certainly, but still gathered together by Christ and with Christ around His Word.

The resurrection of Jesus means that your body matters to God.  It’s not just a mere container for your soul; it’s an integral part of who you are and whom He has created you to be.  That’s why He cares about how you live your bodily life.  That’s why He cares about redeeming and exalting your body together with your soul.  Otherwise, why would He have taken on your flesh and blood and become a true man in the first place?  Why else would He have risen with flesh and bones?   The Christian faith is a concrete, tangible, physical faith.  It deals with stuff that really happened; it deals with the real world of material things, bodily things, the things of this creation.  

So virtual stuff, stuff that we can watch on a screen, is fine as a temporary measure in times like these.  We thank God for that ability and that technology that can keep us somewhat connected, and that the Word of God can be heard in that way.  But the communion of saints is not a virtual communion; it is the living body of Christ.  There is no such thing as virtual communion, just as there is no such thing as a virtual hug.  In the same way that a virtual hug over long distances leaves you longing for the real thing, when you can truly embrace the ones you love, so virtual church away from the Lord’s altar leaves you longing for the real thing, when we can be together in the flesh, where Christ embraces our bodies, speaking His life-giving words into our ears, touching us in the Sacrament of His body and blood, uniting us with Himself and one another as we eat and drink for the forgiveness of our sins.  Our God is the God of creation, the God who redeems and restores our bodies, who will raise us up at the Last Day just as He was raised up, literally, in the flesh.  

For now, though, we must deal with our flesh that is riddled with sin and sickness and death.  We are fallen creatures; our created humanity has been corrupted.  And this Coronavirus is actually a pretty good metaphor for what sin does to us.  It cuts us off from one another; it isolates us; it often makes us fear one another and see each other as a potential threat or competitor.  Sin turns us in ourselves and puts us in a defensive posture of self-interest, guarding our own stuff, losing patience and lashing out at others.  And worst of all, sin is a fatal virus that cuts us off from God.  The deadly pandemic began in the garden.  It is a contagion that makes us delusional, that causes us to rebel against God’s Word, to think that we can live better without Him.  But as the book of Proverbs says, His words are life to those who find them and health to all their flesh.  Apart from Jesus’ words, there is no life; only death and being cut off.

I’ve seen quite a few commercials lately that are advertising something they’re calling contactless delivery.  That’s a selling point now, no human contact.  How awful!  It may be temporarily necessary, I understand, but how awful!  I’ve preached to you before how one Scriptural way to understand hell is that it is utter isolation and aloneness, being forsaken and cut off from God and all that is good, utter emptiness and loneliness.  Sure, we all like a little time to ourselves now and again.  But it is not good for man to be alone.  That’s not how God created us to be.  We are made to be in communion with God and one another.

And that’s what Jesus has come to restore for us and has given to us at Easter.  We are reconciled and reunited with God and each other in the risen and living Christ.  Jesus is not about contactless delivery or social distancing at all.  He who is without sin, without disease, comes with no mask, no personal protection, and He touches our diseased human nature.  Remember the stories of Jesus’ healing of the sick?  A leper once came to Him begging Him for help, and it is written that Jesus stretched out His hand and touched Him (Matthew 8:3).  Think about that!  Highly infectious lepers, of all people, were supposed to be quarantined and isolated.  But Jesus breaks into the quarantine in order to bring the cure to our diseased bodies and souls.

And the cure is His own pure and holy body and soul.  Here’s how it works: Jesus was  willingly infected on your behalf.  He willingly absorbed into Himself every single bit of your sin virus, so that in His death the disease itself would die.  The risen Jesus has become the cure for you, for He is now immune from death.  As we just said in Romans 6, “We know that since Christ was raised from the dead, He cannot die again.  Death no longer has mastery over Him.”  By your baptism into Christ, by your faith in Him, you now share in His immunity.  As it is written, “The death He died, He died to sin once for all.”  The grave is now a toothless enemy for you.  For though you may still die, eternal death and hell are defeated, and you shall rise again, just as Jesus did.  For he said, “Because I live, you shall live also.”  “I am the Resurrection and the Life.  He who believes in Me will live, even though He dies.  And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die.”  

You could compare it to how a vaccine works.  A vaccine introduces into your body certain elements of a particular virus, exposing you to it in a non-lethal way, so that your body produces anti-bodies.  And then when you’re exposed to the full-fledged virus, you have the defenses to fight it off.  It can’t harm you any more.  In a much deeper and greater way, Jesus does that for you.  He introduces death to you in a non-lethal way by joining you to His own death for sin.  As it says in Romans 6, “Do you not know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?”  You’ve been safely exposed to death through Christ.  So now when you face your own death, in Christ it cannot touch you.  For He took it all into His body and destroyed its power by dying and rising again.  Receiving Jesus by faith, hearing His Word, partaking of His body and blood, you have the antibody against death.  He has already conquered death for you, and so sin and Satan and the grave can’t harm you any more.  He is your sure defense against every physical and spiritual pathogen.  As Romans 6 continues, “If we have been united with Him like this is His death, we shall surely also be united with Him in His resurrection.”

This is the great comfort and joy of Easter for us, just as it was that first Easter day for the disciples who were sequestered away in fear.  Jesus’ resurrection means that your sins have truly been paid for.  For the wages of sin is death, but now death has been undone, and there is forgiveness and new life.  Jesus’ resurrection means that you can trust His Word; He prophesied this, and His words have come to pass.  If He is trustworthy in something so important as this, then you can also have confidence in everything else that He says, too.  And Jesus’ resurrection means that you also will rise bodily from the grave on the Last Day.  For Christ is the firstfruits, the first of many more who will be raised at His coming.

So this is why we gather, this is why we assemble.  We can’t help but be near the One who is our source of life and healing.  Our God is in the business of gathering us to Himself so that we may have perfect fellowship with Him and share in His life and live in His presence.  God the Father created your body, God the Son by His blood redeemed your body, God the Holy Spirit by Holy Baptism has sanctified your body to be His temple, so that you may have your part bodily in the new creation to come.  

So this pandemic can temporarily stop many things, but it can’t stop the permanency of Easter.  His tomb is forever empty.  Nothing can undo His eternal victory over the grave.  And nothing can stop the fellowship that you have with one another in Christ.  As we look forward to the day when the quarantines are lifted and we can get back inside church together, let us much more look forward to the Last Day when we shall all be bodily gathered together around the throne of God, in the visible presence of the Lamb who was slain, who has begun His reign.  He is raised and is alive forevermore, so that you may have life and have it abundantly.

The Lord is risen!  He is risen indeed!  Alleluia!