Greetings. This is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth, where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. And today, is the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead essential or non-essential? Oh, I ask this question because the governor's shutdown order overlaps with the celebration of the highest, greatest Christian festival, excuse me, and that's Resurrection Sunday. By the order of the governor, our Easter morning worship services are considered non-essential.

I am sure there's no ill intent upon the governor's part. I'm sure he has the best interests of the citizens of the state of Idaho at heart, and we do face a critical medical crisis in our country, and he's acting in good conscience to try and flatten the curve, as it is called, of the coronavirus infections in our state. It is my sincere prayer that we can flatten that curve without flattening the country in the process. And it is also my hope that, in the end, when this is all over, our government does not stand triumphantly over the corpse of a country and declare, we've killed the patient, but we've cured the disease.

But today, my concern is more with the central tenet of the Christian faith, and that's the resurrection. If we were to reduce the Christian faith to three words, if I were forced to do so, it would be those three words we proclaim at the conclusion of the celebration of the Lord's Supper. He is risen. All other Christian doctrine is dependent upon and subordinate to this one. We are lost, miserable sinners without a destined for no mere mortal death and terror as the coronavirus is, but rather a death that is eternal, a death beyond the grave, which the Bible ominously calls the second death.

In contrast, the resurrection assures us of a life beyond the grave, one of immeasurably greater importance, which extends into eternity and filled with a life and blessings of being with our Creator who loves us, where, as Revelation tells us, behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away." Unquote.

Oh, the resurrection is essential. Why? Two reasons. Number one, the resurrection was essential to Jesus' mission. The resurrection was essential to Jesus' mission.

Jesus' very name means deliverer, savior, Joshua, for he shall save his people from their sins, as the angel announced to Joseph. And in order to do this, as the Gospel of Mark tells us, he began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes and be killed. And after three days, rise again. God sovereignly ordained that this would be his modus operandi for redeeming the world. And we have it here in encapsulated form.

Jesus would live a fully human life as the suffering servant, be crucified for our sins, and then be raised from the dead. The apostle also summarized the gospel succinctly in an early Christian creed. He said, For I deliver to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. Our Lord's life, death, burial, and resurrection were essential to his saving ministry. This is why Easter is essential.

Secondly, the resurrection is essential to our salvation. As crucial and important as Jesus of Nazareth's life, death, and burial are to our redemption, the crowning capstone of it is the resurrection. Without it, there's no hope for those of us who call ourselves Christians. This is why Easter is so important in the church calendar. Paul elegantly reasons it this way.

He says, if there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, all of you who are terrified indeed by the coronavirus, you should be terrified rather of the life to come, the afterlife. Because if in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.

But that is not the case for those of us who by faith know of his resurrection. Paul also says, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. This is the great convocation of the church on Resurrection Sunday, where we affirm publicly, we witness confessing with our mouths for all the world to see that we believe this truth. We are required to do this before the world. After all, when we own this by faith and testify to it, the promise of Romans 8, 11 is ours.

Paul says, but if the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give to your mortal bodies life through his spirit dwells in you. So unlike the governor of Idaho, who tells us by his edict that the resurrection is not essential, the governor of the universe says that it is. The resurrection and Resurrection Sunday are essential to the faith and practice of Christianity. And if I hear this excuse once more, I swear I will be tempted to send such a to his temporary abode of sleep to the resurrection.

And that excuse is, oh, but pastor, no one is telling you to deny the resurrection. To which I must reply, not yet, but you will. Is there any living, conscious, thinking soul out there that believes for a one second that your benign, benevolent government, that government who only wants to serve you? We only want to serve you. Rare, medium, and well done.

Does anyone believe that this government will not do this again? With greater, more expansive demands upon your faith and practice, not to mention your civil liberties. Precisely because we have rolled over and peed ourselves like frightened puppies this time, crying, save us, oh, good God, government. If so, if you believe this, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you. I'll cast you as the upcoming role of the naive, charmingly victimized Pollyanna.

I'll send you out to the big game expedition for the elusive fable Jackalope. That is the level of naivete which we have if we think that this is just a one-off event. Additionally, and this is crucial, such Christians make an artificial disjunction between the resurrection and its witness. Resurrection Sunday, Easter. There is an unbreakable bond between the truth and the fact of the resurrection and its chief collective witness, which is Easter.

The conditions are clear. Belief and witness to that belief are inextricable. Paul puts it this way. If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. The early church father, St. Chrysostom, preached this yearly on Easter to his vast assembled flock.

He said, let all pious men and all lovers of God rejoice in the splendor of this feast. Let the wise servants blissfully enter into the joy of their Lord. That's how he began his Easter sermon every year. And Charles Wesley's hymn captures the communal nature of Easter morning. He sings, Christ the Lord is risen today.

Sons of men and angels say, raise your joys and triumphs high. Sing ye heavens and earth reply. Now we have been seeing the oscillating voices of heaven and earth in rapturous worship in our study of revelation and how closely those voices are bound together one with another. Nowhere is this mystical communion between heaven and earth more palpable than on Resurrection Sunday. The resurrection is the most essential fact in the universe and nowhere is it witnessed to more essentially than on Easter.

Easter. Resurrection Sunday is the linchpin of witness to the resurrection. The earthly fathers and all subsequently have recognized this. Oh, but pastor, I'm not compromising my witness to the resurrection at all. I testify personally to it all the time, of course.

Squishy evangelicals excuse their absence from worship with that kind of excuse. Though it's all well and good, but it's only half of the equation. You are also part of the great cloud of witnesses that comes together as the one body of Christ on Easter to witness to the glorious resurrection. Squelch Easter, squelch the resurrection. Choke off the loud, eloquent testimony of Resurrection Sunday, and you will choke off the witness of the church to the resurrection.

You'll choke it to a hoarse gasp for the rest of the year. Oh, pastor, also consider your flock. Not only do you choke the witness to a lost and dying world, you choke it to new life in Christ, but you also choke your own people by your silence, by your own diminishment of the witness to Christ's resurrection, and blithely going along to get along with a government that brushes aside the church and its witness to the resurrection as non-essential. Really, really. Pastor, if you're silent and compliant here, then you agree by silent consent.

Another objection that I hear, which is a kind of corollary to the one above, goes something like this. If they ever tell me what to preach, then I'll stand with you. Then I'll take a stand. To which I say, no, you won't. In the first place, shutting you down on Easter is shutting you up.

Instead of particular nuances of doctrine, they nevertheless do something far more egregious than telling you what to preach. They compel you not to preach. Altogether, they compel your silence. Be quiet. Well, pastor, you know, it's just for now.

It's just for this Easter. And well, you know, maybe an indeterminate number of Sundays. We're not quite sure. How is that going for you? How many Sundays has it been since you worshiped as a gathered people of God?

How many Sundays will it be before you gather again as the people of God? Have you not now done this so long that it's becoming the new normal? It will become the new normal. It's not so bad. We can adjust.

We can do this. No. Virtual worship is virtual nonsense in the long run. And mostly what I get from people when I ask these questions is kind of blank stares. How long will it be?

Well, I don't know. Whenever they let us. Whenever they turn the spigot back on, right? Someone asked Thomas Jefferson, how much tyranny will a government impose? To which he replied, as much as the people will permit.

Oh, your compliance in not meeting will go on just as long as you permit. This is a test. It's an exercise. Like the culture of the TSA at our airports, you are being conditioned for control. You are being trained for tyranny.

Someday in an indeterminate future, this ban will be lifted. But the training will have been accomplished. Excuse me. Dr. Fauci, head of the CDC, has already hinted that we may well be in for a kind of rolling lockdown, depending upon the recurrence of outbreaks or the appearance of new pandemics. And you will not see the last of Dr. Fauci and his entourage in official-looking white lab coats when this phase of medical tyranny passes.

They'll be back. And you're drawing a hypothetical line like, well, well, well, if they try and tell me what to preach, then I'll stand with you. That may make of you a legend in your own mind, and it may assuage your nagging conscience. But it is an empty ego massage that only makes the road harder for the rest of us down the line. If you will not stand when it is relatively easy to defeat this encroachment of our liberty, what makes you think you will stand when the stakes are much higher and the cost to you much greater?

If you back down now, you'll back down then too, probably even more readily. So at least have no illusions about this, dear listener. If a lawn chair folds under a little pressure, it will certainly fold under greater pressure. And for me, perhaps the most convincing and poignant argument to hunker down and maybe do so indefinitely is that made by the thousands of healthcare workers who are risking their health and their well-being. They are the thin white line, if I may borrow an analogy.

Yes, our healthcare workers are indeed the thin white line who helps stay the flood of pestilence from overwhelming the rest of us. Just like the thin blue line, our police officers stay the flood of an otherwise pestilence of crime. We all owe them a debt of gratitude, and we owe that thin white line our sustained cooperation. And several from this community have appealed to me personally to lessen their burden and risk by suspending our worship for the foreseeable future. Do not risk overburdening staff or hospital beds or ventilators and even cryptically the morgues.

Oh, as is going on in Italy, the morgues are being overwhelmed with the dead. Now this argument indeed gives me much pause. And the military analogy I think is very apt here. We are in a kind of war where there is a dire threat, and only a few of us are trained and capable of effectively fighting that threat. The rest of us back them up as we would our soldiers, and we make sacrifices and we marshal all the resources we can to support them.

For example, one of our elders in the construction trade recently donated his whole supply of masks to a local clinic that was experiencing a shortage. For every GI Joe in World War II, there was a corresponding Rosie the Riveter at home to back him up. So there is a real correspondence in this analogy, this military analogy. But there is also a real correspondence in our respective duties. I do not want to sound harsh or cold or mechanical when I say this.

So please, please, please understand it in the spirit in which it is given. But it must be said, do your duty and I will do mine. You signed up for this, healthcare worker, when you entered this field. No soldier, when the shooting starts, says, I didn't sign up for this. Oh, yes, you did.

As Julius Caesar told every one of his legionnaires, estne officium tuum, which is Latin for do your duty. Estne officium tuum, do your duty. And Caesar inspired their loyalty too by leading out front his troops where the battle was the thickest. So before you seek to track me down, oh healthcare worker, before you seek to track me down and knock my block off, for saying this infuriating thing. And I could see how that could be taken that way.

Oh dear, one, please know that we all know that 99 and 99.9%, excuse me, of American healthcare professionals are doing precisely this. They are doing their duty and most of us and most of them above and beyond their duty. We owe you a debt of gratitude both now and when this is all over. And I dare say there will be many stories of courage and sacrifice in this area, some heroes, even as there are with our soldiers in battle. But again, no soldier on the front lines ever expects those back home to surrender their constitutional liberties for the exigencies of war in America.

That is precisely what the soldier was fighting to defend. Oh, and dear healthcare worker, dear nurse, dear doctor, please remember you are too, in a manner of speaking, fighting to defend indeed our constitutional liberties. Let us exercise them. Because we in the church also have our duty. We have our duty.

In weeks to come, we have a duty to point all mankind to the essential transcendent truth of the whole universe, and that is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which makes life beyond the grave possible. This is why we must all work together as well in order to preserve our liberties. Sometimes the point is made to me that we must be considerate of others who we may infect. We must be considerate of those then who are weak. We must virtually shut down the country in order to, we must virtually flatten the curve in order to flatten the country in order to flatten the curve, excuse me.

While indeed, this is a noble effort, we must also remember that there is a kind of social contract we have, one with indeed a shared amount of risk. If we were to try and eliminate all risk and say that the rule above all other rules is to keep from hurting or harming or infecting one another, and to do so, we must sequester ourselves away. That would indeed give us little more than a monastery, a worldwide isolated monastery. But no, instead, there is indeed that sense of shared risk that we all have with one another, and it is part of the social contract. So we must keep this in mind too, in the larger culture.

And remember that we in the church have our duty also, not only the healthcare worker, but also those of us in the church. We have our duty also. We have a duty in weeks to come to point all of mankind to that essential transcendent truth of the whole universe, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which makes life beyond the grave possible, dear listener. There is a world beyond this one that is eternal and everlasting. We point to that one.

We are prevented from declaring this, and as I have just shown you, that is precisely what is at stake. Well then, as the apostle says, if in Christ we have hope in this life only, that is redemption and salvation from the coronavirus and other kinds of things. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are, of all people, most to be pitied.

If we are prevented, if we are prevented from doing our duty, if we are prevented by edict of the governor of the state rather than the edict of the governor of the universe, if we are prevented from declaring the hope of eternal life, then the saving of mortal lives in this pandemic, as valuable as that may be. And I'm not diminishing that in the least. Well, still, the saving of mortal lives here only delays eternal death to another day. It will come to all of us. None of us get out of here alive, do we?

So, despite all of our best and sometimes heroic efforts, and I don't want to diminish those again, despite all of these efforts, some of us will still die in this pandemic regardless. And we, in the life of the church, we have a duty to declare that hope of life beyond their swiftly approaching grave. Despite being blithely brushed aside as non-essential, we have the most essential mission of all, and that is to hold out the hope of life beyond the grave. Oh, and that grave, dear listener, isn't it for so many of us? That grave draws closer.

It almost seems palpable now in this day, threat of death by coronavirus all around us, but we have hope that we offer beyond the grave. A life that has been pioneered by the one who has gone ahead of us, our Lord Jesus Christ. As the Apostle John calls him in the book of Revelation, the firstborn from the dead, birthed from the dead, raised from the dead. But he is not the lastborn from the dead either, because the promises to us, those of us who are his, those of us who believe in him, who indeed believe that God raised him from the dead, we are also second and third and fourth and fifth.

Innumerable numbers are born from the dead as well, because we have followed in the footsteps of the firstborn from the dead. And this reality as well dispels fear and panic in the heart of the one who so believes. One who believes thusly and knows this to his toenails, indeed has a spiritual poise that you will not see in the world. And if you see a Christian panicked, if you see a Christian in mortal fear, you need to reassure him of this truth.

And indeed, if he does not come around, then there is something wrong with his faith and his belief, because a spiritual poise should enfold and overwhelm the one who knows that his eternal life is safe and secure and enfolded in his Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. So, dear healthcare worker, dear governor, if you would like some assistance in calming the hearts and spirits of Americans, let us do our thing. Let us do our duty. Oh, Americans, will not fear and panic and act hysterically if indeed we are allowed to do our duty. Fear makes you do stupid stuff, doesn't it?

Like hoard toilet paper. Oh, Americans, do not fear and panic and act hysterically when you indeed know your destiny, regardless of our earthly circumstances. Dear governor, we can give the people a hope and a faith based in reality, and that is the reality of the resurrection, if you will let us proclaim it, but we cannot do it in its full power without the day given us, and that is Resurrection Sunday. On that day, we are able to promise that on a soon coming day, as the apostle Paul promises, the trumpet will sound and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.

For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written, death is swallowed up in victory. Oh, death, where is your victory? Oh, death, where is your sting? Join us.

Come and join us, those of you who have yet to believe in this certain reality that is promised by the living God, a transcendent reality, a reality that is essential to the universe, though it may be non-essential to the reigning government at this stage. Death is swallowed up in victory in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. Ah, death has a sting. We see it all around us, don't we? Especially those who are gripped by fear, who are gripped by hysteria.

That is part of the sting of death. But in Christ, knowing in his resurrection, and knowing that because he is raised from the dead, we will be too. Death loses its sting. Death loses its victory. Christ has triumphed over death and the grave by his resurrection.

Come and join us, those of you who have yet to believe. Come and join us, those of you who have yet to know this truth to your bones. Come and join us, those of you who want life. Life eternal life in our creator who loves us and has indeed chosen in his son, Lord Jesus Christ, to give us that life, give us that life eternally. And that's a life that we can know now, such that we have a spiritual poise, a calmness, a centeredness, a certain knowledge that we will indeed be raised again from the dead.

When eventually, and all of us will reach the lip of the grave, and all of us will eventually indeed die, we will die knowing that one day we will rise again. This life can be yours for faith in the risen one, our Lord Jesus Christ. We declare this coming Resurrection Sunday, nothing can stop it. He is risen. This is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

We meet for holy worship on Sunday at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard. Call us for more information at area code 208-523-0196. Area code 208-523-0196.