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Is That All There Is?

Sermon by Rev. Doug Pratt — March 23, 2008
 

Life's Disappointments
It was spring break of my sophomore year in college. I decided to accompany two of my fraternity brothers on a road trip from our campus in Pennsylvania south to get a few days of sun and sand. We threw our duffle bags into my buddy’s Plymouth Duster, and headed south on I-95. As we drove along, we kept seeing these huge billboards advertising something ahead. I don’t remember the name of the joint, but I remember the billboards. About every mile was another sign, each one different, and each one proclaiming some of the wonders of this place just off an exit:

SEE OUR PETTING ZOO
AMAZING REPTILES IN CAPTIVITY
GET YOUR BEACHWEAR HERE
DELICIOUS FOOD
SHOP TILL YOU DROP
GIGANTIC KIDS PLAYGROUND

It sounded like the greatest place north of Disney World. Since it was obvious that they must have blown a half a million bucks just on those billboards, we figured it would be a first-class operation. So we pulled off the exit to check it out.

And what a dump it turned out to be! A greasy lunch counter. One rack of t-shirts and bathing suits. The “petting zoo” out back consisted of a goat and a pig. The “reptile exhibit” was a sleeping snake in a cage. The restrooms were filthy. The playground had a broken swing set. Believe me, it was quite a bit less than had been advertised. As we tried to get out of there as quickly as possible without catching any infectious diseases, I thought to myself, If only they’d spent less money on their billboards and more on their store, this place could have been a lot better. Sometimes experiences in life promise a lot more than they deliver.

We’ve all gotten used to disappointments. We build up our hopes, and then we're let down. We prepare for weeks for the perfect Christmas, and then it's over so quickly, amidst a pile of wrapping paper and opened boxes. A disappointment. We plan a glorious vacation, and then a family member catches a cold or the car breaks down or the airline loses our luggage. Another disappointment. We get married, thinking that life will be “happy ever after,” but marriage isn’t perfect, and is sometimes disappointing.

We have a baby, convinced that this little one will make us happy, and our main experiences are exhaustion, constant worry, and an endless stream of diapers. We get a new job, and find out there are just as many jerks and difficult people to deal with at the new place as there were at the old. We buy a shiny new car, and after three weeks that cool smell is gone and it’s got a ding on the door from some clumsy person in a parking lot.

All of these are the routine, predictable disappointments of life—just as I was disappointed by the tourist trap on I-95. But there’s a bigger issue we have to confront. Beyond the minor and even major disappointments of life, looms a question from which we can try to run but ultimately can never hide. Is this life—these 50 or 70 or 90 years we live inside these bodies—all there is to our existence?

Is That All There Is?
A few years ago I read it in the fine print of an inside page of the newspaper: “Singer Peggy Lee died yesterday in Palm Springs, Calif. at the age of 81.” Peggy Lee was a popular singer in the ’40’s through the ’60’s, and then made a surprise career comeback in 1969 when she recorded the haunting song Is That All There Is?—a record that unexpectedly zoomed to the top of the charts and won the Grammy Award for best single of the year. It’s a strange song—not only because it has almost no discernible melody, but also because of the viewpoint of life that it expresses.

The singer describes, in a flat monotone, various disappointing experiences of life, and then concludes each one with the chorus:

Is that all there is? Is that all there is?
If that’s all there is, my friend, then let’s keep dancing.
Let’s break out the booze and have a ball if that’s all there is.

The song ends on an even gloomier note (if that’s possible):

If that’s how she feels, why doesn’t she just end it all?
Oh no, I’m not ready for that final disappointment.

Though she didn’t write the words to the song, Peggy acknowledged in an interview that the lyrics did speak for her philosophy of life. Born with the name Norma Engstrom in a small town in North Dakota in 1920, she was a pretty Scandinavian blond with a nice singing voice who ran away from home in her late teens, joined various big bands, and eventually was hired to sing with the Benny Goodman orchestra in the ’40’s. She married and divorced four times, struggled with alcohol and prescription drug addictions, made lots of money from her dozens of albums, had a failed acting career, and then encountered numerous health problems beginning in her 60’s.

She became confined to a wheelchair. Her final years in a care facility were unhappy ones. She was visited only occasionally by one daughter, and was cheered up only by a rare letter from an aging fan. After rising to the heights, after gaining fame and fortune, “is that all there is” to Peggy Lee?

Supposing death is the end for all of us; supposing that nobody has ever been able to overcome death and return to life again; supposing that even Jesus Christ—universally acknowledged as the greatest man who ever lived—is still nothing more than rotten bones and decaying flesh in an unmarked grave somewhere: then what? What does the Bible say about this? Here’s what a brilliant man by the name of Paul wrote, in his first letter to the Church in Corinth:

If Christ wasn’t raised, then all you’re doing is wandering about in the dark, as lost as ever. It’s even worse for those who died hoping in Christ and resurrection, because they’re already in their graves. If all we get out of Christ is a little inspiration for a few short years, we're a pretty sorry lot … If there’s no resurrection, “We eat, we drink, and the next day we die,” and that’s all there is to it.

from 1 Corinthians 15
The Message translation

For the next few minutes I want us to think together about this most fundamental question in all of life: Is there anything more, beyond the mortal life of these earthly bodies? And in our consideration of this question, we’re going to apply the ruthless principles of logic and fact.

Our question can have only two possible answers, and we’re going to examine the consequences of those two options:

1. WHAT IF THIS IS ALL THERE IS?


2. WHAT IF THIS IS NOT ALL THERE IS?

Possibility #1: What if this IS all there is?
What you see is what you get. The moment your ticker stops ticking and your brain waves flatline, that’s it for you; you cease in any way to exist. If this is true, then there are only two logical choices for living your few years of life.

The first choice, or response, is the Peggy Lee scenario: “Let’s just keep dancing, let’s break out the booze and have a ball.” Or, in the words of Paul, “We eat, we drink, and the next day we die.” Pursue all the pleasure, the comfort, the enjoyment, the happiness, and the material things that you can possibly grab. Even though you know they will quickly disappear, you might as well at least have a good time during these few short years. Don’t worry about other people, because they might distract you from your pursuit of pleasures.

And besides, why bother to sacrifice for someone else or put their interests above your own? They’re all going to be gone soon just as you are. Grab for the gusto! The one with the most toys wins. That’s a very logical response to possibility #1, that this is all there is.

The other response is the one that Peggy Lee didn’t want to confront. But it’s truly a rational possibility. If all of life is meaningless and transient, and especially if life starts handing you as much pain as it does pleasure, then perhaps the time has come to end it all. If there is no life beyond the grave, no hope for eternity, no purpose to all our striving, suffering and sacrifices, then perhaps it makes sense to go into your garage, turn on the ignition, let the car fill with carbon monoxide, and simply go to sleep forever.

Those are the only two responses to a meaningless existence that make any logical sense. There’s another popular one that many people try, but ultimately it’s a bucket with a big hole in the bottom that can’t hold water. It’s the approach of trying to achieve immortality by hoping to live on in the memories and minds of people who follow after you. Trying to live on through the memory of others doesn’t work. Human memory is just too short and unpredictable to count on.

Possibility #2: What if this IS NOT all there is?
This is the alternative that our author Paul is quite certain about. Listen to more of what he wrote:

But the truth is that Christ has been raised up, the first in a long legacy of those who are going to leave the cemeteries. Death initially came by a man, and resurrection from death came by a Man. Everybody dies in Adam; everybody comes alive in Christ … With all this going for us, my dear, dear friends, stand your ground. And don’t hold back. Throw yourselves into the work of the Master, confident that nothing you do for Him is a waste of time or effort.

If, in fact, there is eternal life, the way the Bible says, then it changes everything. We have to look at human existence from the completely opposite perspective. Those two logical responses to a conclusion that life is ultimately meaningless now become totally worthless. If there is eternal life, if a resurrection and an ongoing existence are available to us, then chasing after vanishing pleasures or committing suicide in despair are completely foolish. If Easter is true, and Christ rose from the dead to give us a future that will never end, then only an idiot would even consider the Peggy Lee scenarios. It would be like panning for gold in a mountain stream, throwing out the shiny nuggets, and keeping the worthless sand.

For if there is resurrection, the logical conclusion must be that this life is just the prelude, the opening act for something vastly greater. It means what we do now will count forever. It means there is much, much more to life than meets the eyes, that what we see is not at all what we get. In his final sentence, Paul tells us why doing the hard but right thing in life is really the wisest and most intelligent response to the resurrection: “because nothing you do for Him is a waste of time and effort.”

Have you seriously considered this possibility #2, that our earthly life is not all there is, and that something infinitely greater is waiting for you? If you haven’t, I encourage you to check it out, investigate it, and see if it might be true. The Bible is a good place to start.

Weighing the Options
So we have two competing versions of reality to weigh: the viewpoint that our physical life is all there is to hope for, and the viewpoint that there is much, much more to come. Only one of these can be true, and the other must, therefore, be false.

That’s the real problem we face: not choosing which one we’d like to be true, but trying to determine which one is, in fact, true. Because we all bet our lives on one or the other. And we’d better be right, because the stakes are the highest imaginable.

If we examine the evidence and determine that everyone who dies stays dead, then Possibility #1 is true. And we have to just deal with that as best we can—we either “break out the booze and have a ball,” or we end it quickly and painlessly. But if we determine that death has been beaten—even once—then it is possible for us to live again. Either the grip of death is absolute and unconquerable, or it isn't. You have to decide which is true.

The Book That Refused to Be Written
Before we close I want to give you one important piece of evidence for your consideration. A gifted young Englishman named Frank Morison zoomed through the academic ranks at the top universities in his country, and quickly achieved a doctorate in ancient history. Then his restless mind decided to take up the study of law, and he earned his legal degree. Early into his practice, he became curious about an area of ancient history he had neglected in his previous studies: the seemingly absurd and ridiculous claims of a small group of people called Christians, that their Founder had risen from the dead. Well-versed in historic methods and research, and finely-tuned to principles of legal evidence and testimony, he decided to write a book to expose the fraud of the resurrection. Surely there would be plenty of evidence to dismiss that hocus-pocus mythology, he assumed.

But the more he investigated, the more frustrated he became. The evidence he expected to find to disprove the resurrection simply wasn’t there. In fact, the weight of evidence in favor of it began to crush him. The more he tried to prove that Jesus' body must still be in a grave, the more he became convinced that the opposite was true. He ended up becoming a Christian. And he wrote a book—Who Moved the Stone—detailing his search and conclusions. He titled the first chapter “The Book That Refused to Be Written.”

This logical, searching, truth-seeking mind came to an unshakable conclusion: that grave, in that cemetery in Jerusalem, on that Sunday morning in the year 33 AD, was empty. Nobody gave Him CPR, nobody transported the body, and no hoax was perpetrated. It happened, in space and time and history, contrary to the seeming laws of nature. Jesus became alive again. And because He did, after promising that He would, then the rest of His promises are true also. If that really happened, my friend, it changes everything. And you had better believe it.