-I know it’s an older story but how many of y’all have seen the movie or read the novel, The Caine Mutiny?
-If you haven’t seen it, it is a great flick. You need to see it.
-It stars the late, great Humphrey Bogart
-I think it is one of his best performances and they would have cleaned up on the Academy Awards, having been nominated for seven different awards, had it not been for the outstanding performance of Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront – “I could have been a contender . . .”
-I know it is a Navy movie and as much as it makes my skin crawl to use a Navy movie in my Easter sermon, it is a good illustration
-If you recall, the movie is set on the minesweeper the USS Caine commanded by Commander DeVriess.
-He is not much of a disciplinarian so his crew isn’t much too look at but they are combat-ready.
-Command of the ship is turned over to Lieutenant Commander Queeg played by Bogart.
-He begins to crack the whip on the crew and they start to fall in line but they resent Queeg.
-They begin to despise him after he makes some major errors while in command of the ship but then blames his mistakes on others.
-Under the pressure of command, Queeg begins to crack. A quart of strawberries comes up missing from the officer’s mess and Queeg goes to absurd lengths to find the person who stole them.
-If you remember, when episodes of neurosis overtook him, he would pull the small metal balls out of his pocket and begin to tumble them in his hand
-The communications officer, Lieutenant Keefer plants the thought in the executive officer, Lieutenant Maryk’s head, that Queeg is psychotic and could be relieved of command.
-During a typhoon, Maryk suggests that they steer into the waves and take on ballast. Queeg freezed under the pressure and Maryk relieves him, supported by a young ensign Willie Keith
-When they return to port, Maryk is court martialed for Conduct to the Prejudice of Good Order and Discipline, a lesser, catch-all charge than mutiny
-Maryk eventually is aquitted, Keith is never charged but even with that cat out of the bag, the trial and what happens afterward are definitely worth watching {PAUSE}
- This is a little like what is happening in our text for today, what happened that first Easter and it is really the overarching Biblical story
-Really, we need to go back to the beginning to get the full story
-In Genesis chapter 1, we get the beginning
-The first four words tell us a ton
-What are they?
-“In the beginning God”
-God was in the beginning
-He has always been but just like a couple that gets married eventually wants to share their love with someone else so they decide to have children
-Likewise, God decided to create.
-He used His astounding creativity to create everything that exists and crowned His creation with the creation of the first man and woman, Adam and Eve
-He put them in the most perfect home in all the world
-He provided everything they needed and gave them one command – not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil
-Unfortunately for them and for us, Satan enticed Adam and Eve to think they could do better, that they deserved to be gods, to mutiny against God
-God held a quick court martial and sentenced Adam and Eve to death
-Not only are they to die but everyone who will be born after them
-And if that weren’t enough, their perfect home will be taken from them and ALL of creation is messed up and confused to top it all off
-But God’s court martial is a little different than ours
-He actually gives some good news
-He promises a savior that will undo the mess that they’ve made by their mutiny {PAUSE}
-Unfortunately, Satan has power to continue to mess with God’s creation and tries to continue to grab power
-Even though God continues to love and care for His creation, Satan’s evil and mankind’s desire to control their own destiny thwart much of God’s goodness
-God reached out to a bunch of nobodies, the Israelites, in the Middle East and showed His love to them and tried to again plant them in a special place where He could watch over and protect them
-However, Satan’s choke hold on creation and mankind is strong and virtually impossible to break
-So God had to act and act quickly or everyone might go down with the ship
-About two thousand years ago, God sent His very own Son, Jesus Christ in human flesh to do what none of us could, live a perfect life, keeping all of God’s commandments
-He traveled around the nation of Israel, healing the sick, curing the blind, the deaf, the lame and even raising some of the dead
-Jesus was in mutiny against Satan’s command over creation whereby Satan brought only death, disobedience and destruction
-Jesus was beginning to break Satan’s hold on creation but He needed to do something more drastic to affect permanent change
-God used the sinfulness of humans and Satan’s insatiable appetite for power in order to bring about His divine plan
-Jesus allowed Himself to be arrested by the religious leaders of Jesus’ day
-Since they were under Roman control, the religious leaders needed to try Jesus in their court
-Pontius Pilate could find Jesus guilty of nothing deserving the death sentence but Pilate feared an insurrection on the part of the Jews who had overwhelmed Jerusalem with Passover worshippers from all over the Roman world
-Pilate sentenced Jesus to death but not before He was whipped and beaten, mocked and spit upon {PAUSE}
-I don’t know if you remember the end of the movie The Caine Mutiny but it is really interesting.
-The Naval lawyer, Lieutenant Greenwald, who defended Maryk, in the end, has a problem with his conscience.
-You see, before the mutiny happens Lieutenant Commander Queeg knows that he’s in over his head after they are ordered into combat and asks his officers for their help.
-But they have decided that it’s too little, too late
-They are just waiting for a slip up and they are going to mutiny
-For after Maryk is acquitted, Maryk, Keefer and Keith are celebrating
-Greenwald comes into the club drunk and tells the three of them what he really thinks of them
-Most of all, he rails against Keefer because he was the one who egged everyone on but testified that he didn’t know anything about it
-Greenwald says that Keefer was the one who should have been on trial, throws a drink in his face and challenges him to step outside {PAUSE}
-You see, that’s what we deserve
-We are all Keefers inside
-We want to do the right thing, the bold thing, but we are not willing to take responsibility for our own actions when push comes to shove
-We deserve to be insulted and slapped around, court martialed, found guilty and sentenced to death
-Fortunately, Jesus took that punishment instead
-If that was the end it wouldn’t be a novel story at all. Lots of people died by crucifixion in the ancient Roman empire.
-The novel part of the story is that Jesus came back to life again.
-We’ve heard it so many times that it doesn’t shock us anymore
-But it needs to shock us again
-Who was the last person you know who came back to life?
-With several of our loved ones who have passed away in the last week, Steele’s dad and my sister-in-law, we should realize that it is very rare
-Only a handful of people in the bible were raised from the dead but none of them did it by their own power
-Jesus raises Himself from the dead
-Jesus’ insurrection against all the powers that control this world is completed
-He has overcome the devil, the power of sin and death itself
-Our text says that Jesus is the firstfruits
-That means that many more people will be raised from the dead
-In fact, everyone will be raised from the dead
-Our bodies, these bodies but better will be raised to new life again
-All of us who refuse to mutiny against God but simply accept His free gift of eternal life, will live with Christ forever here on earth in the newly restored Garden of Eden
-All those that have continued in the mutiny against God by their desire to gain God’s favor through their own merits will go to hell and be punished forever with Satan and his minions
