Do Something About It| Luke 24:1-12
Easter Sunday
Luke 24:1-12
Do Something About It
One Sunday morning in a church in downtown Atlanta, just after the Scripture had been read and the minister was about to begin the sermon, a man no one had ever seen in the church before, stood up, interrupted the service and said: ‘I have a word from the Lord.”
It was not a Pentecostal church. It was not a Charismatic church. It was a church a lot like ours, which means that sort of interruption, was completely unexpected. As heads whipped around, and everyone began to panic, the ushers sprang into action, ran up to the man and escorted him out into the street before he could elaborate further on this “word” he had been given.
Who knows what he would have said or where that word he wanted to share really came from…
But you know, week after week in countless churches all over the world, preachers stand up and essentially say the same thing as that man in that church in Atlanta that Sunday.
The Scripture is read and then we get in the pulpit or stand out front and say, “I have a word from the Lord.”
No one escorts us out. No nervous ushers frantically run toward us to muscle the microphone away from us.
Now, I have a theory. The theory is, if someone did jump up and start speaking to the congregation, we probably wouldn’t soon forget their message. It would create quite an impression among those who heard it. It would stir us up.
In other words, it wouldn’t be like most messages you hear preached at church, which are usually a little less than earth shattering.
I know most of the messages I’ve preached and heard just don’t make that noticeable an impression on people. Every once in a while someone will tell me “nice job,” after one of my sermons or send me a text with a smiley face, but that doesn’t happen all that much.
I have even heard it said, even from scholars with PHD’s maybe the days of people gathering to listen to the preaching of a sermon are drawing to a close. Others say otherwise, but they may be right….
So it was kind of encouraging to me as I was studying for this message when I realized something. I realized that the very first sermon after the resurrection didn’t create a big impression on those who heard it either. It didn’t register real high on the Richter scale.
When those women came back from the cemetery on Easter morning, they brought with them word of an empty tomb and the astonishing news:
“He is not here but has risen!” Wow!
As anybody will tell you, that is the Gospel. That is the essence of our faith. All Christian preaching begins with those words:
Christ has risen! Death is not the end.
However, the message of those first Christian preachers was not exactly well received, as you probably noticed when the text was read.
Let’s look at verse 11 once again. These are not the words you want to hear after you’ve preached the Gospel.
“But these words seemed to them to be an idle tale and they did not believe them.” They did not believe them.
Some have said maybe the word was not accepted because the preachers were women.
The Mishna does say, “From women let not evidence be accepted.” James and John and Simon and Andrew and all the disciples were good Jews who read the Mishna and heard it read in synagogue. Not a nice thing to say about women, but dice rollers and those who loan money for interests were also considered to be unfit to give evidence in the Mishna.
But I don’t think that quite explains why the disciples tuned out their words because the women were only confirming a message Jesus had already told the disciples.
Before he entered Jerusalem, Jesus told the disciples that he would be killed. He had told them that on the third day he would rise from the dead. When the women came racing back with the news that had happened, you would think the disciples would be eager and ready to embrace the good news.
Instead, they yawned, looked at their watches and down at their phones and wondered when the “sermon” would be over so that they could just get back to do doing whatever they had been doing.
Maybe the message was just too much for them, just too much. When my son Michael was about 15 and my daughter Paige was about 9 or so, we went on vacation to California. We visited Yosemite National Park. Out at Glacier Park where you can see Half-dome and the Yosemite Valley, the Merced River and El Capitan, Michael looked over at it all and said, “There is no way that is real.” (Which is exactly what I was thinking at that time). It is pretty unbelievable and so it is easy to see how the disciples might have been so overwhelmed by the message of Jesus being raised from the dead that they just couldn’t comprehend or process it all.
Maybe.
But there is another possible explanation for why they wrote off the women’s message.
Maybe they weren’t just bored or overwhelmed or indifferent, maybe they were resistant. To borrow a phrase a little later in the text, maybe they were “slow of heart to believe.”
They didn’t want to hear the message because they didn’t want to change.
See, if the Jesus story ended with Good Friday, as awful as that was; after a time of grief and mourning, their life could go back to life the way it was. They could go back to fishing or collecting taxes. But if Jesus really was raised from the dead, that would mean something else altogether. It would mean nothing would ever be the same. If Jesus really had been raised from the dead, it would mean everything was going to be different.
It would involve their being sent to places they hadn’t even thought about going, not just Jerusalem, not just Judea, or even just Samaria, but to the ends of the earth, as far away as Italy and maybe even Spain.
It might mean arrests for them just as Jesus had been arrested. It would mean shipwrecks and outpourings of the Spirit and persecutions and Gentiles joining their ranks and stonings and a whole lot of other things.
So maybe they were a little resistant to embrace all of that.
What about us? What if this Easter message really is true? What do we do with this message those women preached at the empty tomb?
If we believe this message our lives are going to change too.
We can’t just glance down at our phones and watches either, we will really need to do something about it.
Guess what? We can. This is just the first week of Easter. Easter season is fifty days and we worship the resurrected Christ every Sunday and do our best to serve the risen savior every day.
Next week we are going to gather right back here again and after a brief prayer and communion service we are going to head out into our community to touch our community with tangible expression of God’s love.
We would love to have all of you join us.
But even if you can’t join us for Church Has Left the Building Day, you can still do something about this message that we’ve heard. There are thousands of things we can do because the One who has risen, in whose name we gather gives us the strength to do them.