Sermon: "Dare I Believe"

Delivered April 4, 2010 (Easter Sunday) by Rev. John Schmidt.
Sermon Text: Luke 24:1-12,36-49; Ephesians 1:15-23

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Let us pray. Lord God, we thank you. We thank you for this opportunity to worship. We thank you for this opportunity to read your Word, to think together about the meaning of resurrection, about the reality of Jesus Christ. So Lord, open our eyes. Open our hearts so that we might appropriately respond to you. For we ask this in Jesus' name, Amen.

I'd like to read to you from the Gospel of Luke, the twenty-fourth chapter. I'm going to begin on the first verse. This is on page 965 of the Bibles in the pew in front of you if you'd like to read along. Luke, chapter 24.

"On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus."

"While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, 'Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: "The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, be crucified and on the third day be raised again"?' Then they remembered his words.

When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others. It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles. But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense. Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. Bending over, he saw the strips of linen lying by themselves, and he went away, wondering to himself what had happened."

This is the Word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

As a pastor, I often find myself meeting with people who are in seemingly hopeless situations. Families who are looking at the final options for chemotherapy. Couples who are struggling with infertility issues. Adoption plans that have hit all kinds of delays and complications. People who are facing addictions in their lives. And for a while, particularly in the early stages, people have all kinds of hope. But as time goes by, options fail, things get hard, and hope dies.

And at a time like that, if someone presents you with some new kind of hope, there is a natural resistance inside of us. Sure, maybe one out of a 100 will jump at any chance. But most of us come to this point where we've learned our lesson. We don't want to be foolish. We don't want to be hurt again. We believed, but we've been so deeply disappointed. And the question that we all face at a time like this is, "Dare I believe it? Dare I believe this new news?" And the more important the issue is in our life, the more difficult it is, the more fearful we are about believing.

Now mentioning such a hard moment in life like this might seem an odd thing to do to begin an Easter sermon. But the first Easter Sunday began in a hard and hopeless place. The story we are looking at in the Gospel of Luke begins in hopelessness. The followers of Jesus had believed that he might really be the Messiah. This was the One who was promised from ages past, who would be the ultimate King of Israel, who would bring justice and righteousness, who would put the non-Jewish peoples in their place and not let them oppress Israel anymore.

And the day would come that God's own rule of peace and justice and wholeness would come under this Messiah. And Jesus looked like just the right kind of Man. He did miracles that no one else could do. His way of dealing with people was amazing. His teaching was profound, and he was fearful of nothing. He was Messiah material. And he was dead. Not just dead, but he was brutally killed by crucifixion, a death that was reserved for traitors, the worst kind of lawbreakers. It was a humiliating death, the kind of death that was reserved for people cursed by God, not heroes. And they had dared to believe, and that belief, that hope, was dashed to pieces.

But they still loved him. And that's why we find these women on the way to the tomb of Jesus early that Sunday morning. The custom in those days was to prepare a body for burial by putting special spices on the body and then wrapping it carefully in strips of linen. And then the body was put into a tomb cut out of a hillside, and a large circular stone was rolled through a track in place to seal the mouth of the tomb.

But Jesus had died right before the Jewish Sabbath day, and pious Jews did not want to work on the Sabbath. So they had to make hurried preparations. They didn't do things properly. And so now here they are very early in the morning it says on their way back to the tomb to make things right. The fact that it's very early in the morning indicates to us the importance of what they're doing but also their devotion to Jesus. They needed to do this. They're loaded down with spices in order now to prepare Jesus' body properly, to give him the honor that they felt they needed to.

There is no hope here that he is not really dead. It's not like they're taking the spices and thinking to themselves, "Well maybe we won't need them." That's not there. When they find the stone rolled away, they don't jump to the conclusion that Jesus is resurrected. Verses 2 and 3 and the start of verse 4. They look around in that situation, and they wonder what's going on. And they're perplexed; they're confused. They don't immediately say, "Oh empty! Let's look outside. Maybe he is in the garden."

They're not looking for resurrection. And in fact, the empty tomb is not where Luke, the author of the Gospel, makes his case, his strongest case, for the resurrection of Jesus. What matters to Luke is the miraculous encounters that these followers of Jesus have over the next few days of their lives. And the first of those visits is this sudden visit of two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning.

The other Gospels identify these men as angels, and they say some specific things to the women. Beginning at verse 5, "'Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: "The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again."' Then they remembered his words."

"Remember Jesus' words. He told you that this was coming and that he must die. It's part of God's plan for salvation to deliver the whole world from their sin. And he is no longer dead; he is alive. Remember? This is what he told you also." Even the fact that there are two angels there might be Luke trying to stress how important this is because in Jewish law, one witness had no standing. But two witnesses were legally binding. And so there might be this subtext of "really listen to this because there are two angels telling you."

Well the women did immediately what you'd expect them to do. They run and go tell the 11 disciples, those special people who had been with Jesus. Goes and tells the 11 and the others who were with them it says in the text. Now as near as we can tell, this is five or more women because it says in verse 10, "It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others (plural) who were with them." So we're dealing with five or more women.

What's the reaction of the 11 when they hear this news? It says in this text that the 11, the apostles, say, "This seems like nonsense." That's a very weak translation of the Greek that's there. The word used here is a Greek word used by medical writers that describe the babblings of a fevered and insane mind. So this is crazy talk! They're hysterical!

And you know, there is a cultural thing going on here. In Jewish society at this time, women weren't trusted to be legal witnesses of any event. They couldn't be trusted. So there is this cultural thing going on maybe as well. "Oh, it's women." Now believe me, that's not my position. That has to be clear. Okay? Okay. They don't believe the women because they have no hope that Jesus Christ would be resurrected. This is crazy talk. This is not what grownups think. They had no hope of resurrection for Jesus.

Now pious Jews did believe in a resurrection that would happen at the end of history when God would judge the earth, judge sin, separate the righteous from the unrighteous. And they believed on that day there would be a resurrection of the righteous. But no Jew was expecting one person in the middle of history to be resurrected. It wasn't part of their worldview any more than it's part of ours.

They might have believed a ghost would visit. That was part of their understanding. They might have believed in dreams or visions. Any of those things could have happened, and it would have been right in sync with their beliefs. But a resurrected body? A re-animated body? No! They didn't expect it.

Now you want a proof that they don't believe the women? Let's take a look at what happens next. They share what they've heard, what they've seen, and it says verse 11, "They did not believe the women." Then it says verse 12, "Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb." I used to always, you know, think, "Well, cool Peter. You know, he is taking some initiative here." I never thought until this last time I studied the passage what else the text is actually saying.

Now another Gospel says that John went with Peter. So two people. That means that nine people who had been chosen by Jesus Christ to follow him, who had walked constantly with Jesus for three years, who saw all of his miracles, heard all of his teaching... Nine of them plus all of the others don't even bother to look. It is so clear in their minds that they don't even walk outside and take the trip over and check out for themselves.

These are hopeless people, but these are not gullible people. But Peter does go to check and see what happens. It says he looks inside. We almost have this picture of him just, you know, ducking down and looking inside the doorway, not even entering much. He sees the linen pieces that would have been on the body all in a heap by themselves. There are no angels this time.

And so in verse 12 we have him walking away, wondering to himself what had happened. He is troubled. He is confused, but he is not immediately jumping to faith. He doesn't look inside and say, "Oh wow! It is true! He is resurrected!" Instead we find him walking away. And maybe underneath it all, under all the hurt and hopelessness, he is asking himself, "Dare I believe it?"

And that's where this passage ends. In the verses that follow, it's in a difference scene. It's different people involved. And I want to jump forward 50 days for a moment, 50 days after we see Peter walking away from the tomb, wondering what had happened. Just 50 days later, we find him standing in front of thousands of people declaring that Jesus Christ has been resurrected from the dead.

And he doesn't just preach it once. The whole rest of his life is devoted to preaching the message that Jesus died for our selfishness, our sin and rebellion. And that Jesus' resurrection from the dead was proof that God accepted this offering and that Jesus was going to be King of the world forever. We find Peter preaching that the rest of his life.

He even leaves Israel and preaches this same message of forgiveness to the very Romans who are oppressing Israel. There is forgiveness for them too. And it's not just Peter. Dozens and then hundreds share the same message. And finally it says in tradition that Peter died in Rome. He was crucified too, and he was crucified because of his message.

Now what happened to Peter? What made this normal man, this hopeless follower of Jesus who saw Jesus died, who was so afraid of what was happening that he denied even knowing Jesus, what changed him? Luke doesn't let us guess. It was encounters with the resurrected Jesus. Later in chapter 24, we see the two men who encountered the resurrected Jesus. They go back to the 11 to share this incredible news that they've seen Jesus. And when they get there, they find that the 11 are already excited, and they're talking about the fact that it's true. Verse 34. "It's true! The Lord has risen and appeared to Simon," which is Peter's other name.

Then in verses 36 to 49 of that chapter we see that Jesus repeatedly visited them and dealt with all their doubts. He even ate with them to prove that He wasn't a ghost, and He pointed them to their own Scriptures to show them that what happened was foretold by the prophets in their history. "Dare I believe it?" turned into a solid conviction. Hopelessness turned into hope, and it was based on their assurance that grew out of an experience of the resurrected Jesus. Peter changed. Peter had hope all the rest of his life because he met the resurrected Jesus. And this story is repeated in the lives of every one of the 11 who were there.

Now I don't know what kind of mindset you brought to worship this Easter morning. For some of you, maybe you came filled with hope, and I hope that by God's grace you have an opportunity to let that hope overflow in worship this morning. But maybe some of you came crushed by some of the things of life that seem beyond hope. And to be honest, I can't promise, we can't promise as a Christian Church, that whatever it is on your heart is all going to work out just fine because there is a lot of suffering in the world.

But we do have an overarching, compelling hope to share. It is Jesus, who died for our sin, resurrected from the dead. We proclaim the hope of forgiveness, the hope of a new kind of life now that has a strong measure of peace and wholeness, a hope of an eternal future with God that extends beyond death. And if that's true, that changes everything. We have proof that God is real. We are not alone in our hopelessness and struggles. God knows what we face from the inside as a human, and he has conquered it all. The hope we hold out is that it is possible to be forgiven for all we've done wrong.

You say, "Well, I've turned my back on God. I've said some things that are against God." That may be true, but in Jesus, God freely forgives. You may say, "I've hurt some people deeply, and I can't imagine how I could be forgiven." That may be true, but in Jesus, God freely forgives.

This message is not for gullible people, but it is a message for needy ones, broken ones, hopeless ones. In other words, normal people like us. But there is a natural resistance to believing news like this. Unless you're part of that tiny gullible group, we rightly have defenses up when we hear news like this. It's outrageously good news. We don't want to be foolish. We don't want to be hurt by some kind of false hope. Dare we believe it?

Don't miss the best news we can hear in life just because it seems so unbelievable because this message, this hope, is the core message of Christianity. Jesus Christ who died on a cross, resurrected, sins forgiven. It's not just here in Luke; it's everywhere in the New Testament. In Romans 10, written by an entirely different person named Paul, in verse 9 it says, "If you declare with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved."

And Paul, recognizing how amazing this statement is, goes back into the Old Testament to find his own proof. And he says the Scripture says, "Anyone who believes in him will never be put to shame." And again he goes to another passage. "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved." This is the message.

But it might take more than just hearing a message on an Easter morning to get us to dare to believe, and that's okay. But I want to give you some challenges. When the women came in and saw the empty tomb, the angel said, "You have to put this in context. Remember what Jesus said." I'd like to challenge you to take a look at what Jesus said. Challenge you to read the entire Gospel of John. It won't take you that long. But pray the whole time that God, if He is there, will open your eyes.

The followers of Jesus also sought one another out. They gathered together to share their experience of Jesus. I encourage you to do the same. Come to church for six weeks with an open mind. Join a Bible study group. Join our Alpha course in the fall. Sign up for a Grow Group in the summer. Get into some kind of study. Do something to get together with people who have had an experience of Jesus. Just hear them out.

And then don't be afraid of just getting out alone and seeking out a quiet place to just think about the things that are on your mind because that's what Peter did. I believe that Jesus Christ died for my sin, for my rebellion, for my selfishness. I believe he was resurrected from the dead and one day will resurrect me from the dead. It's outrageous, isn't it? I believe too that he'll do the same for you if you will believe. This is the message of the Church. It's the only one we really have to offer. Jesus Christ has risen from the dead. Dare to believe it.

Let's pray: Lord, wherever we are in our walk with you help us now to think deeply about what we believe is true, to wrestle with the things we've heard, and by your grace to respond to the outrageously good news that Jesus Christ died for us. We can be forgiven, and you resurrect the dead. And it's in Jesus' name that we pray, Amen.

© 2010, Rev. John Schmidt
Central Presbyterian Church, Baltimore, MD 21204 410/823-6145
www.centralpc.org