Easter Day: An Unexpected Remembrance

Scripture: Luke 24:1-12

Luke 24:1–12 NIV

1 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. 2 They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. 4 While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. 5 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? 6 He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: 7 ‘The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.’ ” 8 Then they remembered his words. 9 When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others. 10 It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles. 11 But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense. 12 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.

4/20/2025

Order of Service:

Announcements

Opening Worship

Prayer Requests

Prayer Song

Pastoral Prayer

Kid’s Time

Special Music (Trinity Dyer)

Offering (Doxology and Offering Prayer)

Scripture Reading

Sermon

Communion

Closing Song

Benediction

Special Notes:

Week 1: Communion

Special Music after Children’s Moment by Trinity Dyer

Opening Prayer:

Mighty God,

in whom we know the power of redemption,

you stand among us in the shadows of our time.

As we move through every sorrow and trial of this life,

uphold us with knowledge of the final morning

when, in the glorious presence of your risen Son,

we will share in his resurrection,

redeemed and restored to the fullness of life

and forever freed to be your people. Amen.

Easter: An Unexpected Remembrance

Rescue or Victory

When you think about salvation, do you think about it as rescue or as victory? That is an important distinction, and it determines not only where you end up, but who you are when you get there.

Rescue is by far the easier experience. In most situations, when someone is rescued, it takes no effort from them. Sometimes they’re not even conscious or able to exert any effort in the first place. Firefighters, paramedics, and other first responders pull people out of disastrous situations every day. Without them, knowing it, and they wake up hours or sometimes days later in the hospital, having been rescued from death by someone else.

Rescue works out well when you know what the danger is. It helps when the dangers are big and obvious, and there are people to direct you away from them. But there are a lot of kinds of danger that we cannot see or feel as clearly. Things like disease sneak up on us, and we find ourselves in trouble long after we should have asked for help. Accidents of all kinds can spring up on us suddenly, even when their causes have been building up for a long time. Often, the foundations of our lives are crumbling long before the collapse that we finally notice. These situations are really difficult because it can be hard for us to tell when we need rescue, and if we really have been rescued or if we're dying so slowly that we’ve gotten used to it and started to think about it as being normal.

Victory, on the other hand, encompasses more than our safety. We claim victory over things when they no longer have the power to threaten us or control us. It doesn’t always mean we have control over them, but it means we have control over ourselves. Or, to put that in another way, we get rescued every day because we don’t have self-control, and we often fall back into the same messes we wanted to rescue from if we don’t get self-control first. When we receive self-control and use it as the fruit of the Spirit that it is, then we have achieved victory. We are finally free from whatever held us in slavery.

So, I ask you the question again: When you think of your salvation, is it a rescue or is it a victory? Everyone has trouble with that question throughout their lives as they come to know and grow to love Jesus. He does so much more in our lives than we see, hear, and feel. Even when we’ve been told what he’s doing and hear from him in his own words, we are still surprised when he does it. Today we celebrate his Resurrection, which surprises us and reminds us of what Jesus has always been doing in our lives.

Surprise

The disciples, including the women, were looking for a rescue. I’m sure they would’ve said they would prefer having victory over their enemies. But I don’t think they would know what that looked like if they saw it.

They watched Jesus cast demons out of people who had been tormented their entire lives and could not be helped. They watched Jesus cure incurable diseases and fix birth defects. Those women had seen the dead come back to life at his command. But when they saw Jesus arrested and then killed, the hope for rescue was gone, let alone victory. So when they returned to the tomb on the third day, they were surprised and confused.

Sometimes the world doesn’t make sense to us. Sometimes we don’t make sense ourselves. We like to think we are reasonable people who gather all the facts and then decide what reality is. And most of us are pretty good at fact-finding. We use all of our senses to gather as much as we can. Then we put those pieces together in groups and line those groups up in a particular order, like clothes on a clothesline. Then, we make a story out of it and call it reasoning. Sometimes we can tell a lot about who a person is or what they do by looking at their clothes on a clothesline, but sometimes we get it wrong.

These women expected to find the body of Jesus in the tomb and saw only his grave clothes folded up neatly inside. So they started telling themselves all kinds of stories about how the body was stolen or something worse than death had happened to Jesus. And that’s understandable, they were using their reasoning.

But here is the odd thing. They didn’t have to use reasoning or imagination to come up with a story of what happened to Jesus when they found the empty tomb and were surprised because it didn’t look like they thought it would. They didn’t have to figure out what happened because Jesus had given them the story before he died. The problem was that Jesus gave them the story before they had the facts in front of them. They, and we, don’t like that. We want to be the ones to put the facts in little piles, decide what order they go in, and come up with the story ourselves.

Remembering

I don’t know why those women didn’t remember that Jesus told them he would be killed and on the third day rise again. I can stand here 2000 years later and pretend to criticize them, pointing out that they had seen him perform all kinds of miracles, including bringing the dead back to life, even after they had been buried. But I didn’t watch him die. I didn’t leave my friends and family, follow Jesus for years, investing everything I had and all I was into him, only to watch him be unjustly arrested, go through a mockery of a trial, be tortured and beaten nearly to death, and then publicly humiliated and executed for all to see how powerless he was. Going through all that might have made me doubt, too.

They needed to be reminded of the story again, so Jesus had his angels on hand to remind those women of what they already knew. They needed to be reminded that they were not writing their own story for their lives or the things that they experienced around them. They were living Jesus' story, and he had already told them this part.

I heard a pastor and seminary president from Ukraine sharing the changes they had seen in their church last year. Their nation was known for many things, but following Jesus was not one of them. They chose to live out many other stories instead. I’m sure Easter Sunday was a big Sunday there, just as it is in our nation and all over the world, but most of the population filled their normal weekends with many other things instead of Jesus.

Then the war broke out, and that changed everything. He said last year, well over 80% of the country's population was in church every Sunday morning. He noted that many of the atheists left the country. Another part of that drastic change in the culture was that the church started being the church seven days a week everywhere they went, and they quit asking if you were Christian or Jewish or Muslim or anything at all, and focused on sharing Jesus and loving each other the way he loves us. Facing war reminded them of the story Jesus haver them to live out.

What they’ve gone through is awful and heartbreaking, and things like this happen in pockets and places all over the world every day, whether we know about it or not. And God doesn’t want us to suffer like that, and he certainly doesn’t want us to hurt one another, the way we do in those situations. But sin makes us forget the story Jesus gave us. It makes us forget because accepting that story means we don’t get to live the lives we want. We don’t get to have the world the way we want the world to be. Life stops being a choose-your-own-adventure book, and it becomes a gift we don't deserve but get the privilege to live.

The Ministry of the People of God began that day when just a few women were tasked with helping the whole world remember the story that Jesus gave us. As they walked back to town to go and tell the other disciples, I'm sure they probably thought, "No one is going to believe us. We didn’t even believe it ourselves until God intervened. Having the facts right in front of us was not enough for us." Maybe they thought it would be more believable if they all shared that testimony together. So they tried it. They went and told the other disciples, and sure enough, no one believed them.

Peter and John came close, though. This testimony from the women didn’t fit in their collection of facts and the stories they were telling themselves. They didn’t get an angel to show up and remind them of the story Jesus gave them because the women could tell it. The women remembered. Still, they couldn’t accept it until they saw it for themselves, so Peter went out to see the empty tomb and experience that miracle for himself.

Repeat

Jesus always works ahead of us. He’s always there speaking through our circumstances, the people around us, our conscience, his word wherever it breaks into our life, and any other way he chooses to. He doesn’t give us the facts to hold and manipulate, reorganize, and re-order the way we think it ought to look. He just repeats his story, tells us how things are going to go, and then tells us to have faith that the details will be there when we get there. He repeats this with every person and with each one of us many times in our lives.

Our faith is not the opposite of intelligence and reasoning. It just works the process the other way around, allowing Jesus to be the authority instead of ourselves or anyone or anything else.

Do you know where you fit in His story? I don’t mean who you feel you can relate to from this passage. I mean, have you heard Jesus telling you who you are to him?

Have you forgotten that story in your life?

Has God ever intervened to remind you of that story at times when you were struggling with doubt or sin that was persuading you to do things your way?

Are you struggling to remember your part in Jesus' story today?

We are starting a new season today at Bethel and in the coming weeks. We will see how powerful it is to remember and live into the story that Jesus gave us.

We know that if you tell someone the story that they are bad repeatedly, they may come to believe it and live into that story. Many of us try to tell each other that we are good, hoping that we will live into that story instead. But all of those stories are fiction. We don’t know our full potential, even in ourselves, for good or evil, until we stand before the opportunities, face our facts, and make those choices. We live each day, potentially jumping from one made-up story to the next, trying to make sense of it.

But the story Jesus tells us and invites us into is the truth. It’s more than historical and greater than scientific because it’s not interpreted by people and passed down to us. It’s given to us by God. And we know it’s true because we aren’t living in His story until we’ve had our own investigation and personal experience with the risen Lord Jesus, just like Peter, and just like those women at the tomb that first Easter morning.

That’s what we offer you today. There’s no gimmick or fancy phrase to pass along. We’re not going to offer you a moment of therapy and then throw you back out into the wild world that you came from, hoping you somehow make it out there. We don’t have the power to change your story for you, even if we sometimes wish we could.

What we have is Jesus. We can remind you of his story, tell you that we know it to be true, and tell you where we found ourselves in his story.

But what you get today is up to you. You can choose the empty tomb. You can decide, for you, that the empty tomb means Jesus is gone forever and that his life has nothing to do with you — that you are truly on your own.

Or you can remember his story and begin seeking him out among the living instead of among the dead, as the angel said. Your decision won’t change the truth. But it will make a difference between you living a life, believing a lie about who you are, or finding true life in Jesus Christ.

Are you still settling for a rescue from the troubles in your life?

Or are you willing to follow Jesus into His victory over all sin and death?

What will you believe?

Closing Prayer

Jesus, we want you to rescue us from the troubles and trials we face in life. But we need more than a rescue. We need victory over the sin that pulls us away from you and the life you want to give us. We know we will never get victory by living our own stories. So today, Lord Jesus, we surrender our stories and attempts at making up our own lives and seek you and the life you have for us. Cast out the lies we have believed and put them to death. Immerse us in your story so deeply that we do not know where we end and you begin in our lives. Help us to hold fast and remember the truth of who you are to us and who we are in you. In Jesus’ name, amen.