What Do You Remember?
“But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. 2 They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they went in, they did not find the body. 4 While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. 5 The women were terrified and bowed 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, but has risen. 6 Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, 7 that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” 8 Then they remembered his words, 9 and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. 10 Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. 11 But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. 12 But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.” Luke 24:1-12
March 31, 2013
Luke 24:1-12, What Do You Remember?
Doug Scalise, Brewster Baptist Church
[vimeo 63083670 w=500&h=375]
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I can’t tell you how happy I am to be here today with all of you for Easter. I don’t want my Easter message to be about me, it’s about God raising Jesus from the dead and what we need to remember about that. However, I understand people wish to know a little about what happened to me. First, I’m grateful to Jill for all her love and care, and here at church I want to especially thank Mary and Patti and everyone else who picked up work or handled a change in schedules in the last week so that I could rest and recuperate from my procedure. By now most of you know, though some will not, that I noticed a change when I was working out the other week in terms of my stamina and a feeling I had in my chest that was different so I went to the doctor and subsequently I was in a cardiologist’s office on Friday, March 22 having a stress test. When the speed and incline of the treadmill were increased a third time I said to the technician sitting there looking at the EKG, “Now I’m feeling what I was telling you about, is it showing up on there?” He replied that yes he was seeing something on the EKG and he asked the other staff member in the room to get the doctor. In a matter of minutes I was being given medication and told I was going straight to Cape Cod Hospital in an ambulance where I got to experience Good Friday a week early as they divided my clothes among them and began to pierce my arms with sharp objects. I still have the stigmata to show from it. I was answering questions and keeping my sense of humor. As the nurse rolled me from the Emergency Room into the Cardiac Cath surgical room, I was talking to her and I said, “If this doesn’t go well, I’d like you to tell my church two things, okay?” She looked at me very earnestly and said she would. I said, “Tell them I said, ‘I love you all very much,’ and ‘I told you the job description was unreasonable.” She laughed out loud.
In the surgical room I was awake the whole time and as I was lying there like a striped bass on the back of someone’s boat, one sweet woman on the surgical team began telling me how much she like my messages on the radio and said she had been to our church a few times. So naturally I invited her and the rest of them to come visit BBC since I was visiting them where they worked they could do the same. The second song to come on while I was in there, (I’d never thought about it before but it was nice to have music playing) was John Denver’s Country Roads and I said I didn’t think it was good to have a song with the line, “almost heaven” playing in a room where surgery was taking place. Obviously everything went well and they were able to put one stent in the main artery in the front of my heart that was significantly blocked and all my other arteries and my heart are fine because thank God I recognized the sign that something was wrong and they fixed it before I had a heart attack. Needless to say it was quite a weekend for me and my family. I recognize how extraordinarily blessed I am to have so many people who care about me and my family and I’ve felt the prayers of hundreds of people as I have been resting and recovering this past week. I wish I could reply to everyone individually but I don’t think I can so please know if you sent me a card, an email, a text, a comment on Facebook, I have truly appreciated your love and prayers and they’ve all definitely helped.
Because I am so atypical of the folks this happens to, everyone is shocked and surprised to hear about it. From elementary school friends to people who I play baseball with, what I have heard over and over is, “You are the last person I ever thought could have something like this happen.” We all should try to exercise, eat right, keep stress at an appropriate level, and listen to our body, but those only go so far, we can’t control our genes. It also was an interesting experience as far as my faith. I didn’t feel for a moment that I was alone in my experience, it never occurred to me to ask, “Why me?” Things happen and we deal with them by leaning on our faith in God. Interestingly, ten days before I had spoken to our Men on Tuesday, March 12 about Strength in Weakness. I shared Paul’s words from 2 Corinthians 12:8-10, “The Lord said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ So I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”
I told the men, “In certain circles there appears to be a belief that it’s God’s will that everyone should be healthy, happy, and have no problems or struggles and that if someone prays and is not healed it is because a person lacks faith. This inaccurate thinking runs contrary to Paul’s experience and to the experience of many faithful Christians including some of us or our loved ones. The Lord’s promise is that whenever a thorn, whenever a messenger of Satan, afflicts us, The Lord will give us sufficient strength to bear up and to cope with what must be faced. Those of us who are Christians are to allow our thorns to pin us closer to Christ who gives grace to the suffering to bear the pain. I kept repeating the message that night, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ That is how I felt going through this, I knew there was nothing I could do at that point other than remaining calm and placing myself in God’s hands and trusting that God’s grace and power were more than sufficient for me.
After hearing from my new cardiologist Dr. Chiotellis in the recovery room and from the surgeon Dr. Zelman on Saturday, I know I had my own Good Friday and Easter a week early. I also had time to think, pray, and reflect on the experience of both the disciples and Jesus.
As we re-direct our attention to Luke’s description of that first Easter Sunday, it’s somewhat surprising that the person we most expect to see, Jesus, never appears. We expect that Jesus is going to show up but he doesn’t. Luke’s account begins with the women who come to the tomb. Jesus, their friend, teacher, leader the one they believed to be God’s Savior, had just died a tragic death. None of the women foresees what is going to happen. At the end of Luke 23:55-56a it says, “The women who had come with him from Galilee followed, and they saw the tomb and how his body was laid. 56 Then they returned, and prepared spices and ointments. On the Sabbath they rested according to the commandment.” The women are coming to tend to Jesus’ dead body. The empty tomb isn’t expected – it is not just good news but a surprise.
In Luke’s telling of the resurrection, God sends two messengers in dazzling clothes in response to the women’s lack of understanding at seeing the empty tomb. After all, an empty tomb simply means the body isn’t there; that alone isn’t a persuasive argument for resurrection. The women at the tomb – Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James were part of the group who followed Jesus. They heard Jesus speak, but it is clear from their response that they did not expect anything unusual to happen. It’s one thing to love or admire Jesus for who he is and what he does. It’s another to remember and believe what he said – including what he taught about living as his follower, and what he said about himself, “that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.”
Like the women, some of us have been drawn to or intrigued by Jesus. We may admire him at some level, but some event, some personal tragedy or evil may cause us not to remember what he said or not to believe his words. A disease or illness strikes a member of our family and our loved one dies. There is an accident. Someone gets into trouble because of alcohol or drugs and spends time in prison. A job is lost. We’re unable to manage our finances. A family is fractured. Our prayers seem to go unanswered. The reality of our own mortality becomes clearer each day and it frightens or depresses us. Events such as these can cause us to forget and doubt what Jesus said about faith or trust or God being with us or God’s love for us, or even God’s power to overcome death and raise Jesus from the dead. Easter encourages us to remember and believe.
When the women arrive, enter the tomb and find it empty, none of them is portrayed as immediately jumping to the conclusion that Jesus has risen from the dead. Mary didn’t say, “Joanna, do you remember the Lord saying something about rising from the dead?” Joanna didn’t reply, “Yes, I seem to remember him mentioning that once or twice, but he was kind of brief about it.” While they’re perplexed and wondering, God sends two messengers with the explanation. Luke believes this is the way God works. God sent a messenger to Mary before she married Joseph and explained she was going to have a son. God sent messengers to shepherds the night Jesus was born so people would know who this child was to become. Now that Jesus has taught about living as children of God, healed, preached, and died on the cross, God sends messengers again to explain what is taking place.
It isn’t a surprise that the apostles don’t believe the women’s words, even though the women are known and respected. As I already mentioned, Mary Magdalene and Joanna were both listed by Luke (8:2-3) among the women who followed Jesus and who selflessly served Jesus and the disciples. Together they related something to the other disciples that they personally experienced yet regardless of their credibility, the disciples had difficulty believing them. Would we have responded any differently? Any of us who have stood in a cemetery and said goodbye to a loved one as final words of faith and prayer were said would react with similar disbelief if friends were to come banging on our door a day or so later breathlessly announcing that our loved one was not dead, not in the tomb, but had risen.
All four Gospels report the discovery of the empty tomb and the presence of doubt among the disciples. What is most distinctive in Luke’s account is the announcement of the two messengers in verses 5-7. “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” The key word to remember is “Remember.” Passover, which Jesus and his fellow Jews came to Jerusalem to celebrate, is a holy day of remembering what God had done in the delivering the people from bondage and slavery in Egypt. When do people tend to get in trouble? When do we? Often when we forget the Lord and what God has done and told us to do. Judges 8:34 says, “The Israelites did not remember the Lord their God, who had rescued them from the hand of their enemies on every side.” The night of Jesus’ arrest, after he shared the Passover meal with his disciples, Peter said he was ready to go with Jesus even to prison and death. Jesus told Peter he would deny knowing him three times that very night. After Peter denied the Lord the third time, the cock crowed, the Lord turned and looked at Peter (Luke 22:61-62), “Then Peter remembered the word of the Lord…and he went out and wept bitterly.”
It’s in Luke’s Gospel that the thief on the cross says to the Lord,
“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”
Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
Remembering seems to be important to Holy Week, the Easter story, and being a disciple of Jesus. How painful is it when we forget the word of the Lord? When we forget what God has done for us and said to us? What do we miss out on? What difference does it make? In Judges, the Israelites were overcome by their enemies; Peter wept in shame and self-loathing; the women at the tomb were shocked and surprised: all because they did not remember the word of the Lord.
The ability to remember is such a defining and vital part of who we are as human beings, that’s why Alzheimer’s disease or any affliction that robs a person of the ability to remember is so painful, discouraging, and heartbreaking. Yet even if our memory or the memory of our loved one may fail, we stand on the promise that though we may forget those around us, our loving God will always remember us. In Matthew 28:20, the resurrected Jesus promises all who will be his followers, “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Even if we are physically unable to remember the Lord Jesus, the Lord Jesus will never forget us; he will remain faithful to us. In 2 Timothy 2:8-12a, the apostle Paul writes “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendent of David – that is my gospel…The saying is sure: If we have died with him, we will also live with him.”
Easter is a day to remember the word of the Lord. After I got out of the hospital someone wrote to me that I would see life differently now because of what happened. Honestly, I don’t think it will make that much difference in my perspective. I already lived with an attitude of gratitude and thankfulness for the abundant ways I have been blessed throughout my life. I have said before that if I died tomorrow, I’d have had a better life than 99+% of the people who ever lived so I could have no complaints. Albert Einstein said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” That to me is a significant part of the Easter message. How are you going to live your life? As if nothing is a miracle; or as if everything is a miracle?
As we celebrate Easter our hope is not merely that Christ died and rose again – our hope is that one day we also will die and rise again; that we will experience Christ’s death and resurrection as a reality in our own lives. Being a follower of Jesus means believing and remembering that out of death can come new life. My prayer for all of us this Easter is that as we celebrate the empty tomb, our minds will be full of the words of the Lord, that we will remember Jesus and what he said and make our relationship with him a priority throughout the year; that we will believe Jesus is not dead, but is alive today and that makes all the difference in the world.
Prayer: Almighty and ever-living God, in your tender love for humanity you sent Jesus to take our nature upon him, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us an example of great humility and even greater love: Mercifully grant that we too may walk in the way of the cross, and share in the resurrection; through the one who is our Savior and Redeemer and who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.