Pay Attention!

If you read the stories of the appearance of the resurrected Christ in all four of the Gospels, you’ll find a strange and unexpected feature to these stories.

Let me illustrate …

At the end of the Gospel of Matthew, the disciples of Jesus are gathered together to receive what’s called the Great Commission – to tell others about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. So, they’re on a mountaintop and they’re with the risen Christ … he’s right there talking to them, but here’s what it says, “they worshiped him, but some doubted.”

At the end of the Gospel of Mark, some women go early on Sunday morning to anoint the body of Jesus with spices for burial. They find the tomb empty, but an angel tells them Jesus has risen from the dead and they should go and tell his followers, but instead, here’s what it says happened: “the women fled in terror and said nothing to anyone.”

In today’s Gospel reading from Luke, it says, when the women return from the tomb and report the good news of the resurrection to the disciples, their response is this, “these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”

And then, as if to emphasize the point, the writer of the Gospel of Luke, a few verses later, has a scene where the risen Christ actually appears in the midst of the disciples and he’s trying to convince them, “I’m not a ghost!” … and then here’s what those same disciples say, “in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering.”

Finally, we turn to the Gospel of John for the most clear and explicit example of what I’m talking about. It’s the story of the disciple we’ve come to call “Doubting Thomas.” He’s told of the appearance of the risen Christ to the other disciples, and he says, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my hand on the wound in his side … I will not believe!”

Here’s my point … all of the Gospels include narratives indicating doubt, uncertainty and disbelief, regarding the resurrection of Christ.

In other words, believing in the resurrection is no “slam dunk” even for the people who are right there in the presence of the risen Christ.

Don’t you find that strange?

I have to believe, the authors of the four gospels are trying to send us a message, because they didn’t have to include these little snippets within the stories they tell of encounters with the risen Christ. It would have been easy enough to simply tell the story in ways indicating a kind of monolithic belief in the resurrection of Jesus … just leave out those bad bits!

So … I wonder if they’re included for a reason …

To get at that reason … let me ask you a question about your life: Have you ever had an experience that made you think there was a higher power at work in the universe?

You see, I’ve talked to enough people to say with a fair degree of confidence, the vast majority of the human race will answer that question by saying, “Yes … Yes … I have had an experience leading me to believe … God is real … God exists …”

Extraordinary things, feelings and experiences happen every day, to everybody … and they come in as many different shapes and sizes as there are human beings …

A strong sense of knowing something’s going to happen before it does … and it turns out … “you’re right!”

An extraordinary sense of peace or calm washing over you … that seems other-worldly;

An amazing set of fortuitous circumstances that changes your life;

Seeing something you can’t believe … can really be there;

Experiencing difficulties or challenges … even tragedies, changing the course of your life, making you into the person you are now … better than you could ever have been without them;

The experience of looking back on your life, and it seems like an invisible hand has been guiding you all along;

Or whatever else that may have happened to you, that left you shaking your head in wonder and amazement saying, “What just happened to me” … “How did that happen?” … “Where did that come from?”

Now, we can have two responses to these experiences …

We can say, “They're a dime a dozen! It’s just a coincidence! It means absolutely nothing!”

Or we can say, “That is the hand of God … an experience of divine providence … a glimpse into an invisible reality ... a momentary foretaste of a mystery of such depth, power and beauty, it lies beyond human comprehension.”

In their honesty, the writers of the Bible have given us the room to see things either way.

In the universe, and in our individual lives, there is always room for both faith … and doubt … and the Gospel writers want us to know, it’s been that way ever since Jesus walked out of the tomb two thousand years ago.

And maybe it goes even further than that … Could it be the Gospel writers are acknowledging, in the lives of everyone who tries to follow in the way of Christ, those two feelings – belief … and doubt … will always be there … always co-existing in the minds and hearts of every Christian? … and that it’s okay … because even those who stood in the very presence of the risen Christ … wondered and doubted …

Now … If I had to bet my life on one possibility or the other, which one would I bet on?

If you had to bet your life … which one would you bet on?

Yes … there is God and the mystery and meaning and power of a supreme being who is aware of our lives in a personal and benevolent way?

Or No … there is just whatever happens to happen, and it means whatever you choose it to mean, and that's all there is?

We may bet yes this morning … and no tonight …

We may know we're betting … or we may not …

We may bet one way with our lips, our minds, even our hearts … and another way with our feet.

But, we all bet … we all bet … and it's our very lives themselves we're betting with, in the sense that “the betting” is what shapes and molds our lives.

And, of course, we can never - this side of death - be sure we've bet right.

The evidence both ways is fragmentary, fragile, ambiguous. A coincidence can be, as somebody once said, God's way of remaining anonymous… or it can be just a coincidence … a bit of good luck … OR a mysterious, wondrous gift - a message from the Lord of the universe.

And whether we bet yes … or no … those are equally acts of faith ...

Whatever your faith may be … or my faith may be, it seems to me inseparable from the story of what's happened to us ... and how we read that story.

Day by day, year by year, your own story unfolds - your life's story. Things happen. People come and go. The scene shifts. Time runs by ... time runs out ...

Maybe it's all utterly meaningless. Maybe … it's all unutterably meaningful.

Maybe we need to pay more attention to what's happening in our lives … and wonder about why it happens … or who makes it happen.

If it's God we're looking for, as I suspect all of us are, even if we don't much think about it that way, or don't much use that kind of talk ... then the only way we're going to find God is to start looking for God … noticing God … and wondering … “Is that footprint in the sand … the footprint of divinity?”

It's Easter Sunday morning, and the Christian faith talks a lot about the resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday morning.

If I had to bet my life on it ... and I do … and I have! I'd say this: sometime in the early hours of that first Easter morning, two thousand years ago, a dead man by the name of Jesus was brought back to life by the power of God. That’s my bet!

So … Pay attention … pay attention! As a motto for our journey in search of ourselves, in search of some answers as to why we're here, and who put us here, and what are we supposed to be doing anyhow! … my motto for the journey of faith is "Pay attention" ... pay attention for the hand of God slipping quietly into your life.

Oh yeah, it may just be a coincidence, or it may just be imagination or good luck ... but as for me, I'm betting on the resurrection, because so many times in my life, it seemed like an invisible hand was moving and influencing the direction of my life … my choices, my circumstances, the things happening around me and to me … and I choose to believe … that unseen hand … is the hand of God.