Central Lutheran Church - Elk River
Weekly sermons from our Central Lutheran Church preaching team plus quick reflections from Pastor Ryan Braley.
Real talk, ancient wisdom, and honest questions — all designed to help you learn, grow, and find encouragement when you need it most.
At Central, our mission is simple: FOLLOW Jesus together, be a community where you BELONG, and LOVE our neighbors across the street and around the world.
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Central Lutheran Church - Elk River
The Resurrection of the Dead and Why We Can Trust the Gospels with Pastor Ryan Braley
What if the most extraordinary claim in human history—that a man died and rose from the grave—was actually true? And what if we could examine the evidence for this claim the same way we evaluate any other historical document?
The Gospels stand at the center of Christianity's most profound assertion: Jesus of Nazareth conquered death. But in our skeptical age, can thoughtful people actually trust these ancient accounts? This episode dives deep into the historical reliability of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, examining them not just as religious texts but as historical documents.
We explore the remarkably specific geographical, cultural, and linguistic details that anchor these writings firmly in first-century Palestine. From the Kidron Valley to Gehenna, from uniquely Palestinian farming practices to period-specific naming patterns, the Gospels demonstrate an intimate familiarity with their setting that would be nearly impossible to fabricate decades later.
Perhaps most compelling is what the Gospel writers included that no myth-maker would: Jesus's family thinking he was insane, his healings sometimes requiring multiple attempts, disciples consistently misunderstanding him, and most shockingly, a crucified Messiah—a concept deeply shameful in the ancient world. These aren't the polished narratives of legend but the messy details of actual events.
The disciples who witnessed these events gained nothing for their testimony except persecution and brutal deaths. Yet none ever recanted. As one observer noted, twelve modern men can rarely maintain a shared story for three days without someone breaking ranks, yet these disciples maintained their testimony until death.
If the resurrection is true, it changes everything about how we understand existence. It means our deepest spiritual longings point to something real, that injustice won't have the final word, and most profoundly, that death isn't the end. What greater hope could there be than that?
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Hey man, thank you, Richard. We're going to pray just a minute. But you ever have one of those weekends where you have just a weird weekend and maybe things don't go as you'd planned or as you would want it, or just you kind of had an off weekend and then you got to go to work on Monday and you have to show up and do it anyway. That's kind of like me today. So I just want to be honest. I had a really kind of an odd weekend. A number of things happened that were not how I planned them, and so the only difference is, when I go to work on Monday, I have to be in front of all you on Sunday morning, and so it's a bit trickier. But I'm okay being here and I'm okay just so you don't have to come grab me after the service and really, you know, and mom, I'm fine, I'm going to be fine, mom, but yeah. So anyway, just want you to know that I have bad days too, or bad weekends, but we're going to be okay. So we're going to pray, and here's also what I would say.
Speaker 1:You know, we can show up in this moment, in this space, with all kinds of, in all kinds of ways, many people, many of you kind of came from a weird morning. Maybe you were at home and you had to rush here, you were late, or maybe you flew in at two in the morning from Washington DC or wherever you guys came from, or maybe you had an argument with your spouse or your kids or you yelled at the dog before you got here. Whatever the case is, maybe you came here and you walked leisurely and you enjoyed the morning and birds were singing. That's great too. But whatever the case is, here we are and so we can approach this next 40 minutes or whatever whatever 30 minutes with our eyes wide open and being here and like in this sacred moment. Or we can just sort of skate by and just sort of wait till it's over and leave and go have lunch somewhere. But and this is kind of how life is we can show up in life, we can be open, with our eyes open, and be present and with each other and with God and with yourself, and hopefully something deep and meaningful will happen. Or you can skate through life and just kind of go from one day to the next, and my encouragement is it's always better to kind of have your eyes open, I think, and so I would encourage us this morning. Whatever we can do.
Speaker 1:I want to invite us to kind of have our hearts and our minds and our eyes open this morning as we engage for the next 30 minutes anyway and just see what God might do. Does that sound all right? Let's pray, god. We give you thanks this morning for your presence here and for your word to us. Thank you for these beautiful stories that we find in the Gospels and this story of the resurrection, and I ask God that you would bless us this morning when these stories come alive in new and fresh ways that we haven't seen before. And I ask that you would encourage us in the ways that we need it so badly, and anybody here who's kind of coming out of just I don't know, a weird time or weekend or year or half of life, whatever the case is, god, would you minister to us in deep ways that we need it so badly and would you fill us with hope this morning. And may this story of resurrection give us hope where we need it badly. In Jesus' name, amen, amen, you can be seated.
Speaker 1:So we're in the middle of our you Pick series, and the you Pick series is that people can write in, and they have written in questions that they want us to just sort of talk about and kind of address and respond to, and we've got many good ones. I think last week I already forgot what, oh last week was Teen Challenge, so the week prior was the Trinity talking about the Trinity, so that was a. We had to blaze right through that in 40 minutes or whatever. And then that was the first one. I think this is the second one. I know Ben is on for next weekend and there was a great question about a passage from Ephesians that we talked about.
Speaker 1:But this morning I want to talk about the Gospels and the question was can we trust the Gospels? And, as you heard that, can we go back to the Scripture Sam? I'll be quick, but the Apostle Paul didn't follow Jesus directly. He has this incredible epiphany with Jesus while he's on a horse going to Damascus and he has this encounter with the risen Christ and he begins to sort of like learn this story in a deeply profound way and it changes his life. And basically he says in this scripture that we heard read if Jesus didn't raise from the dead, then nothing really matters. It's all kind of in vain in our faith and all the stories we've told about Jesus, they're, they're, they're sort of like we're we're misrepresenting God and we've gotten it all wrong. And so it's like if he wasn't raised from the dead, then you and I aren't raised from the dead either, so we can just turn the lights off and go home and we'll see you. Well, we won't see you. You know, that's kind of the end and it's a sermon slides Thanks Sam when Paul basically says if Jesus didn't raise from the dead, then it changes everything, which the converse is also then, true. If Jesus did raise from the dead and I believe there's good reason to think that he did, if he did then that changes everything. It really does, and it changes us today, 2000 years later. If he really rose from the dead, if the stories in the gospels are true, it changes everything, including how we frame the world. So the sermon title is this morning it's the resurrection of the dead, and why I believe we can trust the gospels.
Speaker 1:See Steve Jobs, who was the founder of Apple. You guys have maybe heard of Steve Jobs, one of the greatest companies of all time Apple. Okay, it was not a professing Christian. Here's what he said Walter Isaacson, I think was his name, wrote a book about Steve Jobs and in the interview Steve Jobs says this. He says I like to think that something survives after you die. It's strange to think that you accumulate all this experience and maybe a little wisdom and it just goes away when you die. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures. Maybe many of you have felt like that too. I hope something lives on. But on the other hand, he says perhaps it's like an on-off switch Click and then you're gone. Maybe that's why I never like to put on-off switches on my Apple devices.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how do we frame the world?
Speaker 1:How do we think about the world that we live in? It's a mysterious, wonderfully beautiful and painful and odd thing. We're hurtling through space at millions of miles an hour on this rock with a bunch of strangers. I'm like what do we make of this and who are you and what are you doing here? And how do you understand existence and human consciousness and these things that we have living inside of us, that are sort of out of nowhere? And this world is full of beauty and wonder and awe, and also pain and suffering and death and dying. Is the world just a cold, dark, hard place that death has the final say you turn the lights off and that's kind of it, and just like that click, it's done and over with and any moments of goodness that you experience are just blips on the radar, sort of these interruptions in an otherwise meaningless existence. Is that kind of what life is? Is that how we frame life? And what do we make of these human longings? I would argue we all have.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you know this or maybe you felt it, but, or listen to enough pop culture to kind of understand that if you listen to music or watch movies or read books or hear your neighbor talk, you'll hear a lot of longings in their soul for deep things. Where does that come from? We have a longing, all of us, for justice. We have the sense that things aren't always where they should be and we want them to be put back to rights, to be fixed. So we long for justice. We don't like things that are unfair. My friend always says oh, the fair only comes once a year though, ryan. By the way, I had to find a picture that didn't sort of connote or communicate any kind of like political, ideological stance or agenda, and it was hard to do because even this word, justice, has been co-opted in today's culture. But justice is a deeply, deeply divine thing, I would argue, comes from God and as old as existence itself and us.
Speaker 1:We long for justice. We long for things to be right and just and fair. We long for it. We also long for what I would call enchantment or spirituality, or to be connected to the divine or something bigger than ourselves. We're like is there anything else besides this material world that I can see and taste and touch? Is there something else? And you heard Steve Jobs sort of echo this. This is why you have like yoga studios and these other things. People long for a spiritual kind of experience prayer, meditation. People do these and they've done it for centuries and millennia, intuitively. We also long for relationships. We long for family, for neighbors, for friendships. Even you introverts you do it, just comes out differently. We long to be known and to be known to other people and to be in a partisan, you know even a community that's bigger than ourselves, and friendships.
Speaker 1:I think you know maybe sometimes we men have a hard time with this, but I know for a fact that this is mostly, I've heard, in male stories but I'm sure in female. But there's a guy named Sebastian Younger who wrote a book called Tribe and he wrote about his time he was in Restrepo in Afghanistan and the camaraderie he felt with his military brothers. It's this deeply profound connection where these guys would die for each other. In the moment I've heard a lot of guys in the military talk about this kind of brotherhood and I'm sure with the women too. But I just have read these stories about these men and I didn't serve. But it's like a profound connection because there's this unbelievable relationship between men and women. I'm sure as well. But in places like that, in the culture, like the military, because we long for a connection and those guys would have died for each other at the drop of a hat. It's unbelievably something unique and mysterious that's going on there.
Speaker 1:Lastly, we long for beauty. We long for beauty and we have this like we stand in awe and wonder and we're stirred by creativity and wonderful things and beautiful things and things like flowers and gardens. And now, men, maybe your thing isn't gardens and flowers a bit too girly for you, I get that and maybe, like I'm not, I'm too tough and manly for beauty, wrong Because of this here. Yeah, every man knows what I'm talking about. You mow that grass and you just stand back. That is amazing. That is a divine work of art and like something in you like this is like I'm living in tune with the divine creative forces of the universe when I mow these straight lines like that. And your neighbors know they walk by like lawn's looking good, ryan, thank you.
Speaker 1:Or you know, this is why we like to do things like go out at five in the morning and sit on a boat and throw a line in the water and catch a fish. I know it's kind of funny, but we talk about the beauty of the fish while we're catching. I get like beautiful. We understand like, hey, fish are like these incredibly. You know, like let me just for example this 21 inch smallmouth bass that I caught just recently. Yes, this is a shameless plug for a fish. I caught Biggest fish I ever caught in my life 21-inch smallie. It was 21 and a quarter, but then, because the tape measure was met, you know it's.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we long for these things and where does that come from? And how do you frame the world and what do we do with things like suffering and injustice, and to me the answer is Jesus. Jesus addresses and meets all of these things in us, these longings that we have to put the world back to right, to be connected to the spiritual, the transcendent, to have our relationships fixed and for beauty. And the gospels tell the stories of Jesus. That's all we have really is these gospel stories, or mostly what we have. And the gospels then tell stories about Jesus's birth and how one day he turned water into wine at a wedding in Cana. It's this incredible story. And we read about how he raised a guy called Lazarus, one of his closest friends, from the dead, and how he cried when he saw him dead. And how Jesus gathered disciples and how he also spoke and taught crowds, massive crowds, thousands of people sometimes. He taught these crowds we read about in the gospels. He took care of people, especially those on the outside, the fringes, the margins, those who were forgotten, which, by the way, becomes a uniquely Christian idea, this ethic of taking care of those in the margins.
Speaker 1:In the Greco-Roman world that didn't exist, but Jesus sort of introduces a new way of being a human and taking care of people. He begins a revolution that upsets the imperial power and presence in the Roman empire, and even the Jewish leadership. Nobody liked him. Well, not nobody. A bunch of folks in power didn't like what he was doing because it was a revolution. In many ways it was a revolution. He's arrested, tried and convicted and killed, even though he was an innocent man, and you can read these stories in the gospels about how he was resurrected from the dead. The gospels tell us these accounts.
Speaker 1:Now, when I was younger, I took a class I was an undergraduate at Red Rocks Community College in Colorado and I was like I wanted to. It was English two class and I could write about anything I wanted to write about. I'm like I'm gonna write about, I'm gonna write about the historical validity of the gospels, because that's what, that's what early pastoral nerds do, which I obviously that's fair, because in academia you don't. You can't I mean, unless you're in a theology class, you can't like write, you can't like use the Bible to kind of prove things. It's like a circular reasoning. You know argument, I go, that's fine, she goes. You can't use the Bible because I don't, she goes because I don't give a bleep what the Bible says. Okay, fair enough. Thank you for telling me, but can we trust the gospels, like I know that we all, many of us, are Christians and maybe you grew up reading them like and fair enough, and so you just maybe believe in them because you. It's circular reasoning, like well, I was told to, and they're the Bible, of course I you know. But like, what about rational, reasonable people who didn't grow up in this? Can we reasonably trust the gospels as another piece of literature, as a piece of history? Can we trust what the gospels say about Jesus and about the disciples and about him raising from the dead? If not, then, like Paul said, it's all a waste. Let's just go home and have some Chipotle. If so, it changes everything. It changes everything.
Speaker 1:The gospels many people think were written around 70 AD. By the way, you got some notes. You got a packet of notes. Okay, if you didn't, would you raise your hand, we'll give you some notes. Let me not get the notes that they want. You can follow along. Okay, good, take notes throughout. There on the back page there's a big, whole page of notes. Also, on the third page we's a bunch of resources. If you want to like, read some more scholarly works about. Can you trust the gospels? There's an intro level, secondary level, like a deep dive level. You can get some of those books. I've got a couple of them here If you want to look at them. I've got them, they're great. I only have 20 minutes so I'm going to try to boogie through it, but follow along. So so the Gospels were probably written around.
Speaker 1:Some scholars believe they were written around 70 AD and they think that because in 70, a cataclysmic event happened in Jewish history and in this part of first century Palestine the temple, which is this monolithic building that was the center and hub of all religious activity in the Jewish religion, it is destroyed. It was like a everybody knew, you know it was like this unbelievably, you know, shocking thing that happened and it was in 70. Jesus in Mark 13, allegedly before 70 AD, predicts the fall of the temple. So scholars are like well, it must've happened, they must've written these things down around 70. The first gospel, I believe, was Mark. Like what must've? Mark must've written around 70 or later, because how else would he have known about the temple being destroyed. So he wrote it in 70, after the temple was destroyed, and just put the words into Jesus' mouth that, oh, he predicted the future, but he really didn't. Other scholars are like, no, no, it's okay that Jesus knew the temple would be destroyed because you could see the writing on the wall, or perhaps the spirit told him. So others put the gospels earlier than 70 AD. Here's why it's important, because the closer to the actual events some scholars believe then the more trustworthy they are. So if they were written in 70 or even 100 or later, it's like well, how trustworthy can they be? There's a lot of time in between what actually happened, what they wrote down. Other scholars are like, well, no, the closer they are which we believe that you know he could have predicted the fall of the temple then the more accurate they would be. But either way, it probably doesn't really matter.
Speaker 1:This is the stance I take, because the people that wrote the Bible we don't have dates of the Gospels. We have Matthew, mark, luke and John. We have names, not dates. Two of them were not actual followers of Jesus, mark and Luke. They were companions of Paul, but John and Matthew were, you know, were followers of Jesus and so. But either way, the writers of these four accounts had, like an incredible familiarity with the land and the geography and the names of the people and the locations and even like Aramaic idioms. So remember, in that time, in the first century, these people spoke a lot of Aramaic. Not really beyond this timeframe or area did they speak Aramaic. Most people spoke Greek. It was a Greco-Roman culture and so they spoke Aramaic. There's Aramaic in the gospels.
Speaker 1:There's all kinds of things in the gospels, when you read them, that suggest that whoever wrote it, whenever they wrote it, they were familiar and intimate with that time and place, which lends them credibility, by the way. So it'd be like if I wrote a diary and was like hey, then Tuesday morning I woke up early and left School Street and walked down 169, you know Highway 169, all the way to the Elk River Landfill, you'd all be like, oh, of course, of course you know. But like, 100 years from now nobody will probably know what the Elk River Landfill was. Well, maybe they will, but maybe a thousand years no one will know. But you're like oh, that guy wrote like he was in, that he was like intimately connected to that time and place. So the writers either wrote because they knew it firsthand or they were interviewing people that were like firsthand connected to this time and place. Here's some examples, by the way, of this familiarity.
Speaker 1:So in John John talks about the Kidron Valley. Jesus walked down the Kidron Valley over across to this garden. I've been to the Kidron Valley, by the way. It's a very specific and unique valley in this area of Palestine and John talks about it. It's like, oh yeah, of course that was there. He wasn't talking about some made up mystical forest. He mentions the Kidron Valley. He also mentions a place called Gehenna. Many times this is mentioned in a bunch of the gospels and Gehenna was this dump outside of Jerusalem I've actually been there, by the way and they would burn garbage and garbage would burn incessantly. It would just be garbage burning and fires and there'd be dogs and the dogs would fight over the food. It would gnash their teeth. So Jesus, of course, uses this as a metaphor for what he calls hell, and so you can tell your friends that your pastor's been to hell and back. I went through Gehenna, but he talked about Gehenna. It's a very specific. The word is esoteric. Not many other folks would know this language of this place because they weren't from this area.
Speaker 1:So historically it lends all kinds of credibility to the gospel writers. They're using locations and geography that are specific to this time and place, as though they're writing. They were like I knew the Kidron Valley, I knew the Gehenna. Then there's this part too. I love it. There's this sense of like in this place in time that all these specific animals or like plants or this practice. So in the parable of the sower, the sower goes out and he sows seed amongst rocky ground. There's thorny ground and it's like this unplowed ground. This was a uniquely Palestinian practice In this time and place. In the Roman Empire it was the only place that didn't plow their ground before they planted seeds. So everywhere else in the empire they would plow the ground, then plant seeds Not here. And in this parable that's what it reads like Like oh, this person knew that this is what was happening in this time and place, so it probably wasn't written, like you know, decades or hundreds of years later. It was written right then and there they knew that this was what it was like, a uniquely Palestinian thing.
Speaker 1:Also, there were lots of names used. Matthew 10 is a great example, names specific to this time and place. I mean, for example, if I named my kid Gertrude, you'd all be like Gertrude, like anybody know a Gertrude. They're not usually younger than 50, right, and in this time in the ancient world, names and the popularity of them changed within years. Like every year, there would be different names and they would change in their popularity and their usage. And in Matthew you find all the names actually in all the gospels, but in Matthew 10, that were specific to this time and place. So names like Simon and Judas and John I dropped my prop, don't panic, rumi. Okay, there we go. You know what I'm going to sit down, that's good.
Speaker 1:James Thaddeus, any Thaddeuses out and about today? Okay, bartholomew and Philip, yeah, and even the qualifiers or the nicknames given to these people were very specific to this time and place, sort of suggesting that the writers knew all the trends that were going on. They were very, very close to whatever was happening. So it isn't as though these writers wrote from like miles and miles and miles away, years and years apart. They were writing as very close eyewitnesses to these accounts. Now here's how it happened, though they didn't get written down right away, because right then and there, no one thought to themselves like when Jesus showed up, oh, this will change the course of human history, we should write this down. No, no one knew what was going on when Jesus was there. That's why they don't, when you go to Israel, they don't have like a temple to all these different sites where Jesus was, because at the time no one thought it was any big deal. Then it became a big deal, so they started writing it down.
Speaker 1:But for a long time the stories survived though, through the oral tradition, which is a very Jewish way of telling history. Somebody would tell the story and they would pass it on and pass it on, and pass it on, and then finally Mark, we think, is the first one, wrote it down, and that's your first gospel, the Gospel of Mark. So the argument is well, this oral tradition, though, it can't be trusted because over the course of time things might have morphed and changed. You know like, over the course of time, like a bad game of telephone, things would have changed and maybe they would embellish it or they would add things, they would invent things. You know like, remember, telephone, the game of telephone. So you know it's like Jesus in the text Jesus fed 5,000 with fish and loaves. Then, over like maybe five, 10 years, it changed and morphed into Jesus fed 5,000 with fish, tacos, and then I'll try again. And then it changed over maybe 10 more years, you know, and Jesus invented the first ever Chipotle. Okay, or maybe, you know, maybe the text would have gone like this like you know, the first original thing that happened, the angel appeared and said don't be afraid. Then it changed over time and kind of morphed over decades to like, hey, it's going to be fine, just relax. To then maybe more decades like, hey, just chill, bro. I should have done the Chipotle one second. That's what I should have done. You get the idea, though, right, like maybe it could have changed over time. But here's the deal.
Speaker 1:Jesus and his followers, who were the ones who were like the originators of these stories, were Jewish. Did you know this? They were Jewish men, and he had women followers too. They were Jews, and there was this tradition in the Jewish culture of the rabbi and the student. The rabbi was like the teacher, you know, he would. He would bring his interpretation of the law, he would instruct them, they would follow him everywhere and they would. This was an esteemed position.
Speaker 1:So whatever the teachings were, whatever he said, whatever the rabbi did, they would intimately know it and they would actually memorize a lot of it Because it was so important for them, their teachings were so important they would never have changed it or altered it in any way, because the teaching itself is highly valuable and valued in this culture. It was a sacred thing. Just want to say the teacher, his information was so valuable, it was sacred. They would memorize all the things he said. I'm just saying Most of you can't remember what I said last Sunday, let alone. Hey, that sermon was really good. What did the preacher say? Something about fish, tacos and Chipotle. I don't remember. But the Jewish, the students of the rabbi, would. They would like, in fact the rabbi would give instruction or teaching in like a mnemonic device to help them memorize it. Jews memorized everything they had, the whole Old Testament. Many of them memorized. It was so important to them so they valued it. Wasn't like they would have just allowed it to morph over time and change over decades. They wouldn't have let it do that. It was too sacred to them to embellish it.
Speaker 1:Another argument is that the early church so, decades later, that they wrote the gospels as a theological, not historical document, but a theological document, and they wrote it to address certain theological you know conflicts or to strengthen their faith that these weren't really like firsthand neutral reports. They were biased, you know, altered, changed writings to address conflict or give them moral guidance or strengthen their faith or to answer predominant questions in the in the church. But here's the thing there's many questions that the first church, the early church, had that go unanswered. For example, these are questions that the church had never addressed in the gospels, which would make me think they were not written years and years and years, like by the church. Were written way before that, like things like well, should the gentiles be circumcised? Paul writes about this a lot, like we all. Now this church is like blown open and now there's Jews and Gentiles. Should we circumcise Gentiles? And all the Gentile men were waiting with bated breath on this answer. All the men know what's up. How should churches be organized? They don't address it.
Speaker 1:The gospels never talk about it. Even the theology of the cross, it's never really mentioned. Like, how do you make sense of the cross? Doesn't really talk, it just tells you what happened. Uh, what roles do women play? Doesn't really get addressed in the bible, although the women are the first ones that find the tomb empty. So the first preacher is women, the women Way to go, women. But like it's like these and also there's all kinds of irrelevant information in the gospels that the church wouldn't even care about. They're in your notes so you can look them up.
Speaker 1:So what else is it? I mean, maybe it's not just you know. Well, a lot of folks think maybe it was that these stories were legend, like they grow over time into this legend. You know what I mean. This is for Peter Legend. Okay, fine, myth. Any myth fans in here. Myths are great, by the way. Anyone know this one. Yeah, somebody said it, icarus. Yeah, is that what the gospels are? Here's the problem. I'll just answer it right away. They don't read like a legend or a myth. They really don't.
Speaker 1:There's also this other kind of genre called hagiography. It's like a. It's a genre about writing about saints, and when you write about a saint they often get like portrayed as this, like as a saint. So they leave out all the embarrassing, you know, negative details. They only tell the good things. It's like a funeral, like modern day funerals. You never hear the bad stuff.
Speaker 1:They call it hagiography and the gospels don't read like that, as though they're just venerating jesus and they only tell the good things. They tell the gospels tell all kinds of stuff. It's like negative, embarrassing, like, for example I love this is so funny to me jesus's own family questioned his sanity. So in Mark's gospel it says when his family heard things he was saying, they go and they grab him and they're like hey look, jesus is out of his mind. That's funny. And also, if you're here and your family has ever thought you were out of your mind, you might be in good company because you're with Jesus. They thought he was out of his mind. His own family, they thought it was out of his mind. His own family Like they didn't. They didn't like oh Jesus, he's gone crazy. Just better get him out. Get him out. He didn't get himself in trouble. I love that. It's so funny.
Speaker 1:You would never have included this in a legend or a myth, you would have just taken it out. How about this one? His healings weren't always instant. So he's healing this blind guy and he spits in his eyes. He's like hey, can you see anything? And the guy's like well, I kind of I can see people. They look like trees, though. And the disciples are like uh-oh, what am I supposed to do on that? Jesus is like don't worry, I'll do it again. And then John's like should we write this down. Should we write it down? Write it down, write it down. He's done it. Come on, I love this too. The disciples are really a bunch of idiots. They're knuckleheads.
Speaker 1:There was too many examples to list, in fact, I had to just narrow it down to one. There's a ton of them. Peter gets called the Satan, like one of Jesus' right-hand guys gets called the Satan, like what? That's a bad legend. But in Mark 14, it says then, in his moment of deepest need, Everyone deserts him and they flee because they're a bunch of chickens. The original text doesn't say that, but I added that, yeah, that's like not how you want to be remembered as a legend. That's not legendary. What's the opposite of legendary? It's that. And then, lastly, jesus was a crucified Messiah. Now we don't really understand this as a first century or as 21st century, whatever we're in 21st Westerners.
Speaker 1:But to die on a cross was shameful. Only cursed people died on crosses. Romans were. It was illegal to kill a Roman on a cross because it was so shameful and horrible. The Romans were too good for that so they would never let a Roman die on the cross. So only like scoundrels and like shameful people died on cross, and Jesus dies a cursed death on a tree.
Speaker 1:If you're writing a legend or myth, you would never have the hero die or die on a cross or die at the hands of the enemy the Roman Empire Maybe the Jewish military, but not the Roman Empire. Like what are we doing? Whoever's writing this, this is a terrible idea, but let's go with it. So why would they? It's probably not a legend or a myth. There's all these embarrassing things and also there's this the disciples gained nothing from this. It wasn't like they got a TikTok deal or an influencer deal. They didn't get a clothing line, they didn't get a book deal. They got nothing. They got embarrassed, they got shamed. In fact, many of them got killed. Most of them died horrific deaths. I'm going to show you.
Speaker 1:So Peter was crucified, andrew crucified, james beheaded, john died of natural causes. Okay, there you go, philip martyred in Heropolis. By the way, philip would walk to the gate of Heropolis. When you walked under the gate of Heropolis, there was a Domitian gate. When you walk under it, you would say Domitian is Lord, he was the emperor at the time, and Philip's like I'm not walking underneath that, I'm going to walk around it. And if you do that you get killed and his family's like, according to legend, hey, if you do that, you're going to get killed and he's like I don't care. I saw my rabbi feed 5,000 people. I got him killed. He was killed.
Speaker 1:Bartholomew flayed, beheaded or crucified. Either one, take your pick. Would you rather be flayed? Just kidding, I feel like we've had enough distance from then until now. I can make some kind of jokes. Matthew, likely martyred by the sword. Thomas speared to death in India. Did you know? Thomas ended up in India. That's crazy. James thrown from the temple pinnacle. Thaddeus clubbed to death or crucified. Simon the Zealot, crucified or sawed in half or died peacefully in Edessa. We don't know. Matthias, who replaced Judas, was stoned and beheaded.
Speaker 1:These men lost everything and none of them reneged. No one ever said hey, we made it all up, we were just joking, don't kill me, we were just messing around. It's a legend, just forget. We said anything and they all agreed on what they saw. I had a guy from the first gathering, paul Mesa. He goes Ryan. I tell people 12 men in this day and age. They all agreed on what they saw and then nobody relented. You know the Nixon scandal. He said yeah, yeah, he goes, those men, was there six of those men Within three days. They all turned on each other and said we made it all up. Yeah, I mean, it's not nothing, that 12 guys all went to their deaths proclaiming that what Jesus said and did was true, that he really rose from the dead.
Speaker 1:Now there are these discrepancies in the scriptures, like how many angels were at the tomb. You know, how did Judas really die and did the turning of the temple or the turning of the tables in the temple? Did that happen at the beginning of the ministry of Jesus or the end of his ministry? So there's some discrepancies. So when you read them, don't be shocked, like how many women were at the tomb, and there's all these like minor kinds of things. But here's the deal If you were going to write a legendary script and make it all up, you would scrub the record of any of those discrepancies. You wouldn't have them. So some scholars are like no, the fact that there's these minor discrepancies actually shows it's probably pretty authentic, because that's what would happen is you'd have these minor little things and they didn't erase them, they left them in there. Have known about these discrepancies since the second century. These aren't like new discoveries Like we didn't know. They've known about these discrepancies since the beginning of the second century and they've had all kinds of ways of thinking about it.
Speaker 1:One of the ones I love the most is that if you were going to have four people write an account of Jesus, they would look a little bit differently. So what you have in the gospel is really four accounts, like four portraits of the same person from different angles, and each gospel writer writes what they're seeing and watching from their own viewpoint and vantage point and including their own flavor, their own things that they want to pull out of it, and they're like highlighting certain things. And so it's what you would expect when you see four different gospels from the ancient world. It lends only more so to the credibility of the gospels. In fact, I'll end with a couple more things here.
Speaker 1:But uh, there's a guy named Wolfgang Schottewald and he was a philologist and a literary uh, literary scholar. Philology is a study of like literary texts and development of language over time. And this is a secular scholar who says the reason I believe the gospels and this is not a Christian guy, he's not affirming the theology, but just as a piece of literature, because what you find in them. He calls it experiential vividness that you find these incredibly vivid scenes that pull you in, and they include all kinds of miniscule details, like on the boat. In the boat with Jesus, he's on a cushion why would you include the cushion part? Or they talk about the grass on the hill of the feeding of the 5,000. Or, my favorite, when John and Peter are running to the tomb, john says I got there first Because of course he was.
Speaker 1:It reads like these guys were like these knuckleheaded dudes writing this stuff down as it happened. There's this vivid, the emotion, the expression. It doesn't read like some disconnected sort of theological construct or something like that. It's this incredibly concrete story about what really actually happened. It's beautiful. So, rather than just some sort of like theology book that was made up by the church with all these, it's like this vivid, incredibly powerful, impactful story that reads like history and this is what he says about it and it compresses a ton into a small amount of space. There's action, dialogue, character, insight, setting, meaning, and these things don't happen in myth stories. It reads like an actual firsthand account of what happened and what you would have thought if you were there. But also there's this the stories of Jesus and the men and women that surrounded it and that began to grow into a church.
Speaker 1:It changed the course of human history Like it just did. It changed history A number of things. It elevated human dignity. This is a new thing in the ancient world, like elevating every human as dignified, as a human. Because of the image of God, that person has value. We're going to honor it. This comes out of the teaching of Jesus A radical ethic of love, loving your neighbor, turning their cheek Again. It was an extremely unprecedented moral teaching. In the ancient Greco-Roman world they didn't care about those kinds of things. But Jesus brings it and it changes history. They begin to value the marginalized. Jesus is the progenitor, is the word of the golden rule that came from Jesus. They built hospitals and schools. Christians did Charities. Our laws are mostly founded on Jewish and Judeo-Christian values. Most abolition movements were started by Christians because of the teachings of Jesus. Art, music, all impacted by Jesus and his teachings and his life.
Speaker 1:It changed the world and many of you know maybe yourself included know somebody who met Jesus and it changed their life. You met Richard last week. Last week Richard told how he was a drug addict, an alcoholic. He was abused as a child, sexually and otherwise, and he grows up not caring about anything. He's an atheist. And then he gets confronted with the gospel and Jesus and he meets Jesus and it changes his life. And this same guy begins Minnesota Adult and Teen Challenge, which now serves thousands upon thousands of alcoholics, addicts and abuse victims and he's helping set people free. It changed his life.
Speaker 1:I don't know what to make of that. I know my prophet at community college that doesn't give a bleep what the Bible says. I'm like man I don't know. There's some stuff in there that's like. I don't know what to do with this. Maybe your life has been changed radically because of Jesus. What do you make of this?
Speaker 1:And if the resurrection is true, if it's true, then it makes sense of all the things in the world, like things aren't as they should be. And if there's no hope for resurrection, then what are we doing? Like, let's just go home. Who cares? But if he really rose from the dead, it changes everything, because he promises not just to raise you or him or him from there, but he promises to raise you and me from the dead, which means your life isn't over yet and death isn't the end and your illness, your sickness, your fear, your pain, your brokenness, it can be healed because God resurrects the dead. And if it's true, it changes everything. Would you please stand? Here's where I want to end.
Speaker 1:I want to reread that Pauline passage, but we're going to read it. You know he says if he didn't die, then this but I'm going to I rewrote it in the affirmative that just declares in faith that he did raise from the dead. Because sometimes you wake up and I don't know what to think. I kind of feel like I'm not myself today, or I need hope, or I need faith, and so you got to just declare it out loud as a way of like ah no, it's in faith. I declare these things and believe in the resurrection, and so when there are days when you don't that's why we have each other like I'll lean on you today and you lean on me, and so this morning we're going to read this together.
Speaker 1:And here's what I want to ask if Jesus rose from the dead, it changes everything and it's the best news I've ever heard. So when we read this, let's read it like it's actually good news. Okay, not like you stumbled in here at 11 o'clock in the morning and haven't had coffee yet and it kind of. Let's read it with some vigor. Are you with me? Okay, let's pray this prayer. Let's read the scripture together this morning. We'll read it. No, me, okay, let's pray this prayer. Let's read the scripture together this morning. We'll read it. No, we'll sing a song. Okay, oh, I got the clicker. Sorry, let me click over here. Oh, I'm going to skip that. Help me out, sam, there we go. Okay, you're ready? All right, let's read together.
Speaker 1:Since it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, we proclaim with confidence that there is indeed a resurrection of the dead. Because there's a resurrection of the dead, christ has truly been raised. And because Christ has been raised, our preaching is full of power and your faith is full of life. More than that, we are true witnesses about God, for we have testified that he raised Christ from the dead. He has indeed raised him, proving that the dead will also be raised, because the dead will be raised. Christ has been raised and your faith is strong. You are no longer in your sins. Those who have fallen asleep in Christ are not lost, but alive in him, and because our hope in Christ reaches beyond this life into eternity. We are, of all people, to be most envied For. We share in the victory of his resurrection, Amen.
