Easter At Awakening 2025

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

Happy Easter.

We're working it.

I get it.

We're getting warmed up.

Good.

He has risen.

Okay, alright.

Well done.

Oh my goodness.

And wow, by the way, awakening, you look good.

You clean up.

Real nice.

If you're new, we're pretty casual around here, so this is something special.

I actually get excited to see, you know, your photos that you take over at our photo booth.

Our family and I just took ours uh right before the first service.

Because Easter, isn't it one of those times where you want to get that picture perfect, Instagram worthy post?

It's like, oh man, and so post them tag us.

We'd love to see those things.

Now, here's the interesting thing about a picture.

It's been said that a picture's worth what?

Right?

But in our day, I think a picture is something different.

Maybe it is still worth a thousand words, but truth be told, is a picture rarely tells the whole story, doesn't it?

Let me show you an example of this.

Um, this is a picture of my family circa September 2011.

Yeah, isn't that special?

I don't know what's growing on my chin there, um, if you can see that.

It's wild.

14 years ago, how the time flies, you know, my daughter's now 20, the boys are 18 and 15.

The truth is, as they say, as parents, the days are long, but the years are short.

Where did the time go?

Now, if you take a look at this picture, what the story tells you, what you see is, well, one, yes, you would first go like, wow, yes, they are a very Swedish family.

Uh get that.

But second, you would go like, whoa, what a magical, happy moment they're sharing in this beautifully scenic park.

But the reality is, the reality is, is we were in a September heat wave that was about a hundred degrees that day post-school, the kids are tired, they are hot, they're hangry, they're yelling and screaming, and the kids were yelling and screaming too.

Um I mean, honestly, I was losing my cool.

I was bribing them with ice cream and threatening them with timeouts just to get them to be still long enough and smile for 30 seconds so we could get a picture.

Our um photographer, she's a magician.

I don't know.

We she got a lot of really great photos.

But the thing is, and you know this, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but picture rarely tells the whole story.

And if we just take this at face value, what you see?

Shining, happy, picture perfect, problem-free family.

But the reality is it could be nothing further from the truth, and the truth is the same is true for you and me in our life, isn't it?

We curate the best versions of ourselves, smiles on the outside, but often something very different is going on inside.

Underneath all the filters, all the polish, we carry this sneaking suspicion.

Something inside of me is broken.

And then this fear, and maybe it is beyond repair.

In our picture perfect, performance-driven culture, what we present to the world and the real story, the true you are often very different.

We don't talk about it, of course.

We keep ourselves busy, we cover it up with activity so we don't have to feel.

We cover it up with uh achievement because if we accomplish enough, maybe nobody will notice the ache, the longing.

But if somebody could see the real you, see inside of you, they'd see this longing, this hoping for wholeness, the anxious whisper of the heart that says, Am I beyond hope?

Beyond help?

Am I beyond ever being put right again?

What do you do with the brokenness in your life you cannot fix?

And what if the most broken parts of your life is the very place Jesus wants to meet you today?

What if the places that we cover up that we're most ashamed of, that we avoid, we pretend aren't there?

What if Jesus wants to meet you in this moment in those places?

Mary Magdalene was a woman who knew brokenness.

Not just any kind of brokenness, the deep soul-level brokenness.

Now, Mary Magdalene, not to be confused in the Gospels with Mary, the mother of Jesus, or Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus.

Mary, by the way, was the Jennifer of the ancient day.

Historians tell us one in four baby girls were named Mary.

And so when I read the Gospels, I can't help think of my wife Jenny.

And if you grew up as a Jenny, you know the struggle.

Did you know that for 15 years straight, Jennifer was the number one baby name for girls in America?

1970 to 1984, and then it was in the top 10 for another 25 years.

And so you grew up, Jenny, Jennifer, with five different Jennifer's in your class.

Jen, Jenny with a Y?

Jenny with an I.

How do you spell it?

To be distinct.

Jenny S, and so forth.

Mary, we see a lot of those in the New Testament, and so it's so easy to be confused of like, oh, which Mary is this?

Now, the interesting thing is Mary Magdalene, she plays a significant role in the Easter story.

In fact, Mary Magdalene is one of few people who is both at the crucifixion and the resurrection.

Mary was the last at the cross.

She lingered at the cross, the last to leave.

She followed all the way to the tomb.

Mary was the first to the empty tomb.

She was the first eyewitness of the risen Jesus.

And Mary was the first commissioned by Jesus to share this good news.

All four Gospels record her significance.

In fact, St.

Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest minds and thinkers of Christianity ever, said this: that Mary was the apostle to the apostles.

A theologian said it this way.

He quipped, the very first Easter sermon was preached by a woman to a room full of doubting men.

And this is one of the reasons I find the gospel accounts not just beautiful but deeply trustworthy.

If you were going to craft a myth to create a movement, you would not tell the resurrection story this way.

In the ancient day, unfortunately, a woman's voice was not considered reliable or trustworthy.

In fact, in the court of law, it wasn't even permissible for her to speak.

Her voice carried no weight socially or judicially.

If you're going to tell this story and you're going to make it up, you would want to use Peter, you would want to use John, one of the first twelve.

But no, the gospels, all four of them, tell us it was Mary Magdalene who saw Jesus first.

It was Mary Magdalene who told people first.

Why?

Because that's how it happened.

And isn't it just like Jesus?

To meet and to speak to one who's been overlooked first.

And to give the one who maybe has been voiceless a voice to declare the greatest news of human history.

And it was Mary's story and her encounter with Jesus, is where we discover what do we do with the brokenness we cannot fix.

Mary Magdalene, or quite literally, Mary of Magdala, for she was from the small fishing town of Magdala, just on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee.

We don't know a whole lot about her, but unfortunately, her reputation's been smarred down in history.

Mary was not a woman of ill repute, as some have said, but she was a woman tormented by seven demons.

Seven biblically carries this significance of completion, completeness, totality.

What we know about Mary is she experienced a brokenness, a bondage, a suffering that wasn't partial but overwhelming.

Today, when we talk about battling our demons, and you're like, oh, are we going there on Easter?

Yeah, here we go.

Let's go.

Today, when we talk about battling our demons, we often dismiss, I think, great peril, the spiritual oppression in reality.

And yet we battle our demons nonetheless.

Some of us, we are battling our demons in the area of addiction, aren't we?

You've tried and you tried to break free, to stop, but you just can't.

You're stuck.

It's hopeless.

It's the depression and anxiety that overshadows your life and feels like it has an iron grip on you.

It's the anger.

That response that you wish you could just get rid of.

It's that short fuse that keeps ruining every relationship that you hold dear.

It's the perfectionist, that voice that you're never enough, you gotta do more.

Try harder, it shouts.

Try harder, it shouts.

And why didn't you measure up?

It's the voice of shame.

Maybe the voice of your mom or dad or a coach or a teacher.

Voice that says you're worthless.

A voice that says you're a screw-up.

Voice that says you'll never amount to anything.

Everything you touch, you ruin.

It's the brokenness we cover up.

That we're afraid can never be fixed or healed.

Battling our demons, yes, it is spiritual, but it is also emotional and physical and mental.

We don't know exactly what Mary's battle was.

But what we do know is that she was someone who was broken beyond repair and beyond hope.

And then Jesus enters her story.

He comes to this town of Magdala and this woman who was broken.

And Jesus sees the oppression, Jesus sees the brokenness, and he's not repulsed by it, he's not overwhelmed by it, he doesn't step back from it.

No, he steps into her story.

He leans in and he speaks into her life and she's healed.

See, this is so important, especially in our day.

Jesus did not enter her story to give her good advice or a new life hack.

He healed her.

So often we're just trying.

What is that new tip?

What is that new hack?

What are these things?

And what you need is the presence and power of Jesus in your life.

Jesus steps into her story.

And he saved her.

From that day forward, her life was simply an expression of gratitude back to the one who gave her life back.

And so she followed Jesus.

Wherever Jesus went, she went.

She, along with a few other women, traveled with Jesus and his disciples.

They helped finance the ministry of Jesus.

And the only thing that could match the immense gratitude Mary felt over the one who'd healed her was the overwhelming grief of watching him suffer and die.

Rome didn't invent crucifixion, but they perfected it.

It was their chosen form of terror, of dominance.

The goal was not to kill you quickly, but slowly, to inflict the most pain and suffering, to put you to public shame for as long as possible.

And so what they do, they stripped you completely naked.

They'd beat you just short of death.

And then they would drill and nail nails through your wrist and your feet.

You didn't die because of blood loss, though.

You died because of asphyxiation.

As you hung on the cross, you were not able to breathe, and so you would pull yourself up, push on the nails in your feet and the wrist to pull yourself up to get a gas of air.

And then as the pain was too excruciating, you would slump back down, allowing the splintered wood to drive much deeper into your back that has been ripped from the flogging.

Up.

Down.

Up down.

Until you lost strength and could not go up again.

And you pass suffocating silently.

As a crowd watches and cheers.

She saw the one who cast demons out of her, who gave her life back, who spoke her name, stripped, bleeding, and now silent.

And she could do nothing to stop it, nothing to fix it.

All she could do was just stay.

The kind of grief that presses down on your chest until it's hard to breathe.

I mean, just imagine Mary, along with Mary, the mother of Jesus, John the disciple, and a couple others.

At first, they're at a distance, and as his time on the cross is growing closer, they draw nearer.

She watched him silent storms.

She watched him command demons and raise the dead, and now he is dead.

Mary could do nothing to stop it.

And so what did she do?

She just stayed.

She stayed when others scattered.

She stayed in the whore.

She stayed in the helplessness.

And maybe, just maybe, maybe she wondered if the demons would come back.

If the darkness would win, if everything he had done for her would now be undone.

Because when the one who saved you dies, what hope is left?

That is the grief she carried to the tomb Sunday morning.

That is the sorrow she brought to the garden.

In the Gospel of John, we experience Sunday morning through the eyes of Mary.

John writes this.

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance.

So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciples, and the one Jesus loved, that's John.

That's how he referred to himself.

Jesus loved other people too.

He loved the whole world, but John liked to say it just about himself.

And he said, They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they've put him.

By the way, when Mary shows up onto the scene, it's still dark, the stone has been rolled away, the tomb is empty.

She did not assume resurrection, she assumed desecration.

And what does she do?

The only thing she knows to do, she runs back, finds Peter and John and tells them, somebody's taken Jesus.

And the text tells us that Peter and John run.

Peter started out first, and John, there's a little competition.

He outran Peter.

He gets there, and then Peter runs right in, and they notice the linen, the burial cloth.

The text tells us the way that it's laid there, the neatness is as if the body just disappeared.

And John he begins to believe at that moment, though he's still confused.

But it's interesting what Peter and John do.

They see the empty tomb, and then they just go back home.

But then the text says this about Mary.

That Mary lingered at the tomb.

Peter, John, they're like, I don't know what to do.

Let's just go back.

But Mary lingered.

The only thing she needed to do at the crucifixion was linger at the cross.

I'm just gonna stay close to the one who changed my life.

And she followed all the way until they buried him at the tomb.

And as early as she could get there Sunday morning, she shows up and it's still dark and she's lingering.

And she doesn't know where they've taken his body.

And so the only thing she knows to do is just stay where she last saw Jesus.

She lingered.

We don't linger well in our culture today, do we?

What we tend to do is we run too fast and linger too little.

Speed and efficiency move us, and we live in such hurried space, in such hurried lives.

We live in a world addicted.

To productivity, to new, to next.

There's no time to linger, no time to wait, no time to grieve, no time to be present.

I've told you this before, but one of my favorite features on my phone is the memories that pop up.

The older I get, the more I love them.

They just pop up when my kids are little.

There's been multiple occasions I've been in one of my favorite coffee shops, Pete's.

Stay away from him, right?

And it's just like, oh, this is amazing.

You know one of my greatest regrets when my kids were little?

One of my greatest regrets is how little I was present.

There was something always so important, so demanding, something that I just needed my attention, my time, my energy, something so pressing.

Why do we tend to trade the most important for the most pressing things?

The urgent just drives us, doesn't it?

Why do we allow distraction to drive our lives?

Mary lingered at the tomb.

And because Mary lingered at the tomb, she was the first to see the resurrected Jesus.

She's present.

Here's the truth, friends.

Jesus wants to meet with you personally right now.

The question is: will you linger?

Will you be present?

Will you put aside the to-do list?

Will you put aside all the things that you know that are coming through the day?

And in this moment, would you simply linger at the tomb?

Be present to the moment.

I think we miss Jesus so often because of our hurry.

We live loud, clamoring lives where we cannot hear his voice.

So today, would you hear his voice?

Would you hear it?

Would you slow down enough?

Would you linger?

Text goes on to say.

Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying.

And she wept, she bent over to look in the tomb and saw two angels in white seated where Jesus' body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.

They asked her, Woman, why are you crying?

Still, no thought of resurrection.

They've taken my Lord away, she said, and I don't know where they put him.

At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she didn't realize it was Jesus, overwhelmed with grief, eyes flooded with tears, not expecting Jesus physically again.

He asked her, Woman, why are you crying?

Who is it you're looking for?

Thinking he was the gardener, she said, Sir, if you've carried him away, tell me where you've put him, and I'll get him.

And then Jesus said to her, Mary.

And Jesus said to her, and then Jesus said to her, Mary.

She turned toward him and cried in Aramaic, Raboni, which means teacher.

Jesus said to her, Mary, the most common name in their day.

But this moment was not common in any way.

He spoke her name with tenderness and compassion.

And in him speaking, Mary spoke resurrection power.

That brought a realization and changed her world.

In a single word, her world was changed.

And she recognized the one she grieved is alive.

She moved from heartbreak to hope.

See, when Jesus calls your name, everything changes, by the way.

When Jesus calls your name, everything changes.

Move from despair to hope.

See, where shame once caused us to hide, grace now calls us by name.

Where sin once brought separation, Jesus now brings restoration.

By the way, do you know this?

The last time we see God speaking to a woman in the garden was actually the Garden of Eden to Eve.

Eve, having taken the fruit, having rebelled against God, going her own way, hiding and covered in shame.

And now we see once more in a garden Jesus.

Not asking the question, where are you?

Calling your name.

Calling her name.

And where death once had the final word, Jesus speaks.

A better word.

I like how Frederick Bachner said it.

He's a theologian.

He said the resurrection means the worst thing is never the last thing.

The resurrection means the worst thing is never the last thing.

If Jesus really did rise from the dead, and I'm going to ask, I know many of us in here would say, yes, he did.

But I'm not posing that question to those of us that are wrestling with that reality.

Yes, I want to pose it to you, but I want to pose it if he really did Jesus follower.

If the grave is really defeated, then the reality is the worst thing that you have ever walked through, that you will ever walk through in this life, will never have the final say Jesus does.

But the resurrection isn't just historical, it is personal.

Yes, it is historical.

In fact, if if you don't know this, all of Christianity hangs upon the resurrection of Jesus.

If he did not rise from the dead, this is a waste of time.

Don't spend your hour and ten minutes at awakening.

By goodness, go get your brunch already.

In fact, it's so easy with Christianity.

You don't have to wade through pages and pages of theology and read all of the scripture.

Those are good things.

All you have to do is examine the historical reality of the resurrection.

If he rose from the dead, friends, then all that he said is true and trustworthy.

He is the Savior, risen King of the world.

If he didn't, he's a liar, a lunatic, not worthy of our trust.

You know what's interesting, um there's five facts, historical facts that uh every major scholar agrees about Jesus and the resurrection.

And uh whether you're atheist or theist, they all agree on this.

One that Jesus was a historical person, he was a rabbi in first century Palestine, Judea.

Second, that he was crucified on a Roman cross and buried in a tomb.

The third thing is that the tomb was empty.

People don't really know, maybe you're atheists and don't know why the tomb was empty.

What happened?

What happened?

I don't know.

But the tomb was empty.

The fourth is that the disciples really believed they saw the risen Savior.

So much so that the fifth thing that was astounding and the reason it's almost uh unexplainable why this little small group even survived the first century is the transformation of the disciples who once were timid and fearful, now bold to the extent of laying down their lives and the conversion of skeptics.

Yes, the resurrection is historical, but if you leave it as an event out there and as Jesus as a data point, you'll miss it right here.

The resurrection is personal.

Isn't it amazing that the very first person Jesus showed himself to wasn't the group, wasn't a group of 500, which he did show up to 500, by the way, it was to a person.

Because it's personal.

The one who was grieving and longing and suffering.

And then Jesus said her name.

Mary.

Turn from our hiding, turn from our shame, turn from our striving, turn from our fear, and turn to Jesus, who's calling your name in love.

What do you do with the brokenness in your life that you cannot fix?

We cover up.

We curate.

The best version of ourselves we present to the world to hide our hurt and shame.

What if all of your effort to fix yourself is actually keeping you from the one who can actually heal you?

Most of us go through life trying to cover what's broken rather than bring it to the only one who can heal you.

And so today, would you linger long enough to hear Jesus calling your name?

Would you linger long enough?

You don't need more advice, you don't need a new life hack.

What each of us needs is a life-changing encounter with the resurrected King of the world, Jesus, who loves you with an everlasting love and who is calling out to you right now in this moment.

He longs to meet you personally and profoundly and powerfully.

And when you turn to him and when you hear him call your name and you respond, you will not remain the same.

Would you hear him?

Some of us, we've been followers of Jesus for a long time, haven't we?

Somehow resurrection just seems to be going through the motions.

Would you linger long enough at the tomb for to have a fresh moment with Jesus?

Some of us have wandered off.

Like this is my faith of my youth, but I went through that whole deconstruction thing and I don't even know what's up, what's right.

I have so many doubts and so many questions.

Would you bring all of your doubts and all of your questions to him?

Would you linger long enough to hear him calling your name in love?

There is no shame in his voice.

Just tenderness, compassion.

And others of us in this room, for the very first time, maybe you've gone to Easter three or four times, it's your thing, it's your tradition, or maybe it's your first time ever, and you didn't know the God of the universe came for you, died for you, and defeated death to fix what's most broken in you and to give you new life.

And today is the day where when you hear him calling your name, you respond, you turn to him, and you say, Jesus! And he says, Welcome.

Today can be your resurrection moment, your merry moment.

He's calling your name.

And if that's where you're at, if you want to step into a relationship, have him enter your life, bring new life in you.

I just want to invite you to pray after me.

And if you wouldn't mind just praying together as a group, close your eyes.

That's all it is.

Just pray after me.

Jesus, I believed you died for me.

I believe you defeated the grave and you are alive.

I bring you my brokenness, my shame, my sin.

I don't want to hide anymore.

Would you forgive me?

Heal me.

Come into my life and make me new.

Today, like Mary, I just choose to follow you.

Thank you for saving me, giving me new life.

With eyes still closed and head bowed.

If that's you, if you responded, prayed that prayer.

Would you just raise your hands like pray for you?

Raise it up high.

Amen.

All over you, all over the room.

Jesus, thank you for those today who have heard your voice and responded for the first time, and those of us who responded for the thousandth time, your grace, your mercy, your love.

Thank you.

Thank you, most of all, for your life.

That you are alive.

You are king.

You are hope.

In Jesus' name.

We hope you are blessed by this message.

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