Luke 24:1-12; April 20, 2025; Easter Sunday
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When I was a senior in college I worked with rats.
Yup, that’s my opening line… but it’s true… I worked with rats.
With these cute little guys with red eyes and long serpentine tails.
The worst was when you had to pick them up — their tails would wrap around your wrists…
Anyway, I was a research and teaching assistant for the Psych Department, and I helped run a rat lab, showing freshmen and sophomores how to use and manipulate a Skinner Box.
Remember those? See picture at end of the sermon
Ours were more humane than this one. Ours didn’t have an electrified grid. We didn’t shock the rats or anything. Rather, we attempted to demonstrate how even rats can display motivation, positive and negative, through positive and negative reinforcement.
It went like this: we would first introduce the rats to the box. And over a series of weeks, the student would teach the rats (yes teach them) how to use the lever and understand the light so that eventually the rats would learn that it’s only when the light is on that the lever would work; and that if they pushed it, they would receive a reward. In their case: a food pellet.
Make sense?
Honestly, it was super interesting watching the rats do these things, and more, when they would smartly not waste their energy when the light was off. It’s like they really learned that without light, there just wasn’t much point.
But, most interesting of all was when we would manipulate the box so that everything the rats just learned no longer mattered. Such that even when the light was on, there would be no reward.
At first the rats would just push and push on the lever, almost like wondering “what’s going on here?” They would then run back towards the light, make sure that it was indeed on, and then they would run back to the lever and push again. Soon they’d grow frustrated. Exhausted. And you could visibly see and measure a decrease in their motivation.
So much so that after a series of just days, the rats would ultimately give up and do nothing at all.
Oh, the students would turn the light on. Flicker it even, like flashes of lightning. But the rats just wouldn’t care. They would just sit in the middle of the box and look down, or sometimes, out of desperation try to find a way to escape altogether.
This process, and result, was what we called, “Extinction.”
Though one of our students more appropriately titled it, “Depression.”
And, I think, depression is right.
For those of us who’ve been there, or who are presently there, we know these signs, don’t we? We’ve seen it. Where the lights that used to shine brightly suddenly feel dim or inconsequential. Where the levers that we used to press to find a reward, to elicit happiness, just don’t seem to click anymore. Where in this world, even when it finally feels like Spring, full of all of its warmth and color and birds and crickets, and extended sun into the evening, the light overall just feels like it’s diminished, different, almost as if it’s being slowly extinguished.
And, this world has gotten quite heavy and dark now, hasn’t it? Especially as the things that used to work just feel like they don’t anymore. Like they’re being broken.
And so, like the rats, it feels like we’re stuck here. In someone else’s race. In someone else’s box. In a cage wondering, what’s going on here? And worse, what’s the point?
On Good Friday, we read the chapter in Luke right before our text today, and we heard that when Jesus died and breathed his last, the disciples and women “stood off at a distance” (Luke 23:49) watching, motionless, in disbelief.
That even though Jesus had talked about it, predicted it, it just didn’t feel like it was possible to them — that he would actually die. Not yet. Not this soon. And so, like the rats, they got stuck in their time and place, in a box that just didn’t seem to make sense anymore.
Our own text that Natalie read earlier captured some of this too. Recalling that when the women came to the tomb and found it empty, they are not only “perplexed” but soon “terrified with their faces bowed towards the ground (Luke 24:5).”
It is even said that when angels, of all beings, stood before them in clothes that “dazzled” — or as it says in the Greek, αστραπτο, which can mean something like “flashing in light” – even while dazzling, their good news, relayed, yet “seemed like an idle tale, and they did not believe it.” (Luke 24:11).
An idle tale… oh, isn’t that just so sad, and like textbook depression? When even the best of news somehow feels hollow and false.
And so, like rats in a box… even though their eyes were telling them to believe, that their friend was in fact risen, and that his light was again shining, they just couldn’t bring themselves to push that lever of faith.
Resurrection? Good news? A light shining in the darkness? Nah… for we just saw that light go out on a cross, and made extinct, upon his death.
But then… then in that hour and moment of disbelief, the angels say to them a key word.
They say… “Remember”
Oh, it’s such a beautiful word. Perhaps my favorite. Remember.
“Remember how Jesus told you, that the Son of Man must be handed over and be crucified, but that on the third day he would rise again (Luke 24:7)?”
Remember? Remember.
And here’s the good news, my friends… “And then they remembered.” – Luke 24:8
Just as today we remember, don’t we?
That even though it has felt like we have been living through our own process of extinction, that even though so many of our spirits have beaten down, as if the levers of life just don’t work anymore, we are yet here today, in church, at Grace, to remember that the light has come, that the light is come, and that the light is still on.
For even though his light went out for a couple days… my friends, it came back! And his levers of hope, oh, they still work!
If we but press them, and live with that hope, with that trust, and belief, then not only will we find our reward in the Bread of Heaven, but we’ll also see that he has already broken us out of the cage, and that he has helped us escape out of the box.
For today, he has given us life; for today, he has given us freedom; for today, he has given us liberty… delivering each of us from the dominion of darkness and the extinction of death, into the realm of light and the Kingdom of Heaven.
For, he is alive. He is alive!
My friends, Jesus Christ is risen. He is risen, indeed!
Isn’t it amazing?
Alleluia!
Amen
