200412 Easter Drive in Service audio 200412 Easter Order of Service Sermon manuscript: There is a lot of peace that can be gained from the thought that everything is going to go back to normal. It is encouraging when we think of that time when we will no longer need to meet in cars or listen to sermons on our computer. It will be nice when we can go sit down in a restaurant somewhere or go to the golf course. But maybe what will be nicest of all is when we won’t have to worry about getting sick. We’ve had this trouble of this disease come upon us. We will all have a greater peace of mind when the trouble is taken away from us.The peace that comes from troubles being taken away from us is a peace that everybody immediately understands. We’ve understood since we were babies. When we had the trouble of being hungry we let Mom know about it. When we were filled up with milk, we had peace. When we stubbed our toe and it throbbed painfully, we had peace when the pain went away. When we have trouble we are not at peace. When the trouble goes away, we have peace.Now let’s apply this thinking to Easter morning. To call what had been going on “trouble,” is such an understatement that it is almost farcical. Jesus did not just have “trouble.” He lost his reputation and his dignity. People treated him as though he were a fool. He was beaten and whipped and spit upon. All his friends left him. Peter denied him three times. Nails were pounded through his hands and his feet and his body was suspended from these nails until he could no longer breathe. His heart gave out, and he hanged limply upon the cross, dead. To make sure that he was really dead the soldiers callously thrust a spear into his side, further mutilating his beaten and scarred body. Just before sunset on Good Friday he was placed into a cold dark grave.That was a heap of trouble for Jesus personally, but this also extended to his disciples. His disciples loved him tremendously, and so to hear of the terrible things that happened to him was dreadfully painful. And he had died. There is a special kind of sadness that comes from young people dying. Jesus was in the prime of his life—around 30 years old. But, more than that, Jesus was so good and loveable. The disciples adored him. Now he was so suddenly and violently dead.But there’s more. The disciples did not think that Jesus was just an ordinary man. They believed that he was the Christ who was promised to come according to the Old Testament Scriptures. They believed that he was by all rights in heaven and on earth the king of the Jews. The twelve apostles had left their livelihoods behind to be his students. They had preached and urged others to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, and that through that faith, they would be blessed by his rulership. According to their way of thinking about how Jesus should be the Christ, Jesus’s death meant was all over and done with. How can someone who is dead be king? You can’t prop his corpse up on a throne, can you?And so all of Jesus’s disciples had a heap of troubles too as they all entered into that Easter morning. All of their most pressing troubles came from the fact that Jesus was dead. So according to the logic that we’ve looked at this morning, with the removal of these heaps and heaps of troubles that comes with Jesus being resurrected—no longer dead—Jesus’s disciples should have had peace—tons and tons of peace. So my question to you is, “Where’s the peace?” The angel told these women the good news: They should not be alarmed. Jesus, who was crucified, is risen. That’s why he isn’t there. He lives and is out and about. That’s why he’s not lying there as the women expected him to be. You’d think that after hearing how all their troubles have ended that they would go out from the tomb leaping and skipping for joy—peace having taken complete possession of their hearts. But what Mark says is that they bolted for the door and got out of there as quickly as the