My Worst Easter Sermon Ever

And it's note even close.

I first told this story years ago on my original blog. I share it here as a cautionary tale for my fellow preachers.

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I preached the worst Easter sermon ever back in 2001.

On paper, it read like a masterpiece. When delivered it was dead on arrival.

The Lord, full of grace, mercy, and infinite wisdom, chose not to bring it back to life.

What God Does Best

The sermon itself was built around the observation of how much running there is to and from the empty tomb after the resurrection.

I had the brilliant idea of preaching on how the resurrection gives us the energy to run. In the sermon, I named several scenarios in which, because of the resurrection, we run.

We run to Jesus.

We run away from sin.

We run alongside others with the good news.¹

So far so good.

To enhance the sermon, I asked a friend to take footage from the movie Run Lola Run and loop it on a big screen so that throughout the service we could watch Lola, um, run.²

Then I’d get up and preach about running while continued to Lola on the screen behind me.

I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn it didn’t work.

The sermon itself was half-baked and might have come in at “barely mediocre” had there been no special effects.

The added visual of Lola running ad nauseam made the sermon unbearable.

People left the service wondering if I understood the gospel, and I went home and started looking through the classifieds (2001!) for a new job.

I learned a valuable lesson from that failed experiment.

Easter Sunday is not the time for gimmicks.

If you want to try something cute or clever in a sermon, save it for Daylight Satan (Savings) Sunday. That way if you come up with something good, it will wake everyone up, and if it flops, no one will be conscious enough to notice.

The resurrection doesn’t need our creative help. It doesn’t need us to pump excitement into it. The resurrection generates its own energy and is capable of standing (or running) on its own two feet.

Tell the story and let the gospel do the work.

1. Like how Philip runs alongside the Ethiopian Eunuch’s chariot in Acts 8.

2. Shout out to Kyle Schei for pulling it off at a time when a project like this involved digitizing the movie from a VHS tape onto a desktop computer capable of processing a second of footage per minute. You read that right. It took forever.