“I have seen the Lord…” — Sermon for Easter Vigil, 2023

I had the privilege of participating in the Easter Vigil at St. Micheal Lutheran Church in Harrisburg, and to preach the Good News for the service. Here is what I preached:

There’s a famous psychology experiment that was conducted in 1999 called the “Invisible Gorilla Experiment.” Maybe you’ve seen the video. The researches told participants that they would be watching a video of people passing basketballs to each other. And they were to count how many times the people in the white shirts passed the balls. That was their goal. The video is pretty simple. There aren’t any distractions to prevent someone from counting, even with the people in the video moving around and weaving between each other.

What the researchers were really interested in was finding out how many people were so focused on the task at hand that they would miss something so out of place that it seemed impossible to not see. About halfway through the video, there is a person in a gorilla suit walking through the crowd. At the end of the video, the researched ask a simple question — did they see the gorilla?

Amazingly, 50% of the participants don’t see the gorilla and have no idea that a gorilla walked through the crowd, stopped in the middle, did a little dance, and then casually walked away. They missed it completely because they were so focused on counting the number of times the…