Astounding Women

“Moreover, some women of our group astounded us.” (Luke 24:22)

Yesterday, the third Sunday of Easter, April 19, 2026, I preached from Luke’s telling of the resurrection appearance of Jesus to two bewildered disciples on the road to Emmanus (Luke 24:13-35). Jesus comes and walks alongside them, but they don’t recognize him. They think he is clueless to all that happened to him in Jerusalem, from crucifixion to resurrection. They blurt out, “Moreover, some women of our group astounded us.”

As I read and re-read that narrative last week, I kept stopping at those words, “some women of our group astounded us.” My life has been shaped by astounding women. From my maternal grandmother crossing the Atlantic in 1922 with her young children, including my six-year-old mother, to enter a new land through Ellis Island, a land who language they barely understood; from a hill town in central Italy to this land of opportunity that welcomed immigrants (I still want it to be such a land!). To my mother, who learned to speak English and carved out a wonderful life through hard work and faithfulness. To the lovely young woman I met when I was a first-year student in college, the woman I would be privileged to marry four years later. To the two daughters born to us, now mature and beautiful women. My life has been shaped by astounding women. To all the women that shaped my faith and my understanding of life, their names too many too recall. To all the women I was honored to serve with on the staff of Brunswick Church. To all the women serving in leadership when so many men have told them their place was elsewhere. My life has been shaped by astounding women.

Those two disciples weren’t putting down those women, but were living in a time when women weren’t seen as trustworthy; they were reflecting that warped and incorrect understanding of women. Jesus so trusted women that on Easter morning he appeared first to them. In John 20, Jesus allows Mary Magdalene to tell the male disciples, who, of course, doubted any such report from a woman. She is the first Easter preacher! And major expressions of the Church today still forbid women the equal status Jesus has always given them.

And here we are again, being encountered by the risen Lord. “Moreover, some women of our group astounded us.” My life has been shaped by astounding women. I am who I am because of faithful women. Women of character. Women of grace and grit. Women of valor and courage. Women of tenderness and toughness.

Rachel Held Evans, one of my favorite authors and thinkers, in Wholehearted Faith says, “I am a Christian because of women who said yes.” Shereflects on how Mary’s yes was pivotal to the Incarnation.    

“I am more aware than ever of the startling and profound reality that I am a Christian not because of anything I’ve done but because a teenage girl living in occupied Palestine at one of the most dangerous moments in history said yes—yes to God, yes to a wholehearted call she could not possibly understand, yes to vulnerability in the face of societal judgment, yes to the considerable risk of pregnancy and childbirth… yes to a vision for herself and her little boy of a mission that would bring down rulers and lift up the humble, that would turn away the rich and fill the hungry with good things, that would scatter the proud and gather the lowly [see Luke 1:51–53], yes to a life that came with no guarantee of her safety or her son’s.”  

. “Moreover, some women of our group astounded us.” My life has been shaped by astounding women.