Easter Sunday 2021

Happy Easter

Here are some prayers and a sermon for Easter.

Click on the links for the hymns.

I will be on leave now until Monday 19th April when I will be back with Prayers.

God bless

Rev Tim

Christ is Risen

He is Risen Indeed

Alleluia!

Hymn: Christ the Lord is risen today:

Prayer

God of resurrection, ever renewing, ever reviving,

we adore you for your life-giving presence.

Son of Man, newly risen, sorrow made joy,

we adore you for your sacrificial living and dying.

Holy Spirit, breezing among us this Easter morn,

we adore you for breathing new life into us.

Amen.

Readings  Isaiah 25:6-9 & Mark 16:1-8

Hymn: Christ is alive! Let Christians sing

Sermon

There are two phrases from our Gospel reading that I would like us to look at briefly.

The first is “ he is risen” and the second is “ go tell”.

He is risen. In these days of scepticism people so often want evidence before they will

believe anything.

So what evidence  is there that Jesus is risen? For me it comes in three parts.

Firstly the tomb is empty. This is something that is not in doubt.

The question is how did it become empty?  There is no evidence to suggest

that the followers of Jesus would have even thought of making this up.

There was simply  no precedent in their culture or in scripture, if anything the opposite.

Evenso  many people have tried to come up with a different answer to the one

“ He is raised''. Their solutions always fall down somewhere when the evidence is

closely looked at.

The story is told of a man driving down a country lane at Easter when suddenly

the Easter Bunny jumps out in front of the car and is hit and killed. Distraught the man

flags down another motorist for help.

A woman stops and they both go over to check that the bunny is indeed dead.

“Wait a moment,”

says the woman. She goes to her car and returns with a spray

can which she proceeds to spray

all over the bunny. Within seconds the bunny starts to revive, in a few minutes

it is back on its feet hopping down the road waving again and again at the two motorists.

The man looked at the woman and said “That’s amazing what is in the spray can?”

The women showed him the label. It said: “Hair spray. Restores life to dead hair.

Adds permanent wave.''

No matter what other imaginative stories people make up about Easter,

the fact remains that

the tomb was empty.

The biblical scholar NT Wright comments  “The early Christians  did not invent

the empty tomb…..nobody was expecting this kind of thing. To suggest otherwise is

to stop doing history and enter into a fantasy world of our own”

Secondly over 500 people saw Jesus .

When Paul states this in his letter to the Corinthians he is making the point that

these people were still alive. You could have gone and asked them

What if we had each person that witnessed the resurrected Lord come up here this

morning and talk for 15 minutes giving a testimony to what they saw.

If we listened to the testimony of all the people that Jesus appeared to, we would

be here all day,

and all night, and Monday and Monday night and Tuesday and Wednesday

and Thursday and

sometime early Friday morning they would just be wrapping up the testimony.

It would take over 128 straight hours just to hear, for 15 minutes each,

the testimony of those

that saw the Lord after he rose. One or two might have got it wrong but so many?

And thirdly there is the witness of so many down the ages up until today.

Your witness and my witness to our belief that He is risen because we have experienced

it in our own lives in our own ways.

The journalist Lee Strobel  was an atheist journalist who when his wife became

a Christian tried to prove that the resurrection was not true. In the end he became

a Christian. He wrote this:

“I became a Christian because the evidence was so compelling that Jesus really is the

one-and-only Son of God who proved his divinity by rising from the dead. That meant

following him was the most rational and logical step I could possibly take.”

So on this Easter day we celebrate not just the most

significant historical event ever, an event that guaranteed the redemption of all creation,

we also celebrate a Risen Christ who is and was and is to come.

So let us “ go tell”

Do we share our own stories of meeting with the risen Jesus? Some will be very vivid,

others just a feeling at a certain time in a certain place. And sometimes it might just

be that we know Jesus is with us, or has been with us, we cannot explain it we just know,

that is faith.

I remember waiting to go into my candidates committee almost 10 years ago to the day.

As I sat  quietly I was holding a small  T shaped Franciscan cross my dad had given me. 

Suddenly I had  a profound sense of peace that reassured me that no matter what

happened next all would be well.

I know that you will all have a story to tell. It will be an amazing story because

it will have Jesus at the heart of it, it will be worth telling because it will have Jesus at

the heart of it.

You do not have to shout it out from the street corners, although there isnothing wrong with that,  but you can share it when you see others searching

for a meaning to life, when others ask you what do you believe?

In this way we can all share the Good News about Jesus.

It is good news that tells us that no matter how dark things may seem on

occasions there is always hope because He is Risen. It is good news that tells us

that because He is risen there is always the hope of  a new beginning.

As we move on from this Easter day let us hold on to the truth that our risen

Lord travels with us, let us share that conviction with all and any and let us be assured that

because He is risen the best is yet to come. Amen.

Hymn: All Heaven declares

Prayers

On this day of resurrection  we prayer for the needs of the world.

Where there is war and injustice Lord bring peace.

We pray for a sustainable use of the world’s resources, so all may have enough.

We pray for our nation and those who lead us, give guidance and wisdom.

We pray for our emergency services, keep them safe as they serve us.

We pray for our communities that they may be places of safety for all.

Where there is illness and suffering Lord bring comfort.

In a moment of quiet we offer our own prayer for what is causing us concern.

God who gives us the resurrection hope hear our prayers 

For we ask them in the name of the risen Lord.

The Lord’s Prayer

Hymn: Thine be the glory

Blessing

God of new life and new beginnings,

Bless us today and in all our tomorrows

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.