Categories: god
Tags: God, waiting, Church, Christianity, Christ, Bible, Easter
Date: 12 April 2012 09:42:15
Three Easter Sermons, and not mine. The easiest way to write a blog is to borrow what others have said.
What they have in common is that they provoke in me the Easter response: He is risen indeed. Hallelujah!
Sermon one is from the last Easter sermon as Archbishop of Canterbury by Dr Rowan Williams.
In that sermon Dr Williams says:
Easter makes a claim not just about a potentially illuminating set of human activities but about an event in history and its relation to the action of God. Very simply, in the words of this morning's reading from the Acts of the Apostles, we are told that 'God raised Jesus to life.'
We are not told that Jesus 'survived death'; we are not told that the story of the empty tomb is a beautiful imaginative creation that offers inspiration to all sorts of people; we are not told that the message of Jesus lives on. We are told that God did something – that is, that this bit of the human record, the things that Peter and John and Mary Magdalene witnessed on Easter morning, is a moment when, to borrow an image from the 20th century Catholic writer Ronald Knox, the wall turns into a window. In this moment we see through to the ultimate energy behind and within all things.
Sermon number two was preached at holy Trinity Huddersfield by Rev Calvert Prentis.
Calvert concentrated on the story of Mary Magdalene at Jesus' tomb on the first Easter morning. Unlike Peter and John, who seem to be running around all over the place, Mary is still in her grief. She waits at the tomb. It is because she is still that Jesus is able to appear to her and give her the task of taking the news of the resurrection to the apostles. Are we still enough to hear Jesus say our name?
Sermon number three is from St Pixels, the internet church. Full text here:
Julienne Jones says:
Now on this Easter Day 2000 years later Jesus is calling each one of us by name. We may not hear it, we may not believe it, we may not recognise Jesus as saviour and Lord! But he calls each and every one of us. Each of us is unique, and uniquely loved by God. He desires our love in return and longs for us to accept all that he offers us through the risen Christ. Jesus is here, now, disguised in the ordinary everyday things and we so often fail to recognise his presence. He is calling us back from all the 21st century grief, confusion and fear, and pointing us towards the sure and certain hope of the resurrection. All he asks is that we dare to believe Christ IS risen. How will we answer him?