Easter Day 2015

I didn't preach for very long today. That’s not because I didn’t have lots to tell the congregation: I’ve got so many stories from my time at Brigham, Clifton, Dean and Mosser, I could've gone on all day, but I chose to wait for another time.

There was so much to take in this morning that if I'd started going on about what life was like in Jerusalem during a Passover weekend in the year thirty something AD, or what the burial practices were during a traditional Sabbath, or any of that, I think there’d be a risk of overkill.

Instead I chose to take a few minutes and think about resurrection: 

I know that most of us know the resurrection story pretty well, we know the characters and the events, we know quite a few of the lines that people speak: Mary and her declaration of “Rabboni!” when she realises it’s Jesus.

But even those of us who know the story, might struggle a bit to understand it, because resurrection isn’t something that happens very often; we don’t have similar life experiences to compare it to.

Then for some of us this story might be quite new, and that’s brilliant, because it should be, because the whole point of the resurrection story is about newness and about change.

[Look at the way the Gospel writer describes Peter and John’s arrival at the tomb, the two different ways that they respond to something strange; something out of the ordinary; something that’s changed.]

There are two things about change that are certain: one is that change is inevitable, it will happen, it is always happening. Day changes into night, which changes into day; seasons change; our tastes change

Who likes the taste of red wine? And did you like the taste when you were nine or ten years old?

  

Whether it takes centuries to see the effects of change (like global warming, or cooling, or whatever) or whether it happens instantly (like the rain shower that comes seconds after you’ve left the washing on the line) change is always happening around us.

The other certainty about change is that it’s irrevocable, once a thing has changed it can’t change back, not to be exactly the same as it was. Day might change to night then back to day, but it doesn’t change back to the same day, it’s new.

You can freeze and defrost an ice cube a hundred times, but every time it changes from solid to liquid it becomes a new ice cube, or a new puddle of water.

After a big fight, a couple can kiss and make up, but things don’t go back to exactly how they were before the argument, because the things that have been said can’t be unsaid, the relationship is slightly different, it’s new.

With the resurrection, we had the ultimate in newness.  People were going to have to look at life in a whole new way, because death didn’t mean the end anymore; and that meant that it wasn’t enough to see yourself right in this world, when there’s an eternity to come.

The main reason that Jesus died was because the religious leaders — the priests — and the political leaders — King Herod and Pontius Pilate — didn’t want change.  But they’d heard Jesus talk, and they’d heard the stories about him.  He wanted to change stuff.  He wanted people to be nice to people they hated.  He wanted people to forget about the hundreds and hundreds of rules that governed life, and to have just two rules: love God, love people.  He said that people could do stuff on the Sabbath, actually get up and walk about, help each other out.

The leaders would rather kill Jesus than let him change the way things had been for hundreds of years. So they nailed him to a cross, to make sure everything stayed the same.

But change is inevitable, and nothing, nothing that they could do would stop God’s plan for change.

And change is irrevocable, we can never go back to the way things were before the resurrection.

And there was so much newness in this service today that the place was practically buzzing.  It’s so exciting! We’ve got our new paschal candle, lit from the fire atop Shore Hill, a fire that saw the new dawn on this Easter Day. We have a new member of our church family who was welcomed in as Steve baptised Dylan. I’m back in my home church, and it’s a new me, shaped by four months of experiences in different churches.

I want us to remember today what the resurrection really means.

And Stuart Townend and Keith Getty summed it up for us in their resurrection hymn:

Death is dead

Love has won

Christ has conquered

and what that means is that our lives are changed, every day, for the better. It means that we are to step out into the world as bigger, better and stronger people for God.  We are people without fear of death being the end. We are God’s chosen people. We are Sonrise people.