Sermons

Easter Day
Sunday 8 April at 8am

Simon Cowling
Readings: Acts 10. 34-43; Luke 24, 1-12

Think back to Christmas. What were we celebrating? The coming of God as a baby - a baby who cried when he was hungry, who soiled his nappy, who needed winding over his mother's shoulder. Think back a few days to Maundy Thursday. What were we remembering? A meal taken together by friends at which bread and wine - as well as other food - were held and blessed and eaten. Think back to Good Friday. What were we confronted with? A man undergoing an agonising death on a cross, his body - like any human body in such gruesome circumstances - 'wrung with pains, to use George Herbert's phrase. The body, food and drink, death. Unlike some other popular contemporary forms of spirituality, Christian faith is rooted in the deeply physical, in the stuff of human existence. It is rooted in this way precisely because of our belief that it is in Jesus, who lived among us and as one of us, that we see the God who created us and who has loved us from eternity. The great sweep of salvation history as it is revealed in scripture, the story of God's relationship with humanity, culminates in the puzzlement of the Galilean women at the empty tomb and the amazement of an initially disbelieving Peter when confronted with the evidence. Good Friday, so it seemed, had been the final victory of human weakness and sinfulness, focused in a bruised and battered corpse taken down from the cross and wrapped in a linen sheet.

Yet early one Sunday morning, Jesus' followers - women, first, then Peter and the other disciples, met a new reality. Human weakness and sinfulness had not prevailed. Jesus had been raised from death. In their different ways all four Gospel writers bear witness to this new reality. They describe Jesus eating meals with his followers, suddenly appearing in rooms where they are meeting, having encounters with individuals as he did with Cleopas and his companion on the road to Emmaus, preparing them for his ultimate return to his Father, to our Father.

Sisters and brothers, we are Jesus Christ's apostles today. We are those who have inherited the excitement and the truth of this new reality. We are the ones who must bear witness in word and in deed to the Good News: Jesus Christ is risen! As St. Paul writes, "God's mercy is so abundant and his love for us so great, that while we were spiritually dead in our disobedience he brought us to life with Christ." This new life is what we live and proclaim now - a new life which is only made possible through the physical reality of Christ's birth, his death and his rising again to new life.

The question is, what are we going to do with this great gift? How are we going to be faithful in our discipleship, in our bearing of the truth of the Gospel, the Good News by which we are saved? Well we can be happy for a start. It is Good News! And we can open our eyes to the reality of God's creation, a creation that still, in St. Paul's phrase, groans with pain. That pain is what the Good News has set us free to begin to ease through lives of service. To quote St Paul again, "in our union with Christ Jesus God has created us for a life of good deeds, which he has prepared for us to do." We do those good deeds because through the cross and resurrection we have been set free to serve God without fear. We do them not simply for but with the poor and the prisoners, the blind and the oppressed. We do them as an Easter people whose song is, Alleluia!

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay