Sermon for Easter Day 2009

May the words of my lips and the thoughts of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight oh Lord our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

‘Mummy, Daddy, look’ came the cry of one of our children pointing to the sky as we were leaving a theme park in Disney land. And when we looked up we saw written in the sky the words “Jesus is alive…God loves you’.

My initial reaction was to think my God it’s a miracle and at last God was communicating in a way which I could understand. Then I discovered that this was something called ‘sky writing’, a way of writing text in the sky using smoke produced by a light air craft. Shame. I thought that we had been witness to a miracle. Not so, at least not this time.

But it did make me wonder about what would be an effective way of communicating to people nowadays. If you wanted to communicate a message how would you start? A huge neon sign? Adverts in all the national papers? Or perhaps like the atheist bus campaign you could run slogans on buses with such phrases as ‘There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’ or as one Christian campaign retaliated ‘There definitely is a God so join the Christian party and enjoy your life’.

Or you could use those great signs outside the church which attempt to entice people in:- three of my favourites:

Don't give up. Moses was once a basket case

Don’t let worry kill you, let the church help…………

Lord Help me be the person my dog thinks I am…….

But these ways of advertising, important as they can sometimes be are not God’s chosen way to pass on the wonderful message that he loves us.

He loves us so much that he comes to earth, dies and rises again in order to set us free from all the limitations of this earthly life. What does he do to advertise that? He simply chooses a small group of people and gets them to tell their friends.

But what kind of people did God choose to reveal that Christ had been raised from the dead. Well pretty ordinary people. People who were sinners and yet had been touched by Jesus’ message of forgiveness, of hope, of love.

People, probably like you and me.In John’s Gospel we learn that the first person to see and speak to Jesus was Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene – the woman we understand who, like most of us didn’t always get things right, but whose life had been transformed by an encounter with Jesus. She was the first to witness the most far-reaching miracle the world has ever known – the miracle of the Resurrection that we’re celebrating this Easter morning.

But what a shock this must have been to Mary.

She has been through the desolation of watching Jesus die on the cross; she comes to the grave probably to weep for him and to have something to hold on to her pain. But instead she is greeted with an empty tomb.

She is in such shock that her Lords body had gone that she fails to recognise the angels as messengers of God. Then they say to her ‘Woman why are you weeping’ – at one level that’s a very odd thing to ask someone at a grave.

But at another it is deeply profound – for if only Mary knew what we now know she would be weeping tears of joy. Then she turns around and is confronted by someone she thinks is a gardener. This time the ‘gardener’ repeats the question – ‘woman why are you weeping’? But it’s only when Jesus uses her name that she recognises him as her Lord and Rabbouni, her teacher.

She returns to the disciples and tells them ‘I have seen the Lord’ – I have seen the Lord and that message of faith has been passed on through the centuries – through word, deed and the holy sacrament we will enjoy today.

It was the Resurrection, the experience of meeting their Risen Lord, that completely changed the disciples from a bunch of miserable, frightened men into a band of joyful, courageous people determined to go out and preach the gospel of the Risen Christ, whatever the consequences might be for themselves.

Indeed, the Resurrection is so central to our Christian faith that people who want to attack or destroy Christianity know that, somehow, they have to try and disprove the events of that Easter morning. That’s what the ashiest bus campaigns are about.

There is nothing new in this. There have been many theories about what actually happened on that first Easter morning.

‘Whoops, sorry fellas we went to the wrong tomb’. This was the explanation given by the Jewish authorities; the disciples had made a mistake. But the Jewish authorities failed to produce a body – because they couldn’t.

Others say that the disciples made the whole thing up, took the body away themselves. But many of them died for their belief in the resurrected Christ. Would the disciples have been willing to suffer and die for something they had invented, something they knew was a lie? Would the disciples have changed so completely without the genuine Resurrection experience? Would the Christian Church still be alive and kicking throughout the world today, after over 2000 years of living a lie? I don’t think so!

Perhaps the most far fetched was the one peddled about by Celsus a second- century Greek philosopher who was so desperate to find some explanation for the empty tomb other than the obvious answer that he suggested that the gardener had removed the body, to prevent a stream of visitors from trampling on his – wait for it - ………..lettuces.

But none of these stories stuck.

Instead what stuck was a truth that Jesus rose from the dead and through faith has transformed the lives of millions upon millions of people through the centuries.

God is the master marketing agent. That’s why his advertising campaign has been so successful. That’s why people daily encounter the risen Lord in so many ways and their lives are transformed. And if you doubt the resurrection think about the beauty around you. Why not doubt the rising of the sun or the movement of the moon and the stars?

Why not doubt the miracle of birth or a baby walking and talking for the first time? Are they not miracles in themselves? God continues to advertise his presence all around us in everything that we see, do, smell, hear, touch.

Jane Williams, wife of our Archbishop Rowan, wrote these words: “Why should hope and promise be harder to bear than death and despair?

Why is it so hard to believe, now as then, that life and transformation and joy are as much part of the world and its maker as death and disintegration?

The Christian hope of new life is not based on a kind of blind and meaningless optimism. On the contrary, all our hope is scarred with the wounds of the cross, and it is only hope because of that. It is the hope that God is indeed God. God is the creator, the source of all life, and nothing can make him not God”.

So when the angel speaks the words of life and joy to us, let us believe them, and go and tell others. Go and spread the good news of Jesus Christ to an age which is desperately seeking good news and hope. Go and become agents of Gods greatest advertising campaign. You and Me – because through Faith we have been made as worthy as Mary Magdalene to say ‘I have seen the Lord’. Amen.

©Revd Renos Pittarides April 2009