Worship
Service for April 20, 2025 (Easter Sunday)
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: Why do you look for the living among the
dead? He is not here; the Lord has
risen!
P: He has risen indeed!
L: The Lord has risen!
P: He has risen indeed!
L: Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting? Death has been swallowed up in victory!
P: Christ has risen indeed!
L: Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the
life. All those who believe in me will
live, even though they dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never
die.”
P: Thanks be to God! God gives us the victory through our Lord
Jesus Christ.
L: The Lord has risen!
P: He has risen indeed! Alleluia!
Opening Hymn – Jesus Christ is Risen Today #123/360
Prayer of Confession
God, we offer up to You our
deepest praise for You have brought life out of death and hope out of
despair. We confess our fear of
death. We fear death as life’s ending,
and its threat hidden in poverty, danger, or sickness. We fear death as letting go of old ways, old
relationships, old self-understandings.
We confess our fear of life, as well.
Sometimes we want to build shells to protect ourselves from people who
come too close, from change that comes too fast, from possibilities that seem
too bewildering. God, help us trust our
lives into Your keeping, accept the embrace of Your loving arms, and receive Your
forgiveness and Your promise of life eternal. (Silent
prayers are offered)
AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: God’s love is steadfast and God’s
faithfulness endures from age to age.
Rejoice, people of God, for you have been forgiven, made new, and
redeemed.
P: We praise You, O God, for raising us from
death and giving us new life. AMEN
Gloria Patri
Affirmation of Faith/Apostles’
Creed
I believe in God the Father
Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth; And in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord;
who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under
Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell; the
third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on
the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge
the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost,
the holy catholic Church; the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins; the
resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting. AMEN
Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s
Prayer
Holy God, on this day
of resurrection, may we see evidence of the new life you bring everywhere we
look. Let us look to the children and
see joy. Let us look to the old and see
wisdom. Let us look to one another and see
Christ. Let us look to the earth and see
beauty.
Even in the midst of
newness, we are painfully aware that our world lives in great need of your
renewal, and that new life has not come in its fullness. We ask to be your instruments in bringing
that renewal to our own sphere of influence.
May we reach out to those who need a hand for friendship, a meal for
strength, a roof for protection, or a peacekeeper for safety. May the love of the one who lives forever
shine through our hearts, our words, and our acts in ever new ways.
This day we also pray
for….
And now, O Lord, hear
our heartfelt song of yearning in these moments of silence……
Through Christ we make
our prayer together saying….Our Father who art in heaven. Hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth
as it is in heaven. Give us this day,
our daily bread and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver
us from evil. For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory, forever.
AMEN.
Hymn – Thine is the Glory #122 Blue
Scripture Reading(s):
First Scripture Reading – Isaiah 65:17-25
Second Scripture Reading – Luke 24:1-12
Sermon
- He is
Risen, He is Risen, Indeed!
(based on the whole of the gospels, and Luke
24:1-12)
It’s been said that this world is a tough place in which to
live. And parts of it are really tough. Places like Antarctica with it’s frigid cold;
the top of mountains with their thin air; deserts with their lack of water and
vegetation; the oceans with their tidal waves, hurricanes, etc. – places like
these are pretty inhospitable to humans.
But it’s not just these sorts of extreme places that are
hard to live in. The regular parts of
the world are tough, too. We learn this
as children. We start to learn to walk
and right way what happens? We trip and
fall down on the sidewalk and skin our knees and bump our heads on rocks! And it hurts!
Yet, God created this world and God said it was good when
God created the oceans and the land, and all the rocks and creatures in it and
God hopes we’ll love it and think it’s good too!
But what God didn’t create and what God doesn’t love is
the ways that we tend to run our societies. God doesn’t love it that we’ve created a world
where we live by the law of the jungle, where “might makes right,” where we
compete and hoard, where powers and domination systems place the majority of
humanity into abject poverty and misery.
We are indeed blest here in the United States, but that
is beginning to change in our lifetimes.
Pew Research says that the gap between the wealthy and the poor is the
greatest it has ever been and there are far fewer in the middle in the past century. In the past two decades the top income tier
added 33% to their wealth, while the lower income tier lost 45%, and the middle
income tier lost 20%. And this gap is
getting wider and faster.
The first major, massive scale instance of this kind of
human created system of power and might was the world’s first territorial
empire, the Roman empire. Rome conquered
many nations through the means of military, political, economic, and
ideological exploitation and domination.
They imposed a Pax Romana – a “Roman
peace” – which meant that there was peace unless a nation dared to resist them
– and then they’d be brutally squashed back into submission.
When Octavian defeated Anthony and Cleopatra, he changed
his name to “Augustus” and the Roman empire took things to an even higher level
than ever before. The Romans had just
gone through 20 years of civil war and Augustus ended it. He brought peace – 40 years of peace! One of the longest periods of peace the world
had ever seen, but only because any possible rebellion was quickly dispensed
with brutally. However, because of those
long years of peace, the people responded, “Thank God! Praise Augustus! He must
be Divine!”
And then the Roman “Emperor Cult” was born which was the
heart and soul of the Roman Empire. It
created a unifying ideology which asserted that Caesar was God, that he was Son
of God, that he was Savior, Redeemer, and Lord! And Rome expected all of it’s subject nations
to call him those things too.
Well, God had had quite enough of that! So, when the next Caesar was in power, a
certain Jesus of Nazareth arrived on the scene. And this Jesus, from a podunk town in a
backwater province on the eastern fringe of the Roman Empire, had the gall to
take on and defy that arrogant Roman ideology!
Some of all of this is bit like the story line in the
movie The Matrix. In The Matrix, humankind has
been relegated to serving as cogs in a machine that they’re powerless to do
anything about, as nourishment for a world run by machines. And yet there was a prophesy that a messiah
would come along to liberate humanity from their oppressed state.
That savior came in the form of Neo, “the
One”, Neo Anderson (meaning “Son of Man”). And it’s no accident that that’s the same
title that Jesus referred to Himself as being. But unlike Neo, Jesus’ way wasn’t about
fighting back and becoming even better at wielding deadly martial arts and the
ways of the world than anyone else.
Instead, the way that Jesus taught was that of out-right
defiance and rejection of any powers that be, any powers or principalities that
dare to usurp God’s power in God’s world!
Those false powers were the ones who really had the gall!
-the gall to create systems which put all of the property and farms into the
hands of a few and oppressed the masses by turning them into tenant farmers or
share croppers who ended up beholden to debt collectors; the gall to create a
system where women had no voice or legal standing but were instead treated as
the property of men; the gall to create a system where humans enslaved other
humans; the gall to justify oppressing and exploiting the poor, and force young
people to fight in wars of expansion; the gall to say worldly leaders and
worldly powers are gods instead of God Himself!
It was all done by making people believe that they weren’t enough. It was done by making people believe that
they were less than.
But Jesus’ way was a nonviolent way. He didn’t use the world’s ways against the
world, He simply said that the worldly powers are impotent – they have no real power,
that the real power is with God and in the Kingdom of God! And that each and every one of us is a Child
of God!
Then Jesus demonstrated that power by reaching out to the
people who society had rejected. He
invited people to repent and to change their way of thinking and living so that
they could break free from ways which collaborated with the empire so that they
could start living freely and abundantly in deep community and communion with
one another – sharing all that they had and turning away from the domination
system which sought to oppress them!
After years of preaching and teaching this new way of
living, He went into the belly of the beast – right into the Temple in
Jerusalem which had been collaborating with Roman dominance and said NO! He condemned the corrupted Temple system which
had been blessing the unjust status quo and cooperating with the Roman Empire. He knocked over the tables in the courtyard
and boldly confronted the powers and exposed them as frauds. He took back the Temple for God’s purposes –
not Rome’s!
And then…, the “empire struck back”… The domination system conspired against Him
and they meted out the worst they could do – they had Him arrested, beaten, and
executed. One thing the-powers-that-be
can’t tolerate is being rejected and so they rejected Him! They killed Him. End of story… And with that, Jesus’ disciples
(at least the men) hid away in fear. But,
not the women. They had long believed before
the men.
They heard Jesus.
They heard his teachings. They
heard his voice whispering in their heads.
And they knew it was truth. Lauren
Daigle brings the Lord’s words into clarity with her song, “You Say”
I keep fighting voices in my mind that say I'm
not enough
Every single lie that tells me I will never measure up
Am I more than just the sum of every high and
every low
Remind me once again just who I am because I need to know
You say I am loved when I can't feel a thing
You say I am strong when I think I am weak
And you say I am held when I am falling short
And when I don't belong, oh You say I am Yours
And I believe (I)
Oh, I believe (I)
What You say of me (I)
I believe
The only thing that matters now is everything
You think of me
In You I find my worth, in You I find my identity
You say I am loved when I can't feel a thing
You say I am strong when I think I am weak
And you say I am held when I am falling short
When I don't belong, oh You say I am Yours
And I believe (I)
Oh, I believe (I)
What You say of me (I)
Oh, I believe
Taking all I have, and now I'm laying it at
Your feet
You have every failure, God, You have every victory
You say I am loved when I can't feel a thing
You say I am strong when I think I am weak
You say I am held when I am falling short
When I don't belong, oh You say I am Yours
And I believe (I)
Oh, I believe (I)
What You say of me (I)
I believe
Those women, who heard Christ whispering these words to
their spirits, who somehow believed while the men fled in fear and trembling –
hiding away; those women Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James and
the other women went to the tomb. And something
extraordinary happened. God said, “Uh,
No. That isn’t the end of the story!” And
though He was indeed good and dead, God amazingly and graciously resurrected
Jesus – back to life! Jesus of Nazareth
who had been delivered up by the chief priests and executed by Romans under
Pontius Pilate, was alive again!
And then, as we read later in the gospels, Jesus showed
Himself to those disciples of His who had run away in fear and when they saw
Him and recognized the nail marks on His hands, they came out of hiding! Until they saw Jesus, they viewed the world
the way others did. The central reality
of their lives had been the power of the system and their own powerlessness in
it.
But when they saw Him risen and alive, they unlocked the
doors, came out, and began turning the world upside down! At last, they knew another reality that was
bolder, truer, and stronger than the powers that had been paralyzing them with
fear. Jesus had risen! And Jesus was Lord – not
Caesar!
They saw all that their rabbi, their teacher, their Master,
had been teaching them about the Kingdom of God and how its ways are better
than the world’s ways!
They took to the streets and started preaching the Gospel
of the Grace and Good News of the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus the
Christ! And it spread like wildfire!
That, in a nutshell, pretty much sums up everything we’ve
learned over the years about Jesus and his life here on earth both from the scriptures
and from history.
Even though all of that happened some 2,000 years ago, I
want you to know that the living resurrected Jesus stands before us today. He knows us and He knows our fears. We’re afraid of those voices that tell us we’re
not enough, that we’ll never measure up.
We’re afraid of not feeling loved, appreciated, weak, and falling short.
We fear for ourselves and our loved
ones.
Like those first disciples, we fear our own
powerlessness, weakness, and sense of inadequacy. We’re insecure, frightened by our emotions,
and wary of trusting one another. We
feel both the guilt of our sin when we hurt others and the vulnerability of our
own broken places. Above all, we fear rejection.
We too are hiding behind locked doors and are afraid to
come out. Jesus knows our fear and wants
us to know His resurrection. He says,
“Go, tell my disciples that I have risen and that I’m going before them!” He tells us not to doubt but to believe!
Jesus lived and died to liberate us from our sins, our
doubts, our fears, and the addictions we use to medicate and numb ourselves. God raised Christ from the grave to show us
His victory over them and to set us free from their power. And now, Jesus calls us to boldly to hear a
different voice and to follow Him!
So, what about you and me today? Do we still doubt that Jesus’ way of love makes
much sense in this modern, competitive, dog eat dog world? Do we think that that kind of “suffering
servanthood” can make a difference or transform our world of new empires and
huge and powerful systems and institutions?
Voices that say we are powerless against them.
Well, those early disciples felt overwhelmed by the
powers and forces that ruled their day, but they became people of the
resurrection! They began living lives
filled with the joy of Christ. Friends,
we too can know the power of Christ’s resurrection!
Like those first disciples, we need to come out of hiding
and see the risen Lord! Seeing is
believing, and believing is knowing that we must turn and follow Jesus, the
Christ, the son of the living God. The
resurrection exposes bogus powers and restores us to right community and to who
we really are! Liberated to hear a new
voice in our own head and then advocate for justice and to serve God’s people
and meet their needs, as well – and with that, nothing can stop us!
Every time we act upon Jesus’ lordship, every time we
follow His teachings, we’re demonstrating His victory! Every time we refuse to hear the voice of
subjugation, every time we reject the notion that we aren’t enough, every time we
claim Christ’s freedom over our fear; tear down the walls of race, class, and
sex; love our enemies; stand with the poor; forgive those who’ve wronged us, or
resist the violence of the nations by acting for peace, we’re demonstrating the
victory of Christ in the world!
His victory is present wherever it is claimed and acted
upon. Friends, let’s dedicate the rest
of our lives to claiming and acting upon this victory! Jesus Christ is risen today! He is Risen, indeed!
Thanks be to God.
AMEN.
Offertory –
Doxology –
Prayer of Dedication –
Living
God, as we are reminded today of Christ’s ultimate gift of new life, show us
how we may give ourselves for others.
May our gifts here today be used to ease suffering, to grant hope, to
share in peace, and to allow the work of this congregation to continue and
increase. Blessed by Your Holy Name. AMEN
Closing
Hymn – Crown Him with Many Crowns #151/45
Benediction –
As you go out
into God’s world this week, be Easter people!
Be those who say, “Jesus is Risen.
He is risen indeed!” Be ready to
be surprised with what God will do next.
Look for the risen Christ in those you meet. Let the Holy Spirit nudge and guide you. The tomb is empty because Jesus is out in the
world, and now we must go out into the world too! May the joy and wonder of that first Easter
morning live in your hearts today and everyday.
AMEN
Postlude
