Risen Indeed – Dayspring Presbyterian Church

Worship on the Easter Day
10:00 am April 09, 2023
The Sacrament of Holy Communion
Online & Onsite (Mixed Presence) Gathering as a Worshipping Community
Led by the Rev. Brad Childs
Music Director: Binu Kapadia Vocalist: Glynnis McCrostie
Elder: Sam Malayang

We gather to worship God

Music prelude

Greeting
L: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.
P: and also with you.

Lighting of the Christ candle
Welcome and announcements
Silent preparation for worship

Call to Worship
L: Christ is risen!
P: He is risen indeed!
L: The tomb is empty.
P: Life has defeated death!
L: Rising from the grave, Jesus brings life to all the wrong places.
P: Christ lives where death has ruled.
L: Rising from the grave, Jesus brings life to all the wrong people.
P: Christ welcomes those who are often overlooked.
L: Christ’s resurrection means that we are no longer lost in the wilderness.
P: He provides us with a living hope and travels with us to places where death had once prevailed.
L: The world has been turned upside down.
P: Life has defeated death!

Opening praise: This is amazing grace

Prayers of approach and confession

God of resurrecting power, we are caught up in the joy of Easter and your love fills us with expectation.

Death will never overcome the life, and the powers of chaos will never overcome your loving intentions for the cosmos.

Just as Jesus spoke to Mary in the garden that first Easter day, you call each of us by name because you love us.

So we praise you for the hope you have given us, your powerful love and your promise of new life in Christ.

God of tender mercy, we confess that faith doesn’t come easy every Easter.

When we face loss in our own lives, sorrow can weigh us down.

Our challenges can feel like a stone too heavy to roll away.

Forgive us, O God.

Let the hope of new life in Christ assure us that the power of your love that raised Jesus will never let us go. Amen.

Response: Glory, glory, hallelujah

Assurance of God’s grace

“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Dear friends, Christ has laid down his life for us and invites us to love one another as he has loved us. Let us rejoice in his redeeming, resurrecting love (as we sing with grateful hearts:

Song: Jesus Christ is risen today

We listen for the voice of God

Scripture readings (NRSV): Colossians 3:1-4 and John 20:1-18 (NRSV)

Response: Alleluia, alleluia, give thanks to the risen Lord

Message: Risen Indeed“”

I say, He is risen? He is risen indeed!

John Piper has this great statement he makes all of the time. He says, “God is writing the story of our lives.”

It is very easy to get sucked down into the daily activities. So easy to get pulled down into the dull or the humdrum that we get to drowning in the boss pleasing and bill paying and we forget that God is actually up to something grand in each of our lives. But as the saying goes you can’t see the forest through the trees.

Life has so many starts and stops and twists and turns. And life is confusing. We have cemeteries next to schools and wedding on the same calendars as funerals. And if living is not confusing enough for us than what about the conclusion?

Reality is simple: This heart will have one last beat. This hand will go limp. We all die. No one escapes death. Good Friday and the crucifixion of Christ is extremely powerful but without Easter it means nothing. Anyone can die. More to the point everyone WILL die.

It’s been said that “Death is the most democratic institution on earth”. It accepts no discrimination. It accepts no substitutions. The mortality rate all around the world is the exact same – one death per person, 100%. As the Psalmist says “who can live and not see the grave). No gender is spared; no person exempt. The worlds greatest genius, fastest, the best artist, the wealthiest just like the poorest, no one buys off death; outruns it… no one outsmarts it. No one escapes it.

Julius Caesar died, John Lennon died, Elvis Presley died, and Princess Dianna died. We all die. Nearly two people per second actually. That’s 155,000 people just today that will go to the grave. Since last Easter, 57 million people died. We all die.

No matter what you do. The finest surgeons in the world might be able to enhance or extend your life but they cannot prevent your death. Pop all the pills you want, eat all the green veggies you can get your hands on. Stay out of the sun. Wear a seat belt. You might improve the quality of your life and perhaps the length, but you can’t avoid the inevitable. We just die.

Isn’t that… a bummer?

But what if this (all the stuff that happens before we die) is just the first chapter… what if this is just the first paragraph of the first chapter? What if this is the first sentence of the first paragraph? What if this is the first word or the first letter – in the story that God is writing in our existence? What if we’re just getting started?

What if that’s what Easter is about? I say that is exactly what it’s about. I say, He is risen? He is risen indeed!

The executioners had done their work. They made sure with a spear to the side that this Jesus the Nazarene’s last breath was in fact his last breath. Solider that knew death, saw it, accepted it and took him down. People he knew and loved, took him off the cross and wrapped him up and carried his lifeless corpse of to the tomb. No mistakes were made. These people weren’t morons. And as he lay motionless in the grave, no one thought there was anything else to come. Nobody thought this book had a second chapter let alone an appendix. They thought it was over. The story was done.

It was time to close the book. The bible says, “All the disciples forsook him and fled.”

All!

If you were there, do you think you’d do better?

I don’t.

The whole thing is an indictment of self no matter who you are.

Peter follows Jesus to the trial – but betrayed him; terrified as he was. Next John “the disciple whom Jesus loved” went all the way to the cross with His Lord but then left and hid when things got really hard. And when the women came to the cemetery that morning (while the men were still in hiding) they didn’t come to meet with Jesus for a pleasant conversation, they came to embalm his lifeless body with scented oils so that he would not smell. The story of his existence was done. The final chapter had been writ. The book was closed. It was over. And so were his promises… like eternal life, a world beyond… something more than death.

But what if God’s story was actually just getting started?

I say, He is risen? He is risen indeed!

What if death itself were just the first page, paragraph, word, or even letter in a grand story? What if that’s what Easter is all about. That first tiny seed. A first fruits of heaven for a great bounty to come.

What if?

It all starts off with Mary Magdalene and the other women going to the tomb and finding the rock rolled away.

And right away Mary runs to find the apostle Peter to tell him – what?

Answer: “Jesus is risen” right?

Nope. Life doesn’t work that way.

Dead people stay dead. The back cover of this book is closed.

No, she ran to tell him “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him”. That is the story Mary knew.

But Mary shares it. Who wouldn’t.

So, Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. ⁴Both were running, but the other disciple (John) outran Peter and reached the tomb first. ⁵He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. ⁶Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, ⁷as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen. ⁸Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside.

And then we are told when he did this, he “saw and believed.” Verse 8. But then right after John tells us that “He ‘saw and believed’ (and he’s writing about Peter and himself) he writes, ⁹(But they still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.) ¹⁰So the two disciples went back to where they were staying.”

So just what was it, that John “saw and believed” then. It wasn’t that Jesus is risen. No, John (the disciple whom Jesus loved) had closed the book on that.

What John “saw and believed” was actually pretty weak. He “saw and believed” just what Mary told him. He “saw” that someone “had taken the Lord out of the tomb” and he “believed” that “[Mary] did not know where they had taken” his decaying body. That’s all. He saw and believed that someone took the body.

At this point in his life… John’s God was too small. But that was not to last word. And I say, He is risen? He is risen indeed!

Mary goes back to the tomb as well.

John continues on. He writes, “¹¹Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying.” Why? Because his body is missing. Mary’s God was too small. “As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb ¹²and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot. ¹³They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?”

Isn’t it amazing how conditioned we as human beings are to get caught up in the supposed power of death… to see the future as impossible to overcome? To see obstacles and not solutions, to get weighed down in the only ways we can imagine e things might be?

Think of all the amazing things you have seen in your lives – the miracle that lead you to that perfect person out of 8 billion; just right for you, to all the friends that have cared for you… and still we worry about bills and grades and traffic jams – Maybe our images of God are too small sometimes too? But I don’t want a small God. I want a God of Power! I want a risen one. I say, He is risen? He is risen indeed!

A young paratrooper was learning to jump, and he was given the following instructions: First, jump when you are told; second, count to 10 and pull the ripcord; third, in the unlikely event that it doesn’t open, pull the second chute open; and fourth, when you get down there, a truck will take you back to base.

The plane ascended up to the proper height, the men started jumping out, and the young new paratrooper did just right. 1) He jumped when told. 2) He counted to 10 and pulled the cord, but the chute failed to open. So he did what he was told. 3) He proceeded to the backup chord. But the second chute also failed to open. “Oh great,” he said. “And now I suppose the truck won’t be there either.”

Pessimism abounds. Doubt, fear, Death and darkness want to rule our lives. But I reject all that. I choose life. I say, He is risen? He is risen indeed!

How big is our God?

Even in the face of the miraculous we can’t seem to imagine that God is bigger than the tiny little boxes we try to put him in.

And confronted with angels, angels! – Mary is still so convinced that her understanding of life is all there is, that when angels ask why she is crying she still says again, “They have taken my Lord away and I don’t know where they have put him.” Mary too, has closed that book. At that point in her life… her God was too small. But she was wrong. Our God is huge. I say, He is risen? He is risen indeed!

¹⁴“At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there” and then she screamed “Lord” and she hugged him… right? Wrong. So convinced that death was the last word she could not even see a miracle staring her right in her face. As John writes to us “she did not realize that it was him.”

And so he talked to her saying just as the angels did, “Why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for? And then she recognized him and ran over and kissed his cheek. Nope! The last word has been written; the book was closed. Instead she thinks he’s a body snatching gardener (because that’s more logical than the creator of everything in existence also being able to make one man breathe again?). Mary said he was dead. I say, He is risen? He is risen indeed!

It is not until he looks at her directly in the face and says her name “Mary” that she finally faces the miracle she’s surrounded by and calls out “I have seen the Lord”.

What do you suppose happened to that Book Mary had just closed? What happened to her universe that day? When she saw a living breathing Jesus standing before her what do you think that did to her picture of God. Do you think it grew a little? What chapter of the story did she think she was in while she was walking to the tomb and where did she think she was after? How much bigger did Mary’s God get that morning when she found herself willing to open her mind to something unexplainable? It was the morning when the last chapter of the book didn’t turn out to be the last.

Herman Melville’s great classic, Moby Dick is packed with themes and allusions to the scriptures. For example there is a character aboard ship named Queequeg, who was beloved by all the crew. He plays a seemingly odd, sporadic part that’s almost insignificant until the end – sort of. When Queequeg was seized by a serious fever, everyone tended to him carefully and he recovered. But the illness left him worried about his future. He wondered when and how his end would come. Calling the ship’s carpenter, Queequeg requested a coffin to be built for him. But he wanted something special that reminded him of his island in the south pasific. It was to be shaped like a canoe… like the ones he rode in as a child. Queequeg’s measurements were taken, planks were marshalled, tools were picked up and the carpenter set to his task.

As the book progresses, the story of Queequeg’s coffin disappears from the reader’s mind. The story returns to Captain Ahab and his fatal obsession with the great whale, Moby Dick. In the novel’s dramatic climax, Captain Ahab finds Moby Dick, but the great whale overcomes the captain smashing the boat to pieces, dragging Ahab under the water and tossing the crew into the sea to be eaten alive by sharks. Death is all around. Ishmael the storyteller finds himself floundering in the water being sucked into the vortex of the sinking ship, circling in a fatal eddy, prey for the sharks. In theological terms… It’s a bummer. In all truth, it’s the end of the book (in more ways than one). But suddenly a “Black bubble” bursts from the water, liberated from the depths by its own buoyancy. It shoots up with great force and lands near Ishmael. It is our long forgotten about friend. It is a coffin. As he is about to die a coffin lands right in his lap – the very symbol of death. And yet it is no ordinary coffin – for this coffin is also the canoe that saves Ishmael’s life.

Climbing in it, Ishmael floats for a day and night until he is rescued by a passing ship. It’s not his final chapter. His book was not to close. His story was just getting started.

And in fact, I would argue that were Ishmael real, even if he had died, it still wouldn’t be the final chapter. My God is-not, will-not and can-not be too small. I say, He is risen? He is risen indeed!

Because of his death, because of Easter, our coffins are nothing more than canoes bearing us across the plain. (Sourcebook 251 Coffin becomes a canoe)

Weather you know it, admit, doubt it or even care at all, it doesn’t change a thing – God is writing the story of our lives. It’s not your world. It’s not your universe. It’s not your book. And though we think the book closes along with the coffin door, Jesus proclaims to all who will listen… What if? What if death itself were just the first page, paragraph, word, or even the first letter in a grand story?

It is by his cross that we are free and by his resurrection that we might live eternally.

My God is big. This is Easter morning.

I say… He is risen? He is risen indeed! Amen.

Song: At the dawning of salvation (248)

We respond to serve God

Reflection on giving: On Easter Day, we celebrate God’s most precious gift to us in Christ’s dying and his rising. As we present our gifts to God this morning, may our generosity reflect God’s goodness, and the hope we have in Christ Jesus, our Risen Lord.

Prayer of gratitude and for others and ourselves

Generous God, this day we recognize how much you have given us in Christ Jesus, and what that gift has cost. Bless these gifts so they may offer the hope and joy we feel today to the world you love so dearly. In the name of your greatest gift, Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen.

God of power and possibility, you broke open the tomb that held our Lord. Now break into your church where your people are distracted by old quarrels, discouraging results, or unhelpful divisions about mission and service.

Resurrect, renew and revive your church!