Easter
Sunday
Matthew 28:1-10
March 23, 2008
SCRIPTURES
(Matthew scripture)
- Listen to the sounds of Easter : Moans and groans, sounds of the hammer, weeping, silence, etc.
-sermon: Difference between power and control. Jesus had little control but much power. Pharisees, Romans, etc. had lots of control but what turned out to be
little power. (spiritual power) Lindy
- Craig Barns, Christian Century This day is not about bunnies, springtime and girls in cute new dresses. It's about more hope than we can handle.
-Craig Barns, Christian Century What the Gospels ask is not "Do you believe?" but "Have you encountered a risen Christ?
-So what changed? (After Easter Sunday). That is the wrong question. The question is, rather, Who changed?! The burden of the New Testament is not that the world changed, but that ordinary men and women (the disciples, etc.) changed. Gomes
- "Any way you look at it, (it) is a mighty fragile beginning for a eligion that has lasted almost 2000 years now, and yet that is where so many of us continue to focus our energy: on that tomb, on that morning, on what did or did not happen there and how to explain it to anyone who does not happen to believe it too. Resurrection does not square with anything else we know about physical human life on earth. No one has ever seen it happen, which is why it helps me to remember that no one saw it happen on Easter morning either. The resurrection is the one and only event in Jesus' life that was entirely between him and God. There were no witnesses whatsoever. No one on earth can say what happened inside that tomb, because no one was there. They all arrived after the fact. Two of them saw clothes. One of them saw angels. Most of them saw nothing at all because they were still in bed that morning, but as it turned out that did not matter because the empty tomb was not the point." Barbara Brown Taylor
-"Twiceters"....those
who come to church twice a year. (Christmas and Easter)
Gomes
EASTER
- Easter is the eighth day of creation. Fred R. Anderson
-- sermon If you are desperate and need a sermon to read, here is a beauty! Escape from the Tomb,"
-The new life would not really be new life if it did not come from the complete end of the old life. Paul Tillich
- Easter never happened.....Easter always happens.
-Easter has to do with the victory of seemingly powerless love over loveless power. W.S. Coffin
- It is a Good Friday world. William Sloane Coffin
-The disciples did not see the risen Christ that morning anymore than we do now.
- The human body has a built-in-obsolescence. John Macquarrie
-Remember this: Easter is not just a holy event that happened almost 2,000 years ago in Jerusalem. It is a little Easter on whatever day we discover our need for the love of God. When we discover that all the Good Fridays of our lives cannot destroy the love God has for us. Rev. Nathan Baxter
- Behold, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland. Isaiah 43:19
SERMON How to resurrect; how to transcend; how to Easter Here are a few quotes to give you a start. Lindy
-Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself to become what he potentially is. E.Fromm
-New life = birth pangs
-Easter is not about past, it’s about future. Easter not about death, it’s about life. Easter not about Jesus, It’s about you. Gomes
- As wilderness preceded the Promise land; foolishness precedes wisdom; emptiness precedes fulfillment and suffering precedes joy. So death precedes resurrection and darkness the light. Lindy
- Time to start over! Gomes
-The human body has a built-in-obsolescence. John Macquarri
- "Christ means for me to start over again, and to keep starting over and over and over again until by his grace I get it right. Your mother was right: "if at first you don't succeed, try try again." Gomes
-New life is born out of the pains of the old. H.Nouwen
-Nothing is more surprising than the rise of the new within ourselves. Tillich
-No emergencies only emergances. Life 101
-The greatest burden in life is to have a great potential Charlie Brown
-Through out life one must learn to die. Fromm
-It's not the years in your life but the life in you years Lincoln
-A useless life is an early death. Johann Wolfgang von Goeth
-He who never changes never mends
-When we change, our God changes. (Our perception of God)
-Change is inevitable, except from vending machines
-We are beings in process God takes us at what ever point we may be at. ,
-Is more important as a spiritual process than a physical growth
-We know what we are, but know not what we may be. William Shakespeare
- The symbolic meaning of the resurrection is to die to one’s smaller self and then discover one’s larger Self
-"What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the creator calls a butterfly." Jesus said it this way, "Now he is God not of the dead but of the living."
- God does new things through us.
QUOTES
-No more do we need to ask, "Did he arise from the dead?" It is more appropriate to ask, "Did he ever die?" Richard Niebuhr
-Christ left us that he may never leave us.
-The tomb became a womb.
-We cannot nail Him down. We tried once but he got loose...BB Taylor
- Fides quaerens intellectum Faith seeking understanding
-For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. And when this has happened, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? . . . Thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, beloved, be steadfast, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in God your labor is not in vain. 1Cor. 15:53
-It's only when our body dies that we truly become a noun.
-The message we receive from the empty tomb is not that love wins over everything except human treachery, or over everything except fear, or everything except despair, or everything except racism or pain or death. The meaning of this day, if we embrace the Christ of the empty tomb, is that love is the only thing that triumphs over all else. As Bill Coffin says, "If we fail in love, we fail in all things else." (DeJong)
- Easter is such a "churchy" event. Keith Russell
-· Like a pump…I felt drained. Then someone told me .. I had to go deeper! Yancey
-Where there is death and destruction, there is a morning. from Easter service following tornado destruction in Alabama
- Resuscitation means resumption of physical existence; resurrection means entry into a different kind of existence.
- Who will roll the stone away from those places where death and decay have us locked in or trapped? Keith A. Russell
- Lent, Palm Sunday, etc. is a human response. Easter is God's response.
- The symbolic meaning of the resurrection is to die to one's smaller self and then discover one's larger
- We must roll the stone away that keeps
people from coming out of their tombs.
- Christian faith can be true to life, only because it can be true to death. Buechner
- The story of the Prodigal Son is an Easter story
- Hope is born in not knowing where you are going but knowing who is leading the way.
ILLUSTRATIONS
1. New Scientist magazine is offering a cool
prize — an extremely cool one — minus 350 degrees Fahrenheit, to be
exact. The magazine has been revamped, and to promote its fresh look,
the publication is offering readers a prize “to die for”: cryogenic
treatment, which some people hope will give them new life after death.
The winner will not be able to collect the award until death, of
course, and at that point he or she will chill out in a vat of liquid
nitrogen at The Cryonics Institute of Michigan. If and when medical
technology allows, the winner will be revived to live again. They hope.
how we tend to put Jesus on ice, thaw him out on special occasions, and
then slip him back in the tube — or, tomb. A frozen Jesus is much
easier to handle than a risen Lord who makes demands upon our lives.
And second — how we often put ourselves on ice, reluctant to thaw out
and serve God and others. Homiletics on line
3. Charles DeGaul said he could build the greatest tomb that could ever be built. When asked what would make it great, he said, " Only if you leave it after three days."
4. Barbara Brown Taylor tells: When I was a girl, I spent a lot of time in the woods, which were full of treasures for me. At night I lined them up on my bed: fat flakes of mica, buckeyes bigger than shooter marbles, blue jay feathers, bird bones and -- if I was lucky -- a cicada shell, one of those dry brown bug bodies you can find on tree trunks when the 17-year locusts come out of the ground. I liked them for at least two reasons. First, because they were horrible looking, with their huge empty eye sockets and their six sharp little claws. By hanging them on my sweater or -- better yet -- in my hair, I could usually get the prettier, more popular girls at school to run screaming away from me, which somehow evened the score. I also liked them because they were evidence that a miracle had occurred. They looked dead, but they weren’t. They were just shells. Every one of them had a neat slit down its back, where the living creature inside of it had escaped, pulling new legs, new eyes, new wings out of that dry brown body and taking flight. At night I could hear them singing their high song in the trees. If you had asked them, I’ll bet none of them could have told you where they left their old clothes. That is all the disciples saw when they got to the tomb on that first morning -- two piles of old clothes. The tomb was just the cicada shell with the neat slit down its back. Jesus had outgrown his shell!
HUMOR
-Dumb Easter Bunny gnawed off 3 legs; left 4th in trap!
- I'd rather have them say, "There he goes" than "There he lies".
-Dr. Paul Stuckey, tells the story of an eye-catching ad in a Milwaukee, Wisconsin, newspaper's classified section. Big, bold letters advertised "Used Tombstone. " The ad's text read as follows: "Used tombstone for sale. Real bargain to someone named 'Dingo.' For more information call ...."
-A singing group called "The Resurrection" was scheduled to sing at a church. When a big snowstorm postponed the performance, the pastor fixed the outside sign to read. "Resurrection is postponed."
-When H. L. Mencken was told
that Calvin Coolidge was dead, he responded "How can they tell?"
CHILDREN
- Read Illustration #4 discuss.
- Have a children's Easter Parade. Have them walk up and down aisles of church, etc. Lindy
- Talk about Easter symbols: butterfly (resurrection); cross (symbol of suffering and joy); egg (something in us that never dies); the lamb, Christ; white lily, purity; purple, royalty; green, new life; rabbits, fertility; pretzels, hands in prayer; hot cross buns, cross frosted on top. Lindy
-This is the day that the Lord has made! Let us rejoice and be glad! Point out that these words are the responsorial psalm on Easter. Explain to the children that today is the day we have been preparing for all during Lent. Today we celebrate that Jesus is risen from the dead! sing:
This is the day, this is the day that the Lord has made, that the Lord has made.
I will rejoice, I will rejoice and be glad in it, and be glad in it.
This is the day that the Lord hath made, I will rejoice and be glad in it.
This is the day, this is the day that the Lord hath made.
- Talk about Easter eggs. Before the egg became and Easter symbol it was honored by Spanish, Romans, Chinese, Egyptians and Persians as a symbol of the Universe. It was believed to have special powers. was buried under the foundations of buildings to ward off evil. Pregnant women carried an egg and French brides stepped upon an egg before crossing the threshold of their new home. Christians liken egg to the tomb from which Christ rose. England brought the idea of decorating eggs at Easter time. Today, the egg is a symbol of new life....born again just like Jesus was "born again" that Easter morn, many years ago.
PRAYER PHRASE
-Risen Lord, let your Word take flesh once again among us.
- ....sometimes life is such that we have to rise above our human natures for our humanness alone is not enough to enable us to face the dangers and mysteries of Life. Help us to rise from humanness to Godliness. Lindy
- ….we give you thanks for the continuing power of the resurrection and the new life in us to which it call us. Grant us the grace to use that power fully, radically filled with love that we may know the power of His resurrection in our lives. Gomes
TRY http://www.textweek.com/ YOU'LL LOVE IT!!!
home
title
title
title
-
-