Part One of my Easter Sermon - Keith F. (Nelmes URC) 12th April 2020 Opening Prayer Come with joy. Come with praise. Come with expectation and wonder. He has been raised from the dead! Come and worship our risen Lord. There are two pervasive themes in the resurrection stories: surprise (or awe) and joy. Despite Jesus telling his disciples that not only would he suffer and die, but he would rise on the third day, they would not believe the first, and could not believe the second. Sadly, our problem today is different. Christians are so familiar with the story that it ceases to surprise us. How can we recapture the sense of surprise and joy today? Due to the current situation we find ourselves in we would in theory have more time to watch television, for some of us that means watching the soaps, back in the day all the soaps reflected life quite accurately, not so today, when person X seems to have found there perfect partner, we all know it won’t last – Soaps are invested with every conflict & tragedy imaginable, Do we all like happy endings, Jesus died on the Cross to be raised from the dead, were the disciples filled with JOY was it a happy ending for them, in most cases the answer was NO – but in the time they all had they filled there known world with JOY & Happiness as they spread the word of the Lord. What does Christian Joy look like? There will be many who look at the events that occurred over this period and are unsure that we are remembering a real event, once all the Easter Eggs have gone, and in normal times we would go back to work! Interestingly in these difficult times, there is a split between those coming to our Lord and those laying the blame at his feet. We know that even people who met Jesus after he rose from the dead doubted the truth they were presented with. But the reality to me is that nobody is to blame! Our Jesus is there for us through thick & thin, our effort to let those that don’t see – to see the light well I believe that is what our real work should be! Inspiration from ©ROOTS for Churches Ltd (www.rootsontheweb.com) 2002-2020. Reproduced with permission
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Extracts from my Palm Sunday Sermon - Keith F. (Nelmes URC) 5th April 2020 (Part 4) So here comes my last quote of the day it comes from Mary Colvin the Sunday Times War correspondent made in 2001 so quite a few years before he premature death “It has always seemed to me that what I write about is humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to tell people what really happens in war” Mary followed a path that would lead to her being killed, she was always foraging for the truth, putting herself in danger, much as Jesus did. Is that not what we should do as we attempt to follow the path Jesus has laid out for us not to end up dying because of our faith but giving that authenticity to how we lead our lives.
Extracts from my Palm Sunday Sermon - Keith F. (Nelmes URC) 5th April 2020 (Part 3) As a point of interest one of the quotes I have used has been adapted from the Talmud (The primary source of Jewish law) I have learnt much from my teachers, but much more from my friends, I think maybe Jesus new this as well, he understood that things had to change an example had to be set, he himself was a teacher but his example is to those in legal authority over the populace.
At the start of the sermon I pointed out the saying from Octavia Hill, she was born in 1838 and died in 1912, the quote was written in 1888, when I first read it I thought how true she was. But my theme today has touched on the voracity of our need for truth in our day to day life. Yes we all want quite, we all want beauty…. We all need space. She carries on to say that unless we have it, we cannot reach that sense of quite in which whispers of better things come to us gently. To be continued... |