Easter Sunday 10am

When you walk on stilts you can see more, your horizons get opened up.

When you walk with the Risen Lord Jesus you get shown an eternal horizon. Your life gets opened up to a vision quite out of this world!

Jesus rose from the dead and he went ahead of his disciples to Galilee. He lifts us up and leads us forward - indeed to be his follower is to be part of the most uplifted, forward looking, happiest people on earth.

We live with Jesus now knowing that the future’s his, and if it’s his it’s ours as well.

The Resurrection is the pledge of a world where one day God will be all in all (1 Corinthians 15:28b). It binds us also to those we love but see no longer whose hope was in Jesus.

Above all places this Eucharist brings us together with Christians of all ages as we are made one with the church in her fullness and immensity with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven /

With such fellowship we press forward uplifted by the risen Christ, working and praying for the kingdom of this world to become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ (Revelation 11:15).

With death now conquered we live in joyful hope knowing there’s nothing left in all creation that can separate us from God’s love.

One way of looking at the resurrection of Jesus is to think of a volcano.


What does a volcano show you?

It shows you fire burning in the depths of the earth.

The resurrection of Jesus lets us see God’s fire waiting to erupt so that everything in this world and the next is irradiated with the warmth of his love.

This morning should set us alight with the fire of the Spirit to move into God’s future with our risen Lord.

We’ve been thinking about witnessing to the resurrection this morning. Peter in the first reading, then Jamie Parsons.

Abdullah, a Muslim from South East Asia recently became a Christian through the witness of his friend Yusuf who’d come out of prison a changed man.

Abdullah asked Yusuf what had changed him. He replied by asking him Where is Isa at present? This is the Muslim title for Jesus. Muslims believe that Isa – Jesus – was a prophet of God and that he presently lives with God in heaven, having been rescued from earth before crucifixion. Abdullah answered him: Isa is in heaven with God.

Yusuf asked him a second question… and where is Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, at present?

The prophet lies dead in his grave Abdullah replied.

Yusuf smiled: so, Abdullah! Who do you want to follow? A dead prophet or a living one?

Abdullah was speechless; he’d never thought abut that before. Yusuf's words wouldn’t leave him alone. Muhammad is dead, Jesus Christ is alive.

If Jesus lives and is coming back again, then he must be almighty. If he is really alive, then he should put his faith in him – and he did so!

Hands up if you’ve had the experience of being locked out of your house or your car or wherever?

You know that feeling then when at length a key arrives and you are in!

Welcoming the truth of Easter is like that. It’s knowing the "truth that sets free" as St. John puts it. Knowing that there is nothing in all creation that can separate us from the love of God in the Risen Christ as St. Paul puts it. "If God is for us, who can be against us?"

Well of course things can and do go against us, often mightily. Yet a Christian is freed in his or her spirit by the knowledge that Christ is risen, freed to be a hopeful person. There is no circumstance that should outweigh that foundational truth of our Christianity.

Christians live in the world with an other worldly vision that is opened up by Christ’s resurrection. This is God’s signature on the history of Jesus, his birth, life, suffering and death. It signifies that God has taken our nature in Jesus and taken it to himself.


Why do you look for the living among the dead? The angels said to the women. He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you…that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.

When I read Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code or Richard Dawkins The God Delusion I am struck by assaults upon Christianity that are so far from tackling the real issue of truth that’s at stake.

Are you and I destined for eternal splendour or not? Is the evidence for Christ’s resurrection trustworthy or is it not? Is Jesus the Son of God or is he not?

Roughly a third of the population of the earth bows to the uniqueness of Christ. They do so in heart and mind and sometimes more heart than mind. They trust their Church to be a good steward of the gospel as much as people like Dan Brown and Richard Dawkins distrust her stewardship. There’s an urgent need for more thoughtful Christianity and a fresh awareness of the evidence for the Christian good news and the awesome historical events that make Christianity Christianity. In this context I would like to commend the diocesan face2faith website which has a lot of relevant material. Do pick up a post card from the back of Church.

It’s the historical evidence which secure the trustworthiness of the teaching of the Christian Church.

Look at the evidence. The accounts of the resurrection in the New Testament are strangely matter of fact, even reserved. Like Mary Magdalene in the Gospel the disciples fail again and again to recognise Jesus. This failure would hardly have been relayed to us if, as some critics of Christianity make out, the disciples made up the stories.
Would the different geographical focuses – Matthew in Galilee, Luke in Jerusalem – have survived in a made up version? Would the role of women as witnesses, very controversial in those days, have been included in a constructed tale?

Harvard Law Professor Simon Greenleaf has this to say about the varying testimonies to the resurrection of Jesus: There is enough of a discrepancy to show that there could have been no previous concert among them; and at the same time such substantial agreement as to show that they all were independent narrators of the same great transaction.

This transaction, as he calls it, is further evidenced in history by a really significant development.

When do Jews go to synagogue?

When do Christians go to church?

What happened to change this?

What was it that made the Christian church change its weekly holy day from the Jewish Sabbath to Sunday but the overwhelming truth of Christ’s rising which has made Sunday Sunday, sweeping away the old tradition of Friday Sabbath. What a change that would have been for pious Jews!

There is something unique about the Founder of Christianity as Abdullah found out.

Mohammed has a grave in Medina. The Buddha’s tooth can be visited in Sri Lanka.

But Jesus – where is his grave? Only the Empty Tomb within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem!


Christianity is the only religion that refuses to talk of its Founder as a past figure.

This is why being a Christian is such an uplifting thing – to come back to the stilts!

Jesus can lift us because he’s alive. He’s alive and will lift us – if we entrust our lives to him.

Our young people were courageous to go on the stilts. It takes courage to be a Christian.

This morning throughout the world Christians take the courage of their convictions and renew their baptismal vows. We’re going to do the same in a moment, here at Saint. Giles – to renew our Christian commitment.
I invite you to take a moment now in silence to look through the promises on p4 before you make them with me and commit yourselves once more to the cause of Christ and seek with me the uplift offered in this Easter Eucharist.