Yes to celebration, yes to sorrow, yes to today, yes to tomorrow.
Easter gives us what the world would give its bottom dollar for - I mean hope.
This is the day that the Lord has made so that tomorrow also is God's.
Even if today is the day of your death there will be a tomorrow for yesterday, today, tomorrow Jesus is the same. All must change but Jesus will never change!
Talking of giving your bottom dollar last week I visited an art exhibition in St Marylebone Church on the theme of Stations of the Cross. I talked to an artist who’d made a giant cross suspended horizontally above the nave covered in one dollar bills.
Another cross he’d painted was on a large canvas surrounded by images of hypocrisy. Another life size Cross among the fourteen Stations I saw in a side Chapel was carried by a human skeleton I assumed to be plastic!
In different ways only art can accomplish creative men and women captured the weight of hopelessness in our culture.
The dollars festooning the large cross represented the uselessness of putting hope in amassing money.
The hypocrisy surrounding the cross in the large canvas represented the uselessness in putting your ultimate hope in leaders be they of state or church.
The skeleton carrying the cross alarmed me with its graphic reminder of how death mocks any hope that you put in this world only for, as far as you and I are concerned, in a matter of a few years death will carry us forward.
Forward to where? That is the million dollar question - worth your bottom dollar to have answered - and this anniversary day is about an answer!
300 years of critical biblical
scholarship hasn't disproved what Jesus Christ revealed to us at Easter
concerning what is forward and ahead of earthly life.
Yes to celebration, yes to sorrow, yes to today, yes to tomorrow.
Years ago Timothy Lynch was given a dishonorable discharge from the Army for an incident he would have just as soon forget forever.
He walked away from it deeply hoping that he’d never run into the men from his platoon for the rest of his life.
There was one soldier though he couldn’t run away from, his father.
His father came from a generation that held military service in the highest of esteem and had excelled as a soldier, a no nonsense man, strong on discipline but not so communicative with love. The thought of having to tell his father that he’d failed in the service filled him with dread.
After some years Timothy took the cautionary step of sending a telegram to his father explaining his dishonourable discharge, rather than tell him face to face. He got back a three line telegram. It said:
I will stand by you no matter what happens.
I will be there tomorrow.
Remember who you are.
Those three simple sentences brought reconciliation and hope to Timothy and they sum up in essence the message of Easter.
The women who met the risen Lord Jesus carried the same to his disciples.
I will stand by you no matter what happens.
I will be there tomorrow.
Remember who you are.
Despite their compromise and weakness, God promised he'd be with them and us no matter what.
Yes to celebration, yes to sorrow, yes to today, yes to tomorrow.
Years ago Timothy Lynch was given a dishonorable discharge from the Army for an incident he would have just as soon forget forever.
He walked away from it deeply hoping that he’d never run into the men from his platoon for the rest of his life.
There was one soldier though he couldn’t run away from, his father.
His father came from a generation that held military service in the highest of esteem and had excelled as a soldier, a no nonsense man, strong on discipline but not so communicative with love. The thought of having to tell his father that he’d failed in the service filled him with dread.
After some years Timothy took the cautionary step of sending a telegram to his father explaining his dishonourable discharge, rather than tell him face to face. He got back a three line telegram. It said:
I will stand by you no matter what happens.
I will be there tomorrow.
Remember who you are.
Those three simple sentences brought reconciliation and hope to Timothy and they sum up in essence the message of Easter.
The women who met the risen Lord Jesus carried the same to his disciples.
I will stand by you no matter what happens.
I will be there tomorrow.
Remember who you are.
Despite their compromise and weakness, God promised he'd be with them and us no matter what.
Like the first disciples who
denied, betrayed and forsook Christ we can reject God but, like Timothy's
good father, God won’t reject us.
Despite the very real tragedy and evil that surround us in the world, God promises the triumph of hope in the glorious resurrection of his Son Jesus Christ.
We can despair but God won’t stop infusing hope in the darkness.
Despite the very real tragedy and evil that surround us in the world, God promises the triumph of hope in the glorious resurrection of his Son Jesus Christ.
We can despair but God won’t stop infusing hope in the darkness.
Despite the fact we will die,
life is to triumph over death.
God’s immortal life filling the
world since Easter shines through the universe to brighten every tomorrow
lifting our anxieties.
Yes to celebration, yes to sorrow, yes to today, yes to tomorrow.
On Easter Sunday a profound miracle began. Fearful, anxious men and women with low self-esteem and no hope, were made confident, empowered, courageous and daring.
God gave them the gift of the Spirit and said to them, you’ve already got everything you need, here is my blessing, now go and heal the world.
Are you with them?
Yes to celebration, yes to sorrow, yes to today, yes to tomorrow.
On Easter Sunday a profound miracle began. Fearful, anxious men and women with low self-esteem and no hope, were made confident, empowered, courageous and daring.
God gave them the gift of the Spirit and said to them, you’ve already got everything you need, here is my blessing, now go and heal the world.
Are you with them?
Alleluia Christ is risen! He is risen indeed, alleluia!
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