17th. April. 2022. Service.
Inverkeithing Parish Church linked with North Queensferry Church
Worship April 17th 2022
Prelude “I know that my Redeemer liveth”
Bible Introit 426 “All heaven declares the glory of the risen Lord”
Collect:
Almighty God, who through your only-begotten Son Jesus Christ overcame death and opened to us the gate of everlasting life: Grant that we, who celebrate with joy the day of the Lord’s resurrection, may be raised from the death of sin by your life-giving Spirit; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Hymn 410 “Jesus Christ is risen today”
The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.
Hosanna! Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord.
Jesus humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.
Hosanna! Blessed is our King who comes in the name of the Lord!
Therefore, God has highly exalted him and given him the name that is above every name.
Glory to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, ever three and ever one!
Prayer
O God our refuge and our strength. This Easter morning, we thank you for your overflowing grace and mercy expressed in the death and resurrection of your Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ.
We thank you Jesus, for your life of kindness, inclusivity, boldness, and tenderness, as well as for your willing death for the healing of the world which reveals to us the power of love and your Father’s true, self-giving nature.
In your holy incarnation you experienced intimately our human suffering, having emptied yourself of your eternal glory to express that love for us, truly Immanuel, God with us.
As you suffered then, so you suffer now as the whole world shares the experience of human tragedy, viral plagues, wars divisions in our society. Thank you that you are with all everyone who in your name tries to bring peace reconciliation and healing.
Have mercy on us when we are overcome daily by our worries and our weakness,
Your cross and resurrection reveal the breadth of your reconciling love, your desire to forgive and restore, to gather in your wayward creation. We confess our human frailty and our great need of your love. When we have failed to recognise your love in the actions of friend or stranger forgive us.
When we have failed to recognise your presence in the world in which we live forgive us. When we have hurt and harmed any of our neighbours or any living being in this world, forgive us
When we have failed to remember your gospel in our actions, thoughts and words forgive us. Sustain us when we fail to listen to your Spirit within and restore our hearts in worship, our minds in wisdom and our hands in service. Take our lives and use them,
as a sacrifice of loving service and reveal again the glory of your resurrection in our worship and praise. We thank you for your Easter grace and mercy that is always enough as in Jesus’ name we pray:
North Queensferry
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever Amen.
Inverkeithing
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Save us from the time of trial and deliver us from evil. For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours, now and forever. Amen
The Intimations
A meeting of the North Queensferry Session and Board to which interested members are invited re the proposed Presbytery Plan will be held at 7 pm on Wednesday 20th April in the Church.
The Inverkeithing Kirk Session will meet at 7 pm on Wednesday 21st April in the church re the proposed Presbytery Plan.
Coffee mornings will be held in Inverkeithing each Tuesday at 10:00am and in North Queensferry on Wednesday 27th April at 10:30am. In Inverkeithing, the “New for You” stall will be set up in the side room.
A Thanksgiving Service for the life of the Rev’d Isabel Whyte will be held at 2pm on Monday 18th April in Inverkeithing Parish Church.
The funeral of our member, Mrs Bunty Geddes, will be held in Inverkeithing Parish church on Thursday 28th April at 1:45pm then at Dunfermline Crematorium at 2:45pm. Please remember their grieving families in your prayers.
The Offering
On Easter Day, we celebrate God’s most precious gift to us in Christ’s dying and his rising. As we bring our gifts to God this morning, may our generosity reflect God’s goodness to us and the hope we have in sharing it with the world in Christ Jesus, our Risen Lord.
Prayer of Dedication
Good and gracious God, we come before you with thankful hearts, recognizing how much you have given us in Christ Jesus. Bless these gifts that they may spread the hope and joy we feel today to those who have not yet known your kindness. With our gifts, we offer ourselves to you in the name of your greatest gift, Jesus Christ, our Risen Lord. Amen
Hymn 415 this joyful Eastertide
All Age Talk
Easter is a very happy day, isn’t it? It’s the day we celebrate Jesus’ resurrection. It’s interesting to think about what Jesus’ friends might’ve been feeling on that day.
We all know our faces show the way we feel. Sometimes we try to hide it, but we’re not always so great at hiding how we feel. Today, I don’t want you to hide it. As I tell the story, I want you to show on your faces how the people in the story feel about what is happening.
It was early in the morning on the first day of the week when some women went to visit the tomb where their friend, Jesus, had been buried. He had been crucified and died on a cross.
He was buried in a borrowed tomb and the women were going to put spices on His body. (Pause.)
When they arrived at the tomb, the women discovered that the stone that had covered the entrance had been rolled away. (Pause.)
When they looked inside the tomb, they had the biggest surprise of all. The tomb was empty! They thought someone had stolen Jesus’ body. (Pause.)
Suddenly, two men in bright shining clothes came and stood beside the women. In their fright, they bowed down with their faces to the ground. (Pause.)
The men spoke to the women and said, “Jesus is not here; He has risen! Don’t you remember what He told you when He was in Galilee?” (Pause.)
Then the women remembered what Jesus had told them and they were no longer afraid. Their fear turned to happiness, and they went back and told Jesus’ disciples what they had seen, and that Jesus had risen, just as He had told them He would. What a happy day! (Pause.)
You and I have reason to be happy today. We’re happy because we know that Jesus rose from the grave and that He lives forever. But we’re also happy because we know that the Bible tells us that “Whoever believes in Him will not perish but will have everlasting life.” Now that is something to be happy about, isn’t it?
Dear Father, we’re happy today because Jesus rose from the grave and lives forever. We are also happy because we know that those who believe in Him will also have everlasting life. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Here is a new Easter song:
Chorus: Easter Jubilation
Reading: Isaiah 65:17-25
17 ‘See, I will create new heavens and a new earth.
The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind.
18 But be glad and rejoice for ever in what I will create, for I will create Jerusalem to be a delight and its people a joy.
19 I will rejoice over Jerusalem and take delight in my people; the sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more.
20 ‘Never again will there be in it an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years; the one who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere child; the one who fails to reach a hundred will be considered accursed.
21 They will build houses and dwell in them; they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
22 No longer will they build houses and others live in them, or plant and others eat.
For as the days of a tree, so will be the days of my people; my chosen ones will long enjoy the work of their hands.
23 They will not labour in vain, nor will they bear children doomed to misfortune; for they will be a people blessed by the Lord, they and their descendants with them.
24 Before they call, I will answer; while they are still speaking, I will hear.
25 The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, and dust will be the serpent’s food. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain,’ says the Lord. Amen.
Hymn 413 “The day of resurrection”
Reading: Luke 24:1-12
24 On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb. 2 They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, 3 but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus. 4 While they were wondering about this, suddenly two men in clothes that gleamed like lightning stood beside them. 5 In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? 6 He is not here; he has risen! Remember how he told you, while he was still with you in Galilee: 7 “The Son of Man must be delivered over to the hands of sinners, be crucified and on the third day be raised again.”’ 8 Then they remembered his words.
9 When they came back from the tomb, they told all these things to the Eleven and to all the others. 10 It was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the others with them who told this to the apostles. 11 But they did not believe the women, because their words seemed to them like nonsense. 12 Peter, however, got up and ran to the tomb. Bending over, he saw the strips of linen lying by themselves, and he went away, wondering to himself what had happened. Amen, this is the word of the Lord, to Him be all glory and praise.
Hymn 411 “Christ the Lord is risen today”
Sermon
Very few are celebrating Easter in Ukraine this morning. Their Easter in the Orthodox Church is a week later, they will be entering the desolation of Holy Week before they can rejoice in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. The primary reason why the Orthodox calculation of Easter differs from the rest of Christianity is because the “Orthodox Church continues to follow the Julian calendar when calculating the date of Pascha (Easter). The rest of Christianity uses the Gregorian calendar. There is a thirteen-day difference between the two calendars, the Julian calendar being thirteen (13) days behind the Gregorian.” In 2022, Orthodox Easter falls on April 24. As a result, most Christians in Ukraine 70% will celebrate Easter on April 24, while a minority of Christians (15%) in Ukraine will celebrate it on April 17. While we enter the joy of Christ, they are still mourning.
The remarkable thing is that the events of Easter took place in a situation which has many parallels to the Ukrainian experience. Judah and Israel were occupied territories, full of alien solders, governed by a man who has been described as “a man whose character and capacity fell below those of the ordinary provincial official … in ten years he had piled blunder on blunder in his scorn for and misunderstanding of the people he was sent to rule.” Guerrilla warfare, oppression, revolution, political and ecclesiastical corruption, * and harsh torture and punishments all marked these days. * (In Russia the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has declared that this is a holy war to bring the Ukrainian Orthodox Church back to the true faith!)
It was particularly terrible for those closest to Jesus. Jesus teaching had given them new hope and that kept them going during his lifetime. But the awful events of those last few days seem to have erased so much from their memory as they walked to the tomb that early morning. Even things that they believed they could not possibly forget. No doubt, these women had encountered death countless times before, but how did they feel when they saw it come so brutally to the one in whom they had put their new hope.
Their experience at the foot of that cross, looking on as suffering and shame were piled on Jesus while they stood by helpless, appears to have caused them to forget the power that resided in the One who hung there.
It is bad enough for us when we minister to family members who have died naturally in our mourning, what must it be like for those whose loved ones have been summarily killed as Jesus was, undeserving and unjustly. Having something loving to do was so important to the women as they carried their spices to the garden tomb. Looking back both were women who had already experienced resurrection. Earlier in the Gospel we hear that there were several women who had been ‘cured of evil spirits and infirmities,’ Mary Magdalene chief among them, having been set free from no fewer than seven demons and Mary and Martha who had witnessed the resurrection of their brother, Lazarus. Luke does not identify the women by name in this account, but Matthew tells us they were Mary Magdalene and “the other” Mary.
They already knew deep within themselves what it was to be given their lives back. To be ‘resurrected,’ if you like. But on that first day of the week as they walked together, we do not sense that they remember at all. No, we do not hear that their steps are light with joyful anticipation. Rather, they are weighed down not only by the spices they are carrying to the place of death, but by confusion and fear which often accompany grief like this.
For us, from a lifetime of acquaintance with the tremendous discovery which awaited them at the garden tomb, we know what happened next. For Christians it is the central article of faith which validates Jesus’ teaching and makes sense of his ministry and his place within the history of his pe0ple. For other people who do not have faith it is perhaps an interesting myth which they perhaps have difficulty accepting because it is so unusual, so unexpected. It does not seem to fit with ordinary human experience. Yet we often hear of people who have come back from the dead after they appear to have died and revived.
The oldest surviving explicit report of an NDE in Western literature comes from the famed Greek philosopher, Plato, who described an event, the “Myth of Er,” in the tenth book of his legendary book entitled Republic written in 380 BC. The Myth of Er is a legend that concluded Plato’s Republic which includes an account of the cosmos and the afterlife that greatly influenced religious, philosophical, and scientific thought for many centuries. The story begins as a man named Er, son of Armenios of Pamphylia, who died in battle. When the bodies of those who died in the battle are collected, ten days after his death, Er’s body remained undecomposed. Two days later he revives on his funeral pyre and tells others of his journey in the afterlife, including an account of reincarnation and the celestial spheres of the astral plane. The tale includes the idea that moral people are rewarded, and immoral people punished after death. Although called the “Myth” of Er, the word “myth” means “word, speech, account”, rather than the modern meaning. The word is used at the end when Socrates explains that because Er did not drink the waters of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness the account (mythos in Greek) was preserved for us.
Now, we were considering this “myth” and the gospel stories from a scientific point of view, we might call what happened a “Paradigm Shift.”
Paradigm theory is a general theory that helps to provide scientists working in a particular field with a broad theoretical framework—what is called their “conceptual scheme.” It provides them with their basic assumptions, key concepts, and methodology. It gives their research its general direction and goals. It represents an exemplary model of good science within a particular discipline. Here are some examples:
Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the universe (with the earth at the centre); Copernicus’ heliocentric astronomy (with the sun at the centre) ;Aristotle’s physics; Galileo’s mechanics The medieval theory of the four “humours” in medicine Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity; John Dalton’s atomic theory; Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution; Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity; Quantum mechanics; the theory of plate tectonics in geology; germ theory in medicine Gene theory in biology.
You and I may not know much about these things, but we know about them in principle. We know that the earth and the sun are not the centre of the universe. We know that illness is not caused by too much blood, black bile, yellow bile, or phlegm. We accept that “germs” and “genes” do cause many illnesses. These two are among today’s paradigms. All these paradigms came about as a shift in how people thought about science. They noticed something new, they found evidence that didn’t fit their current understanding. There was a crisis and eventually they changed the way they thought and what they believed. Well, the resurrection could be described as a spiritual paradigm shift. It changed the way people viewed life and death, God and love.
In the gospel, the women and the disciples had in-person encounters with the risen Christ. The men were at first sceptical. Being male they wanted evidence perhaps because of what we used to call their left-brain approach – Even that idea has been discarded according to Harvard Health.
The life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus was the crisis. It didn’t fit people’s normal experience. For many it still doesn’t. But as a paradigm shift in spiritual understanding, it spread as steadily, as scientific ones still do, slowly at first then very rapidly. It was not disproved in the first century as the Holy Spirit convicted and convinced more and more people and it has lasted ever since. Jesus’ resurrection’s main significance is in the inner spiritual life as the Holy Spirit reveals God’s truth. It will never in this life be proved scientifically because it is not a material phenomenon.
The evidence it evinces in this life is in the spiritual, emotional, and moral changes which occur in those who experience its effects. The two Marys and Joanna as well as Peter and John and the disciples changed as we know. And they lived through times as tough as the times we face. They were carried forward not by grief, but by the powerful experience of what God can do, of what God does, and in doing so they carried the promise of the resurrection to all the world.
I would like us now to go back to Isaiah’s vision of the new earth which we read earlier. This concept was taken up in the Revelation to John and it also informed the Apostle Peter’s thinking. This was part of the Messianic promise which clearly has not been fulfilled. Was it an ancient fantasy about heaven? Are we to view it as a millennial period as many fundamentalist believers think? Looking back over the history of the earth there have been many shifts during the past half billion years: the Cambrian explosion, the Ordovician, the Silurian, the Devonian and so forth. In spiritual evolution, is it possible that we are about to enter another crisis, as some think, which may see a rapid change in the experience of humanity as climate and other geological changes take place because of human interference? These could result in a reduction of population and a spiritual leap forward among the survivors. I am not offering a particular view but invite you to marry your faith in Christ to hope for humanity. After all, Jesus told of wars, rumours of war, earthquake, and changes in the heavens before the end and he fortified his disciples with faith. It may be that this and the next generation are the ones for whom this word is meant.
Back to today. I am sure we have all had resurrection experiences in our spiritual lives which we too easily forget, the many times we have known the power of God bringing life and hope and meaning and purpose and joy to us once again. In days of trouble when we found it hard to imagine resurrection anymore, hours when we have made our way to the ‘tomb,’ and failed to remember that God is always poised to do a new thing. And then an unexpected blessing came, and were reminded of the angel’s words, “Why do you, look for the living among the dead? He is not here but has risen.”
Could it be that once again, Jesus will not be where we expect to find him, dead and in the grave? That maybe our hearts have been clouded by all that has been happening recently, causing us to forget for a while what God can do and what God promises to do?
The resurrection reminds us in the strong sense of God’s presence in the hardest of times, in opportunities to be, to serve and to love again in the wake of heartache and loss.
In faith born and reborn, witnessed in others, sure, but also in ourselves.
In congregations, gatherings of God’s beloved, who keep finding ways to witness to the good news which the women proclaimed that first Easter Day. Even in the heart of a global pandemic and among the rumours of war and the worldwide proliferation of the power of evil.
Ours has long been a story of resurrection. And now we are reminded once more that we are people carried forward not by grief, but by the powerful experience of what God can do, of what God does, that we, along with those women, are called to carry this promise to all the world.
So, let us gratefully remember:
that Jesus is always found among the living; that God is poised once more to do a new thing in stones rolled back and unexpectedly empty tombs; to let hearts be awakened once more to what God has always done – bringing life again where we thought death had won. Amen.
Prayers of Thanksgiving and Intercession
In joy and hope let us pray with thanksgiving to the Father.
that our risen Saviour may fill us and all whom we love with the joy of his glorious and life-giving resurrection …
We pray to the Father that isolated and persecuted churches around the world today may find fresh strength in the good news of Easter.
We pray to the Father that God may grant us humility
to be subject to one another in Christian love and count
We pray to the Father that he may provide for those who lack food, work, or shelter
We pray to the Father that by his power war and famine may cease through all the world; that aggressors may be stopped and that peacemakers may prevail in Ukraine, Yemen, Syria, Palestine.
Today Lord, we bring to you the forgotten people
who were in our headlines just a week or two ago; who are still suffering, still fleeing for their lives, still dying for lack of medical provision, still seeing their world crumbling into dust beneath tired feet, but whose plight has been downgraded to make room
for more recent barbarity and persecution.
Lord, we bring to you this fragile world, its precious people, its suffering people, its forgotten people, made beautifully in your image and still crying out for help.
We pray to the Father that he may reveal the light of his presence to the sick, whom we know and name before you, the weak and the dying, to comfort and strengthen them
We pray to the Father that, according to his promises,
all who have died in the faith of the resurrection may be raised on the last day and that all who remember and mourn today may find deep comfort in their faith in the One who guarantees the promise by his resurrection.
We pray to the Father that he may send the fire of the Holy Spirit upon his people, that we may bear faithful witness to his resurrection, Heavenly Father, you have delivered us from the power of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of your Son:
grant that, as his death has recalled us to life, his continual presence in us may raise us to eternal joy, through Christ our Lord. Amen
Hymn 419 “Thine be the glory”
The Benediction
God the Father, by whose love Christ was raised from the dead,
open to you who believe the gates of everlasting life.
God the Son, who in bursting from the grave has won a glorious victory, give you joy as you share the Easter faith.
God the Holy Spirit, who filled the disciples with the life of the risen Lord, empower you and fill you with Christ’s peace. Amen.