Easter Service. 12th April 2020.

Call to Worship

This is the Good News – the light shines in the darkness and the darkness will never overcome it.

Hallelujah! Christ is risen.

This is the Good News: once we were no people; now we are God’s people.

Hallelujah! Christ is risen.

This is the Good News – the grave is empty & Christ is risen.

Hallelujah! Christ is risen indeed!

Let us worship God with Easter joy!

Prayer of Adoration and Confession
O God, who made this most holy morning to shine with the glory of the Lord’s resurrection: Stir up in your Church that Spirit of adoption which is given to us in our baptism, that we, being renewed both in body and mind, may worship you in sincerity and truth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

God of mystery and power, we have heard again the Good News of Easter and we are glad to be caught up in its joy today. Your love fills us with expectation. Darkness cannot ever overcome the light shining in Christ Jesus. As Jesus spoke to Mary in the garden that first Easter day, you call each of us by name because you love us. We thank you for the hope of your resurrecting power which has come to us today. May we live with love for you gladly, today and every day, as with hearts of praise we sing with Easter joy.

Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

Prayer of Confession

God of mystery, we confess that faith doesn’t come easy every Easter.
When we face loss in our own lives, we can so easily lose sight of the promise of eternal life revealed in Jesus’ resurrection.
Anxiety, fear and grief can weigh us down.
The challenges of our lives can feel like a stone too heavy to roll away.
Forgive us, Lord and let the joy of this day remind and reassure us that yours is the love that will not let us go.
The Apostle John records Jesus’ words: “I do not call you servants any longer, but I have called you friends. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” We remember that the Christ has laid down his life for us and invites us to love one another as he has loved us. Together, we rejoice in his redeeming, resurrecting love as we sing with grateful hearts:

Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

Prayer for Understanding

Spirit of power and new possibilities open our minds to a deeper understanding of the resurrection, our hearts to the need for love in this world, and our wills to carry out the mission of the Risen Christ, the living Word of God. Amen.

The Lord’s Prayer (in the words most familiar to you)

The Readings

Psalm 118:1-2; 14-24

1 Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;
his love endures for ever.
2 Let Israel say:
‘His love endures for ever.’
14 The Lord is my strength and my defence;
he has become my salvation.
15 Shouts of joy and victory
resound in the tents of the righteous:
‘The Lord’s right hand has done mighty things!
16 The Lord’s right hand is lifted high;
the Lord’s right hand has done mighty things!’
17 I will not die but live,
and will proclaim what the Lord has done.
18 The Lord has chastened me severely,
but he has not given me over to death.
19 Open for me the gates of the righteous;
I will enter and give thanks to the Lord.
20 This is the gate of the Lord
through which the righteous may enter.
21 I will give you thanks, for you answered me;
you have become my salvation.
22 The stone the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
23 the Lord has done this,
and it is marvellous in our eyes.
24 The Lord has done it this very day;
let us rejoice today and be glad.

John 20:1-18

Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the entrance. 2 So she came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, and said, ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have put him!’
3 So Peter and the other disciple started for the tomb. 4 Both were running, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. 5 He bent over and looked in at the strips of linen lying there but did not go in. 6 Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there, 7 as well as the cloth that had been wrapped round Jesus’ head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen. 8 Finally the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went inside. He saw and believed. 9 (They still did not understand from Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.) 10 Then the disciples went back to where they were staying.
11 Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb 12 and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot.
13 They asked her, ‘Woman, why are you crying?’
‘They have taken my Lord away,’ she said, ‘and I don’t know where they have put him.’ 14 At this, she turned round and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realise that it was Jesus.
15 He asked her, ‘Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?’
Thinking he was the gardener, she said, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.’
16 Jesus said to her, ‘Mary.’
She turned towards him and cried out in Aramaic, ‘Rabboni!’ (which means ‘Teacher’).
17 Jesus said, ‘Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”’
18 Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: ‘I have seen the Lord!’ And she told them that he had said these things to her.

Colossians 3:1-4

If you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory. Amen.

Sermon

Another chorus I learned working with the Presbyterian Young Peoples Society in Canada, is highlighted for the children today. Thou hast turned my mourning into dancing for me, thou hast put off my sackcloth and girded me with gladness. Based upon Psalm 30 verse 11 it sums up the joy of Easter.

This Easter is of course different, we cannot meet and share the full experience, not only of worship and hymns of praise, but also of the worldly aspects of Easter eggs, bonnets a weekend of getting away out into the country, stopping at farm shops and restaurants, sitting beside a loch or having a picnic on an East Neuk beach. It is tempting to be depressed instead. Easter however is about joy and laughter.
Talking yesterday across a safe distance with Jess, the conversation was getting rather glum until someone drew attention to the very crooked middle finger on my left hand. My family joke about it. I cannot have it straightened because that would inhibit my ability to play the clarinet and the piano. As they made fun of it across the garden, we all ended up helpless with laughter, and we parted feeling very much better for it.
It may seem incongruous, but this Easter we need to recapture the freedom and joy of laughter.

Matthew 28:8-9
“So the women left the tomb quickly with both fear and great joy, and ran to tell the disciples. There and then Jesus met them and said: “Peace be with you!” They came up to him, and with adoration knelt and held his feet.”

Those women were the first to share the Easter laughter. They arrived at the tomb in despair and left in boundless happiness. Women were the first joyful apostles of Easter. They could dare laugh as never before.

Let us think today about laughter. Here are a friend’s thoughts about laughter:

Can you, in this crazy old world, still achieve a good belly laugh? A laughter gloriously more holistic and therapeutic than the erudite jokes of cynics? Or a laughter that rises far above the cackle that accompanies smutty jokes?

Why are some things humorous? What is it that makes a situation comical? What is it that lies at the basis of laughter? I will attempt to highlight two factors from what is a very complex subject. These two things are key ingredients of laugher.

There is the factor of incongruity and the hope of restoration.
First, incongruity. Humour occurs when ill matched words or happenings are placed side by side. There has to be a sense of something sharply out of place. Incongruity.

There was the day I was resplendent in a spotless new white alb and iridescent stole. Before we processed into church the choir gave me a ribbing. Imagine their delight when I partially tripped when making my way to the lectern. Incongruity: a preacher in his full flowing dignity is not supposed to be a clumsy oaf in front of the congregation.
The second thing is recovery from the situation which occurs when no harm is done.

At my recent school reunion, some of us still could laugh at a classroom incident when the strictest and most feared teacher accidentally spat her false teeth onto the desk in front of me during a Latin class
It was the incongruity of the situation, the momentary loss of dignity which makes something like that funny. The poor teacher was able to recover, and I believe she laughed herself. She was nicer to all of us after that.
No harm done, as they say. The possibility of restoration was there, or healthy laughter should not have occurred.

It seems then that these two factors: incongruity and restoration are key ingredients in healthy laughter. As they are in Easter joy.

Human life is full of age-old incongruities factors that constitute the human predicament; the things that bring some people to despair, insanity, or suicide. We are currently facing three of these dark factors: disease, evil and death.

It is self-evident that human bodies were intended to be well balanced, functional and healthy. Health seems to be the right order of things.

But the terrible incongruity of disease and handicap confronts us. There are ears than cannot hear, eyes that cannot see, children’s legs that cannot walk and arms that cannot hug. We see little children with leukaemia, people in their prime crippled with strokes, dear elderly people who have lived saintly lives spending their last days in distress and pain. And now the whole of the world is suffering in the face of the Covid 19 epidemic. It is all inappropriate!

We know eyes were meant to see, children were meant to freely play, legs were meant to walk and run and dance. The brain is meant to control the movements of the body, the heart is meant to pump enough blood. This is the right order of things.

Looked at this way, if disability, disease and pain are the final word then there is little to laugh about.

How do we cope with the incongruous fact of evil?
We feel in our very bones that humanity is meant for goodness. We have it in us to be loving creatures, generous and compassionate, truthful and thoughtful, making this world a paradise.

Yet everywhere we encounter the inappropriate factor of evil. This perversity is all around us and within us. Corruption, injustice, rampant greed, lust, hatred, cruelty, racism, torture, murder, apathy and much savage religious intolerance run through all nations and communities.

It gets to us all. We know we are meant to be lovely and loving beings, yet despite our ideals we can be grossly unlovely and unloving. This is a real incongruity, an obscenity in God’s creation. If evil has the last word, there is no room for healthy laughter.

How do we cope with the fact of death?

The third awful incongruity is that we die. By our very nature we are self-conscious living beings. We not only live but we know we live. We not only die but we know we must die. We cease to be. “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” What can possibly be more inappropriate than death to something that knows it is alive?

Like a large black shape following a swimmer in beautiful waters, we are shadowed all our days by the dark figure of death. We are mortal.

If death has the last word, then laughter can only be a hysterical cackle by those who want to pretend it does not matter, while deep down their very being trembles at the thought of nonbeing.

Disease/disability, Evil and Death. Three mocking incongruities which seem to rule us all. If in truth they do utterly and finally rule us all, then let us put a ban on laughter and build our lives (as Bertrand Russell once suggested) “on the unyielding rock of despair.”

There would have to be a massive event of restoration to set us laughing at these three spectres.

There has been that very thing!

Before we slip into a chilling place of despair, let us listen to the feet of some women running very early one Sunday morning. As they run, they chatter and laugh excitedly. As they rush by, we catch a glimpse of them; those women who soon after dawn went sadly to tend the dead body of a much-loved friend. Now they are laughing as if everything in the whole world has been put to rights.

And in a profound sense it has. It has been put to rights.

They have witnessed the spectre of disease and disablement, they have known the pervasive power of evil, and they have seen and touched death. Now they laugh, not with cynicism. but with sheer joy! Their friend has risen, transcended death and has in the mystery of mysteries, has met them on the cemetery path. They run and laugh like creatures reborn in a world that has been reborn…

Matthew tells us “So the women left the tomb quickly with both fear and great joy and ran to tell the disciples. There and then Jesus met them and said: “Peace be with you!” They came up to him, and with adoration knelt and held his feet.”

There is the sure hope of restoration: Here is God’s promise that the bitter incongruities are not forever! The crucified Christ, living gloriously, is the massive event of restoration. Here is the trigger for holy, indomitable laughter.

Disease is not the final and ineluctable word. The Christ who heals diseases gives sight to the blind and new strength to the disabled, lives on. Suffering is not forever. Evil is not forever. Death is not forever! God has vindicated his loving Child Jesus. Laugh then my Christian people, dare to laugh. Laugh not only when you are healthy in body, but even if you are maimed or diseased. Christ is risen!

Many years ago, I met a young woman in Rhode Island who suffered from a severe form of ulcerative colitis which turned into a fatal cancer. Yet she was a person of indomitable faith she was courageous and smiling, always ready to laugh. She died before her 26th birthday, but she had hope because she knew of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Christ is risen! Disease does not have the last word. Laugh Christian; you have the secret.

Evil is conquered every time someone lets go of a hurt and forgives another, or refuses to retaliate because he knows that eternal life is greater than the deepest hurt or the cost of revenge.

Christ has risen! Evil does not have the last word. Laugh Christian; you have the secret.

Death is transcended. Death really happens. There is no denying it. But it does not have the victory.
We have a Christ who did not merely survive death but transcended it. He was raised up to new life. Recently I heard of a dying Dutch immigrant whispering: “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot smother it.”

Christ has risen! Death has no dominion over us Laugh Christian, laugh!

Christ has truly risen. The evidence is overwhelming. Just look around us at our friends in faith still meeting to worship almost two millennia later here and around the world.

Without Christ’s resurrection there would have been no faithful apostles, no church, no memory kept of his life and teaching, no babies baptised in his name, no hospitals developed by his spirit, no common yet holy Table spread for all who are hungry and need the bread of heaven.
God has designed us for life, and in Christ destined us for life abundant beyond our comprehension! I mean that; literally: Beyond our comprehension!

Christ has risen! Death does not have the last word. Laugh Christian, by indomitable grace, you now have the right!

Can you this morning see the women running from the tomb; running and laughing and singing? What a remarkable sight!

Those first apostles of the resurrection Gospel! Easter celebrates the victory over the things that don’t belong that would crush us but for the restoration of all things that Christ’s rising forecasts. He is the promise of the last and final joy. Of all the people in the world, Christians have the best reason to laugh. Grieve for the tragedy and pain of this epidemic of plague, but remember our God is the God who turns our mourning into dancing and laughter.

If we should give up and withhold our laughter, who in the world will then laugh to the glory of God? Amen.

Our Offering

On Easter Day, we celebrate God’s most precious gift to us in Christ’s dying and his rising. As we present our gifts to God this morning, may our generosity reflect God’s goodness to us, and the hope we have in Christ Jesus, our Risen Lord.

Prayer of Dedication

Generous God, we thank you with grateful hearts, recognizing how much you have given us in Christ and what that gift has cost. Bless the gifts we dedicate to you that they may help to spread the hope and joy we feel today in the world you love so dearly. In the name of your greatest gift, Jesus Christ our Lord, we pray. Amen.

Prayers of Thanksgiving and Intercession

With spirits raised by the joy of the resurrection we thank you, loving God, that we have been raised up with Christ to look for and know the things that are eternal.

We thank you for bringing life and immortality to light through the Gospel.

We thank you for the glorious witness of our living Christ to your unfailing, overriding providence as you brought life out of death.

We thank you for the promise that we now share in the victory which Christ Jesus has won.

We thank you that grace is stronger than sin and evil. that mercy is larger than suffering, that joy is greater than grief and that love is mightier than death.

All our joyful thanksgiving and loving praise we bring to you, holy Friend, loving Saviour, and glorious God of the eternal resurrection.
Through Christ Jesus our risen Lord. Amen

Prayers for others

It was for all people that Christ Jesus died and rose from the grave. We now pray for each other
Most loving God, we bring to you our concern and compassion for those whose lives are now filled with acute sorrow because those whom they love have succumbed to the novel corona virus. For those who cannot mourn at a graveside for fear of infection, for those whose final glimpse of their dear one was fleeting. For the parents of a child from Rosyth who is in intensive care and ask for his healing. We pray for those who wait anxiously for news from hospital wards and ICUs, keep their fears at bay and give them peace as they pray for recovery.

We pray those who over this Easter face other challenges and illnesses and griefs; for those whose work and living are uncertain; for those who are hungry; those who are finding being alone and unable to go out very difficult. We pray for people in places where war has driven out refugees or natural disasters are now made worse by this sickness.