Resurrection Sunday 2024: From Mourning to Mission
Easter is unexpected. The resurrection is unexpected. The truth of what we celebrate this morning, what we remember, it's familiar to us and so I think we struggle to fully wrap our minds around how extraordinary the story is. But put yourself in the story and as you do this, you can see just how amazing the resurrection is. Because the hopes that the followers of Jesus had for who he was and who he was going to be, they were dashed.
April 17 Sermon: Death Vanquished
It is in joy and in hope that we gather this morning. While every Lord’s Day is to be a celebration of the resurrection hope that we have in the Lord Jesus there is something about the celebration of Easter that brings out in us the joy of the hope we have in Christ. There are many reasons for this, I am sure. Some years when we celebrate Easter, not this one most certainly, we have the feeling of new life that comes from the bright colors of spring beginning to burst forth. Maybe it is the fact that we are finally making our way out into the world after a feeling of being in hibernation during the winter months. As I was contemplating this idea, I decided to review the different accounts of the resurrection in the gospels but when I started doing this, I realized that the key to understanding the joy and hope we find goes further back into the story.
April 4 Sermon: Just As He Told You
What a blessing it is to be able to gather and celebrate the truth of the resurrection of our Lord. This is the crux of the Christian faith. Without the resurrection there would be no Christianity. Jesus would be a forgotten rabbi from the first century. Just another one of the thousands executed by the Romans during the reign of their empire.
But here we are today, and we are gathering as we do every week to celebrate our resurrected Lord and praise him for his saving work for us. The eyewitness accounts that have come to us through history tell us of the truth of this event and we have read one version of the story in the gospel of Mark this morning.