Diocesan Weekly Sermon
I know it’s a bit late, but I feel I should be wishing you a ‘Happy Easter’ since we were all unable to celebrate it together this year.
Hopefully you did manage the journey of Holy Week at home and the celebration of Easter day. I wonder what it’s been like for you this year and what you’ve learnt from doing it in a completely different way?
In what should have been one of my busiest times of the year I found it strange to be journeying without the reassuring presence of others and I missed the interaction and conversation that usually accompanies this event.
And yet in other ways it has made me appreciate the need to slow down and savour the elements of Easter that make up the most intense week in Jesus’ life, death and resurrection and the culmination of God’s rescue plan for humanity.
Over Easter I’ve taken time to cry Hosanna with the crowds, to have my feet washed, sit around the table and eat with Jesus, to fall asleep in the garden with the disciples, to stand at a distance and watch my Lord undergo trials and humiliations and to see him nailed to a cross and die.
And I’ve also for the first time in a long time felt the excitement of hearing the reports that ‘he is risen’ and stood in a locked room and heard him say to me and all the other frightened disciples ‘Peace be with you’. Words we so need to hear at this time of uncertainty and fear. This Easter may not have been how we expected it to be, but I know that however we’ve done it this year it doesn’t matter, as the message is always the same.
As John 3 v16 says:
16 For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
I hope that everyone had a good Easter and even though the events of Holy Week are over, know that when we are overwhelmed and afraid, Jesus still stands in the midst of us speaking ‘Peace be with you’.
Rev Lisa Senior, Rector of Colne
A pdf of this sermon and all previous ones can be downloaded here
