| New Book now Available Here is an anthology of over 1100 brief prayers and thought-starters, for each day of the year, with almost 400 original prayers by Bruce Prewer. Included is both a subject index and an index of authors-- an ecumenical collection of about 300 different sources. |
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| Title: Brief Prayers for Busy People. Author: Bruce D Prewer ISBN 978-1-62880-090-6 Available from Australian Church Resources, web site www.acresources.com.au email service@acresources.com.au or by order from your local book shop or online on amazon. |
YEAR C, EASTER
DAY
John
20:1-17
(Sermon
2: The New “Big Bang”)
or Luke 24: 1-12 (Sermon
1: It’s Nonsense)
1 Cor 15: 19-26
or Acts 10: 34-43
Isaiah 65 :17-25
Psalm 118:
1-2, 14-24
GREETING AND PREPARATION
Christ is risen!
Christ
is risen indeed!
For us the
stone has been rolled away.
Hallelujah!
The old has
passed away, all things have become new.
Hallelujah!
Let us with
supreme happiness celebrate this feast
Christ
is risen indeed!
OR -
Why do you seek the living among the dead?
Christ is risen!
Christ is risen indeed!
No more
shall be heard the sound of weeping,
nor more the cries of distress.
The Lord is my strength and my song, and has become
my salvation!
Listen to the
songs of victory in the tents of the redeemed!.
PRAYER
Most
wonderful God, we
no longer look for Jesus among the dead but the living. We thank you for the
glorious love that is now immortally among us! We pray that we may abandon
ourselves in adoration and commit our energies to serving beside Christ in this
world which has now become a territory of much promise. To you be all thanksgiving, praise and glory, on earth and in
highest heaven!
Amen!
THE FIRST DAY
(a poem)
It was an
opal morning
like a world made
brand new,
spider webs on the branches
glistened with fresh
dew.
As I looked
out the window
on the scene from my
room,
I saw some
women sobbing
by a limestone tomb.
Repeatedly
they peered inside,
bodies shaking with grief,
as
those who are forsaken
without hope of
relief.
Suddenly
they stepped back
wide-eyed and
terrified,
I would
swear they were listening
to something deep
inside.
They spun
around and set off
laughter now on each
face,
light footed as God’s gazelles
they scampered from
that place.
Curious
beyond measure
I went down to death’s lair,
cautiously I entered in
but found no death
in there.
© B.D. Prewer 1995
CONFESSION AND ASSURANCE
My friends, please join me in unburdening our hearts to the God
of Jesus, whose Easter resourcefulness and power astounds us and whose jubilant
mercy exceeds our most extravagant expectation.
Let us pray.
God of good news, we confess to you and each other
that
we have clutched at things that wither and decay
and let go of your eternal certainties,
we have wearied ourselves with pernicious selfishness
and surrendered our
peace to fractious worries,
we have diluted love with a thousand excuses
and buried true joy under doubts and fears.
God of
resurrection, by that love which brings life out of death,
please pity our weaknesses and forgive our blatant sins.
God
of resurrection, please lift us out of whatever grave we have dug for ourselves
and set our feet once more on the path that leads to
unlimited life.
Through Christ
Jesus our triumphant Saviour.
Amen!
FORGIVENESS
Sisters and
brothers of Christ Jesus,
it is my privilege and joy as a child of the Gospel to declare to
you: “This Friend of sinners is alive for ever. Our sins are forgiven and our
future is assured.”
Christ is risen!
He
is risen indeed!
The peace of
the living Lord Jesus be with you always.
And also with you.
PRAYER FOR CHILDREN
You
Are Great!
God, you are so great!
Thanks a million for not letting Jesus stay dead.
Thanks for raising him up with a new life.
Thanks for promising us the same kind of life.
Please quieten down our many fears,
and teach us the deep love and
happiness of Easter.
Through Jesus our Saviour.
Amen!
PSALM 118: 1-2 & 14:24
Give thanks
to God who is all goodness,
whose sure love prevails for ever!
Let all
God’s people say:
this love prevails for ever.
God is my
strength and my song,
and has become my healing and liberty.
Listen to
the happy songs of triumph
from the camps of the true believers:
The right
hand of God wins all!
The
right hand of God is awesome!
The
right hand of God wins all!
I shall not
now die, but shall live
to recite these wonders God has done.
Though God
allowed me to suffer much,
I have
not been deserted in death.
The stone which the builders threw aside
has now
become the foundation stone.
We owe all this to our God’s actions,
and it
looks in our eyes.
This new day has been made by God,
let us
celebrate and be delighted with it!
© B.D. Prewer 2000
COLLECT
God of
wonders, we who have been caught up in the resurgent life of Christ, pray that
we may share in his mission, finding the right words and deeds to express our
faith, and sharing that same love with which he has so redeemingly
loved us. To your praise and glory forever!
Amen!
SERMON 1: IT’S NONSENSE?
Luke 24:10-11
Now it
was Mary Magdalene and Joanna and Mary the mother of James and the other women
with them, who told the apostles; but they thought the story seemed nonsense,
and they did not believe them.
The men
thought the women’s report that Jesus had risen was nonsense. I cannot think of
a more reasonable reaction to the story. “they thought
the story nonsense.
That’s
common sense, isn’t it? Jesus was dead. Brutally put to death. Rigour mortis had won. The corpse been placed in a tomb; left
through Friday night and the following Sabbath day. Now on Sunday morning,
those women come running with a garbled story about angels telling them that the corpse had been raised to new
life.
The male
disciples knew far better than believe fairy tales. Such talk had to be
hysterical female nonsense. It was far more sensible to face the terrible fact:
the enemies of Jesus had nailed him. Crucified dead and buried. Dead, dead,
dead! This was no time for wishful thinking by women who could not cope with it
the disaster. Face facts. Jesus was dead and with him were buried all their
brave hopes for a bright new world.
------------ ----- ------------
As I read
this story I can only applaud Luke’s courage in telling the Easter account this
way. Much later in the first century, when Luke was writing, the apostles were
the famous heroes, many of them were now the holy martyrs of the faith; a
glorious company of those who had been faithful to Christ Jesus unto death. But
Luke tells it warts and all. These glorious men were at first
disbelievers. They had treated the
reports of resurrection as nonsense
Maybe it’s
because I am a male (as you may have noticed) that I see the reaction of the
apostles as most reasonable. It was common sense. In times of disaster, some
one has to keep their feet on the ground. Jesus was dead; history. And no amount of their love for him could con
them into believing hysterical stories.
And yet, it
is the concerted witness of the New Testament that they were wrong. The women
were right but the apostles were wrong. Common sense was wrong, being realistic
was wrong. Jesus was alive. It does defy all our attempts to adequately explain
it, our Easter
faith may always look stupid in the eyes of many, but with one voice the
witnesses cry out: Christ is risen! The
crucified One is the risen One.
NOT JUST A
METAPHOR
During the
last fifty years there has been a tendency in Western Christianity to treat the
resurrection as a metaphor; to see it as a holy paradigm of success after
failure, restoration after disgrace, hope after
hopelessness. This has of course much
validity. The resurrection of Jesus is a mighty metaphor.
However, it
is regrettable that sometimes the rising of Christ is taught only as a metaphor. Sometimes the very
origin of the metaphor has been discarded; the event of Christ rising has been
either played down or denied.
Not so in
the New Testament. There the resurrection is at the forefront of the Christian movement.
It was something that really happened. Remarkable, indescribable, and for many
implausible, yet the Jesus who was crucified was known to be very much
alive. Death had been transcended. The
tomb did not hold the beautiful young Lord of glory.
Jesus, this
same Jesus, was alive, and because he lives we shall live also. Death is not a cul der sac. It was not the end
for Jesus, or the New Testament Christians. Sometimes they talk about it in
words like resurrection, sometimes with the phrase eternal life. But the
essence was not a metaphor but reality.
The earliest
surviving documents which we possess are the letters of the apostle Paul. He,
like some of the Gospels, talks about the “appearances of Jesus.” Jesus appeared to disciples in various
situations; to Peter and then the other disciples, and on one occasion he appeared
to over five hundred people gathered together. Last of all, Paul says, “he appeared
even to me”. But not like a ghost. It
was the same Jesus although his body had been radically transformed. These days
we might try to express it by saying some kind of sub-atomic metamorphism had taken
place. We are grasping for words; how
can one adequately use words to describe a reality (the resurrected Christ)
that unlike anything else that limited to this space/time matrix in which we
now live?
Listen to
Paul, and listen well. Here he is not talking about a paradigm or metaphor. ( although at other times he does his share of that also).
If it is
only for this present life that Christ has given us hope, then we are among all
people to be pitied the most!
But the
truth is this: Christ was raised to life, the first fruits of the harvest of
the dead
That
vibrant, impudent Christianity of the first century was founded on and inspired
by something that really happened: Christ is risen!
THIS IS
CONSISTENT WITH A PRODIGAL GOD
This whole,
improbable-yet-true, resurrection thing, is utterly
consistent with the extravagant and slightly ridiculous God of the parables and
deeds of Jesus. Again and again we are confronted with a loving God who “goes
over the top’ in his generosity. A God
who does not know when to stop, when enough is enough; when things are past
redemption proves the contrary! The God of Easter is prodigal God.
Remember—
the ridiculous story
of the “first sign” that Jesus did at the wedding in Cana? How he turned about
600 litres of water into wine? 600
litres!
or
the parable about the mother who goes decides to bake some bread, goes prodigal
and mixes up enough dough for 60 loaves of bread?
or that pivotal parable about the father who recklessly gives his second son half the value of the family farm and allows him to go off to the city and squander it; and when the young fool comes crawling home asking to be a slave, the father runs to meet him and throws and throws a giant party in his honour?
or
Jesus’ commendation of Mary ( woman who had truly caught the vision of a
prodigal God) who in her deep love for Jesus anointed his feet with costly
perfumed oil worth about $30,000 ?
It seems
like nonsense? Of course it does. It is so foreign to our benighted, miserly
way of seeing and doing things.
If the
Gospel story has been telling us anything, it has proclaimed this: Get ready
for a God who does the unexpected and the ultra-extravagant thing. Don’t try to
confine God to our little human notions of what seems like common sense; break
out from what seems reasonable. God is unreasonably extravagant, gloriously
unpredictable. The holy, saving nonsense of God is mightily at work at Easter!
Such is the
heart of the Easter message. Unpredictable and prodigious.
Now is Christ raised from death, the
first fruits of the harvest of the dead.
IT’S OKAY TO
BE GOBB-SMACKED
My very dear
sisters and brothers in
the faith, I have not got a clue about how to define the
resurrected life of Christ, nor do I have any way of explaining what our
resurrection reality - which has already commenced
- will finally be like. Eternal life,
unlimited in every direction, leaves me (as the lovable host of the ABC’s
gardening programme is fond of saying) gobb-smacked!
Explanation? Sorry, no.
Affirmation? YES! The resurrection is totally consistent with the whole Jesus
happening, in line with the unreasonable, debonair nature of the Gospel.
Easter is truly about that glorious implausibility of the holy love of God who will never, never let us go.
SERMON 2: THE NEW “BIG BANG”
John 20: 1-18
and 1 Corinthians 15: 19-26
Christ is risen! And for those whose lives are grounded in him there
is a new creation; old ways have been discarded, everything has become new-born .
John tells
us that Mary Magdalene was sitting outside the empty tomb weeping, supposing
that enemies had stolen the body of Jesus. Then as she wept, she found Jesus
there beside her: The same Jesus, now deathlessly alive.
Mary stood weeping outside the tomb, and as she wept
she stopped, and looked into the tomb....... she
turned and saw Jesus standing, but she did not know it was Jesus. Jesus said to
her: “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom do you seek?”
Supposing him
to be the gardener, Mary replied: “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where
you have laid him, and I will take him away.”
Jesus said to her: “Mary!”
She turned and said to him “Rabboni!”
(which means Teacher)
Mary Magdalene went and said to the disciples: “I
have seen the Lord!”
Let me
publicly admit that I do not understand the resurrection of Jesus. The stories
baffle my rational, left brain. They tell of a real Jesus, not a ghost. Yet the
body in which he now appears, obeys none of the old
rules of physics. If ever there was a ‘grandmother’ of all quantum leaps, this
is it!
I do not
understand it, yet without it my life would be that of a straw man in a straw
world. I would be hopeless. By nature I am a doubter; I am a sceptic. But in
spite of all the things I do not understand about
Easter, I know it is the real thing. Behind that triumphant word “resurrection”
is the living truth. Nothing about Christianity makes sense without it. The
fact that we are here this morning, some with a lot of faith and some with a
little, is a testimony to the remarkable nature of the Easter happening.
Paul knew, first hand, the mystery and wonder of
Easter:
“If it is only
in this life that we put our hope in Christ, then we are of all people to be
the most pitied But the fact are that
Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen
into the sleep of death..”.
Christ is risen
indeed!
A NEW
CREATION: THE NEW ‘BIG BANG”
On that
first Easter Day, something happened which was absolutely unexpected and
utterly unprecedented.
Some form of
ultimate power had been at work in that tomb. Something trans-cosmic, had
focussed enormous energy there. No! More than trans-cosmic! It was something
pre-cosmic and post-cosmic, infra-cosmic, supra-cosmic; Something which
preceded the beginning of creation and which will succeed its final end .
A dead person had become a living person, with
the atomic structure of that body so transformed that not one atom of the old
dust remained in its previous form.
When we say we believe in the resurrection of
Christ, we do not mean that the old body was resuscitated. It was something
new. Utterly different yet indivisibly related to the old. Even Mary Magdalene
did not at first recognise that it was Jesus standing behind her; she thought
it was the gardener. Supposing him to be
the gardener, Mary replied: “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where
you have laid him, and I will take him away.”
In was the
same person yet an utterly transformed Jesus. Rabboni! My Master! Christ had risen indeed! Far beyond our ability to
comprehend!
You are
familiar with the present scientific model that suggests creation (all space
and time) began with one unimaginable explosion from a singular, infinitively small
point. So small, it was.... like nothing? It is called the “Big Bang”
theory. To try and actually comprehend
everything coming from nothing, makes our brains almost stall. It seems improbable.
Yet very bit of evidence suggest this is the truth
about how God started things.
What took
place on that first Easter was an event which can only be compared with the
beginning of the old creation. At the beginning God spoke, and out of nothing a
remarkable cosmos came to be. Now, in the fullness of time, God has spoken
again in Jesus, a remarkable new world is has come to be. This time it was a
massive explosion of love-life. Easter is Big Bang, mark II !
Easter marks
the beginning of a new creation; a new universe, a new deathless tribe of
humanity, following in the train of Christ Jesus. Love is all in all.
A FEW OF YOU
MAY DOUBT THIS
Maybe there
are some of you here today that doubt all this stuff. You doubt the fact of any
life after death. From time to time I
have discovered that a few of the best and most loving people in the church
have very little faith in eternal life. In moments of frankness they tell me
that when you are dead you are dead. Nothing lives on except your genes (if you
are a parent) and your values in the lives of those who are influenced by you.
I respect
their faith. I respect their integrity. They can never be labelled among those
pathetic souls who only follow Christ so as to win benefits in the next
life. It’s not a matter of “pie in the
sky when you die” for these doubters. They follow Christ for his sake, because
they believe he is of God. They love their neighbours because it is the right
and most transforming way to live. They forgive because it partakes of the
essence of healing and liberation. They believe God is at work in majestic
purposes which includes each one of us, but they do not expect to contribute to
this purpose beyond their mortal death.
I respect
their integrity yet I think they are selling the Gospel short. In fact, I
suspect that much of this attitude is the result of mind-conditioning by the
materialistic society in which we are immersed and saturated. They seem to me
to have become locked into the dismal old creation. Maybe we could say
brainwashed. In their honest desire to get rid of the rank superstitions which
have often adhered to religion, and to be clear-thinking, reasonable people,
they have discarded an eternal spiritual dimension from their thinking.
Today I
cannot expect to convince those of you who have this limited view of how far
God’s love goes for each person, far beyond death. All I can do is to proclaim
and celebrate the Easter message to the best of my ability, and let the Holy
Spirit of God continue to mother and nurture you in faith, hope and love. And
pray that by God’s grace, I also may be so mothered and nurtured.
SUMMARY
For the
first Christians, Easter was the real thing. Not superstition. Nor was
resurrection merely a “lofty paradigm” as some suggest
these days. It was not a paradigm of those events when hope rises up from
desolation, courage
from anxiety, success out of failure, love out of the ruins of hate, and life
from the scenes of death. Easter was the real thing. Not a myth, not just a
paradigm, not a parable. But an event!
Their Christ
was alive and available to them in a new and permanent way. New creation was
among them and around them and within them. Death could never again harm Jesus,
nor could their own dying separate them from his living presence. Like Mary
outside the tomb, they heard and saw and experienced and believed. Only the
power of that risen Reality was able to transform the monumental despair (that
dumped on them when Christ had been crucified) into the exhilaration and
confidence that followed Easter.
Please do
not try to judge Easter by the rules of the old creation. The “big bang” is indeed the beginning point
that has placed us physically here on an earth. But the reason weer are here in
church , is because of a second “big bang.” This is (to our little minds) as improbable as
the first one. Yet is for real.
Something
new has broken through into time. Eternal love and eternal life is amongst us
in resilient power and with unlimited possibilities.
Rabboni, my Master! .Mary Magdalene went and said to
the disciples: “I have seen the Lord!”
The facts are that Christ has been raised from the
dead, the first fruits of the harvest of the dead!
Christ has
risen indeed.
THANKSGIVING
Most
resilient God, Source of all that is eternally raised up, we give you thanks
for your unspeakable gift of Christ Jesus.
Wonderful
the fingers that anointed blind eyes,
the hands that
gently touched lepers,
the arms that
embraced little children.
Wonderful
the smile that welcomed outcastes,
the frown that
rebuked the arrogant,
the tongue that
told parables of grace.
Wonderful
the courage that led to Jerusalem,
the faith that
agonised in Gethsemene,
the love that
suffered at Golgotha.
Wonderful
the lips that gave the Easter greeting,
the mercy which
restored ashamed disciples,
the joy with
which he filled them all.
Wonderful is
the Saviour who has brought us here today,
filled with
wonder, love and praise.
Therefore
with angels...........
INTERCESSIONS
Throughout
the church, across the world, please loving God, may the message of the living
Christ penetrate beneath the level of familiarity, and begin to awaken that
which is lost and dying within the human spirit.
Come living
Christ,
Come among us and make all things new.
For
brilliant thinkers we pray, those whose thoughts
divert them into doubts and enigmas that leave a genius confused while little
children dance freely into your kingdom.
Come living
Christ,
Come among us with the priceless gift of faith.
For confused
minds we pray, those who have been over impressed with smart theories or
bullied around by sharper intellects, and who this day live like puppets.
Come living
Christ,
Come among us with truth that sets prisoners free.
For
perverted souls we pray , those who for the sake of
varied lusts have told lies to themselves so often that they now believe their
own crooked self-justifications.
Come living
Christ,
Come among us with your light and make us see.
For thirsty
minds we pray, those who are awakening to questions previously ignored, or who
are dissatisfied with the answers of religious quacks and social dogmatists.
Come living
Christ,
Come among us with waters that bubble up with
eternal life.
For wounded
souls and bodies we pray; those in hospitals and clinics, those who watch by
their beds, and those who are grieving and waiting for funerals later in the
week.
Come living
Christ,
Come among us with rest for the weary and peace for
the distraught..
For our own
loved ones we pray, some with faith and others on the fringe, those who are
strong and others who are weak, some who are confident and others who are
riddled with anxieties, those close at hand and those who are far away in body
or spirit.
Come living
Christ,
Come among with that grace which shows its perfection in
human weakness.
Amen! Even
so come, Lord Jesus.
Amen!
SENDING OUT
Christ has
risen!
Christ has risen indeed.
Now the God
of peace, who brought again from the dead the great Pastor of the church, even
our Lord Jesus Christ, make you strong to do your best in every good thing,
working in you that which is delightful in God’s eyes.
Amen!
Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come
again.
The grace of
the resurgent Jesus Christ, the love of the never-weary God, and the fellowship
of the dynamic Holy Spirit,
will be with you always.
Amen!
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