Tag: Easter
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“Christ is Risen”
Two chants from Orthodox Easter liturgy: Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life. Thy resurrection, O Christ our Savior The angels in heaven sing Enable us on earth to glorify thee in purity of heart about the image (first posted April 11, 2018)
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Renewal and Recommitment
Easter is a big day in church world. The biggest. The cliché, familiar from religion text books and every newspaper ever, is that “Easter is the holiest day in the Christian year.” How we measure degrees of holiness may not be crystal clear – we don’t have anything like a geiger counter or a thermometer […]
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Seventh Sunday in Easter
We talked about Passover, and its connections to the communion and covenant language in Mark, in class this morning. It comes as news to people, even when we’ve been around the Bible for a long time, which makes sense, because we don’t always get these connections discussed for us. In Exodus (chapter 12), at the […]
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Easter Sunday
This morning started out foggy and damp, but ended up brilliantly sunny and warm. There were a dozen or so colored eggs in the landscaping by the front door of the church that hadn’t been there the last time – surprise! This gave the front of the church a bright, festive look. About a third […]
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Easter Sunday
The sun tried to come out here for a minute or so right around the middle of the day, but mostly it’s been gray, cloudy, and chilly. Hardly surprising for early April, but not the photogenic Easter sunshine of popular imagination. I am OK with this. It’s easy to love a day of brilliant sunshine, when it’s easy to smile and feel happy. But the idea that Easter and its message of invincible life is every bit as real when there’s a thick cloud cover as when the sun is shining is mighty.
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Notes on Luke 24 1-11
The Uniform Series or “Standard Lesson” text for Sunday, April 1 – April Fool’s Day, and Easter Sunday – is Luke 24:1-12, 30-35. This spans much of “the Easter Story” as told by Luke, but leaves out Jesus’ final appearance to the disciples and Jesus’ ascension in vv 36-53. (This makes liturgical sense at least, […]
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Fifth Sunday of Easter
[A sermon on Jonah 2, with references to Acts 9, which was actually in the Revised Common Lectionary for last week … ] So Jonah’s prayer comes from a dark place; Jonah is in a dark place – not just metaphorically, the way we might mean a place of fear, or desperation, or regret, is […]
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Easter Sunday
[A sermon on one of the Uniform Series texts for today, Sunday, April 16: John 20:1-10.] The church’s Easter greeting, for centuries, has gone like this: one says “Christ is risen!” – in whatever language – and the other responds “He is risen indeed!” We have been saying this for centuries, maybe almost since the […]
Matters of Interpretation 