Easter turning it all on its head

It’s Easter Sunday

And Jesus, we celebrate your resurrection again.

But even as we celebrate it it’s hard to understand what it means.

In these days there are so many mixed feelings.

The horror of what they did to you.

Those awful days of sadness and waiting and thinking about it all.

Your broken body, for us.

Forgive us, precious Jesus, for turning our faces away…

And then you turned it all on its head. Today is Easter Sunday and with you death will never have the last word. Tears are transformed to songs of joy!

What does Easter Sunday mean for us?

For our loved ones?

For our world?

We can hardly imagine. And if we did our words would never be enough.

From here we barely glimpse the beginnings of your never ending love

We only see the surface and not the completeness of your forgiveness and your healing.

Here we only taste a hint of your overflowing blessings to us.

How hard it is for us to imagine the beauty of your risen face, the power and glory of your very being.

We don’t have words for what Easter really means.

We praise you anyway for those ways in which we have begun to understand.

Thank you risen Jesus, that you have conquered, that your love will always be the last word and that you are always near. 

Amen

Easter prayer

 

Risen Jesus

We come to you today

We who know of your great love.

We have sat at your feet and known we are precious.

We have reached out and touched your cloak and felt your healing come to us

We have known the freedom of handing our heavy things over to you.

And we have followed you to Jerusalem and seen the way you let yourself be weak, gave up your power and endured the suffering of death, so that we could really live.

Jesus, our light, our hope, our joy

Jesus, our dignity, our future, our consolation

Jesus our teacher, our brother, our Saviour

We fall to our knees and praise you…  pause …

Yet we confess that sometimes

We hold this pearl of great price

Your love for us, who you are and what you’ve done

Close to our chests

We bury it deep in our pockets,

Keep it somewhere safe where it won’t get us in trouble.

And sometimes we get so used to having this pearl of great price around we take it for granted and lose sight of the treasure that it is.

Forgive us, Lord Jesus.

Your great love so lavishly and abundantly given

Is not something to be hidden away.

Teach us how to share it, to be alight with it, to be overflowing with it.

Come live in us and be known in us today and always.

In your precious name we pray, Amen.

To conquer our mess - Easter morning prayer

Risen Lord Jesus,

Son of God

King of Heaven

Enthroned in majesty.

You were born into our mess

You grew up amongst our mess, though you made no mess of your own

And you allowed yourself to be killed in a horrible way

To conquer our mess.

So that we could be free; free of our mess.

Free to worship you

With no barriers, nothing in the way

Free to see you more clearly, to know who you are

To worship you fully

To soak up who you are in all your love, your forgiveness, your generosity

Free to become more and more like you.

We love you Jesus,

We love that you offer us a new start each morning

That you hold nothing against us.

That we are yours and you are ours forever.

Because you made it that way that first Easter.

Thank you that because of what you’ve done nothing can separate us from the love of God and thank you for all the promise that holds for us and our world.

Amen

Rearrange the furniture in the temple of our hearts

We praise you God for your goodness

We thank you for your goodness to us.

This world can be hard and unkind.

It can break us.

But you are good.

You love us.

You fill us.

You make us whole.

We can be hard and unkind.

We can break each other.

But you are good.

You love us.

You fill us.

You make us whole.

We can be hard and unkind to ourselves.

We can break ourselves.

But you are good.

You love us.

You fill us.

You make us whole.

Loving, good God

Who spread out the heavens

And established the earth

You choose to live within us

To make each one of us the temple where you are to be found.

Amazing!

As you turned over the tables in the temple in Jerusalem so long ago.

We give you permission to rearrange the furniture inside of us.

(Silence)

Fill us.

Love us.

Renew us.

Make us whole.

Amen.