10 Things achieved by the resurrection

Ian Scott, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

1. Confirms all Jesus said and all the prophecies.
2. Confirms Jesus is who he claimed to be.
3. Vindicates his suffering and death.
4. Shows death and the devil are conquered.
5. Manifests God's justice.
6. Frees people from their sins.
7. Displays the power of God.
8. Demonstrates that Christianity is true and unique.
9. Gives believers a living hope.
10. Guarantees the resurrection of God's people in the world to come.

365 Albums 91-105

1. Profile Jan Akkerman 1972
2. Focus in Time Jan Akkerman 1996
3. Uam Julie Fowlis 2009
4. Life in a paper boat Kate Rusby 2016
5. Introspection 2 Thijs van Leer 1975*
6. Planxty Planxty 1973
7. Focus Jan Akkerman & Thijs van Leer
8. Focus 3 Focus 1972
9. Brainbox Brainbox 1969
10. Ommadawn Mike Oldfield 1975
11. Springfever Joachim Kuhn 1976
12. Lent to Maunday Thursday Page CXVI 2014*
13. Good Friday to Easter Page CXVI 2014*
14. Love Beatles 2006
15. Chieftains Tears of Stone 1999

(* Suitable for Sunday playing IMHO)

Lord's Day April 21 2019

It was good to be back in Childs Hill on Sunday. It being Easter Sunday I preached on the resurrection - from John 20 in the morning and Luke 24 in the evening. I wish I had chosen to go more into the implications of the resurrection in at least one sermon. Loved singing some of those good old Easter hymns. We must try some more next week. We had a good turn out in the morning, though the evening was small as usual, with only six at the communion beforehand. Having been away I was struck by the diversity of our congregation. It is quite remarkable, covering all the continents as it does. The warm weather prompted African dress, mostly from some of the older men and women in the congregation. Not many away. Two American couples on vacation who I had never met joined us. They were from Washington State, just north of Portland, and had found us on the web.

Midweek Meeting March 23 2016

Wednesday seems a long time ago now. A mixture of busyness and illness has kept me from reporting how we got on until now. As it is Easter week I thought we could look at something relevant to that and so went to John 12:24 Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. That was a good text to get into. There were about 16 of us present and we had a good time of prayer to follow. Some people really know ho to  pray and it is a delight to hear.

Free Easter ebook

Ligonier have the e-version of Blood work by Anthony J Carter going free at the moment. See here.

HMDUK 16 What is the origin of hot-cross buns?

Cjorsch, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

WHAT IS THE ORIGIN OF HOT-CROSS BUNS? The custom of making bread marked with the sign of a cross for consumption at festivals is both ancient and widespread. There is no ground for supposing that the custom originated with the early Christians; they merely altered its significance by associating it with the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper.

Lord's Day March 31 2013

It was great to have so many people in church yesterday. We were swollen chiefly by former members coming back to see relatives but there were others too and yet still some away as well. I never mentioned the word Easter once but all the hymns and readings and sermons were related to the subject of the resurrection. I preached on John 2:19-21 in the morning where Jesus speaks of them destroying the temple nad he raising it again in three days and in the evening on the Sadducees' question about the resurrection in Mark 12. It was good to be looking at central themes but from less obvious texts.

(I also had one, now removed, for last Lord's Day - "It was unseasonably cold yesterday (I'm dreaming of a white Easter!) and that probably affected attendance. There were a few visitors, however, from Holland and Romania and less far afield. We carried on with 1 Corinthians and preaching the gospel, reaching 2:5 at last, in the morning and in Numbers (28) in the evening. My main points in the evening were about being thankful that we don't need to know the details of that chapter well today and how it teaches us about Christ's sacrifice and our own since that time".)

Five "Christian" islands

Here is a list of five islands currently known in English by the name  of a traditonal Christian festival

1. Candlemas Island

A small uninhabited island of the Candlemas Islands in the South Sandwich Islands. It lies about 2 miles from Vindication Island, separated by the Nelson Channel.

2. Easter Island (Rapa Nui: Rapa Nui, Spanish: Isla de Pascua)

A Polynesian island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian triangle. A special territory of Chile that was annexed in 1888, Easter Island is famous for its 887 extant monumental statues, called moai, created by the early Rapanui people. It is a World Heritage Site (as determined by UNESCO).

3. Ascension Island

An isolated volcanic island in the equatorial waters of the South Atlantic, around a thousand miles from the coast of Africa and 1400 miles from the coast of South America, ie roughly midway between the horns of South America and Africa. It is governed as part of the British Overseas Territory of St Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, of which the main island, St Helena, is around 800 miles to the southeast. The territory also includes the "remotest populated archipelago" on earth, the sparsely populated Tristan da Cunha archipelago some 30 degrees farther south - about half way to the Antarctic Circle.

4. Pentecost Island

One of the 83 islands that make up the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. It lies 120 miles due north of capital Port Vila

5. Christmas Island

A territory of Australia in the Indian Ocean, it is located 1600 miles northwest of the Western Australian city of Perth, 220 miles south of the Indonesian capital, Jakarta and 606 miles East North East of the Cocos (Keeling) Islands

Wesley on Easter

This is another Wesley hymn for Easter

All ye that seek the Lord who died,
Your God for sinners crucified,
Before the earliest dawn, now come
To worship at His sacred tomb.

Bring the sweet spices of your sighs,
Your contrite hearts, and streaming eyes,
Your sad complaints, and humble fears;
Come, and embalm Him with your tears.

While thus ye love your souls to employ,
Your sorrow shall be turn'd to joy:
Now, now let all your grief be o'er!
Believe; and ye shall weep no more.

An earthquake hath the cavern shook,
And burst the door, and rent the rock;
The Lord hath sent His angel down,
And he hath roll'd away the stone.

Easter Hymns

We sang nine of the 20 Easter hymns in the new Christian Hymns yesterday. Some (especially the modern ones we don't know). It struck me again how far superior Charles Weslety is to them all. it's hard to beat words such as

Christ, the Lord, is risen today, Hallelujah!
Sons of men and angels say, Hallelujah!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Hallelujah!
Sing, ye heavens, and earth, reply, Hallelujah!

Love’s redeeming work is done, Hallelujah!
Fought the fight, the battle won, Hallelujah!
Lo! the Sun’s eclipse is over, Hallelujah!
Lo! He sets in blood no more, Hallelujah!

Vain the stone, the watch, the seal, Hallelujah!
Christ hath burst the gates of hell, Hallelujah!
Death in vain forbids His rise, Hallelujah!
Christ hath opened paradise, Hallelujah!

Lives again our glorious King, Hallelujah!
Where, O death, is now thy sting? Hallelujah!
Once He died our souls to save, Hallelujah!
Where thy victory, O grave? Hallelujah!

Soar we now where Christ hath led, Hallelujah!
Following our exalted Head, Hallelujah!
Made like Him, like Him we rise, Hallelujah!
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Hallelujah!

Hail, the Lord of earth and Heaven, Hallelujah!
Praise to Thee by both be given, Hallelujah!
Thee we greet triumphant now, Hallelujah!
Hail, the resurrection, thou, Hallelujah!

King of glory, Soul of bliss, Hallelujah!
Everlasting life is this, Hallelujah!
Thee to know, Thy power to prove, Hallelujah!
Thus to sing and thus to love, Hallelujah!

Hymns of praise then let us sing, Hallelujah!
Unto Christ, our heavenly King, Hallelujah!
Who endured the cross and grave, Hallelujah!
Sinners to redeem and save. Hallelujah!

But the pains that He endured, Hallelujah!
Our salvation have procured, Hallelujah!
Now above the sky He’s King, Hallelujah!
Where the angels ever sing. Hallelujah!

Jesus Christ is risen today, Hallelujah!
Our triumphant holy day, Hallelujah!
Who did once upon the cross, Hallelujah!
Suffer to redeem our loss. Hallelujah!

This is Wesley's most famous resurrection hymn. There are at least 15 others.

Easter Apology

I found this Easter apology to TV broadcaster Richard Madeley here

Dear Richard
About fifteen years ago you walked into Tesco, picked up a couple of bottle’s of champagne and left, forgetting to pay. You were subsequently accused of shoplifting but declared not guilty. In spite of this I took great delight in laughing about you with my friends. Being teenagers we found that the mention of your name brought gales of laughter and so you became subject of a cheap gag. Today I feel guilty about that. I’m a 32 year old man with three small and distracting children; a Tesco over the road which I visit almost every day and a rapidly decreasing attention span. These elements have created a perfect storm. Since Christmas I’ve unwittingly taken things out of the shop without paying on three different occasions. On each occasion I have gone back and paid without anyone realising, and on each occasion I’ve gone home thinking of you. There’s no difference between us. We both wandered out of a shop without paying. It was an accident when you did it just as it is an accident when I and a million people like me do it from time to time. So why was I so keen to mock you? One reason is that when I was 15 I lived to make people laugh and you were an easy target. But maybe there was more to it. I wonder if you provoked my sense of justice like a man hitting a wasp nest with a stick. After all you were a wealthy celebrity stealing champagne while I, a school boy, had to buy the things I wanted with money from a paper round. So on some subconscious level I refused to believe that you had just made a mistake. Even when the British justice system got taken in, I knew the truth and I determined that I would not forgive you. Of course that sense of justice is less pronounced now. One day when the inevitable happens and an overweight and red faced security guard collars me and asks me why I’m leaving Tesco with a block of cheese and no receipt, I’m hoping that the staff in Tesco will accept my explanation that I was distracted and forgot. I hope they will look at the children tugging at my coat, the baby sick on my shoulder and the three day stubble on my face and understand. I hope they will go easy on me. That’s the odd thing about Justice. We demand it for everyone else without prejudice and yet when we find ourselves in a similar position we cry out for understanding, leniency even mercy. It’s double standards of course and also impossible to allow in a civilised country. Sometimes, no matter how many tears are shed and apologies made, Justice must be done at the expense of mercy. If that frightens us in this life it should be terrifying when we think of our relationship with God. After all God is holy and cannot tolerate sin and yet none of us is perfect. In fact the Bible tells we have all fallen short of the glory of God. If God is going to be just he will have to punish us for declare us all guilty and separate Himself from us for ever. But God is a loving God and wants to share Eternity with us so he faces a dilemma. On the one hand He must be just but on the other hand He wants to show mercy. It’s in the Easter story that we see this dilemma resolved. In the darkness and violence of Calvary, we see Justice done; a man called Jesus is punished for sin. The amazing thing is though, that the man is innocent! The sin He is punished for is not His own. More amazing still, the man punished is God’s own son! He willingly entered in an agreement with his father that together they rescue sinful people. And so on the cross, God acts justly, punishing sin, so that he may forgive the sin of everyone who asks, in his mercy. I hope that this Easter you will know the forgiveness and Grace of God for yourself. Yours sincerely.
Jonathan
PS Please do not hold your breath for any accompanying apology from me concerning the number of times I have shouted/ cringed/ chewed my fist at the television when you have been on doing your Alan Partridge impression.

Christmas Easter Combine

My sister Gail with niece Dominique visited us today and we had a combined Christmas/Birthday/Easter celebration all in one as they had been unable to come at Christmas and wanted to get Easter in early.

The resurrection

One does not cheer everything Tom Wright says but this is good in today's Times

Private Eye ran a cartoon some years ago of St Peter standing in front of Jesus's Cross and saying to the other Disciples: “It's time to put this behind us now and move on.” It was a satire not on Christian belief, but on politicians and counsellors, and their trivialising mantras. It depended on Jesus's death being not just an odd, forgettable event - and that it was His Resurrection, rather than a shoulder- shrugging desire to “move on”, that got the early Christians going.

Easter was the pilot project. What God did for Jesus that explosive morning is what He intends to do for the whole creation. We who live in the interval between Jesus's Resurrection and the final rescue and transformation of the whole world are called to be new-creation people here and now. That is the hidden meaning of the greatest festival Christians have.

This true meaning has remained hidden because the Church has trivialised it and the world has rubbished it. The Church has turned Jesus's Resurrection into a “happy ending” after the dark and messy story of Good Friday, often scaling it down so that “resurrection” becomes a fancy way of saying “He went to Heaven”. Easter then means: “There really is life after death”. The world shrugs its shoulders. We may or may not believe in life after death, but we reach that conclusion independently of Jesus, of odd stories about risen bodies and empty tombs.

But “resurrection” to 1st-century Jews wasn't about “going to Heaven”: it was about the physically dead being physically alive again. Some Jews (not all) believed that God would do this for all people in the end. Nobody, including Jesus's followers, was expecting one person to be bodily raised from the dead in the middle of history. The stories of the Resurrection are certainly not “wish-fulfilments” or the result of what dodgy social science calls “cognitive dissonance”. First-century Jews who followed would-be messiahs knew that if your leader got killed by the authorities, it meant you had backed the wrong man. You then had a choice: give up the revolution or get yourself a new leader. Going around saying that he'd been raised from the dead wasn't an option.

Unless he had been. Jesus of Nazareth was certainly dead by the Friday evening; Roman soldiers were professional killers and wouldn't have allowed a not-quite-dead rebel leader to stay that way for long. When the first Christians told the story of what happened next, they were not saying: “I think he's still with us in a spiritual sense” or “I think he's gone to heaven”. All these have been suggested by people who have lost their historical and theological nerve.

The historian must explain why Christianity got going in the first place, why it hailed Jesus as Messiah despite His execution (He hadn't defeated the pagans, or rebuilt the Temple, or brought justice and peace to the world, all of which a Messiah should have done), and why the early Christian movement took the shape that it did. The only explanation that will fit the evidence is the one the early Christians insisted upon - He really had been raised from the dead. His body was not just reanimated. It was transformed, so that it was no longer subject to sickness and death.

Let's be clear: the stories are not about someone coming back into the present mode of life. They are about someone going on into a new sort of existence, still emphatically bodily, if anything, more so. When St Paul speaks of a “spiritual” resurrection body, he doesn't mean “non-material”, like a ghost. “Spiritual” is the sort of Greek word that tells you,not what something is made of, but what is animating it. The risen Jesus had a physical body animated by God's life-giving Spirit. Yes, says St Paul, that same Spirit is at work in us, and will have the same effect - and in the whole world.

More here

Easter with a bang

I'm not making any point here except that it is weird world in which we live. This article is the beginning of from yesterday's Times and can be accessed here.

Once a year during Greek Orthodox Easter, on the night of the resurrection of Christ, the parishioners of two churches in the town of Vrodandos on the picturesque eastern Aegean island of Chios become for a short time, opponents in a war like no other. It is called the Chios rocket war – a friendly battle between the churches of Agios Markos and Panagia Erithiani.
The rocket war is a tradition that dates to the early 19th century at the time of the Ottoman occupation. Although its origin has been lost over time, the most popular legend is that of seafarers from the island, who used to battle pirates with cannons on their ships. When they returned home they brought their cannons, and began a custom of firing them at the Easter holiday. In 1889, the Ottoman occupiers banned it and confiscated the cannons, fearing they would be used in a revolt.
This resulted in the locals replacing the cannons with homemade rockets. The parishioners of the two churches, who always had a friendly rivalry, added the competition that has evolved and continues today.
As Easter mass takes place to mark the resurrection of Christ on the Saturday evening, rival gangs from the parishes fire thousands of homemade rockets across a valley at each other’s churches. The objective is to hit the bell-tower of the “enemy’s” church. What ensues is a spectacle of streaking lights whizzing toward each other across the sky, filling the valley between with smoke.
Air raid sirens wail across the town to inform the inhabitants, churchgoers and spectators of the approaching rockets, and thousands of people gather to watch as the rockets strike the churches.
Inside, the Easter mass takes place and churchgoers light candles despite the smashing of rockets against the walls. The devout run to reach the church for mass and watch the opposing side’s rockets approach from behind protective fine wire mesh that has been wrapped around the church.
The climax comes as church bells ring to announce Christ's resurrection at midnight, immediately drowned by the whizzing sounds of the barrages of rockets and exploding multi-coloured fireworks.
However, the tradition does not come without its dangers. Small fires can break out in the valley between the two churches, and the island’s fire brigade rushes to smother any fires ignited by stray rockets. Firefighters and volunteer watch teams spend the evening patrolling the area as stray rockets can set fire to trees, bushes and homes.
The rocket war has also caused injuries in the past, such as the loss of eyes or limbs and even deaths during production of the rockets, etc.

More here.

Daniel and Resurrection

On Easter Sunday I preached on the resurrection as I usually do. Unusually I preached morning and evening from the OT. The evening sermon on Jonah was perhaps less unusual but I think the morning one on Daniel 6 was quite unusual and yet justifiable.

Here is an outline.

Out of the lions' mouths - resurrection in Daniel

1. Learn from Daniel and his entrance into the lions' den

and from Jesus and his burial in the graveA. Learn from the popularity and success of Daniel and of Jesus
B. Learn from the jealousy and opposition against Daniel and against Jesus
C. Learn from the plotting and trickery against Daniel and against Jesus
D. Learn from the watching, accusing and arrest of Daniel and of Jesus
E. Learn from the innocence of Daniel and of Jesus and their judges' ineffectiveness
F. Learn from the stone and seal and the restless sleep in the story of Daniel and of Jesus

Cf Dan 6:17 A stone was brought and placed over the mouth of the den, and the king sealed it with his own signet ring and with the rings of his nobles, so that Daniel's situation might not be changed.

Restless sleep - Darius and Pilates' wife as reported Matthew 27

(also note refs in Ps 22 to lions)

2. Learn from Daniel and his escape from the jaws of the lions

and Jesus and his escape from the jaws of deathA. Learn from Daniel's escape and Jesus' resurrection
Cf esp Dan 6:19 At the first light of dawn, the king got up and hurried to the lions' den

B. Learn from God's judgement on those who opposed Daniel and Jesus

ie Dan 6:24 and what happened in AD 70
C. Learn from the proclamation that followed Daniel's escape and Jesus' resurrection

Dan 6:25ff and Acts 2 and all the preaching that has followed