Easter Sermon

But I do long to convert people to the Christ who experienced desertion, dereliction, darkness, and death in trust that God would be faithful, as indeed God was faithful on that first Easter morning by raising him from the dead. Christ, the Son of God, who the New Testament rightly reminds us was “like unto us in all things” except that he trusted in God all the time, and we don’t. Christ, therefore, in one very real sense the ordinary man who shows us the nature of our ordinary humanity and the clue also to our destiny as sons of God. For if God was faithful to Christ – and the resurrection is all about the trustworthiness of God – he will be faithful to us when we experience desertion, dereliction. The darkness of this world, the death of those whom we love, and our own small deaths when they come. If that is nonsense, then Christ died in vain. But believing that that is not nonsense, and that he did not die in vain, I wish you all a happy Easter: happy in the knowledge that your eternal destiny is vested in the love and the life and the trustworthiness of God. There is no ultimate meaning to any man’s life greater than that.