05/04/2026
What a wonderful journey to Easter Day through Holy Week in Frensham. Hurrah! Jesus is risen! Easter blessings to all. 🌟🙏🙏🙏
Here below my sermon today…
Easter day sermon 2026: Love is stronger than death!
Readings: Jeremiah 31:1 – 6; Acts 10:34-43; John 20:1 - 18
One of my favourite hymns:
🎶My song is love unknown,
my Saviours’ love to me,
love to the loveless shown, that they might lovely be.
O who am I, that for my sake,
my Lord should take frail flesh and die?” 🎵
My Saviours Love take frail flesh and die???
Oh, my dears, I have such good news for you all today - Love doesn’t stay buried! Jesus Christ is risen and Love’s redeeming work is done!
This day, this Easter Day (as with all other Easter Days since Christ was on this planet) proclaims that God’s Love is stronger than death, as it turns the despair of the sealed tomb into the dawn of a new, eternal covenant. The risen Jesus Christ is the fulfilment of God’s enduring and unbreakable love for us all and gives us something alive, essential and precious to hold onto when everything else is falling apart. The risen Christ anchors us, shields us from despair, and ultimately helps us transcend even the harshest of times… and let’s honestly face it – we are in the harshest of times now in the world with regard to how many people are hungry, how many people are thirsty for water, how many people are in poverty, how many people are homeless, how many people are displaced because of violence and war, how many people through fear of that which is different and through want of their land resources are resorting to persecution, oppression, and war. Humanity has fallen to the lowest of depths, but God has continually provided the ‘antidote to our frailty’ in Jesus Christ…
We hear from Jeremiah: ‘I have loved you with an eternal love – I have continued my faithfulness to you.’ Jeremiah spoke to a people in exile, surrounded by death and despair, wondering if God had abandoned them. God promises later in the book of Jeremiah ‘I will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts’ – this is not a cold, external law which constricts life, but a law of relationship based on intimate love – God’s Divine Love, with all the distinguishing marks that we learn about in 1 Corinthians 13 - patience, generosity, humility, courtesy, joy, discipline and consistency…
On the cross, Jesus fulfilled God’s promise and his final human act was not one of defeat, but one of profound love, prioritizing our salvation even when we were least deserving of it.
The resurrection is the ultimate proof that Love has won and will always win. The same powerful Love that brought Jesus back from the dead is available to us today to break the chains of death for us because of his resurrection. If Jesus had stayed dead, we wouldn’t be here today – there would be no Christian way of life. Jesus, by rising again opened heaven’s door and gave us a new way to journey: a new, growing and evolving way of thinking, of understanding, of living because it changes and dissolves the crushing fear we may have of death – Love has not only overcome death, it has the power to overcome even the fear of death.
Today you are being rebuilt on a new and solid foundation because you have been given a ‘New Covenant’ of a living relationship with the Eternal God, in whose life we live and have always lived, and will always live – but not always realised it, or it’s significance to us. Our lives now and our future lives are secured when we connect with and believe in the risen Christ because our sins are forgiven – in other words, the ‘sin’, the separation between us and God has ended and we are eternally joined together in Love. I thank God that Jesus’ love for us reaches deeper than any grave...indeed beyond the grave to new life!
So, this Easter, step out of the tomb of despair concerning this world and what we are doing to it. The Love of God prophesied in Jeremiah and perfected on the cross of Christ, is the strongest power in the Universe. It is a love that does not just join us, but rescues us and helps us combat our fears and our frailties. It will help us mend what we have damaged…
The last verse of my favourite hymn:
🎵”Here might I stay and sing:
No story so divine;
Never was love, dear King, never was grief like thine!
This is my Friend, in whose sweet praise,
I all my days would gladly spend.🎶”
It is so lovely to spend time in the Love and hope of the risen Lord, But - stop press! The reading from the Acts of the Apostles tells us, that this amazing message of hope and love is not just for us to hear, here – let us let the song of God’s love be heard! We are to spread this Good News – because it is the best news for all humanity – it is the antidote to all the hate, violence, oppression, persecution, and war in the world…Tertullian in the 2nd century AD recorded in his famous work ‘Apologeticus’ that pagans would look upon Christians and remark, “see how they love one another”… he used this phrase to contrast the loving, disciplined Christian communities, with the immoral and internal hatreds of Roman society in his time… Because the Apostles shared this wonderful news of Christ’s resurrection, the early church communities took on board this immense loving message and with self-sacrificing actions served the sick, included the excluded, the poor, the orphans and widows, etc. The early Christians and Christians who have lived in God’s Love and shared it throughout the ages have been a ‘sign of contradiction’ – have been God’s antidote to violence, hate and war throughout time…so in the power of God’s love that conquers death, let us be the antidote too, and do the same in our time.
Christ is risen, Alleluia! Amen!
