St Margaret's Church Prestwich

Rev Sue preached this sermon during the Easter Vigil last weekend. Here it is for you again:

The first time I experienced an earthquake was in the early hours of September 23rd 2002. We were living in the West Midlands at the time. We woke up to the floor shaking and furniture rattling. I put on the radio to find out what was happening, and went to check on our teenage children. Everything settled down, and we went back to bed.

In the morning my daughter said, “I had this really weird dream that there was an earthquake…”

People in the area had jammed the police switchboard with calls, and 12 people had turned up at police stations in their pyjamas. The next day there were the usual jokes—Dudley couldn’t possibly be the epicentre of anything.

The second time was very different. Three years later, I was in Peru. We were at a Sunday morning family Eucharist. Suddenly the building began to shake. Everyone stopped talking, and there was a look of concentration on their faces. They were counting. If it reached ten, they would move to safety.

Fortunately it stopped, and we carried on with the service. Even the children knew exactly what to do.

The difference was that people in Peru were prepared.

In Matthew’s Gospel, the resurrection is accompanied by an earthquake. Not just a metaphor, but an actual shaking of the ground. An angel rolls back the stone and nonchalantly sits on it. The guards are overcome with fear. The seal on the tomb turns out to be no more of a barrier than flimsy crime scene tape.

Whatever the authorities thought they had secured, they hadn’t. Yesterday, they thought they had had the last word. Today, the seat of true power is revealed.

God has done something that changes everything.

The disciples, though, weren’t prepared. They knew the story of the Exodus. They had heard the promises—life coming from dry bones. And Jesus had told them, more than once, that he would rise again.

But they still didn’t expect it.

And, if we’re honest, neither would we have done. Some things are simply too big to take in. And the resurrection is one of them.

It is hard to get our minds around Jesus coming back to life. In our experience, death is final.

But we are here tonight not because we can explain the resurrection, but because we believe that the risen Jesus is real, and that he meets us here.

The clearest sign that something extraordinary happened is what became of the disciples. From being frightened and uncertain, they became people who spoke openly and persistently about the resurrection.

Not because they thought it would keep them safe—it didn’t. Many of them suffered for it, but because they were convinced it was true.

When we say that Jesus has conquered death, we don’t mean that death no longer touches us. We know that it does. We know that we and those we love will die.

But we also believe that death is not the end.

Because we have met the risen Christ, we trust that there is more to come—that this life is not the whole story.

Like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, it is the beginning of something that we can’t yet fully see, but which we believe will be new life, full of joy in God’s presence.

Tonight we acknowledge that a strange and unprecedented thing happened on that first Easter morning, but we give up our attempts to explain it. Instead, we immerse ourselves in the truth that we meet Jesus here and now in this Eucharist.

And we pray that, in our daily lives, the Easter joy will remain with us and overcome fear and pessimism.

We live in the certain hope that because Christ is risen, whatever lies ahead will not be the end of the story, but the beginning of something far greater. Alleluia. Christ is risen.