Worship Notes The Resurrection of Our Lord

Worship Notes

The Resurrection of Our Lord, Year A

April 20, 2014

The Season

The forty-day Lenten journey of the Church is ended with the empty tomb. Christ is risen! Our Sundays in Lent took us to the wilderness, where Jesus was tempted to deny his identity and mission for the sake of immediate self-gratification. We overheard the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus “by night,” when Jesus insisted that we must be born of water and Spirit if we are to know God. We went with Jesus to Samaria, where he encountered a woman at a well, a woman with a “history” and who knew grief and rejection. We were there when Jesus opened the eyes of the man born blind, who “sees” Jesus for who he is, while those who “see” are blind to him. We were amazed with all the others in the crowd when Jesus raised Lazarus, who had been dead in his tomb four days. On Palm Sunday, we were among the crowd shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” We were with Jesus and his disciples at his “Last Supper,” when he washed his disciples’ feet and gave us all a new commandment, “Love one another.” We quickly forgot when we were once again in the crowd only five days after Palm Sunday, chanting, “Crucify him!” As of today, our forty days of Lent move into fifty days of Easter!

In Word

Our First Lesson today and throughout these seven Sundays of Easter comes from Acts, as we set aside the Old Testament for the season, except for the Psalms. Today we hear the Apostle Peter’s testimony that, in Christ Jesus, “God shows no partiality . . . that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name” (Acts 10:34, 43b).

“This is the day that the Lord has made; let us be glad and rejoice in it!” (Psalm 118:24). Thus we sing with our psalmist for today. “I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the Lord” (vs. 17), becomes our mantra, as Jesus’ resurrection affects all of creation, including our individual lives.

The Apostle Paul in our Second Lesson invites us, “So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above . . . for you have died [in baptism into Christ], and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:1a, 3). All of life is transformed in the resurrection, and our lives are “hidden with Christ.”

An account of the resurrection of Jesus is narrated in all four Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—each account with its unique perspective, and today we have the option of hearing from either Matthew (we are in the “Year of Matthew” in our lectionary) or John. We have chosen John, as four of our Sundays in Lent featured long narratives from that Gospel. Here we find Mary Magdalene weeping in the garden at Jesus’ tomb, thinking that someone has taken away his body. Jesus comes to her as she weeps. Jesus comes also to us in our weeping—and in all our living and our dying.  

In Song

While our music throughout Lent was neither mournful nor melancholy, exuberance sounds its clarion call today and throughout the fifty days of Easter. If the music of Lent was lyric and reflective (and lovely), much of it accompanied by the soulful sounds of the flute, today the bright and bold brass dominate. Most of our hymns today draw deeply from the well of tradition, while the elements of our liturgical music—“This Is the Feast of Victory,” “Gospel Acclamation,” “Holy, Holy, Holy Lord,” and “Lamb of God”—were all newly composed in August 2013 by Pastor David.