Sermon slides for Easter Sunday, April 20: Grief & Hope

Those participating in worship online won’t be able to see the slides we show to enhance the sermon, so our experiment with posting sermon slides here continues.

Perhaps this Easter morning we can try some different words, try so other ways to talk about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. 

If we say, as some scriptures do, “Christ died for our sins,” we don’t mean that God required the vicious murder of his son in order to forgive. God is not some deity that needs a virgin thrown into a volcano. Jesus did not die to appease a wrathful deity or to provide payment for a penultimate god subordinate to some other god of punitive justice. 

God did not kill Jesus. The cross is not about the appeasement of a monster god. The cross is the unjust lynching of an innocent man.

If we say Jesus died for our sins, we mean all of us are implicated by our explicit and tacit support of the systems of violent power that frame our world. It was our violent political and religious systems that executed Jesus.

The execution of Jesus reveals our human savagery. The resurrection of Jesus reveals God’s mercy, forgiveness, justice, hesed… Steadfast lovingkindness. 

The resurrection of Jesus reveals God redeeming all of creation.

If we’re honest, words fail us when we try to talk about salvation, about atonement. Sometimes it is better to let our art speak. Here’s an example from Eastern Christian tradition: