2019 Easter Church Service

With Rev. Glynn Cardy, the choir director Jill Stotter, organists Philip Smith and Stephen Vincent, and the church choir and congregation.

The church bells chime, summoning the worshippers to the service.

ORGAN VOLUNTARY: PRELUDE ON NÖEL NOUVELET

played by Stephen Vincent
music by Malcolm Archer

LIGHTING THE CHRIST CANDLE

The Christ Candle is lit before it is carried in procession through the church to the altar.

The service is led by Rev Glynn Cardy.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia!

INTROIT: CANTATE DOMINO

sung by the choir

Cantate domino canticum novum: Laus eis in eccelesia sanctorum. Laetur Israel in eo quic fecit eum: et filiae Sion, exultent in regi suo.

Come ye with joyfulness, come sing ye a new song to your maker:  O praise him with the saintly congregation. Israel, be joyful and glad in him who made Israel: and children of Sion, be joyful, rejoice and be glad in your king.

music by Giuseppe Ottavio Pitoni (1657-1743)

CALL TO WORSHIP

“Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him.”

May hope fill our hearts, our homes, and our communities, as we celebrate the power of love that overcomes and transforms all that destroys. Amen.

HYMN: JESUS CHRIST IS RISEN TODAY

Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia!
Earth and heaven in echo say, Alleluia!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!
Sing, ye heavens and earth reply, Alleluia!

Love’s redeeming work is done, Alleluia!
Fought the fight, the battle won. Alleluia!
Death in vain forbids him rise, Alleluia!
Christ has opened Paradise, Alleluia!

Hearts are strong and voices sing, Alleluia!
Where O death is now your sting? Alleluia!
As he died his truth to save, Alleluia!
Where thy victory, O grave? Alleluia!

Soar we now where Christ has led, Alleluia!
Living out the words he said, Alleluia!
Made like him, like him we rise, Alleluia!
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!

words by Charles Wesley
music from ‘Lyra Davidica’

WELCOME TO THE SERVICE

Tena koutou te whanau o ruka tapu.
Tena koutou nga manuhiri.
Nau mai, haere mai.
Haere mai ki tenei whare o karakia.

Welcome here to St Luke’s Presbyterian Church in Remuera, Auckland.

Welcome to those who are here in person and those who are listening to the radio, or through the RNZ website.

St Luke’s has been on this site since 1875, and this current church that we are worshipping in was built in 1931 – 1932 and is of a neo-Gothic design, modelled on a church in Twecher, Scotland.

We are a church that is here for others. Over the decades all manner of church and community programmes have been run here: we are a major counselling centre; we are the home-base for the Auckland Restorative Justice Trust; Little Treehouse preschool is part of us, to name just a few.

Most of our activities are concerned with social service, social justice, education, and music. We are trying to make our community a more caring, just, and beautiful place.

We are a community centre that anyone is welcome to drop in to at any time. We are symbol that everyone belongs, regardless of belief or background.

Presbyterianism is a broad Christian denomination, encompassing a range of theology and practice. St Luke’s worship, compared with other Presbyterian churches, is quite traditional in form and progressive (or liberal) in thought.

So welcome here, on this glorious and special day as we celebrate the triumph of the love known in the way of Jesus.

PRAYERS AS WE GATHER

Led by Alexa Johnston

Easter is a Christian festival
the name borrowed from the goddess of Spring,
gifting us bunnies, flowers, and eggs –
symbols of the fecundity of life.

As the landscape and creatures transform with Spring
so Easter proclaims the possibility of our human transformation:
– from the tomb of despair towards finding hope
– from the hell of hate towards finding forgiveness and grace
– from the fear of death towards finding the power to love.

So on this glad morning we celebrate that the powers of despair and destruction do not have the final word; that new life can break out; that love is stronger than hate, and hope stronger than despair.

The newly lit Christ candle reminds us that the darkness has not overwhelmed us, that the flame of God’s light can still re-kindle the embers in us.

The radiance of the Easter flowers reminds us that new growth, new beginnings, is possible even after the harshest of winters.

God of grace, in whom we live and move and have our being, today as we proclaim the hope of Easter we are mindful that our country is still grieving with our brothers and sisters of the Muslim faith. We commit ourselves to live out our Easter faith proclaiming that love is stronger than death, giving support to the suffering, offering hospitality to all, and building a nation that embodies the values of kindness, respect, compassion, and decency.

Amen

CHILDREN’S TALK

Rev Cardy talks in front of the altar to a gathering of the children attending the service.

THE FIRST READING: WHAT WE’RE GIVEN BY DAVID E GRIMM

Read by Bruce Miller

Today, right now… Life before death.
That’s always been our Church’s Easter message.
The resurrection and the life is now, in us, if we will.

It’s what we’re given...
To learn to think for ourselves. 
To make the hard moral choices and to live for the good of others,
not just for ourselves.

It’s about a life committed to truth.
It’s about a life committed to justice.
It’s about a life committed to love.

Things that are eternal.
Things that never grow old.
Seeking truth.
Doing justice.
Loving others.

And in living such a life right here on this blessed earth,
discovering the wellspring of living water bubbling up inside us, and our cup running over.
So that as we empty ourselves on behalf of others over and over again,
we always find that our cup is mysteriously refilled.

The well of self is so deep.
And we are so grateful to have life and breath and opportunity. 

May we resurrect our deepest potentials
and express the best that is in us moment by moment by moment. 
Love one another, work for justice
and seek the good, the true and the beautiful.
Always.

HYMN: CHRIST IS ALIVE

Christ is alive, and the universe must celebrate, 
and the stars and the suns shout out on this Easter Day! 
Christ is alive, and his family must celebrate
in a great alleluia, a great alleluia
to praise the power that made the stone roll away.

Here is our hope: in the mystery of suffering
is the heartbeat of Love, Love that will not let go, 
here is our hope, that in God we are not separate, 
and we sing alleluia, we sing alleluia
to praise the power that made the stone roll away.

Christ Spirit, dance through the dullness of humanity
to the music of God, God who has set us free!
You are the pulse of the new creation’s energy; 
with a great alleluia, a great alleluia
we praise the power that made the stone roll away.

Words by Shirley Murray
Music by Jillian Margaret Bray

THE SECOND READING: FROM THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO MARK

Read by Rosie Moore

When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb.

They had been saying to one another, ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?’ When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back.

As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, ‘Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.’

So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

THE SERMON: EASTER – ARE WE READY FOR A CHANGE?

In the aftermath of the tragic slaying and wounding of some 99 Muslim New Zealanders, alongside the deep grief of their families and faith communities, has come an outpouring of empathy and kindness across the land. Kiwis care. And we do more than care.

We want to be a place where the varieties of religion, culture, and skin pigmentation can live together, in safety, in dignity, with respect for one another. We want to be known as a place of hospitality, manaakitanga.

Together we want to build this vision, this meta-narrative.

Out of the horror then has come hope. Instead of being fixated on who is to blame, we want to be future-focused on how to build this inclusive vision. Out of death, we work for life.

Out of hate, we work for love. Out of fear, we work for empowerment. To make room in our country for the ones who might look different, pray differently, and speak differently, we need to make room in our hearts. We need to experience individually and corporately a transformation.

At Easter time Christians remember and re-enact our meta-narrative concerning the death of our leader, Jesus, and the death of his movement; and then the coming back to life of that movement, and Jesus’ spirit living on within it. We re-enact this over several days.

Jesus was killed because he was outside the control of the political and religious institutions of his day. He’d lived and taught and showed a disregard for some of their rules. Whether those rules were around whom you should dine with, or touch, or put as heroes in your stories, or how you picture God… he deliberately flouted them.

His was a spirituality beyond the fences of correctness, and the fence police didn’t like it.

Around Jesus had gathered the financially, morally, and socially poor - those not able to afford or fit into the prescribed packages on offer by the confidently religious. Around him had gathered the nuisances, nobodies and sceptics; people of different ethnicities; outsiders. Jesus welcomed such as these, broke conventions and bread, and loved. In doing so he sketched a vision of hope.

It wasn’t that Jesus was ignorant of the rules, or just wanted to be kind to those who looked different, or promote tolerance. Rather he set his sights on the nexus of ideological and theological control, the Jerusalem establishment, and challenged it to its core.

This control centre determined the rules: who was ‘in’ and who was ‘out;' which race, gender, and thoughts were ‘acceptable’ and which were ‘unacceptable’. Most societies, including New Zealand, have such centres and it is from them that institutional bias emanates.

Jesus wanted to dismantle the fences of the control system. He hoped that his unacceptable ideas and practice would spread. He hoped that like wild windblown mustard seeds, spiritual anarchy would grow, bloom, and seed like a weed in every and any place, beyond the power of the elites.

He wanted religion and spirituality, and thus hope, to be out of the control of those invested in fencing them in.

It was a vision that would get him killed, as it had killed other rebels before him.

It was a bad Friday on the Golgotha hill.

In the years following his death his followers caught the wind of his spirit and the weeds of spiritual anarchy spread. Belief in the resurrection was a commitment to participate in a growing insurrection. On the edges of society men and women, slave and free, all races, shared in leadership and resources.

There wasn’t a lot of control. One never knew quite what would happen. There were lots of good Sundays.

Yet within three centuries a new Christian religious institution with its bevy of rules and rulers had arisen who not only took upon themselves to beat back the spread, but also to redefine Jesus. They sought to bring the movement Jesus seeded back under control - their control.

So a number of shifts in and manipulations of the collective memory of Jesus took place. The spirituality akin to a wild weed, mustard, was genetically modified into a tree with branches able to provide shelter and food to birds.

An institution is like a tree – dependable, predictable, and rooted. Jesus’ spiritual vision was now akin to trees not weeds, to stability not dynamic change.

The institutional controllers also split Jesus from the spirituality he’d taught and practiced. What became the mark of a Christian was not someone who lived that fence-dismantling inclusive faith but someone who believed that the former out-of-control Jesus was now elevated to the heavens, sitting at the right hand of the ruler God. Jesus was ruler, not rebel; he was the maker of religious norms, not the breaker of them.

Yet the domestication of Jesus was never wholly successful…

As in the reading today from David Grimm, many Christians have continued over the centuries to understand the Church’s Easter message to be that resurrection is not describing a one-off historical event in 33 CE but describing a way of life in us, now, if we will – a life committed to seeking out and living truth, justice, and love.

The resurrection is not belief, but behaviour; not dogma but doing good; not proclaiming that there is some magical rescue package for those who believe the right things but proclaiming that there is a deep magic (to quote J.K. Rowling’s Dumbledore) called love accessible to everyone, and that such love is stronger than hate and fear and all of hate and fear’s offspring.

And in such love, hope resides. When the unacceptable are accepted by a community who know that by welcoming unacceptable outsiders the community itself will be irrevocably changed, then hope is tangible.

As Aotearoa New Zealand, in the wake of the Christchurch massacre, reaches out to include and affirm the many faiths and ethnicities in this land, and thereby rejecting the idea that the dominant culture and its religion should always have pride of place, this welcome of the previously ‘unacceptable’ will change our whole notion of acceptability.

It will change us. Are we ready for it? To make room at the table for another means there might be less for us? Are we ready for it? Will we help make it happen? Will we commit to a big society-wide meta-narrative of room for all? We are ready for it!

At Easter remnants of that windblown, unacceptable, eclectic community gather to celebrate that the spiritual path of Jesus lives on among all who dismantle fences in the name of justice, compassion, and hospitality; among Muslims, among Buddhists, and among all manner of those previously labelled heretics.

It lives on as we embrace life. It lives on as we seek to transform the structures that create suffering. Resurrection is not a belief that we argue about, but is the name we give to a way of life.

When freedom is celebrated, when room and food is shared, when justice is worked for, when the constraints of certitude and fear and hatred are broken, when doors previously shut are opened… we know that Jesus lives on.

Alleluia.

ANTHEM: PROCESSION OF PALMS

sung by the choir

Ride on, ride on in majesty;
hark, all the tribes Hosanna cry;
thine humble beast pursues his road,
with palms and scattered garments strewed.

Ride on, ride on in majesty;
in lowly pomp ride on to die:
O Christ, thy triumphs now begin
O’er captive death and conquered sin.

Ride on, ride on in majesty;
the wingèd squadrons of the sky
look down with sad and wondering eyes
to see the approaching sacrifice.

Ride on, ride on in majesty;
thy last and fearful strife is nigh:
the father on his sapphire throne
awaits his own anointed son!

Ride on, ride on in majesty;
in lowly pomp ride on to die;
bow thy meek head to mortal pain,
then take, O God, thy power and reign.

Refrain
All glory, laud and honour
to thee, redeemer, king,
to whom the lips of children
made sweet Hosannas ring.

Thou art the king of Israel,
thou David’s royal son,
who in the Lord’s name comest,
the king and blessed one.

Refrain

The company of angels 
are praising thee on high,
and mortal men and all things
created make reply.

Refrain

The people of the Hebrews
with palms before thee went:
our praise and prayer and anthems
before thee we present.

Refrain

Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Hosanna in excelsis.

Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.

music by Malcolm Williamson

PRAYERS

Let us hold in our hearts and minds those
for whom we are concerned.

The prayers are led by Rebecca Hayward, who concludes with words spoken by the congregation:

In the name of Jesus our brother we pray together saying

Life-Giver, Pain-Bearer, Love-Maker,
Source of all that is and that shall be,
Father and Mother of us all,
Loving God, in whom is heaven:
The hallowing of your name echo
through the universe!

The way of your justice be followed
by all peoples of the world!

Your heavenly will be done
by all created beings!

Your commonwealth of peace and freedom
sustain our hope and come on earth.

With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.
From trials too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us.
For you reign in the glory of the power that is love,
now and forever. Amen.

HYMN: THE DAY OF RESURRECTION

The Day of Resurrection!
Earth, tell it out abroad;
the Passover of gladness,
the Passover of God.

From death to life eternal,
from earth unto the sky,
our Christ hath brought us over
with hymns of victory.

Our hearts be pure from evil,
that we may see aright
the Lord in rays eternal
of resurrection light;

and listening to his accents,
may hear, so calm and plain,
his own "All hail!" and, hearing,
may raise the victor strain.

Now let the heavens be joyful!
Let earth her song begin!
The round world keep high triumph, 
and all that is therein!

Let all things seen and unseen
their notes in gladness blend, 
for Christ the Lord hath risen, 
our joy that hath no end.

Words by John of Damascus
music from ‘Mainz Gesangbuch’

PRAYERS AS WE GO

Led by Alexa Johnston

They buried my body, they thought I was gone.
But I am the dance, and the dance goes on.

That which is Christ-like within us shall be crucified.
It shall suffer and be broken.
And that which is Christ-like within us shall rise up.
It shall love and create.

Holy One, fill us with the spirit of love,
give us new life, disturb and heal us,
bless us with the power of love to go forth
and proclaim your hope. Amen.

HYMN: THINE BE THE GLORY

Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son,
endless is the victory thou o'er death has won;
angels in bright raiment rolled the stone away,
kept the folded grave-clothes, where thy body lay.

Refrain
Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son,
endless is the victory thou o’er death has won.

Lo, Jesus meets us, risen from the tomb; 
lovingly he greets us, scatters fear and gloom; 
let the church with gladness, hymns of triumph sing, 
for her Lord is living, death has lost its sting.

Refrain

No more, we doubt thee, glorious prince of life; 
life is nought without thee: aid us in our strife; 
make us more than conquerors through thy deathless love; 
bring us safe through Jordan to thy home above.

Refrain

words by Edmond Louis Budry
music by Handel

CHORAL BLESSING: THE LORD BLESS YOU AND KEEP YOU

The Lord bless you and keep you:
the Lord make his face to shine upon you,
to shine upon you and be gracious,
and be gracious unto you.

The Lord bless you and keep you:
the Lord make his face to shine upon you,
to shine upon you and be gracious,
and be gracious unto you.

The Lord lift up the light
of his countenance upon you,
the Lord lift up the light
of his countenance upon you,
and give you peace,
Amen.

words and music by John Rutter

BENEDICTION

May the power of love,
that the grave could not contain,
that lives to disturb and challenge us,
empower us to proclaim good news...
and the blessing of God:
life-giver, pain-bearer, love-maker,
be with us and those whom we hold dear
now and for ever.

Amen.

ORGAN VOLUNTARY: FANTASIA ON JESUS CHRIST IS RISEN TODAY

played by Stephen Vincent
music by Malcolm Archer

CREDITS

Thanks to the Community of St Luke, part of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand, for generous assistance with this recording.

Producer: Paul Bushnell

Engineer: Adrian Hollay