"He is Risen! (Why Should I Care?)"

sermon audio:

Here's what happened March 27, 2005:

We celebrated Easter in song by singing "Christ the Lord is Risen Today!" and "Celebrate the Lord of Love." Our dancers danced in celebration of Easter, too.
We listened as Jennifer sang that "I Know My Redeemer Lives."
We read the resurrection story from Matthew's Gospel.
We admitted that, even though we know that Easter is important, a part of us still wants to know "Why should I care?".
We realized that Jesus had an opportunity to come down from the cross while being crucified, but he didn't. He stayed there till the end; he stared at death all the way till the end. When he was raised, he still bore the scars that remind that he has been to the end of all we know - the end that we will face, too. But the message of Easter is that God has a bigger reality, and the end is not the end. Our crucified Savior wants a relationship with us so that he can walk with us in our endings (of our dreams, our health, our relationships, our lives) and remind us that the end is only an illusion. God's reality will break in and give new life!
We shared communion together in the presence of the risen Christ.
We joined Fusion 112 with guest keyboardist Leo Johns leading worship on the song "Breathe" (mp3).
During Act(s) II, we read through Mark's account of the resurrection and pondered why the original ending is so abrupt. Perhaps Mark wants us to answer for ourselves what we would do if we were the women who saw the empty tomb.