Conclusion

This is the conclusion to the sermon that has been occupying the last few posts.

Easter has become a victim of the calendar.

It gets locked into the end of term school holidays and gets camouflaged by chocolate eggs and special church services. We know it’s important, but we resign ourselves to the fact that life moves on, and so Easter becomes a quiet suburban cul-de-sac rather than an on ramp to the freeway. In other words it becomes an annual ‘dead end’ rather than the starting point for an exciting journey.

Think about it this way:

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in ’69 many thought that the space race was all wrapped up.

But even though that was without a doubt the defining event in space exploration, it turned out to only be the end of the beginning.

The space race took its queue from 1969 and has expanded in ways that people could only imagine.

· There were 6 other manned moon landings by the USA

· In the 80’s the Star Wars program introduced missile shooting satellite and space station as the new strategy in warfare.

· In 2005 we had a successful probe landing on Titan, one of the moons of Saturn.

· And now we are racing into Space tourism with Richard Brandson’s ‘Virgin Galactic’ claiming that they will take passengers up for zero gravity pleasure cruises by 2010.

Jesus wants us to see Easter in the same way.
Easter is to Christians what the moon landing was to the space race.
Only the end of the beginning.
And so we are to take our queue from Easter and think of it not as an end in itself, but as the invitation to pick up where Jesus left off.