Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia!
Our triumphant holy day, Alleluia!
Who did once upon the cross, Alleluia!
Suffer to redeem our loss. Alleluia!

Hymns of praise then let us sing, Alleluia!
Unto Christ, our heavenly King, Alleluia!
Who endured the cross and grave, Alleluia!
Sinners to redeem and save. Alleluia!

But the pains that he endured, Alleluia!
Our salvation have procured; Alleluia!
Now above the sky he’s King, Alleluia!
Where the angels ever sing. Alleluia!

Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. ✝

And blessed be his kingdom, now and forever. Amen

From Easter to Pentecost:

Allelulia. Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia

In Lent and other penitential occasions:

Bless the Lord who forgives all our sins;

His mercy endures for ever.

The Lord be with you.

And also with you.

Let us pray:

Almighty God, to whom all hearts be open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hidden: cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy name, through Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Lord, have mercy.

Christ, have mercy.

Lord, have mercy.

This prayer is omitted during Lent and Advent:

Glory to God in the highest, and peace to God’s people on earth.  Lord God, heavenly King, almighty God and Father, we worship you, we give you thanks, we praise you for your glory.  Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father, Lord God, Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world: have mercy on us; you are seated at the right hand of the Father: receive our prayer. For you alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father.  Amen.

 Holy God, holy and mighty ✝, holy and immortal, have mercy on us.

O God, who for our redemption gave your only-begotten Son to the death of the cross, and by his glorious resurrection delivered us from the power of our enemy: Grant us so to die daily to sin, that we may evermore live with him in the joy of his resurrection; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Amen.

A reading from the Acts of the Apostles:

Peter began to speak to Cornelius and the other Gentiles: “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ–he is Lord of all. That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God

1     Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us:

therefore let us keep the feast;

2    Not with the old leaven,

nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness:

but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

3    Christ being raised from the dead dies no more:

death hath no more dominion over him.

4    For in that he died, he died unto sin once:

but in that he lives, he lives unto God.

5    Likewise reckon you also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin:

but alive unto God, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

6    Christ is risen from the dead:

and become the first fruits of them that slept.

7     F or since by man came death:

by man came also the resurrection of the dead.

8     For as in Adam all die:

even so in Christ shall all be made alive.

Thanks be to God

All stand for the Acclamation and Gospel reading.

Alleluia, Alleluia!

Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us;

Therefore let us keep the feast!

Alleluia!

The Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to:

Matthew

✝✝✝

This is the Gospel of the Lord.

Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ

Well – the Day of Resurrection has finally dawned, and we are immediately confronted with the essential truth of Christianity. ‘If Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith also is vain’, as we’re told by Paul in his Epistle to the Corinthians.  Without the Resurrection we would have no faith, and pure and simple, there would be no Church!

Yet despite its fundamental and overriding importance, Easter has never enjoyed anything like the popularity amongst our fellow human beings as has Christmas, with which everybody, believers or unbelievers alike, seems to be able so readily to identify.  The birth of a baby is such a common feature of life that we all have not the slightest difficulty in being able to enter fully into the spirit of such a joyfulevent.

Not so though betrayal, crucifixion and death – all rather ugly, unattractive concepts that we might well all prefer to shut out of our minds.  Yet we spent the whole of the six weeks of Lent in general, and Passiontide in particular, preparing ourselves for exactly such a scenario.  All so very different from the anticipation of Advent and the birth of a Saviour, who was received with such joy by both Jew and Gentile alike!

How fickle people are – there was some of this self-same joy on Palm Sunday, when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, to great acclamation, and shouts of ‘Hosanna’.  For a long time the Jews had, quite understandably,  been looking for a leader who would overthrow their hated Roman occupiers and ‘restore the Kingdom to Israel’, and for one brief moment some of them at least thought that the time for this was at hand.  Yet it was these same crowds who, only a few days later, were then shouting ‘Crucify him’ and baying for his death, so that the mass murderer Barabbas could be released in his stead!  In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus wrestled with his own conscience, as to whether he could go through with God’s plan – one of the many signs of his own true and complete humanity.  Earlier still, Satan had tempted him in the wilderness to ‘take the easy path’ and perform a few miracles so that all might believe – no need to embark on the road to an excruciating, agonising death!  On Good Friday Christians follow Jesus to his earthly end, on the cross at Golgotha, where the vast majority of those who were present must have been convinced that all that ‘the master’ had taught, had been no more than an illusion – a cruel deceit! ‘It is finished’, they had heard from the lips of Our Lord himself!

Then we come to today’s gospel passage, where the two Mary’s came to the tomb and found it empty, only to be told by the angel, ‘He is not here, he is risen’!  They were then to go to tell Peter, and the other disciples, that Jesus would go ahead of them to Galilee, where they would meet him, just as he has promised.

John’s gospel gives a slightly different account of the event, in that Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and, finding the stone rolled away, went back to tell Peter and ‘another disciple’ what they had discovered, and so the three of them returned to the tomb.  There it was that Jesus made the first of his appearances, with Mary at first mistaking him for the gardener.  In the evening of that same day, Jesus appeared on the road to Emmaus and was recognised ‘in the breaking of bread’ – the firstcelebration of the Eucharist after its institution at the Last Supper!

Unlike Christmas, the celebration of which bears no resemblance whatsoever to the actual timing of the event, Easter is entirely different and pinpointed by the Jewish observance of the Feast of the Passover.  It is in Spring, a time above all of new life and rebirth, and so many of the symbols of Easter are an ever-present reminder of that – the egg, and of course all-importantly, the Pascal Lamb.  In countries further to the North than we are here in Thailand, the signs of new life are bursting out all around, with the trees coming into leaf and the nesting birds hatching their young.  Our primitive ancestors were very afraid of the death brought about by winter, and there was the ever-present fear that the spring would not return, hence their celebration of Yuletide, on which the Feast of Christmas was superimposed by the early Church.  Now with the spring, life has returned to the earth in all its abundance, and Christ has destroyed death by rising again from the dead, and so with it we have the hope and promise of Eternal life in Christ Jesus.

A great personal friend of mine, Bishop Michael Perham of Gloucester, who finally succumbed to a brain tumour five years ago,  on Easter Monday, used to say of Christians, ‘We are an Easter people, and ‘alleluia’ is our song’! The whole purpose of ‘giving up’ the use of the ‘A’ word for Lent must surely be so that we can proclaim it with unfettered joy now, in this moment of triumph.  In the rather bland, Anglo-Saxon culture in which some of us grew up, we never really have captured the true joy of the Resurrection in the way that the Greeks do.  As they pass one another on Easter morning, the greeting is ‘Christ is risen’ and the reply, ‘He is risen indeed’.  Our beloved Father Theo, with his background as an Orthodox priest before becoming an Anglican, you will readily recall, was very keen on our returning his ‘Christos eneste’ with ‘Alicos eneste’, although unfortunately this often went off rather at ‘half cock’ – either because folks either couldn’t rememberthe response, or else were simply too embarrassed to shout it out at the tops of their voices!

Inhibited though we might well be, hopefully this is not a reflection of any lack of joy in our hearts.  Our Lord Jesus Christ died for you and for me, for each and every one of us, so that we might live eternally, in and through him. In dying he conquered death, and in rising to new life, opened the gate of everlasting salvation.  No other religion makes such a promise, though as I’ve said on a number of previous occasions, that is not in my view the same things as saying that only Christians can be saved.  Nevertheless, ours is a very special and blessed inheritance – let us pray that we may, each and every one of us, have the courage to live out the joy of the risen Lord in our lives, and never be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ Crucified, not just this Eastertide, but always.  Amen.

Please stand for the Nicene Creed.

Let us together affirm the faith of the Church. ✝

We believe in one God,

the Father, the Almighty,

maker of heaven and earth,

of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,

the only Son of God,

eternally begotten of the Father,

God from God, Light from Light,

true God from true God,

begotten, not made,

of one Being with the Father.

Through him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation

he came down from heaven:

was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,

and became truly human.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;

he suffered death and was buried.

On the third day he rose again

in accordance with the Scriptures;

he ascended into heaven

and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,

who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified,

who has spoken through the prophets.

We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

We look for the resurrection of the dead,

✝ and the life of the world to come.  Amen.

Let us pray for the world and for the Church:

Prayers of intercession are now said and at the end of each prayer the priest says:

Lord in your mercy,

Hear our prayer.

or

Lord hear us,

Lord graciously hear us

At the conclusion of the prayers the priest says:

Almighty God, who has promised to hear our prayers.

Grant that what we have asked in faith we may by your grace receive, through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

 Jesus said: Come to me all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

or

God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

THE CONFESSION:

God is steadfast in love and infinite in mercy, welcoming sinners and inviting them to the Lord’s table.

Let us confess our sins in penitence and faith, confident in God’s forgiveness.

Merciful God, our maker and our judge, we have sinned against you in thought, word and deed, and in what we have failed to do: we have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbours as ourselves; we repent and are sorry ✊ for all ✊ our sins ✊, Father forgive us, strengthen us to love and obey you in newness of life; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen

**(Note: all are encouraged to strike their breast 3 times following the lead of Fr. David as he utters the words: ‘sorry for all our sins’)**

Almighty God, who has promised forgiveness to all who turn to him in faith, pardon you ✝ and set you free from all your sins, strengthen you in all goodness and keep you in eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

THE PEACE:

The congregation stands.

We are the Body of Christ.

His Spirit is with us.

The peace of the Lord be always with you.

And also with you.

Please greet each other with a sign of peace.

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 join the victor strain.

Now let the heavens be joyful,
And earth her song begin,
The round world keep high triumph,
And all that is therein;
Let all things seen and unseen
Their notes of gladness blend,
For Christ the Lord hath risen,
Our joy that hath no end.

THE OFFERTORY

Blessed are you, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have these gifts to share. Accept and use our offerings for your glory and the service of your kingdom.

Blessed be God forever.

 Let us pray

We do not presume to come to your table, merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your manifold and great mercies.  We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table, but you are the same Lord whose nature is always to have mercy. Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of your dear son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that we may evermore dwell in him and he in us.  Amen.