Sermon quotes on easter
Karl Barth
The Easter message tells us that our enemies—sin, the curse, and death—are beaten. Ultimately they can longer start mischief. They still behave as though the game were not decided, the battle not fought; we must still reckon with them, but fundamentally we must cease to fear them anymore.
Robert Brault
Good Friday, and again we are reminded to never lose hope — or at least give it the weekend.
Phillips Brooks
Let every man and woman count himself immortal. Let him catch the revelation of Jesus in his resurrection. Let him say not merely, “Christ is risen,” but “I shall rise.”
Frederick Buechner
And now brothers, I will ask you a terrible question, and God knows I ask it also of myself. Is the truth beyond all truths, beyond the stars, just this: that to live without him is the real death, that to die with him the only life?
Frederick Buechner
Remember Jesus of Nazareth, staggering on broken feet out of the tomb toward the Resurrection, bearing on his body the proud insignia of the defeat which is victory, the magnificent defeat of the human soul at the hands of God.
Billy Crystal
Two thousand years ago Jesus is crucified, three days later he walks out of a cave and they celebrate with chocolate bunnies and marshmallow Peeps and beautifully decorated eggs. I guess these were things Jesus loved as a child.”
Still Foolin’ ‘Em: Where I’ve Been, Where I’m Going, and Where the Hell Are My Keys
Emily Dickinson
…How still the Landscape stands!
How nonchalant the hedge!
As if the “Resurrection”
Were nothing very strange!
A Lady red-amid the Hill
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Well the prophecy was kept;
Christ-“first fruit of them that slept”-
Rose with victory-circled brow;
So believing one, shalt thou.
An Easter Ode
Evan Esar
Easter is the only time when it’s perfectly safe to put all your eggs in one basket.
Clarence Hall
If Easter says anything to us today, it says this: You can put truth in a grave, but it won’t stay there. You can nail it to a cross, wrap it up in winding sheets, and shut it up in a tomb, but it will rise!
Carl Knudsen
The story of Easter is the story of God’s wonderful window of divine surprise.
Martin Luther
Christ lay in death’s bonds
given over for our sins,
He has risen again
and brought us life . . .
It was a strange battle,
that death and life waged,
life claimed the victory,
it devoured death.
The scripture had prophesied this,
how one death gobbled up the other,
a mockery has been made out of death.
Hallelujah!,
Christ Lag In Todesbanden
Martin Luther King Jr
Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in springtime.
Henry Morris
The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the crowning proof of Christianity. If the resurrection did not take place, then Christianity is a false religion. If it did take place, then Christ is God and the Christian faith is absolute truth.
John Henry Newman
Haunting gloom and
flitting shades,
Ghastly shapes, away!
Christ is rising,
and pervades
Highest Heaven with day.
He with His bright spear
the night
Dazzles and pursues:
Earth wakes up,
and glows with light
Of a thousand hues.
“Lauds—Wednesday”
Watchman Nee
Our old history ends with the cross; our new history begins with the resurrection.
John O’Donohue
We ask that streams of Easter light might flow into the intimacy and privacy of our hearts this morning, to heal us and encourage us and enable us to make again a new beginning.”
Pope Francis
We proclaim the resurrection of Christ when his light illuminates the dark moments of our existence.
N.T. Wright
Easter was when Hope in person surprised the whole world by coming forward from the future into the present.
Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, HarperOne.
Pope John Paul II
Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.
Dorothy Sayers
The story of Passion-Tide and Easter is the story of the winning of that freedom and of that victory over the evils of Time. The burden of the guilt is accepted (“He was made Sin”), the last agony of alienation from God is passed through (Eloi Eloi, lama sabachthani) the temporal Body is broken and remade; and time and Eternity are reconciled in a Single Person. There is no retreat here to the Paradise of primal ignorance; the new Kingdom of God is built upon the foundation of spiritual experience. Time is not denied; it is fulfilled. “I am the food of the full-grown.”
“Strong Meat,” Creed or Chaos, 1949
Alexander Schmemann
Thus on Easter we celebrate Christ’s Resurrection as something that happened and still happens to us. For each one of us received the gift of that new life and the power to accept it and to live by it. It is a gift which radically alters our attitude toward everything in this world, including death. It makes it possible for us joyfully to affirm: “Death is no more!” Oh, death is still there, to be sure and we still face it and someday it will come and take us. But it is our whole faith that by His own death Christ changed the very nature of death, made it a passage—a “passover,” a “Pascha”—into the Kingdom of God, transforming the tragedy of tragedies into the ultimate victory. “Trampling down death by death,” He made us partakes of His Resurrection. This is why at the end of the Paschal Matins we say: “Christ is risen and life reigneth! Christ is risen and not one dead remains in the grave!”
Source Unknown
Egg hunts are proof that your children can find things when they really want.
John Stott
We live and die; Christ died and lived!
Robert E. Webber
Easter Sunday is the most important Sunday. It is the Sunday of all Sundays. It is the day of the new beginning of the entire cosmos, the day of resurrection.
In our worship we must be careful not to reduce our message to the Easter fact only. The Easter fact must include the message this fact proclaims: God makes all things new. It must also include the message that we have been raised with Christ. Calling God’s people to die to sin and rise to the new life is central not only to Easter day but to the Easter season.”
Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality Through the Christian Year
Charles Wesley
Christ the Lord is risen today, sons of men and angels say. Raise your joys and triumphs high; sing, ye heavens and earth reply.
Warren Wiersbe
Easter is the truth that turns a church from a museum into a ministry.
N.T. Wright
There is no form of early Christianity known to us- though there are some that have been invented by ingenious scholars- that does not affirm at its heart that after Jesus’ shameful death God raised him to life again.”
The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering who Jesus Was and Is, InterVarsity Press, p. 126.
Still Looking for inspiration?
Consider checking out our illustrations page on Easter.