In the opening verse of our passage from the epistles, the apostle Paul writes, “Now I would remind you, brothers and sisters, of the good news....”
That might well also be the opening line of our sermons this Sunday. After all, it is Easter. The calendar compels us to return to the foundation and the heart of the gospel message. And the people who will fill our pews this Sunday — some of them barely familiar to us since we last saw them on Christmas Eve — already know what we’re going to tell them.
I sometimes wonder at the challenge faced by the first generations of Christian evangelists: Paul and others who traveled the Mediterranean world with the good news when it was still news. In our day, however, though heaven knows that the folks in our culture don’t really know much about the…