EASTER 2

“As the Father has sent me, so I send you...”

Readings:

Acts 2: 14a, 22-32 – God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses...

John 20: 19-31 – How blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have come to believe.

It’s wonderful that we should have these readings today, on a day when we’re going to be spending some time thinking about our plans for the future – some big and ambitious plans, not without risk and maybe a little bit scary – because these readings remind us that all this began with a tiny group of people, fewer than us. We find them in our Gospel huddled together, terrified out of their wits, and with the door shut. The door is shut because they’re afraid of the big hostile world outside.

Not only are they a tiny group to be charged with being sent to the world with Christ’s life-giving Gospel; but they’re about the least likely people you could pick for starting anything important, let alone anything to change the world. But here they are and Jesus knows better than us, he knows who he wants and he knows what they’re capable of. Remember, “you did not choose me, but I chose you”. And he chooses them still. He chooses them now. And as he stands among them, he breathes his Spirit upon them and sends them.

Just imagine Jesus standing among us now and he breathes his Spirit on you, on me, on all of us. Why would he do that do that, why does he do that (because I believe that’s what happens here)? Well, Peter’s experience is the answer to that. Jesus breathes his Spirit on us so that we, like Peter, can go from this upper room into the market place of the world and proclaim the Risen Jesus for a world that needs a renewed faith in new beginnings, a renewed faith in the power of forgiveness, a renewed faith that death is not the last word, a renewed faith that each and every human being is loved from eternity, made in the image of God and made for joy.

This dissolving of locked doors, this breathing of the Spirit, this sending gives the Church its essential energy and its raison d’être. Unless the doors are flung open and we’re energised to share our Good News, we’re just a little huddle of people for whom, if I can put it this way, the Resurrection hasn’t really happened, or it’s not happened yet, or, like Thomas, we’re not entirely convinced. As Thomas might say, show me the small print, prove to me that everything’s ok, unless I see the evidence don’t ask me to take the risk of believing.

The Church today is often at risk of staying in the Upper Room and keeping the doors shut. It seems like an unfriendly world out there, with militant atheism and the church just regarded as a joke at best or as the source of many evils at worst (a charge to which we have to plead guilty at least in part). So maybe the best thing is to just hunker down and wait for people to realise what they’re missing until they come knocking on our shut doors? Maybe, or maybe not.

This week, this St George’s Day, was the 25^th anniversary of my priesting. It came so close to Easter this year I nearly forgot myself; but as I reflect on what that means for me, I can think of almost every church I’ve served in and every one has had a litany of what I call “used to’s”. This goes like this: “we used to have a choir, we used to have curates, we used to have a youth club, we used to have a Sunday school...” and so on. ‘Kind of depressing. So much loss, almost as if with every one the church has closed another door; but equally in every one, in every church I’ve known I’ve seen new doors opening. Because always at some point the living Christ is sensed breathing his Spirit anew, and people, maybe a little bit fearfully at first, say: Yes, Lord, and open a new door.

Could that be happening for us? I believe so. When I ask the Lord: why St Anne’s, Lord? and why me? And why, now? - any of us could ask that question and we should. Why am I here in this moment, now? Why this group of people, with our gifts, our needs, our quirkiness, our need for love and our ability to give love – why us? It is because the Lord has need of us. All of us. We’re the Upper Room disciples, just the right people, the best people, for the Lord to breathe on and send.

We are not here, to be the last ones to worship and witness here, to be the ones who turn out the lights for the last time and lock the doors for the last time. We’re the ones the Lord calls to take the risks of change, which is everything from our bright cheery new signboards to the risks of trying to stay open more during the week so that the children of God in this town, whenever they want to, might meet God here, as we do, and be blessed as we are.

The message we have to share won’t always be understood. When we put up new signs at my last Church, St Ninian’s and they were in bright red with bold gold lettering, one old lady who lived opposite the church phoned up and asked: “Have you opened a Chinese restaurant over there?” Not all our communication will be understood, but renewing our buildings to encourage more community use – more concerts, art displays, meetings and all the rest – are for us an act of faith for our next century. And the same is true for ideas about us drawing physically closer to the altar and to each other in worship – a visible symbol of the real bonds of love that draw us to God and to one another here as the Living Body of Christ. There is real love here and we touch it in our care for each other. This is a very special worshipping community and I want that to be seen and felt by anyone who walks in here to join us.

This is probably the boldest act of faith for our congregation since our Victorian predecessors met with doubtless no small anxiety to discuss the building of an Episcopal church here in Dunbar.

This is that big a moment. But staying in the Upper Room, everything just as it is, is simply not an option. Growth, change, being turned upside down fairly regularly, being breathed on by the same Spirit by which God created everything in the first place, then being sent – apostles, every single one of us – all these are in the job description of the people of God. Even Thomas gets it in the end. And Jesus loves him even if it’s taken Thomas a while to get on board. But Jesus says: How blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe; how blessed are those who take the risk. As the Father sent me, so I send you. 

EASTER SUNDAY

CHRIST, THE VICTOR

I remember once looking at some school assembly material for Easter, and I was interested to see that the suggested visual aid for Easter Day was a pair of Nike trainers. To anyone who knows me it won’t come as a surprise that I don’t own a pair of Nike trainers. But the point is that the word Nike goes with the picture on the front cover of our service sheet today, because Nike is Greek for victory. Just think of all those amazing ads for world famous athletes racing headlong for victory. Today Christ is victor, and the picture shows him with one foot on the edge of the tomb, almost poised to spring into this new life and hit the ground running.

Speaking as someone who loathed every school sports day I can ever remember – last in the egg-and-spoon race, last in the sack race, last in the three-legged race and every other wretched race – this isn’t an image that works for me very easily. That is, it doesn’t work if Jesus has done this for himself – like those kids we can all remember in school who were brilliant at everything, almost as if there was nothing to it. Resurrection? No sweat!

If this is how it works, then there’s no hope for me. I’m stuck at the starting line; I’m dead in the tomb. But this isn’t how it happened. And the Bible is absolutely specific so we don’t miss the point. Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. God RAISED Jesus from the dead. The God who says “This is my Beloved”, his whisper of love was again heard in the darkness of the tomb. Rise up, my Jesus, rise up my Beloved. Resurrection begins from within, not by flexing your muscles, but by hearing the Word that speaks everything into life, including you.

Not being able to keep up in the race of life is something many of us experience, that sense of being left behind, stuck. It is a kind of death, a tomb. But isn’t it most people’s experience that it is only the loving voice of another that can raise you up and get you moving again?

The Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore expressed the despair of Mary Magdalene when she thinks everything is over, or of any of us when it seems like your life has come to a dead end. “I thought that my voyage had come to its end at the last limits of my power, that the path before me was closed, that provisions were exhausted and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity. But I find that thy will knows no end in me. When old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.”

For me that just says so beautifully how new life breaks out inside us like a spring of living water. We can’t do it for ourselves (although we can often do it for others). It’s simply a gift, a mystery and an unexpected joy. God’s will knows no end in Jesus; God’s will knows no end in Mary Magdalene; and God’s will knows no end in you, or me.

Sadly this isn’t a transformation that will turn you into an Olympic athlete. But it can turn you into the YOU that maybe you’re longing to be. The risen Jesus in our picture still bears his wounds – the very tokens of his failure and dereliction. They haven’t vanished, God hasn’t magicked them away. Because they’re part of him, part of the road he’s travelled – indeed, our old hymns describe them as his “trophies”, And it’s the same with our wounds. They’re part of the person who is you, part of your dignity and worth – part of the new person, still being created, brought to life by the calling of your name.

The stricken Mary Magdalene, blinded by her own tears, burdened by a lifetime of rejection, is raised up by one word: “Mary!” And this is her moment of victory. Because this woman, a woman, a woman with a past, becomes the herald of the Resurrection. She’s first past the post, first to utter the words: “I have seen the Lord!” Hearing her name, spoken in love, is enough to get Mary moving, to give her a purpose and a mission and something to live the rest of her life for.

And this is Christ’s gift to us. God speaks your name with love today; he crowns all your failures and mine with victory; and he calls us to set off into the rest of our lives like sprinting athletes. So we lace up our spiritual Nikes and we run, into our futures, into a new day, into a new country filled with wonders. 

MAUNDY THURSDAY

“A NEW COMMANDMENT”

  

Today the Queen will be entering Blackburn Cathedral for the Royal Maundy ceremony. It’s a ritual dating back centuries where the monarch, remembering whose servant she is (as the Prayer Book tells us), gives out little bags of silver coins to pensioners – one for every year of her age and to the same number of recipients. The word “Maundy” derives from the Latin “Novum Mandatum”, a new commandment I give unto you... that you love one another as I have loved you.

So remembering the warning of Jesus to James and John when they ask for thrones in the kingdom, that “the rulers of the heathen lord it over them and make their authority felt, but it must not be so among you”, the Queen will act out symbolically what Jesus tells his disciples: “for the Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”.

If the disciples didn’t hear that the first time, then now, in the Upper Room, they must. Here the king of kings lays divinity aside, takes up the towel and washes feet. He offers the hospitality of his love, the hospitality of God, the washing of feet for the weary guest, the honoured guest, the beloved guest. The guest who is Peter. The guest who is you and me.

Brushing all protestations aside Jesus insists it must be like this. Because by this maybe they’ll finally understand just what kind of king he is, and what he asks of them and of us as well. I have left you an example that you should do for others as I have done for you.

Just imagine how it must have been in that Upper Room, the intensity of it – an atmosphere of fear and love, and it’s been building up for days, even weeks. From the moment Jesus set his face towards Jerusalem it’s all been leading to this night and what lies beyond. In the house of Martha, Mary and Lazarus, earlier in the week Jesus has had his feet anointed by Mary, and Judas has pretty much revealed himself for what he is: “What a waste. This ointment should have been sold and the money given to the poor!” But Jesus rebukes him: “This anointing is for my burial”.

So by now who could possibly doubt that Jesus is set on a collision course with the powers of this world, the powers of darkness? And beyond this Upper Room darkness waits, the anguish of Gethsemane, arrest, torture, Pilate and Herod and Caiaphas – the scene is set and the cast are waiting to play their parts.

Only what takes place in this room will be remembered and celebrated for ever. Before Jesus falls into Pilate’s hands he shows what real power looks like – the power that turns itself inside out to become a slave and washes the feet of the poor. For a world obsessed with the body, preserving its perfection, health and beauty, he takes simple bread and breaks it and says: this is what will happen to me, to my body, for you – and for you for all time. This God holds nothing back. As the writer to the Hebrews says: "he did not cling to his equality with God, but emptied himself..." He empties himself and gives himself. And he did it, does it, in such a way that this meal is offered, celebrated, loved and reverenced, even adored, at all times in all places. Somewhere in the world in every moment, a priest, a minister, lifts bread and offers it to God and says those words: "This is my body".

Last year the Pope memorably washed the feet of prisoners, including the feet of a woman and a Muslim, washed them and kissed them. Today the Queen, who knows the cost of service in a very different way, makes her own act of humility, again, "remembering whose servant she is". Because this is the service of love in which we are all included and to which we're all invited. God serves me today, and you – then asks us to do the same for each other.

TUESDAY IN HOLY WEEK

PRAYERS

AT THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

We adore you, O Christ, and we bless you,

because by your holy Cross you have redeemed the world!

The Cross, laid out on the chancel floor in St Anne's and surrounded by candles, was the focus for our prayers tonight. To the foot of the Cross we brought our prayers for the world, for our loved ones, for all in need and for ourselves. A blessed Holy Week to all from everyone at St Anne's.

LENT 5 PASSION SUNDAY

“BREATHE UPON THESE AND THEY SHALL LIVE”

Readings:

Ezekiel 37: 1-14 – Come from the four winds, O breath.

John 11: 1-45 – See how he loved him.

“Our bones are dried up and our hope is lost, and we are cut off completely”. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died”.

Why is it that death seems such an affront to us? After all the millions of years we’ve been around you’d have thought we’d be used to it by now. But we’re not. It still comes as a shock, we’re hardly ever ready and everything in us seems to rebel and say this isn’t how the story’s supposed to end. Surely God can write a better ending than this.

You don’t get much better than Ezekiel’s vision of prophesying, summoning the life-giving wind, the very breath of God from the four corners of the earth. It’s Indiana Jones stuff, a cataclysmic climax to Israel’s drama. No matter what their failures and their turning away and their breaking of the Covenant, God isn’t done with them. Flesh for the bones, skin covering the flesh, breath entering into Israel. There’s no doubt who’s in charge here, no doubt who writes this script, directs this drama. No time for a chorus of “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones” because hear the Word of the Lord and God, with a breath, puts Israel back on their feet.

So many situations look like that in our world: our hope is lost and we are cut off. There’s real reason for despair in our world: From Afghanistan to Syria, from the grief of the many families of passengers on that lost Malaysian airliner to the grief of one family when their lovely daughter is victim to a freak accident at school. But the hope we look for, although we ourselves can seldom see it at the time, is that God, the best storyteller ever, hasn’t finished any of our stories, neither of the living nor of the dead; neither of what we see happening in this world nor in what we hope for in the world to come.

I always remember an elderly Irish nun standing by the bedside of a family member of mine who was near his end, and her just looking down at him so tenderly and saying: “Ah, to be sure; we’re not meant to die”.

And that, I think, is the rumour that exists in all of our hearts and minds. And it’s certainly there in the hearts and minds of Martha and Mary. Martha is caught between what she knows with her mind: I know that my brother will rise again in the resurrection on the last day (a theological idea, if you like), and what her heart is telling her, that this Jesus – the friend she told off for letting her lazy sister off with the household chores, the friend she’s just rebuked for taking so long to get here – this Jesus in some way is the ending. And to that stirring in her heart, he puts the words: “I am the Resurrection and the life. Do you believe this?” And Martha, who can scarcely understand what this can possibly mean, says: “Yes, Lord”.

It’s that “Yes, Lord” that Christians say in spite of the way things are, in spite of losing people we love and seeing the world full of injustice and hatred and cruelty. We look at it all, and we still say: Yes, Lord, I believe. Or as my Irish nun put it, “To be sure, we’re not meant to die.”

And Jesus knows this and is moved to the depths of his being by seeing what grief and loss do to us, Mary and her friends weeping by the tomb. And Jesus himself weeps. God in flesh cries our tears. Imagine. But he needs to, to know how we feel when the world seems to come to an end for us. He wept and the Jews said: “See, how he loved him”. God knows, in Jesus God feels. This is the meaning of Emmanuel, God-with-us, or it means nothing at all.

But if the story were to end here with the raising of Lazarus that would still be no use to us, because Lazarus will die again as we all do. Another chapter of the story is needed if God’s purpose in Jesus is to be fulfilled.

At the foot of the Cross and at another tomb one day soon people will weep for the Jesus who wept. His identification with us, his being one of us only is completed on the Cross. Only on the Cross does Jesus know what it means to be us, to be vulnerable, weak, afraid and in pain. Here Jesus the healer becomes Jesus the broken One; here Jesus who prays and God answers, becomes Jesus who prays: “My God, my God, why?” and God is silent. Then he’s one of us, then he knows.

But the story’s still not finished, because just as at the tomb of Lazarus, there will be another rolling away of the stone; and the voice of the Father will call him back into life, and the graveclothes will be left behind and Jesus will be reunited with his Father, in love and in glory. And so shall we.

Come from the four winds and breathe on these bones that they may live. I am the Resurrection and the Life, says Jesus. This is our hope, that our suspicion that death isn’t the end is true. God spoke us into being, breathed us into being out of dust at the beginning, and in Jesus he shows he can and he will do it again. Easter isn’t quite here yet, but in Christian hearts the rumour of Easter is never far away. Emmanuel, God with us, God for us, calling us always into life.

"LOVE IN THE LETTING GO"

MOTHERING SUNDAY

30^th March 2014 LENT 4

“LOVE IN THE LETTING GO”

Readings:

1 Samuel 1: 20-28 – For this child I prayed... I have lent him to the Lord.

John 19: 25-27 – Son behold your mother; woman behold your son.

What does it mean to be a wife and mother these days? It’s not so long since Good Housekeeping magazine seriously put forward the following for young women as what they called “The Good Wife’s Guide”. This was quoted in a Sunday a few years ago:

1.      Have dinner ready. Most men are hungry when they come home and the prospect of a good meal is part of the welcome needed.

2.      Prepare yourself. Touch up your make-up. Put a ribbon in your hair.

3.      Light a fire. Your husband will feel that he has reached a haven of rest and order. After all, catering for his comfort will provide you with immense personal satisfaction.

4.      At the time of his arrival eliminate all noise of the washer, dryer or vacuum. Encourage the children to keep quiet.

5.      Greet him with a warm smile. Let him talk first. Remember, his topics of conversation are much more important than yours.

6.      Don’t complain if he’s late, or even if he stays out all night.

7.      Arrange his pillow and take of his shoes. Speak in a low soothing voice.

8.      Don’t question his judgement or integrity. Remember, he is master of the house. You have no right to question him.

9.      A good wife always knows her place.

And the paper concluded with a final 21^st century a word of advice for men: Don’t try this at home.

It’s not so unbelievable when I come to remember how my grandmother treated my grandfather: dinner on the table the minute he appeared home from work and he probably never cooked a meal or lifted a duster in his life. But there was a mutuality about their life together. He worked six days a week as most men did, long hours of hard physical work. They complemented each other. And the nurturing wasn’t just one sided either. My grandfather made wooden toys for his grandchildren, including me; he kept a garden that was a delight for the whole neighbourhood, told us stories and taught me to draw sitting on his knee.

Women and men are both equally called to nurture, to care and to send children into the world believing in their gifts, and an absolute loveableness that nothing can take away.

This the motherly, fatherly love of God, was revealed to Mother Julian of Norwich in her hermit’s cell in 1373. “As surely as God is our Father, so also he is our Mother. Therefore he needs must feed us. The mother may give her child to suck her milk, but our precious Mother Jesus, he may feed us with himself, and does full courteously and full tenderly with the blessed sacrament of his body and blood that is precious food of very life. For he in all this uses the true office of a kind nurse, that has nothing else to do, but to attend about the salvation of her child”.

This is the love Jesus means when he says: Jerusalem, O Jerusalem, how often would I have taken you under my wings as a mother hen with her chicks and you would not let me.

Motherly, fatherly love, God’s and ours embraces the pain as well as the joy of this kind of loving. We see this in Hannah. Imagine wanting a child so desperately, and then in faith and trust handing him over to some old priest of the Temple for the rest of his life. How much trust to think that God’s love might be even greater than her own and let him go?

And Mary shows the same trust. She watches her Jesus, this miracle child, leave her to walk into a world which will receive him not. She doesn’t always understand. Like all Mums she suffers some horrendous put-downs from her wayward boy: Lost in the Temple – “Know you not that I must be about my Father’s business?” (precocious or what?); at the wedding at Cana when she wants him to do something about the wine problem – “Woman, my time has not yet come.” (but he does it anyway); when she sends a posse of relatives to save him from himself because the family, quote, thinks he is out of his tiny mind – “Who are my mother, my brothers, my sisters? Those who hear the Word of God and do it!”

But whether she gets it or not, her love stays the course and when all the macho men with the swords are vanished (Peter with all his bluster and all the rest), there she is at the foot of the Cross. From the crib to the Cross, there’s no shaking off this mother. She’s there for the long haul, through life or death, whatever God sends.

This is the wonder of this kind of loving. Like holding a butterfly in your hands you daren’t hold it too tightly or you’ll bruise its wings and crush it, and sooner or later you have to release it. The poet C. Day Lewis catches this in a moment of bitter sweet insight watching his son go off to school one day:

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day –

A sunny day with leaves just turning,

The touch-lines new-ruled – since I watched you play

Your first game of football, then, like a satellite

Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

           

Behind a scatter of boys. I can see

You walking away from me towards the school

With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free

Into a wilderness, the gait of one

Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away

Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,

Has something I never quite grasp to convey

About nature’s give-and-take – the small, the scorching

Ordeals which fire one’s irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so

Gnaws at my mind still.  Perhaps it is roughly

Saying what God alone could perfectly show –

How selfhood begins with a walking away,

And love is proved in the letting go.

He’s right. This is Godly love. This is the Father who lets his Son leave his side to enter a world like ours to embrace his suffering, his adventure, his destiny. This is Hannah, with her heart almost standing still, letting go of Samuel, child of her dreams and her prayers. This is Mary letting go of her son, and her Son, from the very Cross letting go of his mother into the arms of his friend. The last act of Jesus is to create a new family: Son behold your mother, woman behold your son. This is the love we know that breaks our hearts, empties our bank balances and fills us with the joy of love, human and divine. May God bless all the families of the earth and your family today.