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Easter - hidden depths and fresh understandings
 | Sunday 27th March 2005
Easter Sunday - Andrew
Forget the pernickety detail that is doctrine. Forget the nit-picking particularities of dogma and creeds and the historic formularies of the Church of England.
It’s Easter Day: abandon all of those things and hold on instead to the stories. Stories of faith that are full of ambiguity and hidden depths and fresh understandings.
The story of Good Friday and Easter. The stories in the Bible of love and war, of lust and peace. These are tales to be told and retold, stories to help us make sense of the world today.
We’ll come back to the story of death and resurrection in a few minutes’ time. But first, we’re going to pause for a moment to think about family stories.
Baptism is one of those times for family get-togethers. And when family and friends get together, those who are absent are acknowledged with sadness, and stories are remembered and told.
Almost always, there is one person in the family who has an almost fictional take on history. Who is unafraid to make imaginative leaps into the remembered past, who provides details that no one else can recall – embroidered details, mischievous embellishments, surprise bits and pieces, to gently mock and embarrass.
A family needs such a hooligan – to push the rest of us into a good remembering. Because, family stories are part of our life blood, they are part of what makes us who we are.
As one generation dies, so the next become the keepers of the family stories. As Thandeka grows us, she will hear the stories and learn them. She is, already, part of them. The story of today, of her baptism (and the before and after), will be told – who is here, who is unable to be here, whether or not she cried and so on.
Comparisons will be made with Brandon’s baptism, as that story is once again retold.
She and her brother will be told the stories of her parents’ childhood and growing up and of their parents.
Stories that will be brought out like spring flowers: to blossom and fade, only to reappear as the seasons turn, each time the same but a little different. Each time adding to the picture of who and what we are – the bits of fiction to be attended to, the accuracy changing over time.
And, it’s no different with the stories in the Bible, the story of Good Friday and Easter.
One example, from Good Friday. And, I make no excuse for talking about Good Friday on Easter Day: the cross is central to our faith, central to our Easter Resurrection faith – in the midst of life is death, in the midst of joy there is sorrow.. and all that.
Stanley Spencer painted the crucifixion. He places us, as onlookers, behind the cross, so that we are face to face with the soldiers who are so enjoying their work, of nailing Jesus. It is deeply offensive. Well of course it is, crucifixion is awful. One of the problems with some paintings of the crucifixion is that they are so beautifully done that we miss the point.
So that’s a version of the Good Friday story. Now another. Earlier in Holy Week, Tilery School came into church to give their version of the story. Which they did through a wonderful mixture of concentration, vagueness, wonder and excitement. They sang and read and acted the words. The reception class solemnly wore their Easter bonnets and everyone waved their palm crosses at the right time.
But the moment came when Jesus was crucified. There was a cardboard cross that was just the right height for Jesus, with loops of string at either end of the cross beam for Jesus to put his hands through. It’s not easy getting your hands through those loops of string, so the soldiers helped him – gently, and carefully. Taking their time and making sure that all was in order.
Looking intently at Jesus all the while, to see that they’d got it right and that he was OK. And then left him with his arms outstretched, and every time he got a bit weary and let his arms sag, so the upright of the cross buckled.
It’s the same story, but two very different versions, different soldier-attitude. To open out and amplify our understanding.
That’s why it’s important to hold on to the stories – not to extract doctrine and dogma and rules and regulations, but somehow to listen to the same old stories afresh each time.
Thank goodness for those family members who embroider, who embellish with their imagination – after all that’s precisely what Matthew, Mark, Luke and John did.
Our baptism calling as disciples of Christ, Thandeka’s calling, is to keep on looking at the story from different angles, to keep on learning from the ambiguity, from the poetic depth of cross and resurrection. And to keep on listening and contributing to our family stories.
May God give us grace.
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Living in between-times and listening
 | Sunday 10th April 2005
The third Sunday of Easter - Andrew
We are living in a period of between-times. We are now in the lead-up to local and national elections, the pope is dead long live the pope. At least yesterday there was the end of the affair with the marriage of Camilla and Charles. So, some small closure there.
And here at the parish church, the vicar is leaving and we have the annual meetings next Sunday with elections of churchwardens, members of the deanery synod and members of the Parochial Church Council.
Living between times is deeply unsettling. Those on the road to Emmaus thought they’d hit end time, their brave new world abruptly done to death on a cross.
It wasn’t until the stranger broke the bread, that their eyes were opened and they realised that they’d surfaced into another dimension, that they were not in end time after all, but in the first stage of resurrection time. But that too turned out to be another between-time, the fifty days of Easter that takes us to Ascension Day.
And, strangely, Ascension Day this year is May the fifth, polling day, for the local and national elections.
Meantime, on 18 April, the 117 cardinals under the age of 80 will meet in conclave in the Sistine Chapel and the world will await the right sort of smoke to announce John Paul’s successor.
Meantime, the receivers (or should that be administrators) have been called in to MG Rover, the workers now trapped in a limbo that looks all set to be punctuated by fading hope, disintegrating promises and an overriding sense of helplessness. And out of that limbo, gradually, some new starts will be attempted.
Yesterday, today and tomorrow. Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter. With all the confidence and assurance that was Palm Sunday suddenly just a distant memory.
Between times can be like wandering a hall of mirrors, a looking back on ourselves, seeing reflections of our distorted selves.
The two of them are on the way to Emmaus, walking down Desolation Row, commiserating on what a tough time they’re having. Notice the focus: what an awful time that they have been having.
This guy who’d convinced them and then failed to deliver, and got himself crucified. The shock and emptiness of that bereavement. And then the women telling them that he’s not dead but alive. Our hope’s destroyed, they say, and now hysteria is pushing its way into our private grief. How are we supposed to cope, they say, their gaze locked in to the mirrors?
And along comes a stranger to show them the way. He tells them they are looking in the wrong place and redirects them to a roller coaster ride through scripture. He takes them through God’s family stories one more time.
It’s still not enough. The heartburn doesn’t set in until he breaks the bread. And, incidentally, there is no evidence that the two of them were there at the last supper – they may have heard about it, but they weren’t there. (And, if we really want to confuse ourselves, in John’s version of the gospel, there is no bread and wine, body and blood at all.)
Anyway, the stranger took the bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened. In that moment, they are pulled, out of the past, into the present. The hall of mirrors has evaporated.
In that moment their eyes are wide open.
In that moment, the stranger, the risen Christ, vanished from their sight, but their eyes remained wide open. The vision is there, not easy to hold on to, but it is there, in Emmaus.
There was a stranger who turned up here at Stockton Parish Church at the end of the three hours’ service on Good Friday. Unlike the stranger on the road to Emmaus, he didn’t rehearse the scriptures with us, because he knew we’d just done that, he didn’t break bread with us because we’d just done that, nor did he say this is my body.
But, he did place himself in our hands: he’d been refused asylum, please would we help him.
He was here for just a few minutes. But of course it was only after he had gone that the penny dropped and hearts burned.
Sometimes the risen Christ stands so clearly between us and the mirrors we gaze at, that he is unavoidable.
But in between times, in between times he’s usually not so obvious. In between we need to keep working on the dull mechanics of being clear what this building and ourselves are here for.
What we are here for is to worship God, and to serve the people on the High Street, all sorts and kinds, to serve the institutions and organisations here in the town centre, again: all sorts and kinds – without prejudice, inclusively.
That’s why we invite everyone to eat the broken bread and drink the wine outpoured.
That’s why, against all common sense, we persist with this magnificent building. This hugely expensive house of God.
That’s why we are committed to developing this church and hall the better to serve people in the town centre, to practice what we preach.
Not least with the promised rising of the new phoenix that will be the North Shore development, all of which is in this parish.
It is hugely tempting in the between time to gaze at our navels if not into the mirrors. To rely on human wisdom instead of divine foolishness.
Which brings us to the how-to-do-it of discipleship.
The studying of scripture, letting the stories echo and tell themselves.
Listening attentively to God.
Listening attentively to the stranger and to one another
The vital importance of taking next week’s annual meetings very seriously. The vital importance of talking with the people who are standing for churchwarden, deanery synod and PCC.
Finding out their understanding of God’s vision for this place. Because they are the ones that you are electing to make decisions on your behalf over the next twelve months.
May God give them and us: the courage and the grace to walk with Christ, our eyes and hearts and minds wide open to his will.
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We can turn out the light of Christ but ....
 Sunday 24th April 2005
The fifth Sunday of Easter - Andrew
Here we are, more than half way through the fifty days of Easter, season of new life, sap rising, spring sunshine, new birth and all. And what are our readings about? –
Stephen the first martyr being done to death, lynched by a crowd stirred up by religious fanatics.
And that magnificent passage from John – in my Father’s house, says Jesus, there are many rooms, many dwelling places, and I’m going there to prepare a place for you - which takes us straight back to the last funeral we attended.
Now, my guess is that what most of us focussed on in those two readings, was what St. Francis referred to as Sister Death. We are trapped in a horror-vision of Stephen’s awful, wrongful, unnecessary death. And the small detail of it: people took off their jackets and rolled up their sleeves, relishing the task they were engaged in. And piled their jackets up at the feet of fanatical Saul who was soon to become hardly less fanatical Paul.
And although John’s image is of the heavenly home with a room for each and every one of us, what comes to mind is the funeral when that was the reading. And we are straight into the mourning and upset, the unfairness of death, and the circumstance of that particular dying. We are thinking mortality. Resurrection is really the last thing on our minds – we deal with what we think we know rather than what we don’t know.
Sister Morphine and Sister Death are in charge.
The cross looms large, perhaps especially in this season of Easter. Remember the two of them walking to Emmaus on that first Easter Day, both of them locked into the finality of death, dismissing what the women had to say about Jesus being alive as mere hysteria.
And, of course, the issue here is not simply the business of our mortality – that we are born and live and die – remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return, and all that.
These stories are also about all the endings and new beginnings that make up the every day of our lives.
And, it may be that in the everyday we are also in thrall to Sister Death. Yearning for what has gone. Frustrated and disappointed that something has gone for good. The rose that never blossomed. The MG Rover sickbed, and the anger surrounding that death. Ailing and dead relationships. The list goes on.
But, that’s not what the writer of the Acts of the Apostles or of John’s version of the gospel were on about. Their focus is in the what- next: spring, new life, hope, moving forward.
Stephen’s eyes are already fixed on what lies beyond. In an echo of Jesus’s words to the soldiers who nailed him to the cross, Stephen forgives his persecutors and is already moving on, past the awfulness of his death, almost, as it were, ahead of the event itself.
And, what Jesus is quoted as saying about his Father’s house is far more complicated than the way we take it at funerals. The life immortal that we believe goes on after we die is part of the story, but it’s a story that’s also very much about the here and now. John is for ever taking us on a swirling path that is both us being taken up into God’s glory and God’s glory coming down into us.
In my Father’s house there are many rooms, many dwelling places, and I’m going there to prepare a place for you – that’s the taking up bit. But also, God finds his dwelling place in us, God is in us, Jesus Christ is in us. Jesus promises he has sent his holy spirit to dwell in us.
Here we are clunking along our mortal path, hoping to be hiked into the immortal on pain of death – and Jesus is saying that’s only part of the story. If only we can tear ourselves away from mourning the past and realise what’s already within us. New life, new beginnings, hope, risk, wonder – all bubbling around in us, if only we dare. And sometimes bursting forth anyway, whether or not we dare.
Step lightly, said Jesus who is the way, it’s never too late, make another new start. Whatever time it is, with Christ it is a brand new day, with new horizons, new possibilities that we are not yet aware of. So, for example, the man standing by the pile of coats, who’d been driving blind justice for years, but then the blinding light on the Damascus road, and his eyes were opened. The goal posts moved. And he made a new beginning. From Saul to Paul, from prosecutor to advocate.
From death to life.
On that first night flight in Argentina, back in the 1930s:
It was a dark night with only occasional scattered lights glittering like stars on the plain. Each one, in the ocean of shadows, was a sign of the miracle of consciousness. In one home, people were reading, or thinking, or sharing confidences. In another, perhaps, they were searching through space, wearying themselves with the mathematics of the Andromeda nebula.
In another they were making love. These small flames shone far apart in the landscape, demanding their fuel. Each one, in that ocean of shadows, was a sign of the miracle of consciousness… the flame of the poet, the teacher, or the carpenter. But among these living stars, how many closed windows, how many extinct stars, how many sleeping people…. From from Wind, Sand and Stars (1939) by Antoine Saint-Exupéry
We can turn out the light of Christ that is within us, hide it under a bushel, save electricity. Or we can, individually and together, be a cosmic twinkle – forever saying it’s a fair cop to Sister Death and moving on – walking in the way, the truth and the life that is the risen Christ.
May God give us grace.
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Ascension is also a time for taking stock
 Sunday 8th May 2005
Seventh Sunday after Easter - Andrew
Today we are celebrating the feast of the Ascension, we’re in the season of Ascensiontide.
Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the VE Day celebrations.
We are now waking up to what will be a third term of office for Labour and another search for another conservative leader.
And, Stockton Borough Council is now a hung council, with all the changes that that might bring about.
Ascension is also a time for taking stock – of our own selves, and also of ourselves as church.
All of these things, then, are at least part of the context in which we wonder this morning about Jesus’s cloud-ride to heaven.
And our text is from the beginning of John’s version of the gospel. Nathanael, who’d just said can anything good come out of Nazareth, is told by Jesus: very truly I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man – a text which echoes the dream that Jacob had at a crucial turning point in his life.
So, with text and context in mind, we turn to the story. And suddenly two men in white stood by them and told them what to do – the same two maybe who were also suddenly there on Easter day, stop staring into the empty tomb, they said. Why do you look for the living among the dead?
Stop gazing up into the sky, get yourselves down to earth and get on with life, they say this time. It’s a crucial turning point in the disciples’ lives. Their temptation is to be transfixed, caught in the cosmic headlights like rabbits. Which is why the men in white tell them to get moving before they get run over.
Up there is Pie in the sky - Lucy in the sky with diamonds – Blue sky thinking. Down here, life goes on.
On another occasion, high up on Transfiguration Mountain, the air thinned and time concertinaed. And Peter, James and John found themselves in the very presence of Moses and Elijah and Jesus was revealed as the Son of God.
But there was no staying high in the sky, bunnies in heaven. Cloud nine lifted and down they went, to get on with the bump and grind of everyday living.
Ascensiontide is the fulfilment of what Jesus said to Nathanael right at the beginning of his earthly ministry. Ascension-time is a Jacob’s ladder time, the bridging between mortal and immortal. In Jacob’s dream it’s the up and down travelling of angels – the ladder firmly rooted on earth and reaching into heaven.
And when Jacob woke up, when he moved from dream-time to real-time, the image remained – and that led him to say How awesome is this place. This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. And he turned his pillow stone into a pillar to God and continued on his pilgrim journey.
But also, the Jacob’s ladder that is the Ascension of Jesus to heaven, stretches back for us the church to Ash Wednesday.
The Ascension is 40 days after Easter, Ash Wednesday is 40 days before Easter. On that first day of Lent we are instructed: Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return. It’s a line from the story of Adam and Eve being thrown out of Eden, out of the Garden of Everlasting Delight.
This reminder of our mortality, that we are utterly of this world: we’re born, we live and then we die, is the bottom rung of the ladder that takes us through Lent and Holy Week to the victory of the cross and Easter resurrection.
Another forty days on from Easter and the gate of heaven is in sight. But, the wild blue beyond is not where it’s at. Why do you stand looking up towards heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way that you saw him go.
So what did they do? They were, Luke tells us, constantly devoting themselves to prayer. In other words, each of them individually and collectively were ladders between earth and heaven, here and there, human and divine.
Waiting upon God, being open to God.
It was out of that prayer ladder that the church came into being, it is out of that ladder of persistent, prayer that all faithful living is built.
Each of us is a Jacob’s ladder, with angels tramping up and down us. And that would suggest that we are both human and divine: that we have a foot in each camp – the bottom of the ladder on earth, the top in the clouds of heaven, with new life midway, at the very heart of our being.
VE Day was one of those pivotal, Easter moments. A looking back to the terrible mortality of war, the loss of so many and so much – with the hope, the looking forward to building the new Jerusalem. From rubble to prefab. From rations, eventually, to sliced bread. From the almost stolen moments of intense passion to the slow-burn of returning routine. Not all of it, it has to be said, felt like heaven on earth: around the time of VE Day there were far too many rungs of the ladder broken and missing, some of them beyond repair.
Again the elections, which of course took place on Ascension Day, last Thursday, were also pivotal, Easter moments. The has-been giving way to the might-be. The political climate, for better or for worse, has changed.
And so to ourselves, as individuals and, as this church. In need of being repointed and having our windows repaired – and that’s just ourselves.
Once again today we have walked into this very house of God, this gate of heaven, this ladder with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven coming down to us, taking us up with them.
We ourselves are ladders: we carry the risen Christ in our hearts. We are called to see Christ in others.
It’s very tempting to just stand here and stare, up into the azure blue or, more accurately, to be transfixed by dark storm clouds. But our example is those first disciples, who stopped looking up and got on with the business of prayer, of being ladders to earthly and godly traffic.
May we with them be true to our calling. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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The coming of the Holy Spirit was mind-blowing, intoxicating, he
 | Sunday 15th May 2005
Pentecost - Bridget
“Indeed these are not drunk, as you suppose – for it is only nine o’clock in the morning.” V. 15. Acts.
The coming of the Holy Spirit was mind-blowing, intoxicating, heady stuff!
When the Spirit came there was transformation. The disciples dramatically and publicly changed, in such a way that they were longer hid behind locked doors. FEAR HAD GONE.
When the Spirit comes there is joy and peace in our hearts – not just an absence of conflict and anger, but a patience that wasn’t possible before. There is harmony. We become gentle with ourselves and others. There is TRUTH. There is a great need and yearning for all these qualities in the World today, because so often we have got it all wrong and go on doing so.
The Christian life is about living in the ordinary, the getting up and getting on with it, the predictable – But never giving up the possibility of the extraordinary, the life-changing experience. (In other words – enjoy the mundane, but expect the life-shattering!)
But we have to take risks when the Holy Spirit prompts us. Look what happened to the Disciples!
Before the coming of the Holy Spirit – these were frightened men terrified of crucifixion, imprisonment; now preaching boldly, braving everything, healing the sick, raising the dead, facing a violent world that had hurt and frightened them and crucified Jesus. And yet they learnt to forgive and love those who had been responsible for all of that.
The Disciples were sitting waiting, expecting something to happen but the Holy Spirit often comes when we least expect it. Often we are concentrating very hard on doing something ordinary or difficult. But however ordinary or dramatic the situation, the Holy Spirit always comes with fire.
Let me tell you how I know that – from a vivid experience I had on Sunday 16th July 1989. I had done the intersessions in the morning, and decided to cut the privet hedge. (A bit like Queen Victoria going home from her Coronation, and bathing her pet dog!!)
I had know for some time that further commitment was going to be asked of me, but I had no idea what it would be. I just knew it was a matter of waiting. I was standing on the top step of a ladder, the hedge was a least 9 feet high, balancing precariously and leaning over , trying to reach a stray twig on next door’s side.
I was concentrating very hard – when quite suddenly I felt a firm push on my right shoulder, and turned to reprimand whoever it was; who could possibly think of such a joke, when I heard a firm voice say, “It’s the Lay Ministry for you”. Of course, no one could possibly have reached me that high up and it had never crossed my mind until that point that that was the calling.
I felt a great burning as though I was on fire and a great sense of peace and joy, exhilaration. As I turned round a long sweep of white mist disappeared round the wall. I can’t remember if I finished the hedge but, I realised I would have to go through the set system of the Church of England. I hadn’t studied for 30 years, and I questioned my physical and spiritual strength.
That evening I went to Evensong, and Alison Harrison’s sermon was about all the various people in the Old Testament who had made every excuse you could think of for not being suitable to do the work God asked them to do.
So that was the end of the doubts. God has given me all the direction and strength I needed, but I think my guardian Angels sometimes, probably often, find me a bit heavy going!!
Any calling from the Holy Spirit demands action in trust – A practical response. A coming down out of the clouds of euphoria – to face the world and the work in hand.
Look at the response of the Disciples in the Early Church. We know that 3,000 people were converted to Christianity after Peter’s address to them all. (Read the next bit in Acts
2.) But have we ever thought of the implications of this?
It was absolutely staggering. Most of them were foreign visitors for the Festival of First Fruits – 50 days after the Passover.
These coverts decided to stay in Jerusalem – with nothing. They were broke, homeless and hungry – jobless. It was almost impossible to see how the situation could be managed. But manage it they did. Church history since then has never seen anything like it again. The Church certainly cut its teeth being radical. That small bunch of believers in Jerusalem, (out of their minds with joy), shared everything they had – their homes, their money, their food.
People found jobs – they did anything – and everything was shared. They lived in the equivalent of 50 houses. One man sold his home and with the money rented three houses and bought food. Those who stayed sold the properties in their own countries. They took on any kind of work. No one knew what would happen tomorrow.
Their daily live evolved around meetings and praying constantly in Solomon’s Porch in the Temple – and working for- and sharing with others.
All this grew out of the overwhelming love of Jesus Christ and their experience of his love for them.
But today, as then, it doesn’t all stop with that special experience. We have much to learn from the response of those early Christians to each other. As someone said:
"If we do not burn with love many will die of the cold.”
We must never lose the fire!
We must never stop taking risks or forget the responsibility of being open, and vulnerable to others and new ideas; to receiving and acting on the prompting or pushing of the Holy Spirit towards other people, situations, and to the needs of the world around us – and most of all, in the months ahead – in this church.
AMEN
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