A homily for candidates and electors in any selection process

Luke 9:7-9

Now Herod the tetrarch heard of all that was done, and he was perplexed, because it was said by some that John had been raised from the dead,  by some that Eli′jah had appeared, and by others that one of the old prophets had risen. Herod said, “John I beheaded; but who is this about whom I hear such things?” And he sought to see him.

So it begins.  A weekend of seeing each other in the flesh and of hearing the clicking mineral sounds of minds being made up and the churning liquid sounds of minds being changed. 

Deborah Kerr, Julie Andrews and others might have said or, rather, sung:

“Getting to know you.  Getting to know all about you”

which might suggest that, somewhere out there, is a reservoir of facts - information, additional items and increments - which further answers to pointed questions will provide.  Under this logic, the more our delegates and parish members pump the candidates for answers to their questions, and their views on the issues delegates feel are important, the more they’ll know them.  Is that how it works?

Surely, though, there’s a difference between

“knowing that….” or

“knowing how…”

and the type of knowing we claim when we say that we “know” a person.

There could be a problem with the English language which doesn’t differentiate between

Savoir and Connaître or

Wissen and Kennen

the way other languages do.  To the English language you might need to specify the nuance that coming to know a person has a dialectical element to it.

Our anticipation

must meet with

its contradiction

so that

a new thing emerges

which is not directly the fruit of what we first believed.

I was visiting friends in Albuquerque New Mexico years ago.  I was alone in the apartment one morning  Their phone rang and, and as a guest, I let it ring.  It switched to the answering machine and what I heard next on the speaker was a political robo-call of some sort relating to the State elections which were taking place at the time.

Candidate A was rubbishing his opponent, candidate B

who, it appears, wanted to raise taxes (and was happy to let terrorists teach kindergarten) but who, most importantly, had “flip flopped” on Proposition 6 (whatever that was).  I remember thinking, at the time, that changing one’s mind was clearly considered to be a sign of weakness in a candidate for a State election. 

Why should that be? 

Perhaps candidate B had gotten the interns doing a little research and now knew more about it.  Perhaps Candidate B was tough enough to stand up to her own constituency association and her donors because, after researching the matter thoroughly, she had come to the opinion that Proposition 6 was an utter dog and needed to be opposed. 

Let’s hear it for flip floppers! 

Let’s hear it for men and women who are not so tied to first impressions, or the search for a candidate whose opinions are completely congruent with their own, that they cease to be open to sensing the candidate with whom they could build a healthy and life-giving relationship.

Facts and additional increments of information might not do that.  Reserve may not be helpful.  Expressions of personality in question-and-answer sessions, in informal conversations over coffee might well fit the bill better.

We could quite realistically, as candidates, as electors and as non-voting persons involved in the transition process in our Convocation, pray earnestly for a hearty process of loss and gain this weekend.  We should be happy with a dynamic process this weekend in which our delegates and visitors arrive at the Town Hall meetings in Paris, Munich and Rome, with their minds made up and end up needing to admit, either sheepishly or with immense pride, that they have changed their minds.

I was pleased to see today's eucharistic lectionary reading from Luke's Gospel at the beginning of a series of town hall meetings.  Herod is eager to meet Jesus and to compare his person with his reputation.  With friendlier intentions, but no less curiosity, our delegates are eager to meet you.

Come away my beloved!

The Fifteenth Sunday

after Pentecost

Proper 17 – Year B

Song of Solomon 2:8-13

The voice of my beloved! 
Look, he comes, leaping upon 
the mountains, bounding over 
the hills…..

My beloved speaks and says to me: "Arise, my love, my fair one, 
and come away;”

You’ve seen the movie.  You read the novel.  The woman debarks from the airplane, dragging her defective cabin baggage through the endless expanse of an airport on her way to domestic arrivals.  As she’s passing Gate A5 she notices the man sitting in the waiting lounge with his laptop open.  He’s a little older now but he’s still the same man she knew in another life.  His gaze shifts to the left and for an instant they lock eyes.  In a trice the lost years tumble back into being, the music of another decade, the landscape of other places, the smell of cologne, the scraps of long-forgotten words spoken between people.  Their respiration and heart rates increase.  He forgets he has a laptop open in front of him.  She forgets her suitcase is broken.  And then……

Nah.  You’ll need to wait for a future instalment of the Weekly Bob to find out how it comes out in the wash.  But if I told you, wearing my clerical collar and looking at you over the top of my specs, that what I’m working on here is an allegory of God and Israel or Christ and his Church you’d express incredulity or even disappointment. 

This is all a piece about human affections, please Father.  It’s got a pronounced sexual element to it as well, don’t you think?  We know you well enough to know you weren’t raised in a glass beaker jar.

No, you’re right, I wasn’t.  I don’t, however, think that the Song of Solomon is some early version of Nine Loves Has Nurse Susan which made its way into the Hebrew Scriptures and thence into the Christian Bible by accident or oversight.  The Rabbis made sense of it as telling the story of God and humanity.  Rabbi Akiva, in the first century of our era, is on record criticizing those who sing these verses in taverns.   The Song of Solomon forms the heart of the mystical writings of St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Avila.  A good love story?  A religious allegory?  One or t’other?  Both/and?

The imprecations of Rabbi Akiva fell on deaf ears.  In the first century tavern, between choruses of “Arise My Love, and Come Away” revellers also told stories of cunning and importunity:  

I knew a man who walked through a field and spied a hidden treasure.  Quick as a flash he sold everything and bought it. 

What about that old widow who couldn’t get a judgement in court?  Sure, she showed up on a Friday night and banged on the judge’s door with a rock until the poor man came down in his housecoat and slippers and rewrote the judgement for her on his doorstep just to be rid of the old bat.

What do you think, says Jesus, telling the sort of story of longing and outrage one might hear in a tavern.  

The Kingdom is like a man who…. 

It is like a woman who…..

You could tell the story of God's approach to humanity with recourse to well-worn religious ideas and high principles.  When you boil it down, though, the rabbis, Jesus himself as well as the later Christian mystics preferred to take human longing, desire and hunger as their launchpad.  These stories of longing are infinitely more comprehensible.  They reveal what we have at hand and what we are missing.

I desire to see his face.  

I want to be held in his arms.  

I want to find the treasure.  
I am aggrieved and want the crushing sense of injustice within me to depart.  

It is a rawness which I know as hunger, as fatigue with chronic poverty, as a desire to be reconciled to my circumstances, as desire for my beloved.  

I can feel it.  It’s right here.  
It causes not only my mind but even my flesh to stir.  

One glimpse of the object of my desire resets life’s clock to zero. 

A funeral homily

Isaiah 25:6-9

When I was eleven or twelve years old my father took me back to his home town in the province of Saskatchewan for his school reunion –for the reunion, in fact, of maybe a decade’s worth of graduates from the very small school in the very small town.  On the average, only three or four young people graduated during any one year and, so, ten year’s graduates amounted to a community of only thirty or so individuals.  Many of the graduates arrived with their children.  There, with the townspeople in one place, were many generations – multiple decades of joy and grief, or ease and hardship gathered into one place.  The small town was in a mood to celebrate.  The old parish priest was brought from his nursing home in a wheelchair with a blanket over his knees.  The older men who once had played baseball for the town’s team in the past were pitted against the current softball team.  My dad pitched, as I remember.  The women of the community cooked and baked.  Tables were set out and blankets laid out upon the field of mown barley where the festivities were to take place.  It was a unique and special gathering which crossed the boundaries of time and generations.

.

In our reading this afternoon Isaiah the prophet has a vision.  In this vision there is a hillside and upon that hillside are laid tables covered with the richest of fare.  Savoury meats and good wine, bread and olives.  We know it to be a vision because upon this hillside are gathered generations which, in the ordinary way of counting, could not possible be gathered together – the living and the dead, those of past ages and those of the present day.   This is what God shows Isaiah:

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
  a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
    of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
  And he will destroy on this mountain
    the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
    the sheet that is spread over all nations;
    he will swallow up death forever.
 Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces,
    and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth,
    for the Lord has spoken.

We are subject to time in its ebb and flow.  It brings us in and it takes us out.  

Why are we here?  We gather today at the funeral service of someone we have known and loved – someone we have cared for.  We do so for several reasons:  We express, first of all, our grief at the loss of somebody important and significant.  Their place cannot be taken by another.  It is a time to weep and remember.  We gather, secondly to show our support for close family members – to support them in the significance of their loss which is much more than ours.  But we gather, as well, because we too are mortal men and women and will, one day, be “gathered around” by our family and friends as they come to see us off.  

Every person’s funeral is a reminder and a prompt. Remember that funeral sermons are for the living and not for those who have died.  They might well inspire hope as we recognize all that we cannot control, like the length or our days or the shape which fortune will take for us in the end.  All of us place ourselves in the hands of the One who leads us beyond what we control.  Time is in his hands.  He loves the creatures he has made.  A funeral may, however, also remind us that we are the living who will go from this place and that much remains in our own hands and within our own power:  the conversation, the phone call or the letter which would patch a rift between people who have fallen out.  What remains in our control is also the very old vow we made to live life to its fullest and to risk ourselves by engaging meaningfully with the world we live in. 

You might leave this chapel with a sense of discomfort - discomfort about how far along the road you are and what remains for you to do and to be.  I’m sorry about that but maybe there is something you have not done, have not said, have not ventured and have not been.  That discomfort might only tangentially have anything to do with the full and eventful life of the friend, the mother and the grandmother whose memory we honour this day.   It has much to do with you.  That discomfort could prove to be your best friend.   Were it to lead to action there would be no better testament to the life of an elderly woman, well-lived, that her friends and family were spurred to action upon reflecting on what the passing of an earthly life might mean to them.

She only touched the hem of his garment......

The Sixth Sunday 

after Pentecost

Year B - Proper 8

Mark 5:21-43

A small story, wedged into the midst of the larger narrative of Jesus’ healing of Jairus’ daughter, tells the tale of some nameless woman - ill and at her wit’s end - who pushes through the crowd to touch the edge of Jesus’ robe with the certainty that this is all that will be required of her.  She will never be asked to come to the lectern and testify, nor will she be give a box of church envelopes or asked to join the ACW.   Just this and nothing more.

George Frederick Root wrote a hymn about her in the late 19^th century which appeared in the Sankey Hymnal in 1897.  It’s one of the hymns of my youth which I still sing in the car when I’m stopped at a red light.

She only touched the hem of His garment
  As to His side she stole,
Amid the crowd that gathered around Him;
  And straightway she was whole. 

    Oh, touch the hem of His garment!
      And thou, too, shalt be free!
    His saving power this very hour
        Shall give new life to thee!

The earliest version of Root’s hymn had different words –  more rugged and arguably more self-assured.   The first line was:

In faith, she touched the hem of his garment

And the chorus went like this:

I’ve touched the hem of His garment,
And now I, too, am free;
His healing pow’r this very hour
Gives life and health to me

Good news for her, then, that saintly lady.   Well done, her.  Good news for whoever sings the song.  Good for them.  Great faith meets with great results.  That's what it says on the package.  We are ordinary people, though.  We in the back pews review the faces of great men and women of faith portrayed in their stained-glass windows and are left cold by the story of yet another spiritual athlete – very much unlike ourselves – who receives his or her due for that tremendous leap of faith which always eludes us.  The saints do things we cannot do.  They’re saints. 

Ira Sankey clearly agreed.    His collection of hymns and sacred songs  - Sacred Songs and Solos:  1200 Hymns - contains a large persuasive offering to that crowd of people hunkered down in the last two pews of the meeting hall.  They have not yet put their hands up.  They have not signed their cards.  They have not yet walked up to the front of the church for prayers or initiated the conversation which would see them home.  They have, in fact, been coddling the impossibility of the task and rolling it around in their minds.  

That somebody else might have done great things will not help.  

That somebody else is claiming the victory will be no great boon to them. 

Sankey is collecting his tunes for the man, the woman, the boy or the girl in the pew who would discern within themselves what first preliminary step they might take.  Thank you, George Root, for a wonderful hymn but it needs a tweak or two.  The modified version, which appears ten years later, accomplishes two things:  

First of all it returns the hymn to the story itself in the Gospels.  The woman takes a very small step (she only touched the hem of his garment…) - a step conditioned as much by desperation as anything she might have conceived of as faith.  It is Jesus, in fact, who, turning in the crowd, sees her there and declares that this small step is, in fact, faith.  It is faith in its seed as a preliminary act and proves, as saving faith, to be faith in its flower.  It is sufficient.  

For those of you reading this blog post this afternoon, the question remains open.  I pose it in the spirit of St Mark the Evangelist and in the spirit of George Frederick Root, the composer of hymns, and of Ira Sankey, the curator of that great opus of 19th century hymnody (some of which remains entirely singable in the 21st):    What small act remains to you - born as much of desperation as of faith - which would constitute your small step of faith, and make what has seemed impossible to you both real and present?

The earth produces of itself.....

The 4th Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 6
Mark 4:26-34

Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.”

This is the thing we might find hard to believe when our back is to the wall.  

Surely the watched pot boils a bit faster, does it not?  We ask the question a half-dozen times to make sure it’s been understood because, after all, there is no shortage of idiots in the world.  We hover over our children as if each inch of their forward progress were dependent upon our total concentration.  With little to worry about we would worry nonetheless.  True, though we might meet people who should fret more than they do.  But not you who are reading this.  No, not you.  And not me, either.  Likely not.  We could do with letting the words of this parable flood over us.

Take note please:  In this short saying of Jesus, found only in Mark's Gospel, we are not being asked to trust in the ability of the seed to sprout itself and to grow up big and tall.  We are being asked to trust in the ground to produce a harvest.  I think this makes a difference. 

The mystery of the Kingdom of God is that God's Kingdom is within us, around us and among us

and that it works.

   

Jesus goes to enormous lengths, in the guise of innumerable parables and analogies, to tell us that God’s Kingdom is taking shape around us. 

It is here, it is there. 

It is the treasure hidden in the field, the valuable pearl nestled amongst lesser gems, the yeast in the dough and the smallest seed planted in the garden.  See how the country people and the villagers flood to the hillside to hear the Kingdom spoken of.  Look at the lame man carrying his pallet away on his very own pegs in triumph.  See the harlot, the Quisling and the outcast restored to community because the words of peace and invitation have been spoken.

It doesn’t depend on you.  So relax.  The Kingdom is not your handiwork.  You are not its chief engineer.  

But relax and watch.  What remains at play is not the reality of the Kingdom but your own very self as a participant.  Will you have the eyes intent on seeing the whole thing play out?  And the ears to hear about it? 

Do you want to be a part of the process?

Nicodemus the Car Thief

Trinity Sunday

Year B

John 3:1-17

You see a car advertised. 

It appears to be the very one you want.  The right size, the right model.  Mileage looks good.   The right price.  You fire off an email or leave a voicemail – AND you get a message back within the hour.  Yes, you can see the car but no, you can’t drop by to see it.   I will come to you.  Tonight.

What gives?  Why the wait?  Why night-time?   You're right to be suspicious.   A darkened street corner in some public space, really?  You rightly wonder that maybe this person is trying to sell you something which doesn’t belong to him.

You know what belongs to you – your moveable and immoveable goods.  You’d call these your property.  You might have a list of these things stapled to your insurance policy. 

Secondly there are those things which you don’t own but which are nonetheless “your baby” – processes at work which you got rolling, an article you’ve written, an idea, a recipe, a piece of music, even, which you created that you consider yours.  

Lastly there are those things which you’ve been given to care for and to manage – the family fortune, the company secrets, the charter of the Association you belong to.  Whether any of these things belongs to you or not, you still have some sense of ownership over them.

In the third chapter of John's Gospel, Nicodemus the Pharisee pays a late-night visit to Jesus.  He’d know better than to say that he was an owner of Israel’s religious tradition.  But there’s no question that he comes to Jesus this night as a gatekeeper of Israel’s religion - one of its chief stewards – one of its guarantors - one of its border guards, if you like.  Israel’s religion is his baby.  As a religious expert and arbiter Nicodemus could be said to “get” the whole concept of God and to be one of the “go to” people for questions of law-keeping and belonging.  

Tonight Nicodemus believes he’s in a position to sell something.  He comes to Jesus expressing a genuine interest.  The night-time meeting, on the other hand, suggests a guarded caution about what Jesus is doing.  We think you’re one of us, he tells Jesus.  God must clearly be on your side given what’s happening around you in your ministry. 

One of us – one of us. 

Nicodemus presumes to stand in Jesus’ presence as somebody who believes he can include or exclude this itinerant rabbi from the mainstream. He’s offering Jesus a franchise.  And this is where Jesus stops him in his tracks. 

You see this is the deal with God – God gives to whom he wants.   He chooses unlikely partners, he gives to people who don’t deserve it, he decides to start somewhere and points his finger at Abraham wandering with his family at some crossroads on a middle eastern trade route and he says – this one - I think I’ll start here with this one – with this random - and Abraham gets what he needs because he says “Okay – start with me then”  

It’s on your curriculum, all of this, Nicodemus – I’m not telling you something you don’t know.  God gives freely and wants the world to have what he wants to give and here you are telling me that you can cut me in on your deal?  That you can let me have a bit of what you have? 

Ask yourself what anybody’s “property” consists of, at the end of the day.  Your name may be on the title deed but you’re only one of a series of people who has lived at 246 Elm Road across the span of a century.  You’re here and then you’re not.  And notwithstanding intellectual property laws, can anybody really be the proprietor of an idea?  Our conceptions of ownership don’t survive a steady gaze.  Not when we are just dust in the wind.

God crosses the centuries.  Nicodemus must know that.  The spirit of God moves here and there.  God speaks to whom he wishes.  Our drawing of circles around ourselves and our communities, our dividing up of religious resources and our “proprietary” attitude towards the story of God prevents us from being willing participants in the process ourselves and hold others back from being included.   No, Nicodemus, you don't get God - you may not draw a circle around him.  He's not your possession or something which you claim in the name of your tribe or the nation or your collection of right thinking friends.  We are not proprietors of God's Spirit although, on a good day, we might end up being followers of that same Spirit.

We don’t “get God”.  If anything, God gets us.

Things in a bag

The Fifth Sunday 

of Easter

Year B

Acts 8:26-40

I have three things here in a paper bag.  Let me pull them out and name them:  jack-knife, envelope, rose petal.  I lay them on the edge of the pulpit - three individual things which, a moment ago, were all together.   They were part of a set.  We’ll call that set 

“things-in-a-bag”

I can pinpoint, in terms of time and place, the beginning of my mild obsession with the relationship between things: I’m in southeast Alaska in the late summer of 1982.  I am looking at a river.  The shutter of my mind opens and captures the water of Ketchikan creek flowing swiftly downstream to the sea.  The dimly visible shapes of large Chinook salmon can be seen swimming upstream slowly and with determination.  Somewhere in the trees over to one side, a raven croaks loudly from a high perch.  An animated couple ambles upstream along the trail on the other side of the creek, meeting a single person walking briskly into town with his head down.  A fox crosses my path up ahead.  A few fallen leaves tumble in the strong breeze at an angle across the gravel bar.  I am struck by it – the whole thing – no one part of it but the whole together, creating within me a colour or a flavour, a picture, an impression, even a story.  Forty years on I still remember it.  I can tell you about it this morning.

Unrelated things are gathered in to a set.  For a moment, completely one and in relation to one another. 

In our first reading this morning, Philip the deacon travels south because he’s been told to go by the Holy Spirit.   He catches up with a diplomat from the court of Queen Candace of Ethiopia, on his way home, who is seated in his chariot reading the copy of the Book of Isaiah that came into his possession in Jerusalem – a work produced by a people not his own – a voice, centuries old, speaking to him for the very first time.  He is moved by the words but perplexed by the book.  Philip is invited up into the chariot to explain.  They approach a stream - water tumbling over stones, creating rapids and eddies.  The Ethiopian diplomat says “See, here is water!  What is to prevent my being baptised?”  

This handful of things and persons are gathered together in a bag.  God’s will is worked out not by the visible and substantial individual things but by the invisible and insubstantial relationship between them – providing from the mix itself novelty, opportunity and occasion.

Much of the Acts of the Apostles relates the experience of people tumbling through the invisible but undeniable tumult of the Spirit's fresh progress in the world.  Freed from fear and filled with the power of the Spirit, they are thrown together and set upon the road.  The saints emerge from that mixed bag. Communities of faith are cobbled together in peculiar circumstances.   The waters of baptism erode the borders between classes and languages.  The fire of God’s spirit defies conservative and self-preserving tendencies.  Love covers its multitude of faults.  Forgiveness releases people from isolation and loneliness.  What could prevent such a thing from happening?  If you stood in its way you might get knocked over.

Teased apart into their strands, these things mean little.  Seen whole from within as a participant, however, they begin to make eminent sense.

A ghost does not have flesh and bones.....

The Third Sunday of Easter

Year B

Luke 24:36b-48

"Touch me and see; 

for a ghost does not have flesh 

and bones as you see that I have".

Might the story have been easier to grasp if Jesus had appeared to his disciples as a disembodied spirit rather than somebody with wounds and an appetite?  

It’s less of a leap, perhaps, to imagine a ghostly person which is somehow the real person.   The ghostly bit lives inside one’s body for a spell before escaping into the atmosphere or groaning diaphanously in hallways and then disappearing again, floating off to be somewhere better (or somewhere worse).  A default position.  It might be what some of us think will happen to us when we die.   Even the Old Testament has a famous ghost story where Saul and the Witch of Endor conspire to conjure up the ghost of the prophet Samuel from the depths.  Ghosts are not unknown in the traditions of Israel.

But no - the Evangelists present Christ as being bodily present in the midst his disciples.  It’s not an easy circle for them to square.  On one hand, in John’s Gospel, Christ bears his wounds and shows them to Thomas and the other disciples.  In Luke, he manipulates bread and wine on a table and elsewhere he asks his disciples if they have something to eat and, when given a piece of broiled fish, he digs in.  On the other hand, doesn’t he appear once in a locked room?  On another occasion, is he not taken suddenly from their sight? 

He is the same.   But he is different. 

The reaction of his disciples is understandably mixed: “...in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering”.

Of what import this bodily life in the economy of eternity?   We both give and receive in our world - in time and space - through the medium of our bodies, our emotions and our voices.  We drink in colour and kindness, smells and textures with these bodies of ours, these brains, these minds and imaginations.  Will we enjoy the warm pong of a smelly Labrador retriever in heaven?  Will we be finished with the combination of fresh rosemary and lamb chops or those gorgeous cream tarts you can buy warm from bakeries in Portugal?  Will any of these sensual experiences be a thing anymore?  

The earliest record (earlier than the completed Gospels by decades) are the words of Saint Paul in 1^st Corinthians 15 about both Christ’s resurrection and our own.  With respect to the General Resurrection (of which Christ’s resurrection is “the first fruits”) he addresses the very question which these Gospel accounts pose: 

But someone will ask, "How are the dead raised?

With what kind of body do they come?"

The details are beyond any human wisdom, but Paul’s response suggests that what we sow into the ground (that which undergoes death) is both like and unlike what God will one day remake for an eternal purpose.  What is sown in death is a seed – more precisely a “naked seed” of what will ultimately become the full glory of the plant.  It retains its lineage with the bodily life and the recognized identity of people living in their present world and it is not for nothing that the final chapter of 1^st Corinthians caps an Epistle which has ethics and community life as one of its major themes - what the Christian does with his or her body in this life – how that body is expressed faithfully in marriage, how it is presented in equal fellowship with the bodies belonging to those of different classes, races, languages and backgrounds.  None of these things is wasted – neither our senses nor our ethics.   All of them are important.  

We are now the seed, at least, of what we will become.

So what?

The 2^nd Sunday of Easter

Year B

John 20:19-31

Congregations are oftentimes quite small around the world on Low Sunday.  Will we buck the trend at Christ Church?  Let’s see.

Life carries on.  Two disciples trudge along to Emmaus speaking in hushed voices about what the women’s message about the empty tomb could possible mean.  They are organizing their mental response, repairing their mental walls and wondering what the “new normal” is.  In the Gospel reading this Sunday, Thomas sorts out the tumble of things in his head in such a way that he “will believe” A, B and C and “will not believe” X, Y and Z.  Some disciples are planning a return to Bethsaida or Capernaum in the Galilee to get their nets, weights and floats out of hock and to recuperate earlier careers.  Even those who were open to the women’s proclamation that something remarkable had occurred in and around the tomb of Christ might ask the seemingly irreligious and outrageous question which positively insists on being asked here: 

So what?

Did someone win the lottery or have a patent approved for their invention?  Good fortune landed on them.   Well done, them.  You jot them off a message of congratulations and that would be the end of it.  You ask a mutual friend whether she’d heard how Arthur had landed on his feet.  Good for Arthur, your friend says.  It means absolutely nothing to the two of you who’ve never won anything more than a replacement lottery ticket and have had your best ideas thoroughly ignored at work. 

Making practical sense of the resurrection is not a topic for Easter Sunday – that’s reserved for proclamation, invitation and positively basking in the mysterious symbols of new life and new beginnings.   It is a topic, however, for all the Sundays prior to Pentecost so you aren’t going to avoid the issue.  A post-Easter-Sunday sermon attempts to make sense of the resurrection of Christ in some way other than “Good for Jesus”.  We use Jesus’ own words to do this.  His words to his disciples indicate a new beginning for them.  Both his death and resurrection are Pro Nobis – for us and for Creation itself and must be understood in relation to the things of earth:  Money, career, beauty and justice – our attitudes towards friends and enemies and towards our own varied estimates of our strength or weakness, life and death. 

It is the lens through which life is focused for you who are strong and you who are weak, who have gained much in this life or have lost a great deal, who would apply your strength to the best of things or who want to navigate the weakness within and around yourselves.  It means something – this sharing with Christ in his victory over sin and death.  Life takes on new meaning in the light of Easter.  There remains much time in your three-score-years-and-ten for this to be worked out for you as it was worked out for the disciples in conversation with their Lord in the days after Easter Sunday.  

We begin (again) on Sunday.  If you are not elsewhere – I look forward to seeing you.

"Has risen" or "Is risen"?

Easter Sunday

Year B

Mark 16:1-8

Ye seek Jesus of Nazareth, which was 

crucified: he is risen; he is not here

I got a query this week from a young person in Scotland who sent me a picture of this flyer, which came through the mail slot from his local parish church, along with the following:

…a wee question: just saw this in the post and I’m wondering if this is correct. I have heard it before written this way, but [his girlfriend] thinks since risen is past perfect should it not be "has"? I don’t have an answer for her. Any help?

Well, one answer would be that the English language used to construct verbs of movement and emergence by using the auxiliary “to be” in the way that French still does:  

Nous sommes venu,

elle est parti,

je suis devenu.

You can find examples of this in the King James Version of the Bible:

I know that Messias cometh, which is called Christ:

when he is come, he will tell us all things (John 3:25)

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels,

and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass,

or a tinkling cymbal (1 Cor 13:1)

Archaisms endure in religious language.   We love 'em.  But it’s more than that.

One of the soldiers, say from Matthew's gospel, who’d been tasked with guarding the sealed tomb might have reported to his superiors about the Easter Sunday events that “Unfortunately, Sergeant, he’s no longer there.  He has risen.   It happened yesterday.  It's in my report”.

That same soldier years later in Asia Minor, having been the object of Christian preaching himself, is in church on an Easter Sunday morning.  He grasps his neighbour’s hand and utters the traditional Easter greeting: “Alleluia, Christ is risen!”.  His friend would respond (as will you this Sunday) “The Lord is risen, indeed.  Alleluia!”.  This has nothing to do with old-fashioned language.

The power which animates this life amidst what seems like surrounding disorder and decay is the power of the Risen One.  He is contemporaneously present (in the midst of his people, in the midst of Creation itself, in the Sacrament of the altar and in Christian preaching) as the Risen One – who “is” and not only “was” gloriously alive.   

Men and women of faith look, not to the historic victory of a hero against terrible odds, but to the contemporary presence of One whose victory is also their victory.  From that living presence flows the courage to proclaim the Gospel, to make justice in the Auvergne and around the world and to treat aging and weakness – even death itself - as no impediment to hope.  Such faith animates the ordinary life of the believer.  Death has been conquered in Christ.   My death and yours are conquered in him.

Of whom we say, in our prayers and Collects, that he “ … lives and reigns…..”