Let love draw you in and connect up your heart

Can I tell you something?  Well, there was this man Jesus from Nazareth, a prophet, he taught with powerful words that cut to the heart, and did amazing things, healing people, raising them from the dead, feeding thousands of people with a boy’s packed lunch, loving the unlovable, opening our eyes to see what God’s word really means… we hoped he would be the one to redeem Israel – no-one else like him has ever come before.  But on Thursday, he was arrested by the chief priests and handed over to Pontius Pilate, he was beaten and mocked and sent to be crucified on Friday morning.  We saw him through the crowds, falling over again and again under the weight of the cross, and heard the hammer on the nails, watched as the cross dropped into the ground.  The sign above him said ‘Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews’ – did Pilate believe it was true?  We didn’t know what to believe, and then the sky grew dark, I felt a strange kind of fear grip me, the hours passed, I felt rooted to the ground. And then Jesus cried out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ and the tears fell down my face, how could this be happening.  Then Jesus cried out again, I couldn’t hear what he said but it was like all sound and all reality was just sucked away, I couldn’t breathe, and time stopped…


Then like an exhale, the earth beneath me began to shake, I fell to the ground, and heard the soldiers shout out, ‘Surely he was the Son of God’.  And then I ran and ran, the ground shaking beneath me…


Later I heard that in the temple the curtain had torn in two, and Joseph, you know – the one from Arimathea, the rich one on the Jewish Council – he went straight to Pilate told him Jesus was dead and asked to take his body to be buried.  They moved quickly because sabbath was coming and were able to wrap his body in grave cloths, and seal the tomb with a rock.  All day yesterday we didn’t know what to do between the tears and the questions, should we stay here in the city, or is it all over, should we go home, what should we do?!!


Then this morning the two Marys went to the tomb and as they watched an angel appeared and rolled away the stone.  They said: ‘Do not be afraid, I know you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified.  He is not here, he is risen, just as he said.’ 


Can you imagine yourself there?  Listening to an eyewitness account, what would you make of what you had just heard, let’s press pause and take a poll… If you were in Jerusalem and you had just heard that story what would your response be to Jesus disappearing from the tomb?  Is it: whateva! – I don’t care, they must be high, someone stole his body, he wasn’t really dead, I don’t know but it’s scary, I want to find out more, Jesus is alive


All of these responses would have happened.  For many years, I had the first response – whateva! I don’t really care.  But I remember so vividly that first Easter in April 2000, a few weeks after I became a Christian, and we were in church and singing a song with the chorus ‘Jesus is alive’, and suddenly I felt a rush of fear and excitement, and a flood of realisation that what I was singing was true.  Jesus is alive!


Today, for the first time since St Catharine’s church building was finished in 1915, we are not gathered in the building to sing and to celebrate that truth.  It feels painful not to be together.  I was so looking forward to my first Easter with you.  And yet, I think we learn something at a deeper level today than we could normally.  As the women come to the tomb, they hear the angel say ‘He is not here’, ‘Jesus is not here’.  And we can imagine perhaps approaching our church building, and in the quiet, hearing that same voice saying: ‘He is not here’. 



The women hurry away from the tomb, and suddenly there is Jesus, he greets them and they fall at his feet and worship. 


They like us begin to realise that Jesus is with us in a whole new way.  Our buildings are important because they provide a place to gather together, but our church is not our building.  Our church is us, each person, each household, touched by the love of God, by the truth that Jesus is alive.  It is that love that draws us together and connects up our hearts.


Our first reading came from Acts 10.34-43 – this book which is like part 2 of Luke’s gospel – tells us about the events that followed Easter Sunday.  It mainly follows those who believed that Jesus had died and been raised again, and the whole book tells how those followers travelled about with this news, facing incredible hardship and persecution because they believed the good news they were carrying was world changing.  No other event in the history of the world has rung true with people in every generation, culture, nation and language.  No other event in the history of the world has changed the lives of the people who choose to believe, and to act like it is true.  God will never compel us to believe, that is not what love does. Love draws us in, it connects up our hearts.  


In our church services we often say the Creed together, it is a summary of our Christian faith that has been repeated by believers for hundreds of years.  Here in the reading from Acts we see a very early summary of Christian belief.  And it is extraordinary because the words are spoken by Peter, a Jew, to Cornelius and his household, Gentiles.  Peter is having a conversion, realising that the good news about Jesus is for all people, not just the Jews.  Jesus is Lord of all.  And we see how God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are together at work making this offer – the opportunity to respond to God’s love made known in Jesus Christ – God makes this offer to all.  We are not created to be alone, we are created to be with God.  At the moment you may be feeling alone, and isolated, I think we are realising perhaps as never before how we are made to be in relationship, with each other, the world and with God.  Our promise from God is that through Jesus all these relationships that have been fractured can be healed and restored.  God’s love draws us in, and connects up our hearts.

So what are we to do, on this day of all days, the high point of the Christian year, a day when we desperately want to be together to celebrate a love that overcomes even death.  We want to be with those we love, our family (both church and birth) and our friends.  And the loss of that perhaps feels more painful today.  I wonder if we don’t run from the pain of that sense of separation, but sit with it, I wonder if we will feel something of what God feels towards us.  God offers us unconditional love, there is nothing you or I can do to earn it, and when we turn our back on it, I think God feels the pain of that separation.  So would you let yourself today, wherever you are, would you let yourself be loved by God?  To say sorry for all the times you have turned away, and to turn back, God’s arms are always open, God’s forgiveness is always there.  Let love draw you in and connect up your heart. 

hallelujah

Hallelujah or Alleluia...it's that time of year when Christians say it a lot! It means 'praise ye the Lord' or 'Dudes! Let's praise God!'.  We say it to encourage one another to recognise how awesome God is.  It feels a particularly powerful word just after Easter in the Church of England because we have tried to avoid saying it in Lent during the six weeks that run up to Easter.  Why?  Because we are waiting for Jesus to be fully revealed as a different sort of Lord and King.  A King who was enthroned on a cross, killed by those he chose to forgive as he showed that through him - Jesus - nothing can separate us from the love of God.


Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8.38-9).


After Easter I went off to Spring Harvest with my church.  Spring Harvest is a big Christian conference with thousands of people gathered together to study the bible, pray and sing to God, and learn more about how to live the Christian life.  Whilst I was there we had the privilege to hear from someone who had spent many years in prison in North Korea for being a Christian.  It was a distressing and powerful story to hear which involved the killing of family members, brutal torture, hard labour, and unbearable living conditions.  In this place of sleeping on cold concrete, rat and insect infected, piled up in small rooms with people who died in the night and whose bodies were often not removed for days...in this place the whispered gatherings of a handful of people kept faith and hope alive.


As Christian believers passed each other they would whisper to each other 'hallelujah'.  What an extraordinary word to whisper into the face of unbelievable oppression. Hallelujah.  What is it about Jesus that draws praise from the lips of someone in the midst of such intense suffering?  Hallelujah.  I think it is this truth that there is no place to which God is not prepared to go to with you so that it can be healed and redeemed.  And in that truth is hope. 


Leonard Cohen sings of hallelujahs that are cold, hallelujahs that are broken, hallelujahs that are holy.  Choosing to praise the Lord does not always come from a place of joy and peace. Sometimes it may not even come from a place of hope.  But the hallelujah that emerges as a trailing whisper from the very end of ourselves will always connect us to the One who knows our end from our beginning, who holds our lives together. 

Ugly bulbs

For the first time in a few years I have been growing an amaryllis lily.  When I planted the huge ugly bulb 5 weeks ago in a pot that was almost as big as the bulb I had forgotten what an extraordinary process it is watching the stem, bud and flowers emerge.  The stems are now 72cm!  And the flowers that have been opening in the last few days are quite beautiful. Who would have imagined all that life and beauty was waiting to burst free?  Certainly the look on my little nephews face when I showed him the bulb at Christmas said something along the lines of 'you must be mad, that is like the worst and weirdest Christmas present in the world!'


A couple of weeks ago my sermon was on 2 Corinthians 5.11-21.  In that passage, we are reminded that Jesus looked like nothing special, but turned out to be God, and so we should learn from this not to judge people by what we see.  God is at work in people bringing new life (new acts of creation the verse says). It can be pretty discouraging sometimes looking around at the world, wondering if things are going to change or whether they will stay ugly and broken.  And then I look at myself, and think about the changes that God has helped bring about in me, sometimes in the blink of an eye and sometimes in the imperceptible process of reflection, repentance and forgiveness.  We all look pretty ugly inside from certain angles, maybe in places so hidden from others that only God sees.  But watching my lily grow reminds me that God is not fazed by the ugly and the broken, because God sees the potential of life and beauty held within that and always wants to call it forth.

Manchester

View of Manchester from the Cathedral © Robert Watson



This morning I put on my dog collar with a heavy heart and a sense of trepidation. What does it mean to wake up in the morning, as a vicar, to hear the news of an attack like the suicide bombing in Manchester? After initial prayers for those caught up in the bombing, thoughts turn to your own community. What effect will it have on people here? And what words can I offer into that? The swirl of your own distress about what has happened somehow needs to be oriented towards God. Within an hour, the first conversation, a man walking home with his paper, feeling like nowhere is safe now. Also not knowing how to respond. I urge him to do good and believe in the goodness of others. Because that is apparent too. One bomber versus thousands of people helping because they were there, or it is their job, or they could do something small to help another. Twitter full of offers of beds, tea and phones. A narrative of hate, some would say evil, juxtaposed with a narrative of love, care and compassion.

And so this is where I begin when I think about our world. The truth is that we all carry within us a mixture of love and hate, of good and bad. We all have a choice about which direction we want to move towards, to love more or to hate more, to do good things more often or bad things more often. I wish I was more consistent in my choices, but even the most consistent person does not live a perfect life of love and goodness. And what are we to do about this? In a bomber we might see the magnification of a hate that we sometimes see in ourselves. In a grandfather who swoops down to keep an unknown young girl safe until he can find a way to reunite her with her parents we see a magnification of care and love that we sometimes see in ourselves.

And this is why the Christian story gives me hope. Because it is a story of original goodness. It is a story that both recognises the extraordinary value of every life, and this capability we all have of choosing to do good things and bad things. It is a story of a God who loves and cares so much about people that these good and bad choices are not left hanging, but are gathered up by One who judges justly. And in this gathering up also offers the opportunity of repentance and forgiveness. I cannot give an answer to why bad things happen, but my trust is in a God who can hold all that together and calls us into a story of hope and redemption.

Ash

Today I had a new experience. As part of the Ash Wednesday service I had the opportunity to perform the 'imposition of ashes'. One by one the congregation came forward and I marked the sign of the cross on their foreheads whilst saying 'Remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ.' It was very moving, rich with symbolism, and also a little weird! Being daubed with ash is not really a part of 'normal' life, so why do it?


I guess one of the most similar activities is soldiers putting their camouflage streaks across their faces so that they can blend into the landscape. They are wanting to become like the earth so that they can't be found. If they do it successfully they might be more likely to live another day. Being 'ashed' on Ash Wednesday is a similar reminder that we are all walking on a narrow line between life and death.  Day-to-day I don't think too much about my own death, whilst all around me personally and through the news I see and hear about people who have stepped from life to death, or are about to. These rituals of faith are ways to help us hold such tensions. Life is inevitably and inexorably linked to death.  The Christian story lifts up that tension and places it in a bigger story that describes why life is given and how death is redeemed. It comes with no promise that the pain which now accompanies the severing of life will be any less. But the promise is of a companion for the journey who has travelled that way before.

Transformation

This evening I was preaching on 1 Corinthians 15.12-34 at church, and we were talking about what it means to live life differently as a result of believing that Jesus rose from the dead. Paul clearly expected that the gospel, the good news about who Jesus is - his life, death and rising again, would make a difference to the way that Christians lived. In fact he says that Christians are to be pitied if the gospel is not true because we have chosen to live a difficult life of loving our enemies, putting others first, forgiving, suffering and even dying for our faith.  So I asked how our lives today as Christians look different from the lives of non-Christians around us.


We had a good discussion, and coming away from it I was struck particularly by three things. First, on the face of it, the lives of Christians day-to-day don't generally look much different. But underneath the day-to-day sameness, I think (and hope) that Christians are holding a shifted perspective on things, asking what God thinks about a situation, and asking God what they should do in a situation. The outcome might be the same, being kind to a stranger, or helping someone out, but the motivation comes from wanting to serve God, rather than feeling better about yourself, or wanting to gain something from another. In a sense Christians have already died. Baptism is a death to self, and new life post-baptism means living for God, not yourself.


Second, Christians are in the process of being transformed into more Christ-like versions of themselves. You may not be the most loving or giving person, but there is a transformation going on that means, as you become more aware of God at work in your life, and ask God to help you change, you gradually become more loving or giving or more whatever it is. Ask any Christian that you admire and they will be pretty clear that there are all sorts of areas that they are changing and growing in. It is a slow process of submitting our lives to being shaped by God through the Holy Spirit, but God is faithful to God's promise to complete the good work begun in us (Philippians 1.6).


Finally, Christians are more likely to play the long game. The life of faith looks ahead to a heavenly home. Someone read out Hebrews 11.13-16 - those who believe in God will not be totally settled on earth, there is a confidence in a final destination beyond death. Whilst it doesn't make pain and suffering in this life any less real or difficult, it does become more temporary. Hope stretches further than the life we see around us.








Image from: https://developer.ibm.com/dwblog/wp-content/uploads/sites/73/2016/02/dwblog-middlewarecloudtransformation.jpg

Certainty

Humans seem to be hard-wired to want things to be certain. When I was thinking about becoming a Christian 16 years ago, the thing I most wanted (as a scientist) was proof that God existed. To be honest, at times not much has changed! There are times when we desparately want God to prove that God is there, by healing our friend or stopping a war, or making it sunny for our party! It feels hard to live without that certainty. 

But the point is the God is not some truth that we can possess. We are designed and created to be in relationship with God, and relationship (this side of heaven) simply does involve a degree of not knowing (1 Corinthians 13.12). To become more certain about a matter of faith we have to try trusting that it is true. Having been on that journey for 16 years I am more certain now than I have ever been that God is who the Bible says God is. In fact, more loving, gracious, faithful, merciful and forgiving than I could imagine. And because God knows me inside out (and often better than I think I know myself), I don't have to try and keep my bad bits covered like I do in most other relationships. I know God loves me and wants me to change to live in a healthier, more fruitful and life-giving way. And that's a good thing to become more certain about!