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A sermon preached in Salisbury Cathedral on Easter Day 4th April 2010 by The Very Revd June Osborne, Dean
Acts 10 vv34-43 and John 20 vv1-18
"EASTER DAY"
Acts 10 vv34-43 and John 20 vv1-18
It felt as if I’d witnessed a kind of resurrection so on this day of resurrection let me tell you about it. It happened about three weeks ago when a woman I hadn’t seen for almost twenty years came to visit. She’d been a member of the church in East London where I was before coming to Salisbury. The reason I hadn’t seen her for so long was because she’d emigrated to Australia in the early 1990s, trying to escape an abusive marriage. Her two children made different decisions. One stayed in London living with her boyfriend. The other, her eighteen year old son, went with her into a new life. We saw them off with a sense of optimism because we’d seen her misery and we were confident that Peter would find Australia an exciting prospect – better than a Tower Hamlets estate. But within six months Peter was dead, killed in a motorcycle accident. I could only imagine her grief and read about it in her letters.
She’s now back in this country, drawn by three grandchildren and the desire to support her daughter. She’d brought photos of them for me to see and as she talked about her relationship with them there was the same effervescent love of life I remembered of old. But also very real, forming the backdrop of our conversation, were the years of her suffering, her ‘death place’ you might say because, as she described it to me, she’d wanted to ‘get dead’. It wasn’t only that for five years or so after Peter died she didn’t want to live but some part of her had gone forever when he was killed. Listening to her joy about her granddaughters was a bit like witnessing a resurrection.
As we parted, as she walked away from our front door, she turned to me and said: “I had to come because you know my story. You know me.”
Easter Day is about being met at our ‘death place’, and about being known.
We’ve a bishop in the Church of England who takes a few more risks than most bishops. He’s an Essex lad, indeed he’s about to return to Essex as their bishop. You may’ve even seen him on local TV because he likes doing church things in places such as supermarkets and shopping malls. He once said that Jesus would’ve shopped at Asda rather than Waitrose which got him some notoriety, but I suspect not an Easter Egg from the John Lewis Partnership!
Anyway, he’s just written a little book about the words Jesus said after he was raised from the dead and when he was writing it he tried some of it out in his sermons last Eastertide. When he went to take confirmations around Berkshire he would ask the congregation ‘What was the very first thing Jesus said after his resurrection?’ You, of course, know the answer because you’ve just heard it read to us but apparently the guesses from these congregations were always wide of the mark. He says that fairly quickly he stopped doing it because he simply couldn’t cope with exposing the ignorance of the clergy.
So what was the first thing Jesus said when he was raised from the dead? It’s not as if the writer of John’s gospel was prepared for us to miss it because it’s said to Mary Magdalene twice, first by the angels sitting in Jesus’ tomb
“Woman, why are you weeping?”
and then by Jesus himself to her. His opening line is also:
“Woman, why are you weeping?”
We can have some sympathy with those Berkshire congregations because it’s not as if this is what we’d expect Jesus to say immediately after being raised from the dead. But then we wouldn’t expect to see a woman crying in public. Unlike children who easily shed tears when they’re hurt or frustrated or disappointed or fearful we don’t much weep. If we do we know we make people feel awkward and clergy are used to people apologizing to them for crying. But most of us try not to cry, for instance, even in the face of current pressures and living in an anxious and atomised society we keep our tears well bottled up.
Yet Mary Magdalene was weeping and if she’d answered Jesus’ question she might have said: “I’m crying because what had worked to bring me near to God has failed for me.”
Let me suggest to you that what lies behind this moment is pretty well known to us. You yourself may feel that what once worked to bring you near to God has long failed you.
On Friday evening more than 2,000 people watched as the crucifixion was acted out in front of the Cathedral here. We were reminded that almost all the followers of Jesus fled and refused to be part of what was happening. This wasn’t just human cowardice but it was people realising that their images and projections about God had proved false. God wasn’t an all-conquering hero. God wasn’t a Messiah. God wouldn’t do what they expected. For the men who couldn’t remain to watch Jesus be crucified a gap had opened up between this suffering manifestation of God and their own images of Him.
I say this is pretty common because I suspect many of us reach a place where we realise that what once mediated God to us in a lively, meaningful way now doesn’t work. We may look back on our former religious feelings as sham, intellectually naive or delusional, or we may even miss them – like favourite clothes we’ve outgrown. We may still know that God is the only credible explanation to a world such as this. In that sense He is real but we can’t cross the distance to that reality. And if we’re really honest we live in exile from the truest centre of our self, like refugees we long for home.
It’s our Gethsemane where all we hear is God’s silence.
It’s our Golgotha where faith in a God like this is tested.
It’s not an exaggeration to describe this as a ‘death place’; it’s our tomb – and we’re right to weep.
And yet there were women who remained throughout Jesus’ dying and burial; waiting to witness whatever reality might show itself. And what happened next for Mary Magdalene was that something new and radical flooded in, something that meant she felt known.
The God she could not imagine crossed the gap to her and called her by her name.
In a sense Dan Brown was absolutely right to portray the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene as one of lovers in ‘The Da Vinci Code’ though he turns that idea into something rather silly and shallow, whereas we’re asked to see in the resurrection event the deepest sense of ourselves being known and met at the core of who we are. It’s the promise of being truly alive: the inward gladness of being: the energy and freshness of instinct: the spontaneous desire to communicate: the pearl for which we’ll sacrifice all. Some of these phrases belong to Ann Belford Ulanov, a Professor of Psychiatry in New York, who also writes:
“Most of us know one person who exemplifies this loving energy. Around such people we feel possible yet can never exactly explain why. Their words do not jump out in our memory as especially wise; they do not perform miracles. And yet they do, for around them we always feel emboldened, generative. They evince our courage – to dare, to hope, to dream, to imagine. We risk all...” (Finding Space)
The only way we find to describe this is by saying that the resurrection shows us that God loves us. In a single word, in calling her name, ‘Mary’, Jesus conveyed to Mary Magdalene an eternal truth: that the One who creates me knows me.
It was the action of God crossing the gap. And whatever looms as our basest fear or despair now turns out to be just the occasion and place where God comes to us and meets with us.
I’m daring to say to you today that for many of us what once worked to bring us near to God has long failed. What tradition taught us or the personal images upon which we relied: these have ceased to seem credible to us. Perhaps we tell ourselves that our previous constructs were ill-founded intellectually, that the Church is unrewarding or worse untrustworthy; perhaps we say that it’s possible to be a good person without faith, or that we’re more comfortable with occasional church attendance but without radical dependence on God.
And then a God we cannot imagine crosses over that gap to introduce us to new possibilities. Because he knows us, names us, calls us to see that we live a valued life he also gives us power to see that what we are is linked into the centre of his reality, that nothing can separate us from his love.
Today we’re declaring that ‘Christ has risen!’ We’re celebrating joyfully that the One who created us knows us, and meets us. God meets us where we’re weeping for our deprived and depraved self. As my friend, like Mary Magdalene, discovered, he meets us in the place where all hope is lost and all our bridges have been destroyed. It’s at that point that God is restored from the grave to make all things new.
Whether we recognize him is for us to say but be assured, He calls us by our name.
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She’s now back in this country, drawn by three grandchildren and the desire to support her daughter. She’d brought photos of them for me to see and as she talked about her relationship with them there was the same effervescent love of life I remembered of old. But also very real, forming the backdrop of our conversation, were the years of her suffering, her ‘death place’ you might say because, as she described it to me, she’d wanted to ‘get dead’. It wasn’t only that for five years or so after Peter died she didn’t want to live but some part of her had gone forever when he was killed. Listening to her joy about her granddaughters was a bit like witnessing a resurrection.
As we parted, as she walked away from our front door, she turned to me and said: “I had to come because you know my story. You know me.”
Easter Day is about being met at our ‘death place’, and about being known.
We’ve a bishop in the Church of England who takes a few more risks than most bishops. He’s an Essex lad, indeed he’s about to return to Essex as their bishop. You may’ve even seen him on local TV because he likes doing church things in places such as supermarkets and shopping malls. He once said that Jesus would’ve shopped at Asda rather than Waitrose which got him some notoriety, but I suspect not an Easter Egg from the John Lewis Partnership!
Anyway, he’s just written a little book about the words Jesus said after he was raised from the dead and when he was writing it he tried some of it out in his sermons last Eastertide. When he went to take confirmations around Berkshire he would ask the congregation ‘What was the very first thing Jesus said after his resurrection?’ You, of course, know the answer because you’ve just heard it read to us but apparently the guesses from these congregations were always wide of the mark. He says that fairly quickly he stopped doing it because he simply couldn’t cope with exposing the ignorance of the clergy.
So what was the first thing Jesus said when he was raised from the dead? It’s not as if the writer of John’s gospel was prepared for us to miss it because it’s said to Mary Magdalene twice, first by the angels sitting in Jesus’ tomb
“Woman, why are you weeping?”
and then by Jesus himself to her. His opening line is also:
“Woman, why are you weeping?”
We can have some sympathy with those Berkshire congregations because it’s not as if this is what we’d expect Jesus to say immediately after being raised from the dead. But then we wouldn’t expect to see a woman crying in public. Unlike children who easily shed tears when they’re hurt or frustrated or disappointed or fearful we don’t much weep. If we do we know we make people feel awkward and clergy are used to people apologizing to them for crying. But most of us try not to cry, for instance, even in the face of current pressures and living in an anxious and atomised society we keep our tears well bottled up.
Yet Mary Magdalene was weeping and if she’d answered Jesus’ question she might have said: “I’m crying because what had worked to bring me near to God has failed for me.”
Let me suggest to you that what lies behind this moment is pretty well known to us. You yourself may feel that what once worked to bring you near to God has long failed you.
On Friday evening more than 2,000 people watched as the crucifixion was acted out in front of the Cathedral here. We were reminded that almost all the followers of Jesus fled and refused to be part of what was happening. This wasn’t just human cowardice but it was people realising that their images and projections about God had proved false. God wasn’t an all-conquering hero. God wasn’t a Messiah. God wouldn’t do what they expected. For the men who couldn’t remain to watch Jesus be crucified a gap had opened up between this suffering manifestation of God and their own images of Him.
I say this is pretty common because I suspect many of us reach a place where we realise that what once mediated God to us in a lively, meaningful way now doesn’t work. We may look back on our former religious feelings as sham, intellectually naive or delusional, or we may even miss them – like favourite clothes we’ve outgrown. We may still know that God is the only credible explanation to a world such as this. In that sense He is real but we can’t cross the distance to that reality. And if we’re really honest we live in exile from the truest centre of our self, like refugees we long for home.
It’s our Gethsemane where all we hear is God’s silence.
It’s our Golgotha where faith in a God like this is tested.
It’s not an exaggeration to describe this as a ‘death place’; it’s our tomb – and we’re right to weep.
And yet there were women who remained throughout Jesus’ dying and burial; waiting to witness whatever reality might show itself. And what happened next for Mary Magdalene was that something new and radical flooded in, something that meant she felt known.
The God she could not imagine crossed the gap to her and called her by her name.
In a sense Dan Brown was absolutely right to portray the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene as one of lovers in ‘The Da Vinci Code’ though he turns that idea into something rather silly and shallow, whereas we’re asked to see in the resurrection event the deepest sense of ourselves being known and met at the core of who we are. It’s the promise of being truly alive: the inward gladness of being: the energy and freshness of instinct: the spontaneous desire to communicate: the pearl for which we’ll sacrifice all. Some of these phrases belong to Ann Belford Ulanov, a Professor of Psychiatry in New York, who also writes:
“Most of us know one person who exemplifies this loving energy. Around such people we feel possible yet can never exactly explain why. Their words do not jump out in our memory as especially wise; they do not perform miracles. And yet they do, for around them we always feel emboldened, generative. They evince our courage – to dare, to hope, to dream, to imagine. We risk all...” (Finding Space)
The only way we find to describe this is by saying that the resurrection shows us that God loves us. In a single word, in calling her name, ‘Mary’, Jesus conveyed to Mary Magdalene an eternal truth: that the One who creates me knows me.
It was the action of God crossing the gap. And whatever looms as our basest fear or despair now turns out to be just the occasion and place where God comes to us and meets with us.
I’m daring to say to you today that for many of us what once worked to bring us near to God has long failed. What tradition taught us or the personal images upon which we relied: these have ceased to seem credible to us. Perhaps we tell ourselves that our previous constructs were ill-founded intellectually, that the Church is unrewarding or worse untrustworthy; perhaps we say that it’s possible to be a good person without faith, or that we’re more comfortable with occasional church attendance but without radical dependence on God.
And then a God we cannot imagine crosses over that gap to introduce us to new possibilities. Because he knows us, names us, calls us to see that we live a valued life he also gives us power to see that what we are is linked into the centre of his reality, that nothing can separate us from his love.
Today we’re declaring that ‘Christ has risen!’ We’re celebrating joyfully that the One who created us knows us, and meets us. God meets us where we’re weeping for our deprived and depraved self. As my friend, like Mary Magdalene, discovered, he meets us in the place where all hope is lost and all our bridges have been destroyed. It’s at that point that God is restored from the grave to make all things new.
Whether we recognize him is for us to say but be assured, He calls us by our name.