Easter Sermon: Forgiveness is risen from the grave

Sermon. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford, 27 March 2016

Easter Day

Gospel: John 20.1-18

This is from the Easter Homily of St John Chrysostom:

'Are there any who are devout lovers of God?
Let them enjoy this beautiful bright festival!

Are there any who are grateful servants?
Let them rejoice and enter into the joy of their Lord!

Are there any weary with fasting?
Let them now receive their wages!

If any have toiled from the first hour,
let them receive their due reward;

If any have come after the third hour,
let him with gratitude join in the Feast!

And he that arrived after the sixth hour,
let him not doubt; for he too shall sustain no loss.

And if any delayed until the ninth hour,
let him not hesitate; but let him come too.

And he who arrived only at the eleventh hour,
let him not be afraid by reason of his delay.

For the Lord is gracious and receives the last even as the first.

He gives rest to him that comes at the eleventh hour,
as well as to him that toiled from the first...

First and last alike receive your reward;
rich and poor, rejoice together!

Sober and slothful, celebrate the day!

You that have kept the fast, and you that have not,
rejoice today for the Table is richly laden!

Feast royally on it, the calf is a fatted one.
Let no one go away hungry.

Partake, all, of the cup of faith.
Enjoy all the riches of His goodness!

Let no one grieve at his poverty,
for the universal kingdom has been revealed.

Let no one mourn that he has fallen again and again;
for forgiveness has risen from the grave.'

*

Do you get it? If you are used to church and the Bible, you will get it, in that you will get the principal references. The parable of the workers employed at later and later hours in the day and all paid the same, and the story of the prodigal son which ends with the feast with the fatted calf.

But I mean more: do you get it? Do you get the point that all are welcome. You are welcomed. You are welcomed to Gd's celebratory party.

If you have kept Lent well, here is your reward. If you tried, but life and stuff intervened, no matter. You are welcome to the party. If you tried, but failed abysmally, no matter. You are welcome to the party. If you didn't even try, no matter. If you want to be here, you too are welcome to the party.

And this is important. This is our faith. We know – don't we? - that the impression that the church and religion in general can give is one of judgementalism, of being judgemental. It is felt that we have a clear sense of what it is to be good, and if people fail at all, we judge them, dismiss them, damn them, shun them.

Today, against that, we hear the truth of our faith: 'forgiveness has risen from the grave'.

Now, Christians do talk of sin (including at baptisms), because what we do counts with Gd. As I said on Good Friday, Gd does not treat us as infants who could do no better. But it is always-but-always sin in the context of forgiveness. Always, all we have to do is seek Gd's forgiveness – seek it sincerely; we cannot manipulate Gd – to find it is already with us. Forgiveness rises from the graves we make of our own lives.

Now, if our neighbours think that we or religion in general are about judgementalism, it would be perverse if we in turn judged them for it. No, we forgive them. And we wait, patiently and prayerfully, for the time when they see something – something - in our lives that suggests it is not so, when they realise we are all about hope, grace and forgiveness. And then (and perhaps only then), we can invite them to the celebration.

Divine forgiveness in Christ means more than a declaration of pardon. Christians have always known that Gd is Gd, that Gd can issue words of pardon whenever and however Gd wills to. But forgiveness in Christ means the fulness of reconciliation that only comes from the reconciler spending time with the reconciled, each coming to value the other's company. It might even be said that this reconciliation makes for a stronger relationship than was there before the estrangement. (We'll be hearing more about this throughout Eastertide.)

This is the life-giving message we are today sharing with Kaiam. As Gd welcomes us to the party, at each and every point in our life, so Gd's clear welcome today clearly goes out to Kaiam. And we give our sincere thanks to Andy and Chantelle for bringing him here to join us.

Not that Kaiam has anything to be forgiven. But, you know (I whisper it) at some point, he will. And that's when he too can - and by Gd's grace will - know that what he did wrong does count with Gd, as he counts with Gd, but that forgiveness is his. His forgiveness rises from the grave.

Something not wholly different is happening in this morning's gospel. Mary Magdalene experiences Jesus with power and perspicacity in the midst of her achingly deep grief. When? You know when. It's when he calls her name. Mary. This is not accidental or incidental. You see, out of all the chaos we make of our lives from time to time, because of wilful sin, negligence and fear, and for that matter because of ordinary human clumsiness and failure, Gd speaks our own name, and new life is possible.

A baptism isn't actually a naming ceremony. They don't have to, but if the minister does say, 'name this child', that isn't some solemn naming ceremony. It's really just saying, 'let me make asbolutely sure I get this right'. That said, the candidate is named in a baptism. You cannot normally be baptised without your name. So we rightly speak of baptismal names. The love that rises from the grave speaks our name. With Gd it is never not personal. Alleluia!

Indeed: Alleluia [signed]!

Today is called the Solemnity of Solemnities. And that is right. But it does not mean it is 'solemn' as in serious, grave and dull. On the contrary, it is the greatest occasion for joy. If we cannot be joyful, because of circumstances in our lives, we do what we can to be oriented towards joy. For today's Alleluias go all the way down. It is the day for shouts and dances of joy.

And if we are not quite ready to be a church of shouts and dances (I don't know... are we?... let me see whose eyes I can catch...), we can, in any event, bring our bodies into our thanks, praise and rejoicing.

Thus... remember... [signing]

Alleluia. Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed. Alleluia!

Let us now say together the end of that Easter sermon of St John Chrysostom. Each sentence begins with 'Christ is risen!' I invite you to join in.

'Christ is Risen, and you, o death, are annihilated!
Christ is Risen, and the evil ones are cast down!
Christ is Risen, and the angels rejoice!
Christ is Risen, and life is liberated!

Christ is Risen, and the tomb is emptied of its dead;
for Christ having risen from the dead,
is become the first-fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

To Him be Glory and Power forever and ever. Amen!'

Sermon. Lent 3: Kierkegaard &co

Sermon. St Vedast-alias-Foster, City of London. 28.02.16

Third Sunday of Lent (Year 3)

Isaiah 55.1-9

1 Corinthians 10.1-13

Luke 13.1-9

Genuinely a privilege and pleasure to be with you again. And I assure you of my ongoing prayers for you in your communal discernment process, hoping the diocese is helping energetically! When I was last here, much comment was made on the high standard of the sermons from visiting preachers. And, further, you were kind enough to be kind about my own effort. This of course means there might be for me, in my preparations and right now, the pressure of meeting great expectations. Imagine my delight, then, when I came upon these words from Soren Kierkegaard [1813-1855]:

'People have an idea that the preacher is an actor on a stage and they are the critics, blaming or praising him. What they don't know is that they are the actors on the stage; he (the preacher) is merely the prompter standing in the wings, reminding them of their lost lines.'

A wonderfully incisive Kierkegaardian insight.

A different but related point is this: my Jewish friends do not tire of telling me that the Hebrew verb 'to pray' is a reflexive form of the verb 'to judge'. To pray is to judge oneself. But (let me stress) not in the sense of 'to condemn' but rather 'to discern the truth' about oneself. You know, even without this linguistic prompt, we know this is right. If we pray - and pay attention (that is: we don't simply enjoy someone's cadences, or hope for gossip on Mrs Brown's bunions...) - if we pray and pay attention to our praying, we will soon notice what moves us, what does not move us, how much resistance to prayer there is inside us (there will be some), what draws us in, and what, if we are honest, we are not drawn to pray for at all. We will be discerning truths about ourselves.

And here we are, and it is Lent. Lent: the season in the church calendar when the call to be self-discerning is at its clearest and most insistent.

Today's readings bring this home to us. First, from the prophecy of Isaiah, a question which resonates through the centuries: 'Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which does not satisfy?' Indeed, why do we? Surey there has never been such a wasteful generation and culture as ours?

If we were asked in the abstract what our greatest sin was, we might say 'selfishness'. But this question challenges that. A range of Christian thinkers insist that our root problem is actually that we are not selfish enough. We do not sufficiently will our own happiness. We do not seek to be unhappy - true. But we are willing to postpone or marginalise our happiness and act out of fear, habit, compulsion, pride (keeping up appearances), and so on. Naturally, marketing and advertising departments are acutely aware of this, and manipulate us to buy more, though it nourishes us not.

This is a good place to return to, again and again, in Lent. How can I be more selfish? More truly selfish. We know that being purely pleasure-seeking promises happiness but does not deliver. (If you don't know, give it try, and get back to us.) We stand a better chance of sustaining proper, authentic selfishness (as it were) if we order our lives to fit with our sense of our own unique vocation, our call from Gd. And if you don't yet know yours, or have lost confidence about it, don't panic.

Isaiah again: 'Seek the LORD while he may be found, call upon him while he is near.' This means not that Gd is about to disappear. Rather it means it is always good to have a sense of urgency in our search for Gd. The claim is that by seeking Gd (in the very seeking), we become more ourselves, the more free to feed on what really feeds us, to receive what really benefits us.

Our second reading, from St Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians, however, warns us that it will not be that simple. Yes, there is a form of wrong desiring, from which Gd can deliver us. But however 'healed' we are, there is a proper form of testing, of temptation, which will abide, which is ours to deal with. Even the saints – one may well say especially the saints - experience this. But this testing is to renew our conscious reliance on Gd, who alone brings the way out of such testing.

About today's gospel there is an ambiguity. It refers to calamities which have fallen on some people in Jesus' day (though if you want to know more about Pilate's Galilean blood or the falling tower of Siloam, I cannot help you; there just is no evidence outside the gospels). Jesus relates these to other tragedies in his people's past. But the question is: does he mean

• that all disasters, including untimely deaths, are random, and the main thing is to live fully, not ever putting off the repentance you need?
• Or is the main point that life is about to become more and more disaster-laden, as the end - the final cataclysm – approaches?

Unfortunately, the following parable of the fig tree can itself be interpreted in either way.

Now, part of Jesus' message was that the world is about to end – so-called apocayptic. I suspect that if we deny that outright, it may come back to bite us. But we can fairly add that in the history of the Church, too much insistence that 'the end of the world is nigh' has not made for a happy story. On the other hand, wisdom surely involves a profound if painful acceptance that life throws random events at us, both good and bad, both life-giving-and-preserving, and life-denying and deathly, and the main lesson to learn from these is to live as well as you can, in each day. In each moment.

And so back to Kierkegaard: you are the actors, the do-ers; I am your prompt. I am, then, prompting us to remember

• to seek out our own ways of being better at being selfish,
• to act towards fulfilling our own calling (which is how we get to right selfishness), and
• always to remain urgent in our underlying search for Gd, both when life is broad and pleasant, and when it is narrow and in-human-terms impossible.

I want to end on a different note. Kierkegaardian challenge is always good. But it is not everything. It may need tempering by some warmth from the East. St John Chrysostomos of Antioch [fourth century] said: 'The Church is not a courtroom but a hospital for our souls.'

So, yes, when we worship, we have a task to do, a task of self-reflection. And, yes indeed, we worship in order to equip ourselves for the greater task, of being Christians in the world. But! But alongside the tasks, there is also the sheer abandonment to Gd. Like patients in hospital, we are patiently to trust in the process of being made well by Gd.

At the heart of all our overcoming of temptation lies – not some great project of self-improvement (though that might have a place from time to time) – lies rather our willingess to stop, stand, and gaze on Gd in Christ and the saints.

Or, to put it slightly differently: yesterday we Anglicans had occasion to commemorate our own George Herbert [1593-1633]. So my final reference is one you will I am sure know, but which bears repeating:

Love bids us welcome...

We must sit down, and taste his meat.

Alongside all our testings, that too is Lent.

Alongside all our tasks, that too is Church.

Amen.