Sermons for Holy Week and Easter - St. George's Anglican Church

Sermons for Holy Week and Easter

St. George's Anglican Church, London

2011

Foreword and Dedication

Preachers are made, not born. What makes a preacher is a mystery, but at the very least two things are involved: first, a love for the Word and a desire to hear and proclaim it; second, a congregation that is willing to listen and to think along with the preacher and also to probe the message and even to question it. A congregation that does these things will make a preacher. St. George's Anglican Church, London is such a congregation. There are many here who offer words and gestures of encouragement to the preachers who step into its pulpit. Among them is Mrs. Janet Cluett, whose attentiveness and questioning and love for her clergy is received with gratefulness and joy. To her we dedicate these sermons as a token of our love and esteem.

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Cover image by Rachel Barrett


Sunday of the PassionRev'd Canon Dr. Timothy Connor

Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 31:9-16; Philippians 2:5-11; Matthew 26:14-27:66

There is no week in the Christian Calendar so laden with emotion as Holy Week. So I wonder just how and what you are feeling having once again heard the long reading of the gospel of the death of Jesus of Nazareth. For many of us it is difficult to read or to hear these words apart from tears. Our hearts are wrung by the betrayal of Jesus by a trusted disciple and friend. We grieve at the hardness of the human heart which contrives to send an innocent man to his death. We are repulsed and yet strangely drawn to the appalling violence of Jesus’ final hours. The disciples’ abandonment of their Lord and friend floods us with embarrassed disappointment. There is something about this story of Jesus’ death that can send us deeply into ourselves and open up well-springs of emotion that perhaps we have not tapped in years. And herein lies a twofold danger. First, upon hearing the story of the passion of Christ we may respond in outbursts of sentimentality. We may be driven so deeply into our own feelings that we miss the Christ who suffers thus. And second, we may miss the simple fact that we read and hear the story of the suffering and death of Jesus as good news – God’s good news. (Remember that there is only one day in the Christian Calendar that is called good and

that is Good Friday, God’s Friday.)None of this is to say that our

emotional reactions today are not warranted. The good news of the death of Jesus is a human story full of distress, of sorrow and pain, of excruciating suffering and of cruel death. There is a great deal of darkness and horror in what we have heard. We are right not to let all of this go unnoticed. But we must also note that this story of the death of Jesus is a story of deep and abiding trust in God, of resting in and relying upon God’s steadfast love. There is distress, certainly. But there is also deep trust, abiding faith in the midst of distress, trust and faith that God will still save. When Jesus cries out to God in the anguish of his abandonment on the cross he cries out to the one in whom his trust is irrevocably placed: ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ Surely it is of utmost significance that these words, drawn from Israel’s Scriptures, are the heart’s cry of the people of God for promised deliverance. Jesus did not draw back but instead gave his back to those who struck him and his cheeks to those who pulled out the beard. He did not hide his face from insult and spitting. He did so knowing that the Lord GOD helped him. With the psalmist he can say, “But I trust in you, O Lord; I say, “You are my God. My times are in your hand; deliver me from the hand of my enemies and persecutors.” Distress, certainly, but also unshakeable trust in the midst of distress. Suffering, yes but also self-emptying service. Becoming a victim of violence, yes but also vindication.

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It is at this point that St. Paul pens a word for us from his jail cell about this distress and about this abiding trust and self-emptying service. ‘Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus’, Paul urges us. This ‘mind’ or this ‘fundamental attitude’ can be glimpsed along the trajectory of the incarnate life of Jesus. It comes to expression as self-abasement, self-emptying, humility. Listen to these golden words: “Let this mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.” ‘Have that same mind’, Paul instructs the brothers and sisters at Philippi. ‘Adopt this very same attitude’, is Paul’s word to us today. But why should we heed Paul? This counsel of his flies in the face of everything which this world prizes, commends to us and instils in us. You and I as citizens of the Western world in this late modern age inhabit a narrative of unconstrained lust for power and influence. We have been taught to prize autonomy above all things. We cling stubbornly to the hope that we can be anything we desire to be, that we can have anything we set our hearts upon, that we live in a world of ever-expanding possibility and progress. This is the modern dream that floods all our fantasies. It is this narrative, so attractive and yet so damaging, that Paul’s word withstands. It is the example of Christ in his deep distress resting in even deeper trust in the steadfast love of God to which Paul

appeals. The cross then is a place of unmasking, of deconstruction, of exposure. To come to that place is to enter a place of dislocation and displacement. And just to the extent that the cross is such a place we will always be tempted to reduce it to sentimentality or simply put it behind us. How indeed could we ever ‘market the cross of Jesus’?

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” Can that mind, I wonder, become yet again the mind of the Church in the midst of its distress? Can it be our mind, yours and mine, faced with all that troubles and upsets us? Let’s not answer too hastily at this point. Remember Peter. Remember what he promised. Remember also his denial of Christ. Peter is also us. So let us at this point at the outset of Holy Week wait and look at Jesus as goes to his suffering and dying, his self-emptying obedience even to the point of death on a cross. That direction and that place will be the measure of our mind – what we purpose to do in this place and how by grace we might do it; what we shall become in this place and how by grace we might become it. To us again is given the opportunity to watch and to wait, to look deeply into the way of Christ in his cross and to look deeply into the way of our life in his Church. We can look and live in hope because “God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should

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confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” So distress, yes but also abiding trust in the midst of distress and also vindication too. So let us wait and watch then, confident that the One who vindicates is near. In that confidence then, let us go forward into Holy Week and the rest of our lives together.

Monday in Holy WeekRev'd David Tiessen

Isaiah 42:1-9; Psalm 36:5-11; Hebrews 9:11-15; John 12:1-11

Today's Gospel text begins with Lazarus. Lazarus “whom [Jesus] had raised from the dead.” With the raising of Lazarus we could not be more at the centre of understanding who Jesus is. In such an act as this we see that it is with Jesus that the advent of the very Kingdom of God comes into the world. In such an act we see what God is about; we see God's desire for this world: that it be moved from all its striving after those things which are self-serving, those things which want power for themselves and their own gain. It is in such an act, in which Lazarus was raised from the dead, that we hear all that we need to hear: Jesus the Son of God is made manifest so that death and the ways that lead to death might be overcome in the resurrection life: the kind of life that is only possible when the God of all life gives it; the kind of life that does not really make sense apart from the act of God on our behalf – for our sakes and for the sake of the redemption of all things.

Yet even after this sentence is written and read and heard, more sentences follow. And the sentences that follow are telling: together, they tell of varied responses to Jesus:

Martha: Martha takes responsibility for dinner.

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She is the host to this Jesus who has raised her brother from the dead. She responds by feeding both her brother and by feeding Jesus. She responds by offering food to the very one who tells us that he has food that we know not of. Jesus is the divine One among us, but also the very human One, the limited and vulnerable One who sits at table to eat the food of his host. Here Jesus is both the most welcome of welcome guests – he is a guest who in his vulnerability, in having nowhere to lay his head, depends on the food of those who host him. Martha embodies the welcome we would all, as Jesus disciples', want to give him. At the same time, Jesus has blessed this family so deeply. In that blessing he is not merely guest but also host to them. There is an ever-present sense that we are always guests at his table because he sustains us in our very lives.

Mary: Mary's extravagant gift of costly perfume is a gift of honour. It is a gift that without words fills the house with the joy of life. The extravagance of the gift embodies the gratitude of this sister of Lazarus. And beyond that its fragrance as it fills the house conveys an image of the Kingdom of God itself – it is in this person, this Jesus of Nazareth, sitting at table in a house in Bethany, that the world will find its true beauty, its beating heart. It's from this lowly person of Mary, in this small but rich act, that our attention is directed to the singular uniqueness of this Jesus, who has saved Lazarus but who will not save himself.

Judas: Judas Iscariot finds this to be too much. It is too much not just because the money saved from the perfume could have been used to care for the poor; it is too much because he fails to see who Jesus is. In failing to see who Jesus is he acts for his own gain, and in referring to the poor he fails to see that Jesus is himself poor. Jesus is at this point in John's Gospel squeezed between those leaders who want to eliminate him as dangerous to their own power, and those who would welcome him with gladness to feed him and bless him as the Messiah. Judas simply fails to see that even as Mary pours out the perfume on Jesus' feet, Jesus' feet are walking toward the cross on which he will himself be poured out for the sake of all the poor, all those in need, all of us.

Three responses then, to the Jesus who raised Lazarus from the dead as a sign of the Kingdom of God that has come in Jesus and is to come:

• Martha welcomes and feeds Jesus. Her work sustains him as she hosts him, and in turn is hosted by him.

• Mary, without words, declares his value to be the heart of life itself.

• Judas turns inward, failing to see the very extravagance of the Kingdom of God at work in and through Jesus. Why is he not simply astounded that

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Lazarus has been restored to life? How can he not see that extravagance is the only response to such a thing?

But this is the way of Jesus in this world – as the letter to the Hebrews tells us, he will offer himself as the new covenant for our sakes; he will fulfil the covenant promises of God unto salvation. He will do so for us, such that we and indeed the whole of creation may come to see as Martha and Mary see, and as the Psalmist sees:

Your steadfast love, O LORD, extends to the heavens, your faithfulness to the clouds.

Your righteousness is like the mighty mountains, your judgments are like the great deep; you save humans and animals alike, O LORD.

How precious is your steadfast love, O God! All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings.

They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights.

For with you is the fountain of life; in your light we see light.

Amen.

Tuesday in Holy WeekRev'd Canon Dr. Timothy Connor

Isaiah 49:1-7; Psalm 71:1-14; 1 Corinthians 1:18-31; John 12:20-36

“For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” So St. Paul in our Epistle text tonight. Paul points out that this foolishness of the cross is God’s wisdom, a wisdom that overthrows what counts as human wisdom, whether it be Jewish wisdom or Greek wisdom. The message about the cross which is both God’s foolishness and God’s wisdom (depending on the angle from which you look at it) turns everything upside down. Worse than that, it reduces the things that are to nothing. So the message about the cross looks like foolishness - like a particularly destructive kind of foolishness. It turns the world upside down. It reduces things to nothing. It pulls the rug out from under the feet of Jews and Greeks alike. Now this is not mere speculation on Paul’s part. He had resolved to proclaim Christ crucified and this message had been greeted as a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to the Greeks. From this perspective, the missionary journeys of Paul must have looked like long, meandering parades of foolishness around the Roman Empire. I wonder how many times people told Paul rather pointedly that he was out of his mind.

I was reminded of this on Sunday

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morning. There we were all lined up in procession, palm branches in our hands, the Sunday School kids on parade and as we moved off to make a loop of the church building the thought crossed my mind that this must look more than a little foolish. If someone walked in off the street at that point, would they have thought we were engaged in a bit of silliness? Yet to us it was entirely meaningful and many told me afterwards how moving and beautiful they thought it was. So there is another perspective. To some the message about the cross looks like foolishness. To others, however, it is the power of God. It is the wisdom of God by which the world’s wisdom has been exposed as foolishness. It points them to the source of their life in Christ, to the one who just is God’s wisdom come among us, God’s righteousness and sanctification and redemption, as Paul puts it. So for these others, the message of the cross is the wisdom and power of God by which they are being saved. The cross just is the symbol, the message, the sign of our salvation. So as Paul presents it, the cross is the occasion of considerable awkwardness. As he proclaims Jesus’ death to Jews they demand a sign. When he speaks about it to Greeks, they tell him it’s a load of nonsense. But to some, to those who are being saved, it is the wisdom and power of God. Put another way, if you are going to speak about Jesus, you will find yourself speaking about the cross and you will therefore step into a moment of considerable awkwardness.

We are living all this in the church right now, it seems to me. There is just so much awkwardness about the cross of Jesus. Some would feel more comfortable speaking about a Jesus who didn’t hang from a cross - a good moral teacher; a person universally kind and hospitable to everyone, perhaps; a man who did a lot of good. Who could take offence at that kind of Jesus? And who would dare to call that way of living foolishness, even if deep down they really thought that it was? So a clever strategy for some in our church is to help us over the obstacle of awkwardness occasioned by the message about the cross. Just don’t talk about it, these folk counsel. Talk about everything else - sex and sexuality, the environment, social justice, open table – but do not talk about the cross.

My dear friend, Fr. Jay Koyle, posts on his FaceBook page videos about growing congregations in the Episcopal Church. Recently he featured a parish in Chicago named, ironically enough, St. Paul & the Redeemer. In the video, the past rector of the place spoke glowingly about all the changes they had made in order to welcome people. One of these involved the large crucifix that hung at the front of the church. First, they changed the skin colour of the corpus on the cross so that it would not be offensive to people of colour. Second, they moved it to the very back of the church and hung it up high on the wall over the gallery so that it would not be offensive to non-Christians who came into the church. The only reason they kept it at all was because, in the words of their

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former priest, “some people like it and it was important to them.” So you see, the awkwardness persists. Some people like the cross but others are worried that it has become a point of offence.

So what should we do with all this? It is Holy Week once again and in our imaginations Jesus is on his way to the cross. There just is no other destination for him this week. He would rather not go to the cross but he embraces it because he is sure that this is the Father’s will for him. He cannot shrink back. He must go to the cross and go alone. We heard all this on Sunday morning. And we will hear it again on Thursday and Friday.

Tonight let’s just take another look at all this from another angle. In our gospel, we have John’s point of view. We heard Paul speak about the message about the cross. Here we have heard John’s message about the ‘hour’ of Jesus. All through John’s Gospel, Jesus is speaking about his hour. He doesn’t want to do certain things, for example, because his ‘hour’ had not yet come. That is, he was watching and waiting for an indication that he is about to be glorified and he is having to figure out just when that time had come. There was a time coming when God’s glory would shine in and through him in an unmistakable way. But when would that time come and what would be the sign of its coming? Not easy to tell. What would count as a clear sign of that? Hard to say. So in our gospel tonight we heard that some Greeks have come and indicated to Philip that they want to speak with Jesus. “Sir,” they say to

him, “We want to see Jesus.” There is no indication that they ever got the chance. Jesus simply infers from this request that this hour has come - the hour, that is, for the Son of Man to be glorified. It turns out, however, that the hour of glory is the hour of death. Jesus immediately speaks in quite general terms about dying a fruitful death, of a life lost in this world that will be kept for eternal life, and of the troubling of his own soul in the face of such an hour. So the hour has come and it turns out to be an hour of death. What’s more, it turns out to be the hour of his death.

John draws our attention to two aspects of Jesus’ hour of glory as the hour of his death. First, it is the hour of the judgement of this world. Now this is another awkward word - judgement - and we instinctively pull back from it. I don’t like being judged and neither do you. So we hope to avoid all this awkwardness by not speaking of judgement. But John has Jesus speaking about his death as the hour of judgement. And he seems to think that this judgement is a good thing, the source of good news, even an aspect of God’s glory. And for good reason. In this hour of judgement the ruler of this world is put to rout and driven out. The hour of Jesus’ death is the moment of Satan’s defeat. The death of Jesus on a cross marks the defeat of evil, of all that withstands God’s will, of all that enslaves human beings. The judgement of the cross opens the door to human liberation from all that ensnares and enslaves us. It is the hour of our emancipation.

Second, the hour of death is also the

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hour of redemption. Jesus says, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.” And John adds, (He said this to indicate the kind of death he was to die.) To be drawn to Jesus is to be led to him from however near to him or far away from him we happen to be. The cross is the great magnet of God’s love for sinners, drawing us back towards its powerful source. To be drawn to Jesus is to be drawn through his death into communion with him and with the one he calls Father. To be with Jesus where he is, is to be with him as he is lifted up. We are drawn into eternal fellowship with God around the cross of Jesus. So to speak of Jesus’ hour is to proclaim the message of judgement and redemption. This is the hour of God’s glory in Jesus Christ - the defeat of the devil and the restoration of humankind to its rightful place in relation to God.

Can you imagine how foolish this ‘hour’ looked to Jesus’ people, the Jews? The Pharisees had holiness on their minds, Torah to study, laws to keep, judgements to make, even decision about pots and pans and other mundane things. The Saducees had a Temple to run, congregational development to roll out, a bottom line to be concerned about. The Zealots had the Romans to overthrow and a country to liberate through violence. And Jesus wants to talk about judgement and redemption, about the glory of God and the hour of his own death? How crazy does that sound? And yet, what is the glory of God but God’s wisdom and power, God’s love and God’s presence. To be engulfed in the glory

of God even at the foot of the gruesome cross is to begin to see the fallen world judged, all things made new, the world restored to its rightful ruler and humanity to its rightful place.

So the message about the cross only looks foolish to those who are perishing. The hour of Jesus’ being lifted up only seems foolish to those who cannot see the glory of God. The question here and now on this Holy Tuesday is, how do they seem to us?

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Wednesday in Holy WeekRev'd Canon Dr. Timothy Connor

Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 70; Hebrews 12:1-3; John 13:21-32

At the beginning of Holy Week the change to the liturgical colour red always makes an impact on me. I note this because red is not my favourite colour – far from it. Yet there is something about the liturgical furniture and the clergy who occupy it being vested in red that makes its mark. This year, however, as I reached for my red stole, kissed its cross and put it round my neck, I felt an odd kind of shudder go through me. It struck me that this red is the colour of martyrdom. It is the red we don as we celebrate the lives of those who have died for their faith, who have made the good confession and whom the Church now counts among its faithful witnesses. And we wear red on their feasts for the simple reason that it is the colour of Passiontide, the colour of the season in which we mark the death of Jesus Christ. So today on this Wednesday in Holy Week we are in red because in this celebration we are marking once again the death of Jesus. And this Jesus just is the faithful witness, the martyr par excellence, even the pioneer and perfecter of martyrdom, that is, of being a faithful witness. So the pulpit, lectern and altar and the holy vessels are all vested in red, as are the clergy. But let’s imagine that we all have donned the red of the faithful witness tonight and then ask ourselves what that could possibly mean.

First, though, I think that we need to make a primary decision. We could say that it would be crazy – a thing of pure foolishness – to don red as the clothing of martyrdom for the simple reason that we intend no such thing as martyrdom by our gathering here tonight. We could admit that we have come here because it is both safe and convenient. True, it will push back our dinner by an hour or so but this is, after all, Lent. We could say that being a Christian in this time and place is not about to cost us our lives. We can more or less carry on as good and decent citizens of Canada with all the attendant rights and privileges thereof and more or less be left alone. We could say, perhaps even thankfully, that faith is a private matter and that it is nobody’s business what we believe and that moreover we have a right to believe it and to be left alone. Or we might even agree with an opinion voiced in an ordination sermon not all that long ago in our Cathedral that more or less made fun of the notion of martyrdom. We might rather be attracted to Christianity because it makes us feel good or is so life enhancing or life affirming. So first it might be helpful to admit to a sense of awkwardness around the notion of martyrdom itself.

Second, we might as well face up to our fears that we may not be cut out for martyrdom. If the time should ever come – God forbid – and we had to decide to make the good confession or else to deny our Lord, what if we couldn’t do it? What if we didn’t have what it takes? We might feel that kind of uncertainty about ourselves and about the

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measure of our faith and hope for a more settled kind of Christian existence. That would be understandable. In fact at each liturgy we pray to the Lord, ‘Save us from the time of trial’ for precisely that reason. So there is awkwardness about the notion of martyrdom itself and about our own fitness for such a calling.

With that awkwardness in mind let us turn our thoughts towards the Epistle text from the 12th chapter of Hebrews for a few moments. The author of this text presents the life of faith as the very opposite of a settled, routine existence. He likens it by contrast to an athletic contest, to a race in fact. There is a race to be run, a finish line to cross and he notes that discipline and perseverance are required of all who run the race. Discipline is needed to strip away every encumbrance that would prevent maximum performance, anything that would hinder free and powerful movement. All this has to be stripped away if we are to run the race as we should run it. We are not, however, pioneers in running this race. No, rather, we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. Now it’s worth pausing over this phrase. You and I hear it as ‘cloud of witnesses’ but the original audience of the letter heard it as nephos marturon - and in that last word we hear the root of our English word martyr. So this ‘cloud of witnesses’ are not merely observers or onlookers – although they are that – but they are also witnesses. They surround us in our race because they have already raced and finished the course. They are all those who

have made the faithful witness even though like us they were encumbered and hindered by sin and required discipline and perseverance to lay it aside so that they could run. What counts for their faithfulness is that they never took their eyes off the finish line. They kept on going towards it even when the course was difficult and steep and hazardous to life and limb. Indeed if you turn back into the 11th chapter of Hebrews to read about some of these witnesses, you will discover that they lived through a powerful lot of suffering and misery and torment and many of them didn’t live through it at all. Now, note one more thing here. It is not just a few of his audience whom the author addresses as runners in the great race of faith. He is not addressing himself to the superstars, the star athletes, the professionals of the faith, as it were. No, every Christian is called to run the race, the very same kind of race run by the cloud of martyr/witnesses. So now we must ask, why is that?

The great example of the martyr/witness is Jesus Christ himself. He is the one to whom all believers look as they run their own race. This Jesus is the pioneer of our faith and he is its perfecter. He is, that is, the one who has blazed the trail and reached the final destination. So as we run along the course of our own race, we must keep an eye on Jesus who has demonstrated how to run faithfully and well. He has set the pace for us. So he serves for us as the great example of what it means to be a faithful witness.

But his course was his own. The finish

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line was for him what the author of Hebrews calls ‘joy’. There was joy set before Jesus Christ as his goal. Between the goal of joy and Jesus’ starting place stood the cross and in order to get to the goal of joy, Jesus endured the cross. Note: the cross was not the goal but rather the thing that had to be endured in order for Jesus to reach the goal. His race has been run and he has taken his seat in the place of exaltation and authority. But he waits still to enter fully upon his joy. There are other runners out there in the race and it is possible that they could grow weary or lose heart. And so Jesus waits for them to finish so that his joy may be full. To the degree that we consider him – that is to look at him and compare how he fared with how we are faring – we may find strength and fresh resolve to bear faithful witness to him. He endured the cross and he endured hostility from sinners. He despised the shame that attached to him from death on a cross because he could already taste the joy that lay on the other side. Why shame? Well, death on a cross was reserved for those who didn’t really count as humans, for ‘sub-humans’ like non-Roman slaves or enemies of the state. The cross was the place where the powerful elite nailed up their non-human trash. For the joy that was set before him Jesus endured this excruciating, public rubbishing called death on a cross.

So we ought to shudder when we reach for our red stoles – all of us. But we also ought to be able to glimpse the joy that was set before Jesus and is now because of

his faithful witness set before us. We ought to consider him, to look to him so that we too might run the race. We do not know what obstacles lie between our starting place and the finish line. We know that some who have gone before us have made the good confession through suffering and death. We cannot say that this will not happen to us. The call to make a faithful witness in the death of martyrdom came to Dietrich Bonhoeffer at the hands of the Nazis on April 9, 1945 and some who were there said that he went to his death able to see the joy. It came to Oscar Romero who was machine gunned as he was celebrating the Eucharist with his oppressed campesino neighbours. It came to Archbishop Janani Luwum of the Church of Uganda whose brutalized and lifeless body was stuffed in the trunk of a car by the henchmen of Idi Amin. It came just a few years ago to those 7 French Trappist monks quietly serving their Muslim neighbours in Tibhirine, Algeria. (We all need to go see Xavier Beauvois’ film Of Gods and Men.) It could come to me or to you or to any one of our brothers and sisters who look to Jesus as the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who consider him who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, who endured hostility from sinners. Let us pray, then, that God would save us from the time of trial. That too is a most faithful witness. But then there is the matter of our everyday witness here and now. Let us pray also for that discipline and perseverance by which we might put aside the sin that would hinder us

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from making a faithful witness today in these circumstances so that even now our joy, the joy that was set before Christ, may be full.

Maundy ThursdayRev'd David Tiessen

Exodus 12:1-14; Psalm 116:1-2, 12-19; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; John 13:1-17, 31b-35

Peter is shocked when Jesus disrobes and begins to wash the disciples' feet. He protests: how can the one who is Teacher and Lord be the one to wash the dirt off their feet? But Jesus insists that this is precisely what it means to his disciple; it is precisely in such lowly action that God's glory shines.

The shock here runs deep. In this action Christ becomes the servant to his followers and the gospel is demonstrated in the most basic of ways. This shocks us just as it did Peter and the disciples. It shocks us I think because we always think of glory in terms of what is grand and beautiful. It is a struggle for us to grasp that glory might also be found in what is small and lowly and humble and broken and even ugly. Yet God's glory is what is at stake here. So Jesus insists: “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” The disciples do not really understand this yet, and yet Jesus promises that they will.

They will come to understand because the washing of feet is but an exemplification of Christ's whole life. His life has puzzled them. His mission has perplexed them. They have followed him as the Messiah of Israel, and yet Peter still does not fully realize that God's Messiah leads with humility as a servant. Christ is unlike any other leader.

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Christ washing the disciples' feet is a moment of distinct revelation: God's ways are not like our ways, but in Christ God makes a way for us to follow a new path.

So this evening we remember two things: The Institution of the Lord's Supper, and the Washing of Feet. We remember them against the backdrop of the Jewish Passover, of which we heard in the reading from Exodus. In Exodus, the Israelites are instructed in the proper remembrance of their salvation from slavery in Egypt. They are instructed on how to remember even as they are preparing for the exodus itself.

To Moses and Aaron the LORD gives explicit instructions on how to prepare for their escape. They are to follow these instructions carefully. The meal they are to eat is a very specific meal. It is eaten in homes because there was no place of worship permitted to the Israelites among the Egyptians. It is eaten as the meal of preparation and readiness, the meal of exodus from slavery and oppression into the freedom that is given by God. In short it is Israel's meal that will take them out into the desert to freedom but also into a situation where they must trust God alone for their provisions. It is by this meal that they will come to remember who they are and what God has done to make them who they are.1 This is why by the end of our passage the text moves from the event itself to the ritual

1 Exodus 11:7: “But not a dog shall growl at any of the Israelites – not at people, not at animals – so that you may know that the LORD makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel.”

remembrance of the event. It must never be forgotten. The harrowing events of being covered by the blood on the doorposts, of being spared God's judgement, of being freed from oppression, are transferred into ritual: “This day shall be a day of remembrance for you. You shall celebrate it as a festival to the LORD; throughout your generations you shall observe it as a perpetual ordinance.”

This is the Passover – Pesach. Pesach carries more than just the sense of being 'passed by.' It intimates protection and the action of sparing. It conveys that the Israelites were delivered that night from both Pharoah and from the angel of death. Pesach is about liberation: Pharoah is judged; Israel is separated and protected from the terror of this judgement.

Jewish faith continues to look to Passover as central to Jewish identity – in the Jewish calendar today is the 3rd Day of the Passover Festival. The reading for Jewish Morning Prayer today was from chapter 13 of Exodus in which the people are instructed to keep a festival of unleavened bread as a perpetual reminder of the hurriedness and readiness necessary to deliverance from Egypt. But the point of this is not just to remember something past; it is remembered “so that the teaching of the LORD may [always] be on your lips” in the present and at all times. The Festival of Passover is an eight day festival: it moves from remembering the Exodus, to the giving of the Ten Commandments and the renewal of God's covenant with Moses and the people, and

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finally to the anticipation of the redemption of all things: signalled in the anticipation of the coming of Messiah. The past – present – future of Jewish life and faith is centred and renewed in the Passover, this primary act of deliverance by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ... and Moses and Aaron ... and Jesus.

The Lord's Supper is in turn instituted at the heart of Pesach. Passover. Deliverance. Protection. The Christian difference is that this meal is instituted by the Messiah Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ who gathered the disciples around him at his table. Here Israel is reconstituted in a new renewal of the covenant – a new covenant in which God himself visits his people in the incarnate Son, pouring himself out as the Paschal lamb – the lamb whose body and blood is broken and poured out for the sake of deliverance, Passover, protection, provision. This is the new Exodus, in which God's deliverance is given not just to Israel but to the whole of humankind: Jew and Gentile alike are invited to look to God's action in Christ as the healing of the nations, as the end of strife, as the place of the unity of all things. And to do so because because this is God's action: in Christ the covenant that God gave long ago comes to be faithfully fulfilled.

Most astoundingly it is fulfilled not at a steep cost to the Egyptians, but at a steep cost to God himself: the Father gives the Son unto death and the Son offers himself to the Father on behalf of all humankind. Here the Messiah receives into himself all the violence

and oppression and slavery that humankind knows in itself. In Christ, God knows this too and takes it up and offers it in the brokenness of the cross. In Christ, God comes to replace that violence for the freedom and life and love of God and love of neighbour: and love even of enemies.

So Christ institutes for his disciples – for us – a perpetual ordinance in the Lord's Supper as both a continuation and a reorientation of Passover. This ritual, this ordinance or ordering (this provision), has been handed on to us not as something passive but as something active and formative. It is here that our identity as those who follow Christ's way is established from the past, orients us in the present, and feeds our hope for the future.

The Apostle Paul offers the Corinthian church a very clear definition of what it means to commune at the Lord's Table. He tells them that “as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.”

You proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. To receive the gifts of God for the people of God at the Lord's Table is not like any other meal. It is certainly not akin to having lunch at the local diner. When you receive the sacrament of the bread/body and wine/blood of Christ, you are not merely receiving a gift but you are also actively unwrapping it. You are deliberately ingesting it. You are participating in the gift yourself, with your very life. By eating and drinking you are

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proclaiming and preaching – saying out loud – that your life is ordered and provided for and held in the hands of Jesus the Saviour. You are proclaiming that Christ is the Passover Lamb who is the source of Peace for this world; the Promise and Hope of the Redemption of all things. You are joining with the whole people of God in declaring that this is the place of God's glory – however small it may seem.

Its smallness is made most clear in the humble action of the washing of feet. With this symbolic action Jesus tells the disciples that he is the source of their complete cleansing and liberation. He will be their Paschal Lamb. They do not yet understand this and perhaps it must be said that the church in the power of the Spirit is always learning and relearning this too because God's glory comes in ways that are so strange to us.

The disciples call Jesus “Lord and Teacher” and Jesus acknowledges that this is true. In this he is their host and they are his guests at the Table. He is their leader and they are his followers. But he simply refuses to lead like a Pharoah. His path is the path of humility and self-giving love. This is the heart of Christian life together in Christ as we gather around his Table and remember his ongoing command to love one another as he has first loved us.

Good FridayRev'd Canon Dr. Timothy Connor

Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Psalm 22; Hebrews 10:16-25; John 18:1-19:42

Just four months ago, give or take a couple of days, many of us were assembled in this place to give thanks for the birth of Jesus. On that night we prayed:

Eternal God, this holy night is radiant with the brilliance of your one true light. As we have known the revelation of that light on earth, bring us to see the splendour of your heavenly glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Late at night we also read this testimony from the Gospel of John: “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” And we heard also this witness: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.” On that night we gave thanks for Jesus, the Word made flesh, the bearer of God’s heavenly glory into the realm of creaturely darkness and our hearts were full of joy.

Today, of course, is a very different kind of day. Here only a few of us are gathered in a room stripped bare of its adornments. The focal point of our gathering is now not a manger but a cross on which the

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Word made flesh was hung to die. It can look for all the world like a very dark day indeed. It can seem to us that the darkness has triumphed and overwhelmed the light. So let us remember here and now that this is Good Friday, a solemn day but not a sad one. And if we have listened at all to the long gospel reading from John, we must also say that this too is a day of radiance in which the glory of God in human flesh still shines. The darkness has done its worst but it has not overwhelmed the light. True enough, God’s glory glimpsed in John’s account of the death of Jesus may not look to us like glory but its signs are there all the same. John has schooled us to look for the glory of God revealed in Jesus in the strangest of places and now he helps us to glimpse it again in the arrest and execution of Jesus on a Roman cross.

Recall with me some aspects of this strange itinerary of incarnate glory. In Cana of Galilee a wedding feast is about to go terribly wrong when it is discovered that the wine has run out. Evidently there is a whole lot of water about the place but what good is water at a wedding feast? Jesus’ mother implores him to do something. Even though his hour had not yet come, Jesus orders the stewards to draw water out of the six stone water jars and it is discovered to be wine – and a very good vintage at that. The day is saved and the bridegroom is bathed in honour instead of disgrace. Or consider a time in Samaria as Jesus banters with a woman at a well. Jesus is hungry and thirsty and he needs a drink. Yet it is he who offers a drink to the woman

who has the bucket which he lacks. He offers her the living water which will spring up within her to eternal life. Glory shines in the testimony concerning Jesus which she bears to her neighbours who come to believe in Jesus as ‘the saviour of the world’. Recall, too, a man born blind who is given his sight and Lazarus who is called back to life from the grave. Glory shines in Jesus here in these unlikely places: in the ordinary circumstances of a wedding feast, in the territory of the Samaritans where Jesus dares to talk to a woman in public alone, in conflict over a Sabbath day healing with the Pharisees, and out in a grave yard where Jesus stares down death. There in those places Jesus’ glory, which is God’s own glory, shines. There as dark clouds of controversy and conflict and impending violence begin to swirl round Jesus’ head, God’s glory shines in him, in his words and in his deeds. God’s glory shines in Jesus even in those circumstances in which his enemies contrive to bring about his death.

And then, as we remembered last night, glory shone as Jesus took a basin and towel and stooped to wash the dirt and the grime, the muck and the mess, from the feet of his disciples. Now I think that is a hard notion to swallow. How can we see glory in washing feet, in doing, that is, the work of a slave? Peter couldn’t see it and, frankly, neither can I. Just when I think I am beginning to get the glory of servanthood it becomes tinged with narcissism or at least self-regard or else it devolves into sentimentality. Jesus saw servanthood as glory because his whole

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life, his very existence, ministered to the glory of God.

So washing feet, slaves’ work, is one thing. What about death on a cross? Admittedly here it becomes more difficult to spot the signs of glory but, still, I think, they are there for us to see in the story that John tells. When Judas comes with soldiers and police from the chief priests and the Pharisees to arrest Jesus notice what happens: “When Jesus said to them, “I am he,” they stepped back and fell to the ground.” He will be arrested and taken into custody on his own terms and subject to his own will. Note, too, that Jesus immediately begins to give orders to those who have come for him. And note also the almost magisterial tone of his discourse with those who interrogate him. He is a study in cooperative non-cooperation. He is confident that the only reason all of this can be unfolding as it is, is that it is all somehow in accord with God’s will. And that extends to the power that Pontius Pilate has over him – if he has any at all, it is because God allows him to have it. Jesus is the king of a kingdom “which is not from here”, not subject to any of this power and violence and wanton disregard for the dignity of Jesus’ person. Note also that on the cross Jesus gives direction concerning his mother’s care and ultimately he declares that “it is finished” and bows his head and gives up his spirit. There is throughout this whole narrative of the death of Jesus the ground bass, the cantus firmus of glory, glory in a minor key, certainly, but the glory of the only Son of the Father, full

of grace and truth, all the same.Sure, there is darkness too. How could

it be otherwise? Note the treatment accorded to an innocent man in the halls of Roman provincial justice – flogged, crowned with thorns, arrayed in purple, the object of the soldiers’ game, Jesus is handed over to the blood lust of the mob to be crucified. But in John’s telling all this darkness is strangely muted as well. He does not dwell on it. There is in fact a kind of tawdry matter-of-factness about the whole thing. This sort of things is just what darkness does. But in the face of it, Jesus goes according to the will of the Father, according to the glory of his kingdom.

What, then, is that glory? Recall again that Jesus had said that just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up. The glory of the cross is that it is the site which God has set up in the midst of a perishing people where they only have to look and they will live. Recall again that when Greeks came asking to see Jesus and Jesus then knew that his hour of glory had come, he proclaimed that when he was lifted up, he would draw all people to himself. The glory of the cross is that it is the site set up in the midst of a lost and alienated people at which they might be turned and drawn to the Son and with him into communion with the Father. So the glory of the cross is that it is the place where life is freely offered out of death. The glory of the cross is that it is the site of God’s redemption and reconciliation of a people who are drawn into new relation with Godself. The glory of

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the cross is that it turns out to be the site of God’s grace and truth.

You will catch a glimpse of this glorious grace and truth today to the extent that you attend to its way in the world from the manger to the cross. You will see it fleetingly perhaps as darkness threatens to overcome it. It is so easy for the darkness to captivate our minds. Let us then as we meditate before the cross today ask for the light of Christ’s glory to pervade our minds, to help us to see what the good God is up to in the cross of Jesus, and how we ourselves might look and live. If we must shed tears, then let them be tears of joy. If we must look away for shame, then let us also be drawn by the offer of forgiveness and relationship with God. If we are overwhelmed by darkness, then may God turn us and draw us into the light of his glory. On this Good Friday, may his grace and truth come also to be ours.

Easter Vigil MeditationRev'd David Tiessen

Genesis 1:1 – 2:4a / Genesis 7:1-5, 11-18, 8:6-18, 9:8-13 / Exodus 14:10-31, 15:20-21 / Isaiah 55:1-11 / Ezekiel 36:24-28 / Ezekiel

37:1-14 / Romans 6:3-11 / Matthew 28:1-10

Between the creation story of Genesis and the testimony to the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, there is a great deal of human history – a history that dips and dives in and between both darkness and light. All along the way, the testimony of the prophets of Israel is that human history is not left to itself and its own devices. Human history is attended by the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus. Human history is attended by the God who first created the world as good for fulfilling God's own intentions and purposes. Those purposes are and always will be good. But the freedom that God has granted to creatures and to creation: the freedom to evolve and shift and change, the freedom to love and to love in return, the freedom to shape and mold the created order – that freedom comes with a call and a responsibility to live in keeping with God’s good purposes. It is a call to image God in the world, to act in ways that foster life and oppose death. Human history is marked by the darkness of failing to do that; yet it is also marked at so many points by the light with which God lights creation and us creatures.

The readings from the scriptures we have heard tonight name the dynamics of

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darkness and light. But they name them not as an equal tug-of-war or as a cosmic dualism of good vs. evil. The darkness that covered the face of the deep is dispelled as the wind from God sweeps over the face of the waters and God speaks: “Let there be light.” And with that word – that good word, that divine word – there was light. With that word God separates the light from the darkness.

Yet this is about more than just the day and the night of the revolutions of the earth. This is about the good word of God spoken into creation itself. God’s good word dispels the chaos and disorder that belongs to the darkness. God’s good word comes to judge and to expunge all that does not belong to the light. What we must hear in speaking of God’s judgements is that God's judgements are made in keeping with God’s desire. And God’s desire is that the whole of creation will flourish – so that every creature in the heavens and in the earth will be what God intends it to be and creates it to be: creatures in proper relation to one another and to the Creator. For this to come to pass requires more than just a tug-of-war between two equal powers: dark vs. light. It requires that the light is more powerful than the darkness. It requires that the grip of darkness is loosened and ultimately shattered by a light that cannot be overcome.

But that light cannot be a merely human light. It cannot be our own project. It cannot be merely our own version of justice. It cannot be merely our own version of a certain kind of politics. It cannot be merely our own

version of morality or ethics. It cannot be this because we are creatures who have joined the chaos and contributed to it. What we need is to see the light of God in our world, dispelling the darkness. What we need is to pursue this light, to follow it, to hold fast to it, and to let it lead us as we pray and act and trust that God’s light will lead us in the way that we should go.

Right at the heart of our readings we heard from the prophet Isaiah. The prophet Isaiah is confident in God’s everlasting covenant. Through the covenant God made with Israel the whole of the world shall be blessed. Nations will turn to hear of God’s steadfast and sure love not firstly because of Israel’s faithfulness – because as scripture depicts, they know themselves to be too often unfaithful, just as we all do – but because of what the Holy One of Israel does. God extends mercy where human creatures do not; God offers pardon where we would harden ourselves and execute our own judgements. God’s ways are higher than ours, Isaiah tells us – and they are so because God’s goodness and generosity and mercy exceeds our own. The mystery of God’s way of salvation runs deeper than any darkness. And so God’s good word that goes forth from his mouth shall not return empty but will accomplish the purpose for which it was spoken.

By virtue of that promise – by virtue of this magnificent God whose desires and judgements are good and whose word is true – Isaiah sings that the people of God “shall go

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out in joy, and be led back in peace,” that “the mountains and the hills . . . shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” Instead of the thorn there shall be a great tree of cypress and it shall stand as “an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.”

Yet it is by way of Good Friday that this promise is made sure; it is by way of a crown of thorns that the great tree of life spreads its branches to all the world. It is by way of the darkness of death that the light invades it and shatters it. In the cross of Christ death’s dominion is exposed; through the cross of Christ death’s dominion is destroyed; from the cross of Christ God’s good, life-giving, never-failing word is spoken – and it is spoken unto life.

And so the angel of the Lord appears as lightning, garbed in the purest white, to do what angels do: to speak the word of God and the word of God alone: ‘Do not be afraid; . . . you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay.’

The place where he lay is now empty. The fearsome grip of death is shattered, dispelled in this great act of God in which God demonstrates for us that the ultimate word belongs to the God of all life; that because of God’s word death and chaos does not and cannot have the last word. This great act inspires a fearful awe and a joyful shout. For here is the sign of all signs – God’s act for us and for our sakes. It is into this new beginning that we have been baptized, by this that we

are fed in bread and wine – that we human creatures might come to know the true image of God laid open before us in the life, death, and resurrection of this Jesus the Christ; that in this word the whole of human history might be reshaped to the glory of God for the sake of all creation. God’s word. Which does not return empty. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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The Day of ResurrectionRev'd Canon Dr. Timothy Connor

Jeremiah 31:1-6; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; Acts 10:34-43; John 20:1-18

Just up the road in the City of Stratford they are preparing to roll out another season of theatre. Central to the playbill is the musical and this is not hard to understand. First, the musical offers, well, music! And it is often stirring and memorable. You’ll leave the theatre with the principal tunes playing over and over in your head. Second, the musical offers a happy ending. You’ll leave the theatre entertained, consoled that all has turned out well, believing once again that life is good. Stratford types will tell you that they have to do the musicals in order to be able to do the ‘serious pieces’ on the playbill, especially the great tragedies of Shakespeare. So they give you entertainment in the hopes that enough tickets will be sold so that the dramas that will really open us up can be performed. So this year, for example, the advertising literature for Camelot trumpets, “Bring the whole family.” But no such invitation is given for Richard III or Titus Andronicus. We love happy endings. Indeed, we hope that, like the musical, our lives will have a happy ending, that in the end things will turn out well for us. We want deep down to be consoled.

It may well be the case that we’ve come to church today hoping to celebrate a happy ending, a happy ending to the story of Jesus. The dark themes of Thursday and

Friday – betrayal, servanthood, the perversion of justice, torture and execution – are today caught up into and suffused with joy. We may even hope to put them behind us. This is a day for praise and singing, for the one who was dead is alive again, the one who was crucified is risen. Of all days we deem this one to be the happiest, a day of deep consolation and of true mirth. Now with you I want to affirm and enter into this great celebration which unfolds today and for fifty days. I want to give myself wholly to this ‘queen of seasons’, the longest and most joyful of the entire Christian Year. And I want to do this because today we celebrate an event that is so much more than a happy ending. So much more, indeed.

Now, how is that so? How is Easter so much more than a happy ending? Well, consider this. On Easter morning, Jesus’ closest friends and disciples discover two things. First they learn that the tomb in which Jesus was buried is empty. The grave clothes in which he was wrapped for a proper burial are still there. And the cloth that covered his head is still there in the tomb, neatly rolled up and lying apart where it had been left. But Jesus’ embalmed body is not there. Mary Magdalene has come to the tomb and noticed that the stone used to seal the grave had been rolled away. She reports that the body of Jesus has been removed and that they do not know where it has been taken to. Peter and the beloved disciple run to the tomb and they discover that it is empty. The beloved disciple took all this in and believed. But then

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he and Peter went back home. Jesus had died on the cross. His body was prepared for burial and placed in the tomb but it was no longer there.

The second thing that the disciples learn is that Jesus is alive again. Mary Magdalene does not return to her home as the others did but remained weeping outside the tomb. And it is in that moment of grief that Jesus approaches her and speaks her name. She then recognizes him and he tells her to go and tell the others. Mary Magdalene becomes the first witness to the resurrection. So the tomb is empty and the body of Jesus is missing. But Jesus is alive again and he comes to those he loves and he speaks words of peace to them. For fifty days the Church will rejoice that the tomb was empty and that Jesus came again to his friends and disciples and spoke words of peace.

Now imagine for a moment how the story would unfold if what this amounted to was merely a happy ending. Imagine how you would tell the story from this point. Well, let’s begin with Mary Magdalene. Obviously her grief is of a deeply personal kind. She is deeply attached to Jesus and she owes to him a great deal. She had lost him and now he has been returned to her. What ending to this story could be happier than for Mary Magdalene to find true love with Jesus, to settle down with him and raise a family, living out her days in marital bliss in the warmth of a loving family? Alright, Dan Brown beat us to this story line and made a lot of money from it. But a happy ending would dictate that Mary

Magdalene would have Jesus back and find fulfilment in relation to him. What about Peter? Well, it would be good for him to be forgiven and reinstated in some position of leadership and lead Jesus’ mission out into the world in ever-expanding waves of success. That too is a great story line and the evangelist John takes up part of it at least. Peter will be forgiven and restored but he will not in fact taste success. Rather the shape of his life will look pretty much like the shape of Jesus’ life and in the end he too will taste death, even death on a cross. What about Jesus himself? Surely now that he is alive again he will be entirely vindicated. Soon an official apology on the imperial parchment issued over the signature of the Emperor himself will arrive in the mail, expressing outrage in the highest quarters about the miscarriage of justice Jesus had suffered and relating that Pontius Pilate had been summarily fired. Jesus would now be free to take up his ministry and mission where he left off, perhaps opening a healing clinic in Nazareth or, better, a theological college on the shores of Galilee. What could be a happier ending than that?

Of course, none of that happened. The Easter gospel does not offer us a happy ending. It offers us so much more than a happy ending. Life does not go on as before – only better – for Mary Magdalene, for Peter and the other disciples or for Jesus. And there are a few clues in the gospel text we have heard to indicate why that is the case. First, there is something quite strange about the

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Jesus who comes to Mary in the garden. It is surely telling that she does not recognize him. He comes to her looking like a complete stranger, like a gardener whom she has never seen before. It is only when he speaks her name that she is able to make him out. Second, she wants to hold him, to cling to him but he cannot be held. He is moving on, going away from her. He is ascending, not settling down. He is moving forward, not going back. So while it seems appropriate to say that Jesus shows himself here to be alive again, it is also apparently the case that he is not alive in just the same form or same way as he was before. He is ultimately recognizable to those who love him and have known him but he is also surpassingly strange. He is at once familiar and elusive. There is even something about him which startles and frightens. The tomb no longer holds him but neither do his loved ones.

So how does that add up to ‘more than a happy ending’? Well, it is happy to the extent that Mary Magdalene is no longer immobilized by grief and sorrow. Jesus sends her to his other disciples and she tells them with joyful confidence, “I have seen the Lord.” But it is more than a happy outcome in that Mary Magdalene comes bearing an Easter message from the lips of Jesus. It is this: “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.” Now it is not in the least bit strange, not, that is, to careful readers of John’s Gospel, to hear Jesus refer to his Father and to his God. All through John’s telling of the Jesus story he has laid

great emphasis on the intimate relationship between Jesus and his Father. He has stressed again and again the depth of that relationship between Jesus and his God. “I and the Father are one,” Jesus says. And now it is to this God that he goes, to this Father that he ascends. And in going and ascending he declares that this same God is our God, that this same Father is our Father. Through his rising again from the grave Jesus draws his disciples into the life-giving depth and height and length and breadth of his relationship with God. If this God is now our God and this Father is now our Father, then we too must share the destiny of Christ crucified and risen and ascended to the Father.

So again I must ask, how is this better than a happy ending? In just this way, I think. Happy endings are fleeting things. They belong to the world of entertainment and entertainment is an exercise in distraction from the very real and complex world around us. Happy endings speak to a deep longing within us that all will one day be put right. But such happy endings seem to be unequally distributed and to some they never come at all. We can be very honest at this point. Some of us here are sick and others are sorrowing. Some bear the burden of a broken heart, even on Easter morning. Some are frightened, anxious and given to depression and despair. Some know in their bodies that death is not very far away at all. Yet! Yet if Jesus who has been crucified is risen again; if Jesus goes to his God and this God is now

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our God; if Jesus returns to the Father and his Father is now our Father; then we have grounds for hope. Death will not have the last word for us because it did not for him. Sorrow and pain, depression and despair, fear and anxiety, will not be our lasting legacy. In the presence of God Jesus now speaks our names, recognizing us before God so that we might recognize him. Dying and rising, his destiny is ours. And that, my dear friends, my brothers and sisters, is so much more than a happy ending. Alleluia!

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Sermons for Holy Week and Easter - St. George's Anglican Church

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