It was never my practice, in about 30 years of parish
ministry, to preach a sermon on Easter Day. This was in part a kind of “marketing”
strategy: I use the word cautiously. Throughout those years Easter still had a
residual hold on many in the community, and a large number of individuals and
families would head off to church, perhaps to please Granny, perhaps because there
was this memory of some sort of faith connection from Mum and Dad’s youth, a
faint memory that it was the done thing and couldn’t, surely, be all bad.
To be honest, often it was. I heard of long dreary sermons,
hell-fire and damnation condemnations, page shuffling morasses of confusions.
In some places where the liturgy was profoundly beautiful to the regulars it
was dense and meaningless to the irregulars, and all too often there was
nothing more than some scraps of A4 paper for children to draw Easter eggs on.
And of course there were exceptions.
But in any case I decided that Easter is beyond words,
resurrection is beyond words. So I settled for music, or even dance (on the
rare occasions I could find a genuinely faith-enflamed trained dancer). Sometimes
just a poem, or a reading, for example, from C.S. Lewis’s wildly hope-filled depiction
of the humans and other creatures running pell-mell into the new, resurrection Narnia
(from The Last
Battle,) or Tennyson’s joy-filled “Ring Out, Wild Bells.”
Because words were not enough. Words sometimes sank the joy
of Easter. Good liturgy has many quite beautiful hope-filled words: more were
not needed.
I’ve been largely out of parish ministry for a few years now,
since one of my own Good Friday – Easter journeys. (As it happens I was leading Easter services for
the last couple of years, but that’s another story). But the Easter hope-filled
joy won’t leave me. And even in the midst of Covid-19 I still find myself
seized by resurrection hope.
So in these pixellated pages I share with you three
reflections that I have been privileged to share this year.
- A link to my biblical reflections written for the Diocese of Dunedin, here
- A link to my reflections on Easter Day, and those of my colleagues (scroll down)
- A link to a broadcast I was honoured to record for local community radio station OAR-FM for this day (scroll for 12th April podcast – (once posted, some time after 0830 on that day!) …
What follows is the
script to that last link, in the hope that it may in its own way be something
of a “Broken Moment” for you, even without sound and without many of our normal
experiences of Easter, as Easter hope breaks the tomb of a Good Friday, Covid-19
world.
SERMON NOT PREACHED AT ALL!
NOT EVEN PREACHED IN AN UPPER ROOM
TO A COMPUTER AND TO AN INTERNET
BUT, FROM, EASTER DAY (April 5th)
2020
but the text of a …
RADIO CHURCH BROADCAST
OTAGO ACCESS RADIO OAR-FM
0830 SUNDAY 12th APRIL, 2020
Tēna tatou, haere mai, haere mai, haere
mai ki te rā
tapu, e ki te hāhi
reo irirangi, Mo te « Radio Church » Ko Michael Godfrey toku ingoa.
Welcome to you, whoever and wherever you are, welcome to
Sunday and welcome to Radio Church. My name is Michael Godfrey. Great to be with
you, “with” with all its strange connotations, in these weird times.
Welcome too, to Easter.
[Have a listen to “The Easter Song” … Very
1970s, but it was in its time a joy-filled explosion of Easter hope and touched
many lives with its message]
Easter. Forgive me for a moment if I travel to another world
that many of us remember faintly:
Alice was not a bit hurt, and she
jumped up on to her feet in a moment: she looked up, but it was all dark
overhead; before her was another long passage and the White Rabbit was still in
sight, hurrying down it. There was not a moment to be lost: away went Alice
like the wind, and was just in time to hear it say, as it turned a corner, “Oh
my ears and whiskers, how late it’s getting!” She was close behind it when she
turned the corner, but the Rabbit was no longer to be seen: she found herself
in a long, low hall, which was lit up by a row of lamps hanging from the roof.
[From Alice in
Wonderland]
I’m not sure what Charles Dodgson, Lewis Carol, had been
ingesting when he wrote the Alice books, but he was a master of words,
and he took us into a world far beyond most of our imagining. A fantastical
world, certainly a world very different to that into which gospel-writers
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John take us. But like them he only had words to
covey his scene.
[Have a listen, if you like, to Jewel’s “Goodbye Alice in Wonderland” … in it she explores the pain of hope and innocence lost]
Jewel Kircher, in a quite autobiographical album, penned an
emotionally laden song, “Goodbye Alice in Wonderland,” in which she is bidding
goodbye to a fantasy world that had left her bewildered and hurt. Bad fantasy,
even bad mystery, can do that. French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre used the phrase
“mauvais fois,”
bad faith, for this. But faith does not have to be bad – even when it is faith
in one who many dismiss or mock as an “invisible friend.”
The gospel writers struggled with words to tell of an
experience they and their fellow-believers had undergone some decades earlier.
The words they came up with take us into a world beyond words. Like Jewel’s
song Alice in Wonderland their world of resurrection hope can be
meaningless and treacherous pie-in-the sky, mauvais fois. In the hands of some the Christian resurrection stories
become an excuse to avoid reality: to spread Covid-19 recklessly by
holding meetings that endanger the lives of countless thousands, as we’ve seen
recently in the United States (though not exclusively there).
The resurrection story-tellers struggle for words to convey
some life-changing experience that a handful of early Christians had undergone.
Some who read the words and images of the resurrection of Jesus take them as an
excuse to be, as the saying goes, so heavenly minded that they’re no earthly
use, or worse, they become utterly destructive of human society and the
greater, natural world.
But these word-pictures of the gospel writers have also
inspired greatness, life- and world-changing greatness.
Something happened in the lives of those first word-challenged believers: something beyond words.
[Have a listen, if you like, to the last movement – about six
minutes from the end of this link – of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony.]
Amongst other words in the Resurrection Symphony
Mahler includes the line “On the wings I have gained / I shall soar with ardent
love.” Here we break out of prose, out of factuality, into the words that are
beyond words, words of awe … and mystery … and love. Sometimes some of us need
to believe in hope beyond sight. When we are witnessing quite
apocalyptic scenes all around us, the wrath and destruction wrought by an
invisible virus and in many places aided and abetted by irresponsible behaviour
and even leadership, sometimes we want to believe in something greater than
lives cut off in horrendous circumstances.
Seven days ago, in an online sermon, I made some dark
suggestions: Let us stay, I suggested, with the death of hope ...
Not an ersatz
or false death, but death. Real death.
Death like the deaths of those countless souls dying,
separated from loved ones because draconian regulations now rightly forbid
basically all family contact while victims are dying of coronavirus.
Death, mind
you, like a myriad other forms of death:
- Death like those died in the
hell-holes of war.
- Death like those died in
concentration camps.
- Death like those died in the
Black Death.
- Death like the early waves of
HIV-Aids.
Not romantic “turn your eyes upon Jesus and beam a beatific
smile death” but death, tormented death: death like those of NZ's obscenely
high suicide and domestic violence rates.
Real death. Your death, my death, either of which may or may
not be peaceful or pretty.
Much of Christianity tries to sidestep harsh realities –
which is a wee tad surprising, since the founder of the faith died a brutal,
lonely, abandoned death.
But Christians very quickly came to believe even that
death, and even the deaths I described in that sermon last week, was – is
– not the final word. Unprovable of course, and perhaps not everyone’s cup of
tea, but at its best this strange set of beliefs, this one of six impossible
things to believe before breakfast, this has inspired ordinary human beings to
greatness.
At its best this strange set of beliefs has inspired ordinary
human beings to face the trials of human existence, including Covid-19. Perhaps
we too can be inspired to lift our eyes, some of us believers, some not, to
recharge our lives with compassion and justice, and to face another day,
because a handful of frightened women approached a sealed tomb and found it
empty.
Thanks for joining me.
[Have a listen, if you like, to Pete Seeger (or the more
digitally enhanced Enya) singing “How Can I Keep from Singing”]
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