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Friday, 25 April 2025

proclaim ... hope

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN
and St Peter’s, Queenstown
SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER
(April 26th) 2025
 
Readings
Revelation 1: 4-8
Psalm 150
John 20: 19-31

 

 

It’s easy enough to be a part of a liturgical Christian tradition without realizing the extent to which our readings are set not by some personal whim of the preacher, but by some clever people who have worked out a scheme by which we are exposed to as much of the scriptures as we can fit into a three-year cycle of readings. It is fact one of the factors that has kept me immersed in liturgical Christianity, for as one who preaches I have limited opportunity constantly to inflict on you my pet, self-aggrandizing or edifying passages of scripture.

But the pattern the lectionary readings follows, the shape of the church year, is largely based on the chronology of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, rather than that of John. To some extent that doesn’t matter, but it is why we find this scene from John appearing twice in our year, once in the Easter season, once at Pentecost.

Because John conflates the resurrection, and the appearances of the Risen Lord, with the coming of the Spirit. Or maybe Luke, who the lectionary tends to follow, separates them. We can’t tell. Our Tardis cannot take us to those early days in Jerusalem. And while the biblical writers had their own reasons in their own contexts, and the collators of the texts had theirs, centuries later, the critical issue is the gift that the Spirit of Pentecost, the Spirit of Resurrection, brings us. And that is the gift of the experience of the Risen Lord. Not by sight, or by the touch that Thomas sought, but by powerful moments of spiritual encounter. In liturgy, fellowship, in sacrament, and in a different way in nature, creation,  we can from time to time feel the impact of the presence of the Risen Christ.

And we are called to take the gifts that experience gives us, and take them out into the communities into which God has placed us, called us, and proclaim them by our lives, our actions, occasionally our words.

By these aspects of who God is making us, we are called to proclaim, as Paul put it, faith, hope, and love, elements often powerfully countercultural to the  world around us. Other gospel ingredients, too: proclaim justice. Proclaim reconciliation. Proclaim joy. All countercultural in a world that will gravitate always to chaos, gloom, darkness.  That is why we have a photo of children decorating a cross … youth, golden colours, even the shafts of sunlight which have nothing to do with us but everything to do with a God who flings sunlight across universes, all these are bearers of the hope that is in the defeated Cross of Roman torture, the cross of evil. The cross of evil turned bizarrely, impossibly, into the cross of inextinguishable light, and hope and love. The God who resurrects, despite all darkness.

And yes, as every evangelical will rightly remind us, we are called to open ourselves up to, to receive, once and then again and again, the Risen Lord of that Cross into our lives, out actions, our thoughts.  Some of enacted that on Easter Day in a service that includes renewal of our baptismal vows. But we do it every time we make eucharist, as we confess our “not good enoughness,” and hear the priest murmuring God’s words of reconciliation.

Of course these are impossible things to believe, harder still to explain. Harder than impossible. How many impossible things was Alice challenged to believe before breakfast? We are called to believe many more. And we are called to believe just one. Christ is Risen.  For us, with us, in us, and us in him.

So we seek God’s help to be a people proclaiming that hope by our lives and our attitudes.

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