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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