Sermon 26th April 2015

Today, one of our Lay Readers, Adrian Parkhouse, continues our study of the Gospel of Mark. 

The reading is from Mark 1:21-34

  THE HEALING TEACHER

“The Son of Man came not be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many” Mk 10:45

Within a thick and spreading hawthorn bush
That overhung a molehill large and round,/
I heard from morn to morn a merry thrush
Sing hymns to sunrise,/ and I drank the sound
With joy;/ and often,/ an intruding guest,/
I watched her secret toil from day to day -
How true she warped the moss to form a nest,
And modelled it within with wood and clay;/
And by and by, like heath-bells gilt with dew,
There lay her shining eggs,/ as bright as flowers,
Ink-spotted over shells of greeny blue;/
And there I witnessed, in the sunny hours,
A brood of nature's minstrels chirp and fly,
Glad as the sunshine and the laughing sky.

Where I grew up, John Clare was our local poet.  Stories were told to us in school of how in his later years, after he had reached the peak of his fame as the Peasant Poet, noted for simple descriptions of the countryside of his native east Northants, he used to be seen walking along the paths that became the Billing Road, on his way to take up his usual place sat in the portico of All Saints Church in the centre of the town.  That was a century before I walked some of the same route on my way to school, but the countryside was very close and we could still find what had so enraptured him.

And my walk took me past the gates of the place from which his daily walks began:  for me, St Andrews Hospital;  for John Clare, The Northampton County Asylum.

We continue our reading of Mark’s gospel.  Last week we heard the message of the closeness of the Kingdom of God and the need to repent;  and the call to the fishermen:  “Follow me” and they did.  This week we see the start of Jesus’ ministry.  And straightaway we are drawn into the paradox that is Jesus – the paradox that is summed-up in our theme verse from Mark 10:  that the Son of Man (which is a term that has generated a ton of theological theory – but is at the very least a title that identifies Jesus with suffering and with greatness) came not to be served but to serve:  the strong serving the weak.  And in our passage this morning that paradox emerges from its twin, interwoven themes:  authority and compassion.

The challenge of Jesus’ authority has already emerged – though unspoken.  Why did those men leave their nets, their boats, their families and follow? What was it about this man that so effected them?  The questions intrigue us.  We find it difficult to imagine how it could have happened, why and how they could just have got up and gone.  It so unreal to where we find ourselves, bound up in our complex lives, dependent on so much and so many dependent on us.  Footnote 1: Did you see the press coverage this week about the increased numbers of people (still small) joining religious orders?  I was struck by one new nun’s comment that the religious life offered her the freedom she felt she needed to serve God fully.  She might have explained – to respond to his authority, to follow.

Today this theme of authority becomes explicit:  Jesus’ teaching wasn’t like the scribes’, the teachers of the Law, because “he taught with authority”.   The evil spirit was expelled because “this man has authority to give orders to evil spirits and they obey him.”

What had Mark noticed among the worshippers in the synagogue?  As on the lakeside, what was it about this man that was so strikingly authoritative?  We could answer that from Jesus’ perspective:  while we have saved Mark’s account of Jesus’ baptism by John until later in the series, that experience of heaven opening, the Spirit’s descent and the words of authorisation, You are my own dear Son.  I am pleased with you, marked the authority that Jesus felt.  On another occasion, John reports Jesus being challenged outright about his teaching:  Jesus answered, “What I teach is not my own teaching, but it comes from God, who sent me.” (Jn 7:16).  He speaks of what he has seen and heard with the Father.

That is how Jesus accounted for his authority.  But that is not why it would have struck the listeners in such a way.  From their perspective, the authority lay in part in the contrast with the scribes.  The scribes had a formulaic way of teaching:  they started with the Torah and then took and compared the opinions of conflicting scholars of how the Law was to be applied in everyday life.  It was close to lawyers arguing case law before a judge.  But Jesus went to the heart of the matter – in ways which explained not how the Law was to be dissected in a descending order of detail, but rather, looking upwards,  at why the Law was given as a means of enabling God’s people to respond to His grace.  We do not know what he preached that day (Cf Luke 4:17ff ”The spirit of the Lord is upon me …”), but we will see plenty of his teaching in this series and we can imagine the thrill of hearing, not a debate about the minutiae of behaviour, but an exhortation that how we are and what we do is significant if the Kingdom of God is here!  And the Kingdom of God is here.

Cynical though we are, critics that we are encouraged to be, nonetheless, we, like that synagogue crowd, crave to hear a voice of authority.  Stripping away the veneer of our independence, each of us longs to hear the truth; not because it is something forced on us, certainly not because we will like it, but because it is something of authority that we can decide for ourselves to follow;   something in which we can invest – or start to the search for - that part of ourselves that is the “real” us.  In some ways, we should like to be children again – not for the innocence, that cannot be restored, but for the natural trust that children have.  What did Jesus say?  Unless you accept the kingdom of God like a little child …” (Mk 10:15) .  We would like help in the search for, what perhaps we call “meaning”, in our lives.  I think that was the authority of Jesus they saw that day.

What of the other theme:  compassion?  For Mark the first “healing” is not the expulsion of the evil spirit it seems, but the quieter, private events surrounding the cure of Simon’s mother-in-law.  But the handling of man in the synagogue and the other exorcisms recorded in our reading must have been acts, not only used to advertise Jesus’ authority over evil (the first theme) but also acts of healing and so compassion.  William Barclay in his commentary wisely suggests that we can approach these accounts as either being literal, or as being symbolic or as being real in the terms understood at the time.  While I do believe in a power of evil, I favour the last of these alternatives and so for me I am struck that, for Mark, Jesus’ first act of compassion, if not healing, is exercised in respect of a condition that we might now describe as being a mental one (the description is much the same as the insane man in the Gerasene country:  ch.5).

To preach on mental illness is beyond me.  It would require a sensitivity that I lack and, if already, you are concerned, forgive me.  The Bible deals very sensitively and honestly with many forms of illness, including those we term psychological.  Whatever I say will be too simplistic.  Forgive me.

The statistics tell us that a significant proportion of the population and so those in church this morning, are impacted in some way by mental illness.  My own experience bears out the figures:  I share the powerlessness and fear that conditions of mental illness can induce in myself and those I love.  And history shows us that society’s incomprehension and inability to respond has frequently led to exclusion and even incarceration.  We live in more enlightened times and it is a matter of pride that our parish sits so close to a leading caring institution which is the Maudsley and a matter of rejoicing that so many people within our churches are individually engaged in caring for, curing or campaigning for the mentally ill.  From these enlightened times we look back and realise how sometimes the very illness which threatened exclusion may have created greatness.  John Clare is just one very small example:  another close to me was the priest and translator, JB Phillips.  And, without romanticising the real pain, the list of composers and artists is a long one and it continues to be written:  as the experience they, we, have may bring its own glimpses of fullness.  Which is one reason why exclusion is wrong.

As a matter of history, western societies used the resources left behind by the disappearance of leprosy (and we gospel readers love a good leprosy story – one next week!) to incarcerate those whose reason it doubted.  As one excluded class went, it was replaced by another.  Footnote 2:  Watching the news reports this week of the deaths in the Mediterranean, I wondered whether we were now ready to create another class of “the excluded”.  It is not just the attitudes expressed, not just the camps on the edges of towns, but I was reminded too of the “Ships of Fools” which in the Middle Ages used to carry the mentally ill along the great waterways of Europe, from city to city – never reaching home .

The point is that Jesus went straight for the jugular:  no hiding behind cultural nicety, his culture or ours.  He healed equally:  equal respect, equal treatment, equal love.  Why?  Because, Mark seems to want to understand at the outset, whatever we may think – and even when think it about ourselves – we are all the same in the sight of the Father, no matter what. And His love shown in the compassion of Jesus is equally given.

Authority and compassion.  Meaning and inclusion.  That is what you would have experienced had you heard him that Sabbath.  Read the passage again and see if his words don’t reach you still?

I am: yet what I am none cares or knows,

My friends forsake me like a memory lost;

I long for scenes where man has never trod;

A place where woman never smil'd or wept;

There to abide with my creator, God,

And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:

Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;

The grass below--above the vaulted sky.

Sunday 19th April 2015

Today, our Vicar, Cameron Barker, preaches. We look at Mark's Gospel.

“The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”.

It is quite a way to begin any new series, I realise; but this time it’s the only way to do it, I think. And, if you learn nothing else about Mark’s Gospel – though I very much hope that you will do, of course – make this it. Here is the truth that was central to what Mark lived, taught, and wanted all people to come to believe, as he had done: that “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”. And then prepare for your life never to be same ever again; as it wasn’t for these 2 pairs of brothers!

Actually there’s one other key thing to learn about Mark at the start. So, rather than having any lighter interlude next, we’re going to do that learning; in a very Mark-like way: by taking action! Mark was a man of action; who told an action-filled story; in action-packed ways; and he expected his readers to take action as a result of what they read. So our action now is to learn his central statement as a memory verse for this whole series. Learn it well, because we will say it several more times along the way today; and likely often in weeks ahead too. So: “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

Now in some ways it’s entirely ‘coincidental’ that this should be how we begin a new series just 2 weeks after Easter. It has rightly been said (of all 4 Gospels, in fact) that, if boiled down they are essentially the Passion story with an introduction. The books that we call Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written above all to tell the story of who Jesus is; and what he did. And at the very heart, of all of them, were the events of that last week of Jesus’ ‘normal’ life. Nothing of what Jesus said or did in the 3 years before that makes sense – unless we understand what happened in Jerusalem, and why it did in that Passion week. You see: “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many’. And it’s that fact which is the eternal game-changer that each Christian must then work, and live, out.

The story of Jesus is told in its rawest, and most urgent, form by Mark. Since the early 19^th Century scholars have believed that’s because Mark was the first Gospel written. In terms of New Testament writings, some of Paul’s letters pre-date it, very likely; but by the mid-60’s AD the story of what Jesus himself said and did was itself written down; and this is it. Nowhere in this book do we read who did that actual writing, though. From before the end of the 1^st Century AD, though, tradition said that it was John Mark, who appears in Acts. Tradition also said right from the start that Mark was writing down the eye-witness account of Simon-Peter; the 1^st fisherman in today’s encounter. And to round off that tradition, Mark was said to have written this in Rome; primarily with a Roman (i.e. a non-Jewish) audience in mind.

That’s all important information to keep at the back of our minds between now and the Summer. As with any Bible book, our learning of how to follow Jesus today must be shaped by the message that was intended for its original readers. We might be tempted to think that doesn’t apply so much to stories about what Jesus did and said, but it still does. The gospel writers very much had a purpose in mind when they chose what to put in, or leave out of their accounts; and that impacts our learning. So we do need to know from the outset that Mark was a man of action; who wanted people to take action as they follow Jesus: because that now means us!

Again it’s ‘coincidental’ that we should be studying Mark this time round. As we’ve said before, the Anglican Lectionary runs in a 3-year cycle; and this just ‘happens’ to be the Year of Mark. (Matthew and Luke also get their own year, while John’s Gospel is spread across all three). However the preachers’ group was very clear that what we need at this stage of our parish life is to go back – yes, again! – to the story of Jesus. As our parish Aim says, he must always be at the centre of all that we learn and do here. Unless Jesus is at the centre of our own lives we can’t hope to bring him to the heart of this community (or of anything else, for that matter). And the only way to keep Jesus at the centre is to come back time and again to what he said and did; and to ask ourselves as we do so what action that demands we take in the present.

Action is very much order of the Parish of Herne Hill day at the moment too. The key outcome of the Discovery programme that we worked through over the course of 2 years or so was the setting up of a community action steering group. Those who have been around through the last year in particular have already seen a full range of practical outputs from that group. Its next exciting venture is being officially launched today; and, once again it includes a call to action, for people to be part of it. In common with all the other ventures, it depends on participation – at whatever level you’re able to do that. So listen out for what our own Mark (Hughes) has to say about that later in the service; and do choose to do so in the context of this series’ call to take action.

Now this particular community action may not be the right one for you to be involved with, of course. There have been, there are, and there will be, many more, though. So, we are now in the process of reviewing the youth and children programmes that we helped put on in Milkwood Community Park during the Easter holiday. The plan is to run a much bigger programme this Summer. That may be where you want to focus your own action (if so, contact Sharon Crooks). And there’s more: there are conversations going on about how best to contribute to the future of Carnegie Library too, to name but one other. (Andrew Makower is taking the lead on that). And the aim of all of these ventures is to take action to be God’s blessing to this community – because we are people who have this Jesus at the centre of our lives.

There is so much about Jesus that we can learn, or maybe even re-learn, as we follow him through Mark’s story for the next 3 months. I won’t try and preview that today, then – other than to say that we won’t even get through the pre-Passion introduction. That’s partly why I began as I did; because unless we go into this series remembering the direction and purpose of Mark’s whole book, then we might go astray. “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”, remember. Jesus never lost sight of that purpose; from start to finish. Everything that he did and said was working it out in practical ways in the lives of real people. If we want to take the right, Godly action then we will also need to base it on the same Godly purpose that Jesus did.

So, then – briefly – to the start of the story that we’ve heard today. I’m sure that you’ll have worked out how Mark didn’t bother with any extras as all. There is no birth story; just straight in there: “This is about Jesus, the Son of God”! In a mere 13 verses Mark then covered: the Old Testament prophecy; the life and ministry of John the Baptist; Jesus’ baptism and temptation; and then it’s here we go, with the main event. Note how there was a trigger for that, though. It was when John was arrested that Jesus moved. And the lesson, for all of us, here is that we need to look out for God’s trigger. It will likely be something different for each of us; but it will be real; and it will demand that we take Godly action; so look out for it: today; and throughout this series; and do respond to it.

“The time has come,” (Jesus) said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” It may only be a summary of his message; but note how right away Jesus demanded action from his hearers in Mark. We’ve frequently explained here before what repentance is, and how it works. The headline summary then is that it’s both a turning away from, and a turning to. Today’s story at least hints that sometimes repentance may even be turning to something better, more Godly than we are currently doing. There isn’t time to explore that now, much less the exact nature of the good news that Jesus declared. That will become very clear in the weeks to come, though; and so will the disciples’ part in living and sharing it – but here’s where it all starts.

It’s so action-packed that it’s easy to miss the implications of this. Jesus said “Come”, to each pair of fishermen brothers – and they did; without hesitation or question, it appears. But let’s push the pause button briefly now; and resolve to think it through more fully later. What did they have to leave behind, to follow Jesus? Their homes; their families; their communities; their jobs; and what did that leave? Nothing other than him, pretty much. These first disciples followed Jesus into an uncertain, undefined future – because they believed this amazing good news about the arrival of Kingdom of God in the person of Jesus. How challenging is that for us to hear – let alone even to consider doing the same ourselves today?

In his “For Everyone” series commentary, Tom Wright says that Mark is written: “In a way that is meant to grab you by the collar; and make you face the truth about Jesus, about God, and about yourself”. Consider yourself grabbed by the collar today, then; and do be bold enough to come back next week for the next instalment of this necessary truth-facing venture. But don’t be under any illusion as to what’s involved in doing so. We are to be ready for God’s trigger to action; and to obey it when we recognise it. That action is following Jesus though serving God’s world for the sake of his kingdom. It may well be costly for us, as it was for the disciples. It was so much more for Jesus, remember – but: “The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many”. So now let’s pray for the grace, strength and courage to follow him – wherever he may lead us …

Sunday 12th April 2015

Today, one of our Lay Readers, Simon Brindley, preaches. The reading is from Luke 24: 13-35. 

The Road to Emmaus 

(Draw a modest sized black dot, about 1-2” across in the middle of a large blank sheet of paper)

It’s not immediately obvious what that is but, to start with at least, I want you to think of it as representing the City of Jerusalem. It’s the place where Jesus came to in the last few days of his life and it’s the place where he was arrested and finally killed on the day we remember as Good Friday.

And our story today is about this (draw a shortish black line leaving the dot to the NE).

If this picture is a map, today’s story is about the journey made by two of Jesus’s disciples, on Easter Sunday, three days after Good Friday, from Jerusalem to a village called Emmaus.  The story is recorded in both Mark’s gospel and the longer account we have just read in Luke’s gospel. We know one of the disciples was a man called Cleopas, the name of the other is unknown.  It’s often assumed it was another man but as far as I know it could just as easily have been a woman or possibly a child.  They were walking. The journey probably took them about 3 hours. They met another man on the road, they talked and at Emmaus the three of them had something to eat. Then later the two of them went back to Jerusalem.

(Write in “Emmaus”)

It looks quite simple doesn’t it? A city, a walk to a village and a meal. In some respects it could have been just a normal, normal day. We are not told why they were walking. It may well have been just to get away for a while, it may have been to visit friends or family, it might have been to deliver something or pick something up….

Anyway, the distance was 11 kilometres or 7 miles and walking it would have been very common in those days.

Hmmm, 11 kilometres or 7 miles.  I guess for that distance today we might get the bus or go by bike. If we are energetic we might even run it or we might possibly walk.

So, if you are the kind of person who travels a lot by bus, think of Camberwell to Croydon on the 68. That’s about how far it was. If you are a cyclist, think of commuting from Ruskin Park to the Isle of Dogs or perhaps a leisure ride at the weekend from Herne Hill Road to Richmond Park. If you are a keen runner it was just a bit more than a 10k training run. If you want to imagine how far it might be to walk, think of walking from Camberwell Green to the far side of Lewisham. That is the kind of distance it was.

So it was not an easy stroll but this was no three week spiritual pilgrimage into the mountains. You’d probably be quite tired when you got there, but you would have had some good time to think, however you did the journey.  It could so easily have been a normal, normal afternoon…..Like getting the bus from here to Croydon….

In fact, it was not, of course, a normal day at all. It had started, right at the very beginning, probably as badly as any day you or I have ever had or could possibly imagine. Can you imagine what these two must have felt like when they woke up that morning? Whatever their dreams, as they slept, the horrible reality of the last few days would have flooded back into their minds instantly as they woke up.  Just two days before they had seen one of their closest friends, their  teacher and leader, arrested, repeatedly mocked and beaten, unfairly passed around and tried by the authorities and then cruelly tortured to death in public.

Not only that, but he was a good man.  He did not deserve any of this at all. Everything he had said was good. Everything he had done was good. And he seemed to be unusually blessed by God. So much so that they had got to the point of putting all their hopes in him. They had started to build their lives around this hope that Jesus would be the leader who would make their country a great and a peaceful and a free land, a place where their children could have the sort of future every generation dreams about.

So, when he was killed, their whole world had just been cruelly shattered.  And I suspect that they had planned the walk the previous evening just to get out of the city and get away for a while.  

If it was today, it would have been started by a text wouldn’t it:

“Look, I really need to get away. Fancy a walk tomorrow to my place at Emmaus?  I’ve got some food there and a nice bottle of wine from last year..”

Or today, in our situation, we might actually text a friend, for example:  “Fancy a bike ride in the morning to the café in Richmond Park…..I have had a really, really awful week. Everything is falling apart and I just need to get away for a few hours…?”

Having said that, before they actually set out, Cleopas and his un-named companion did at least have a suspicion that something remarkable was going on as some of their friends, some women, had gone to Jesus’ tomb just as it started to get light and came back saying that the tomb was empty and some angels had told them Jesus was alive. Then some of their other friends had gone to the tomb and it was empty. So something was going on…

But I wonder if these two had even started to believe what the women had said? Maybe they were like the others who, just earlier in Luke’s gospel, are recorded as saying that the women were talking nonsense.  How could he possibly be alive? They had seen his battered and broken and pierced and very dead body just two days before. Utterly impossible….

That seems to make sense because when the stranger came alongside them on the road and started walking with them and when he asked them what they were talking about, the gospel says they stood still with sad faces, to tell him about the last few days…

So it is hardly surprising that as the stranger talked to them on the road it did not even occur to them to wonder if it might be Him. There were some stories, but that was the kind of thing you got from time to time when people got really tired or stressed or fanciful, just stories. People do not rise from dreadful death. Let’s get on with life…it is the only way now….let’s go  for a walk to get away, have some fresh air then a meal and a bottle of wine and try to work out how on earth we are going to go on from here…..

I think that would have been their frame of mind.

But as they walk the stranger moves things on a little further because he explains to them how everything in their faith and the history of their people should have prepared them for Jesus’ suffering and death, that it really was all meant to happen like this. And when they get to Emmaus they  are so engaged by what he has to say that they invite him in to the house to eat with them, their hearts already burning inside by this stranger’s explanations of the last few days..

And then, for me, something truly remarkable happens.

The fact is, Jesus had died on the cross and the fact is, this was Him walking with them and he was alive, as alive as if he had never actually been killed. He had died but he had shown himself more powerful even than death itself and he had come back from death and his body was healed. We often say he had defeated death itself, and he could walk those miles and talk and discuss as if death was just nothing at all.

I doubt there is a single event that is more astonishing in the history of the human race. I certainly can’t think of one, can you? Let me know please if you think you can.

But in a way remarkable thing, for me at least, is how those two people, Cleopas and his un-named companion, perhaps a man, possibly a woman or even a child, learned about it..

And here I need a little bit of help please…from three younger members of the congregation……first take one bread roll, ask one of them to break it in two and hand it to the other two….

That was it, no explosions in the sky, no choirs of angels, no voice from heaven this time but simply a man called Jesus, in a village three hours’ walk from Jerusalem, breaking some bread in two and giving it to his friends.  It was then that they realized who he was and then he left them…

[A modern day equivalent might be a stranger on the bus to Croydon sharing a piece of his sandwich with you.  It was just an ordinary event…….]

So, just to help the rest of us take that in for a moment, please would you two (the two playing the parts of Cleopas and his un-named friend) please take the other two small loaves of bread and break a small piece off and hand it out, to the people on the front two rows only, we don’t really have time to do the whole church. But I am going to leave all the remaining bread up here until the end of the service so if anyone else wants to come and take a piece please do so after the service and just think again what it must have been like for those two, to realize that Jesus was alive when all he did was break the bread and hand it to them…

And Cleopas and his friend were so excited and amazed, hardly surprising, they just got up and went back those 11 kilometers immediately to tell the people in Jerusalem what had happened.  Do you reckon they would have run part of the way at least?! I bet it did not take them as long to get back…. And by the time they got back Jesus had already also appeared to Simon Peter and the wonder of it all was just beginning to sink in.

It’s been sinking in ever since. Adults here today please ask yourselves again, what does the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth mean for me and children and young people here today I urge you, as you grow up, never to forget this about what we call Christianity. It is about a man called Jesus who died but that was not the end. He came back to life and he talked to many people when he did so.

There it is.  A city, an afternoon’s walk and the village at the end. But we are not quite finished because now I want to turn over the page and draw a new dot.

Draw……

And I want to think of the dot this time as us, you and me, and just ask ourselves for a few minutes about some of the journeys we and other people have to take in our lives:

Turn the paper and draw a new dot.

Some of the journeys we have to make are easy, some are hard.

Sometimes we or other people we hear about have to travel very difficult roads indeed.

We all one day have to travel the road that leads to our own death, but the resurrection of Jesus gives us great hope that death will not be the end. For me it is why, although I do not want to die, of course I do not, I do not fear death; This week saw the 70^th anniversary of the death of one of the martyrs of the 20^th century a German called Dietrich Bonhoeffer, part of the German resistance to Hitler and the Nazis and his last words are reported as being, “This is the end for me, the beginning of life”;

Men and women sometimes have to stare in the face the possibility of dying, in war for example, but again the fact of the resurrection of Jesus helps many face those risks. I know at least one soldier who took with him to war the words “No guilt in life, no fear in death, this is the power of Christ in me”.

Whole countries sometimes have to face the dreadful consequences of civil war and atrocities. Our Archbishop Justin is reported in the current edition of the Bridge church newspaper, as saying how he has seen God begin to heal deep and bitter divisions between communities caught up in civil war in places like Central Africa, Nigeria and South Sudan. I am sure he would say they do so partly as they understand the power available in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ;

Many, many people have to walk the road to suffering,….This is not an easy thing at all to come to terms with but I do believe that the resurrection of Jesus and his own healed resurrected body give hope that suffering in the end is not the final human experience. Jesus himself of course had to suffer enormously and Sidney Carter writes in that hymn we know so well “It’s hard to dance with the Devil on your back”, but still Jesus danced “as the sky turned black”;

Increasingly perhaps today, at least in some parts of our world, those of us who call ourselves Christians have to journey into a world and into places where our faith in God seems to mean nothing.  Well, the fact of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is probably the most important of many reasons why I think our Christian faith will never die out and will continue to inspire generation after generation;

People often take a journey back into their past and some find it very difficult to come to terms with. But the resurrection of Jesus gives great hope that all that can be dealt with and the past forgiven.  All that pain and sorrow and sin is not the final human experience;

People often look forward on their journey into the future and live in fear of what the future might bring. I think the resurrection of Jesus gives great hope that whatever the future might hold, we should love by hope and not by fear;

And often of course our experience each day is of just making those normal, normal journeys, by bus to Croydon or Lewisham, by bike to Canary Wharf or Richmond Park, the training run or wherever we might go. And the message of the resurrection of Jesus is that he can and will be with us wherever we go, giving us new life each day, alive in us. 

In fact I would suggest that there is no road that we have to walk on where Jesus cannot appear and walk alongside us.

Wherever we have to go this week and in the weeks ahead, may we experience the risen Christ walking with us and recognize him for who he is.

Amen