25 April 2021

Sermon: 4th Sunday of Easter

 Sermon: 4th Sunday of Easter

25 April 2021 – Archdeacon Mark Long

Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23; and John 10:11-18; NRSV

What does love look like? I have had the joy of solemnising the marriage of three couples in the Parish over the last four weeks, and love has been physically visible in the body language and responses of the couples to one another. Despite the nervous excitement of the moment each couple have radiated a confidence in their shared love, and I was particularly struck by the breadth of the groom’s smile on Friday afternoon. The nature of love expressed so powerfully in marriage is is based on a firm faith by the couple in one another, and a concrete hope in the resurrection gift of possibility and potential.

What does love look like? Today’s Gospel reading expresses it in these words, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”[1] Love here is expressed in this image of Christ’s unending and unfailing care for all God’s people, just as shepherds in Jesus’ time would have cared for sheep out in the wilderness, facing down predators at the possible cost of their own lives.[2] Love is also visible in Jesus words that there are other sheep that belong, too, although they belong to another flock; and that a time will come when there will be an easy diversity in our belonging – one shepherd and one flock.[3]

What does love look like? Today’s reading from Acts expresses it in these words, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.”[4] Love here is expressed in the sufficiency of Jesus’ name, and more specifically in the power of Jesus’ name, based in the reality of death and resurrection, in the possibility and potential for the renewal of our lives and relationships, and the healing of the brokenness and heartache we experience in our broader society.

What does love look like?  Today’s Psalm expresses it in these words, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.”[5] A beautifully simple reminder that in the Hebrew understanding of God, Yahweh satisfies every need. And more than that, God’s love provides for us in every aspect of life, and is never conditional. We know and love this Psalm through the poetic beauty of the King James’s translation, and are often comforted by it in the context of death, embedded as Psalm 23 is in our funeral rite. A more accurate translation of some Hebrew phrases reminds us that this Psalm is about an active journey through life, one where the green pastures and still waters are a brief respite on a journey where we continually seek to return into God’s presence, pursued only by goodness and mercy along paths of righteousness that are more game tracks through dark valleys of difficulty than my imagined highways of righteousness leading to eternal bliss.[6] This is what love looks like: life’s journey with God ever present providing all that we need on the demanding and difficult rutted pathways we often find ourselves traversing.

This is what love looks like. And this is the love you and I are called to make visible. When we look with honesty in the mirror, when we look around us in the more intimate context of family and friendships, and when we gaze out on society our love lacks so much, and is a very muted expression of the love today’s Scriptures reflect. Our love is insipid in comparison to God’s, our lives and love often so self-focused and conditional, our desire to have others conform to our will so dominant, that God’s love is diminished and disfigured in our living of it. And yet this is the call of Eastertide: to sacrifice what we have made of love that it may die, truly die; that out of the devastation of death our love may be resurrected, embraced in the fullness of God, restored and transformed, renewed into the fullness of all that love and life has been created by God to be. This is the Easter love we are given freely without any strings attached, a love we are invited by God to live not in our own strength alone, but in the strength and resilience of the Holy Spirit of God.

We need to live intentionally, awake daily to the potential and opportunities for living life creatively and fully, vulnerable before God and one another, sufficiently courageous to acknowledge any failure and open to God’s forgiveness in such a manner that our lives and relationships are continuously formed, reformed, and transformed; embracing one another across the diversity of our religious, cultural, and gender differences. Jesus’ resurrection is a constant reminder of the potential for new beginnings for ourselves, for others, and for our world. Each new beginning requires us to take a step in faith, trusting in God being ever present in our lives, the Good Shepherd continuously caring for us, resourcing us, loving us. This is the love we are called to live. Let’s live it!

Let us pray,

Jesus,

You sought to seek love
in all you did:
your friendships, your critiques
of yourself, your critiques of
abusive power, your critiques of
halfhearted work. It was love
that you followed, and love
that you did.
 
Help us to remember that there is
no place where love cannot be sought.
And if we find such a place, remind us
that you, too, went there, seeking
for the love that was waiting there
to be found.
 
Amen.[7]

Sermon: Easter Sunday

 Sermon: Easter Sunday

4 April 2021 – Archdeacon Mark Long

Isaiah 25:6-9; Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24; and Mark 16:1-8; NRSV

 “So [the two Mary’s and Salome] went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”[1] Do you join me in feeling a certain element of disappointment in these words? Perhaps the disappointment lies in the fact that we’ve been immersed in John’s Gospel over the last few weeks – a Gospel that speaks with deep certainty about the purposes of God – and a return to Mark’s Gospel with its deep connection to raw human emotion seems a let-down, especially as all our expectations are suddenly wrapped in terror, amazement and fear; and nothing is spoken of the glory and honour we were perhaps expecting in the telling of the resurrection narrative?

A year ago, as we were forced into an almost complete lockdown in response to the COVID-19 virus, I found this ending to Mark’s Gospel comforting in the context of the anxiety that had wrapped itself around me like a suffocating blanket, with all the fears and concerns it brought upon us as individuals, families, and communities. For the first time in my life I could fully relate to the experience of those early disciples and their complete loss of hope as their dreams and longings for liberation from the strictures of the Roman Empire were shattered by Jesus’ crucifixion and death. In that moment there was no victory on the cross, no hope for the future; just the raw trauma of the moment. And for these three women who had been close to Jesus, as they go about the duties death required, the missing body and the strange messenger at the gravesite was a demand too far, and they flee fearfully. It is one thing to believe in resurrection to this life; it is quite another to be faced with its reality; and completely another to explain this reality to others. I am not surprised they said nothing to anyone in the immediate aftermath of this experience. We all know how the death of someone close to us pulls the rug out from under our feet, and the time it takes to get in touch with the reality, and our hesitancy in speaking to others in the emotional chaos of the moment.

Preceding the disappointment of these closing words of Mark’s narrative there is a promise relayed by the angelic messenger, “tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him … .”[2] We can be thankful that these three women clearly overcame the terror of the moment and the fear that had seized them, and must have eventually shared this news. The promise, and subsequent meetings (recorded in other Gospels) gave reality to this news of Jesus’ resurrection to this life and energised the disciples, and has continued to energise the Church throughout the ages.

Rowan Williams[3], former Archbishop of Canterbury, points to the abrupt, confused, vivid and unpolished nature of resurrection stories such as this one in Mark’s Gospel as a sign of the veracity of Jesus’s resurrection to this life, and while we may easily conjecture that Lazarus – after being raised from the dead – died a second normal death, the Ascension narrative indicates that Jesus was resurrected to this life and remains alive, and is contemporary to the present moment. How do we respond to this? And do we believe it to the point where we are willing to proclaim it? Or like the women, do we say nothing to anyone? This, perhaps, is the essence of the Easter challenge.

What does it mean to proclaim this Easter message? This is an important question in a world that is increasingly consumed by an individualist tenor of our times that translates all to often into a message of personal salvation that allows for faith and life to become disconnected. What Easter does ask of us is that we look death in the face – something that the Covid-19 pandemic has also asked of us these past twelve months – and having looked death in the face to allow all the fears and anxieties of our lives to fall into perspective as variants of our fear of death[4]. Easter asks us to face our fear and move beyond it, finding the courage to undermine the pretence that death, evil, and our human brokenness require our acquiescence; by our attitudes and example, by our actions and our words to proclaim the resurrection reality that change, transformation, renewal is possible, and that we can live differently, creatively, life-givingly in our broader society.[5]

Easter invites us to engage our faith with the often tragic realities of life, and ensure that the promise proclaimed in today’s Isaiah reading becomes the lived reality of all our communities, that “[on] this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.”[6] While the Easter message will hopefully always be a source of personal comfort and courage, may it inspire and resource us as people of faith to engage creatively in the liberation of our society, and of creation itself.

May our Easter greeting, “Alleluia, Christ is risen” and the joyful response, “He is risen indeed, alleluia” be more than mere words: may they be a source of strength and hope for our times!

Let us pray,

Jesus
our dead and living friend,
We walk the ways of death and life
holding death in one hand
and courage in the other.
Come enliven us.
Come bless us with your peace.
Because you are the first day of creation
And all days of creation.
Amen.[7]


[1] Mark 16:8; NRSV
[2] Mark 16:7; NRSV
[3] Rowan Williams, God with Us: the meaning of the cross and resurrection, then and now, Chapter 4
[4] Rowan Williams, Ibid. Chapter 5
[5] Ibid
[6] Isaiah 25:6; NRSV
[7] Pádraig Ó Tuama, Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community.

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