After the Emmaus road

 14/4/24                                St Peter’s                             Easter 3

Acts 3:12-19                                                         Luke 24:36-48

    

When I looked at the gospel passage what struck me most was how determined Jesus was to make it crystal clear that the resurrection is a physical, bodily event,  Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a ghost does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.” 

But why- there he is with them - they can see him - what’s the problem? 

But put yourself in their place

About a week ago they had followed Jesus  as he rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. They hadn’t been sure what to expect  but they had been met by a cheering crowd - it had been a triumph. 

But just few days later everything fell apart in the worst possible way-Jesus - the focus of their life for the last two or three years was betrayed by a friend then brutally executed after  a mockery of a trial. 

The disciples were left with grief, shame, and despair for the loss of what might have been.

Our reading takes place three days after the crucifixion. When they woke that morning they hadn’t begun to come to terms with what the death of Jesus might mean for them. How could they remake their world? What was left for them.

But our reading isn’t about the morning but the evening, and it’s  the evening of the day of resurrection and into that terror and confusion an impossible hope is beginning to insinuate itself. 

Stories are beginning to accumulate - Mary and the other women who went to the tomb at dawn say Jesus met them there, Simon and John hurried after them and they met him too- the disciples are still digesting this when the Cleopasses arrive back from Emmaus.

and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together. They were saying, ‘The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!’ Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.

Jesus is making himself known to people and then disappearing

Still frightening, still confusing but somehow, hope has begun to intrude. 

While they were still talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” They were startled and frightened, thinking they saw a ghost

But Jesus is not a ghost. A ghost is a dead person and Jesus is not a dead person, and that is what he spends this time demonstrating to them. Death has not tamed, has not captured the God of life. God does not give death the last word. Jesus is not an apparition, he is flesh and blood, recognisably the person with whom they shared the last three years; whatever has happened to Jesus he is still the same Jesus they knew.

Jesus shows them the nature of resurrection life and then opens their minds to understand the scriptures - to show that what they see is not an aberration - it isn’t God making the best of  an awful mistake - instead this is how God’s forgiveness is opened to us. The resurrected Jesus is both the guarantee and demonstration of God’s reconciling plan.

But first he has to deal with infinite human capacity to try and domesticate God, we feel more secure with  laws than grace, with guarantees than trust, and so try to fit him into a framework we can understand ‘they thought that they were seeing a ghost’ - they had heard stories about ghosts -perhaps they were true after all -

Jesus won’t have any of it -‘look at the scars, touch me, give me some fish’  

Whatever they’d heard about ghosts didn’t include being invited to prod them or seeing them deal with that bit of fish that Andrew had caught and Matthew had cooked but that nobody in the end had felt like eating. 

None of this was what they expected ghosts to do, on the other hand they had seen Jesus eat fish lots of times. The Jesus who has joined them is solid enough to have tweaked James’s nose if he’d wanted to.

Jesus standing among them in the fulness of resurrection does not  conform to our understanding of death - somehow he is much more playful than we expect.

In a few minutes we’ll say  ‘On the third day Jesus rose again in accordance with the Scriptures;’ and at the very end of the creed when we talk about our future ‘We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.’ 

This resurrection, which is our our hope because this is our resurrection too,  is not tame - it’s inconvenient because it doesn’t sit well with the Spirit of the age - which often tries to deny death’s realities - it’s monstrous, because it goes beyond our understanding, taking us into areas where we proceed by faith and not by sight -  it’s unnerving because we know the strength of our faith wobbles, we continually fall short of our aspirations let alone Jesus’s but our resurrection hope has been demonstrated by the most trustworthy pioneer that we could have, who knows us and our frailties better than we know ourselves.

People have produced flimsy alternatives to resurrection hope but they don’t ring true.. 

A few years ago Disney made a film - Coco - based around the Mexican Day of the Dead. The film’s central conceit is that the dead have a kind of limbo life so long as they are remembered by those who love them. 

Some try ignoring death Woody Allen said ‘“I don't want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don't want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.” 

Both these ideas fall well short of what Jesus did for us by his life, death, resurrection and ascension.

The resurrection hope - it isn’t comfortable, and it doesn’t feel safe because just as for Jesus there was no way to his resurrection  except through dying,  so too that is true for us. 

What we are offered in Christ isn’t an escape from death - bad luck Woody Allen - rather it is the denial that death has the last word. And after all that is how Jesus came to his resurrection - through the death he genuinely died.

In “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ Mr Beaver talks about Aslan  - Safe?” said Mr Beaver ..."Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good.’We are being asked to put our trust not on a safe bet but in the son of God, who is good and true. 

Resurrection is fulfilled on the other side of the grave but it begins now. It is the good news at the heart of the kingdom of God - though things may be bleak now they will be set right. How do we live in that hope? It sounds very simple, but takes every part of us - Love God, with all your heart mind and strength, love your neighbour as yourself, do unto others as you would have them do to you - but we are accompanied by the risen Jesus.

Listen to St Augustine

‘Let us sing alleluia here on earth, while we still live in anxiety , so that we may sing it one day in heaven in full security... We shall have no enemies in heaven, we shall never lose a friend. 

God’s praises are sung both here and there, but here they are sung in anxiety there in security; here they are sung by those destined to die; there by those destined to live forever; here they are sung in hope , there in hope’s fulfilment; 

here, they are sung by wayfarers; there, by those living in their own country. 

So then let us sing now, not in order to enjoy a life of leisure, but in order to lighten our labours. You should sing as wayfarers do - sing, but continue your journey ...sing then, but keep going.’

Passion Sunday sermon

 17/3/24.   (Passion Sunday)          St Peter’s Birkdale                Holy Communion

Jeremiah 31:31-34                                                John 12:20-33

Imagine yourself in Jerusalem at the time of the gospel. You are one of Jesus followers - not one of the inner circle, you don’t know Jesus especially well - not like the twelve who were always with him - you might only have talked to him a few times - one to one - but those times you’ve had his full attention have changed you, he’d seen the truth of who you are now, but that was OK because he also saw the truth of who you could become and in company with him that change no longer seemed impossible.

Something you heard Peter say once, ‘Who else could we follow, Lord? You are the one who has the words of life.’ And you can say yes to that - it’s what talking to him felt like. And you’ve seen his words of life in action,  you were there when he raised Lazarus from the dead - you still find it hard to believe your eyes. Not that it made Jesus popular with the religious authorities - he’d never been flavour of the month, but raising Lazarus turned  the heat up a notch.   

some went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin. “What are we accomplishing?” they asked. “Here is this man performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation.”

Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, “You know nothing at all!  You do not realise that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.” So from that day on they plotted to take his life.

Therefore Jesus no longer moved about publicly among the people of Judea. Instead he withdrew to a region near the wilderness, to a village called Ephraim, where he stayed with his disciples.

The chief priests and the Pharisees had given orders that anyone who found out where Jesus was should report it so that they might arrest him.

Jesus was in danger - and he was dangerous to know - the closer he and his followers came to Jerusalem the tenser the atmosphere. If the disciples had said to Jesus, ‘When we celebrate Passover this year could you try and blend in’ - it would have been hard to blame them 

But that was never his way, even so when he started to make arrangements to ride in on a donkey  as publicly as possible in a way that unmistakably fulfilled prophecy,  their hearts must have sunk. As his follower your heart sinks too. There is danger and there is dancing in the dragon’s jaws. Is he going to drag you down with him. 

But … Jesus rides in, the crowds roar for him and then …. nothing happens.

The disciples must have been on a high ‘Coming in to Jerusalem like that wasn’t so crazy after all, He must have known this would get the people on his side, the temple authorities have had the wind taken out of their sails.’ Relief.

We know things that they didn’t know. We know Jesus has set his face on the path that will lead him to the cross, the disciples don’t. 

Inevitably we see everything from Palm Sunday onwards as Jesus’ end game- they didn’t. 

So when Philip and Andrew go to Jesus about some Greeks who want to see him it feels like getting back to normal. Until what Jesus says points in exactly the direction they had hoped to avoid.

First he says, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.’ In John’s gospel  talk of glory is talk about the utterly human Jesus displaying the utter fullness of God’s presence - Look at him, this is God in the flesh  - But then Jesus says , unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. 

 It’s an image that’s easy to map Jesus’s future onto. Jesus, God the Son, is here to work the possibility of mercy into the fabric of human life and the only way that can happen is through his death. In purely human terms what did it cost him to walk this path for our reconciliation? At least as much as it would cost anyone else. The coldblooded courage he shows required just as much from him as it would from us. He had no exemption from fear and pain.

 But Jesus is talking about more than what is going to happen to him He is speaking of the pattern of life for his people ‘Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honour’  What do these words mean for us?

As followers of Christ this is a pattern we attach ourselves to - the seed must die. We know where that took Jesus but for the vast majority of us following him doesn’t mean martyrdom, it doesn’t even mean as I rather expected when I was younger that God’s will for me would be to force me to do the thing I least want to do. It’s hard to look at Jesus and his friendships, the way he dealt with people and believe he valued misery for it’s own sake.

What following Jesus should do is shift our priorities, our ultimate loyalty. At the very least the seed going into the ground so it can bear fruit means my recognising that my life is not all about me.

We are all called to follow Jesus - but  our call does not come in a vacuum. 

It is in the middle of our own actual not theoretical lives, in the midst of its real possibilities, responsibilities and challenges that we each have to work out how to best play the cards we have been dealt in the service of his kingdom of justice and reconciliation.

We are not called to be self denying for the sake of it, not called to a one size fits all pattern, however onerous or virtuous. We are called to bring all that we know of who we are to all that we know of God, which will not always be easy. If we do it with integrity sometimes it will feel like a wrestling match.

And so we wrestle...In the preface to ‘The Splash of Words’ Mark Oakley writes about scripture in a way that can be expanded to include our whole relationship with God. ‘To take the bible seriously does not mean shrinking it into your own particular system of thinking about God, others and yourself. To take the bible really seriously means engaging with the variety of its texts, its history, the cultural, interpretative and ethical questions that need addressing, as well as the similar questions they ask of us. It is to invite the comfort and the unease of their inspiration, artistry, open-endedness and teasing of human pride. We mustn’t close down the conversation with texts. We spend a lot of time asking whether the bible is ‘true’ and miss the fact that the biblical texts are often asking us ‘Are you true?’ This is the real question that readers of the bible should face - others are a distraction -’

The trouble with a question like ‘Am I true?’ is that whilst it’s obviously important it’s hard to be quite sure what it means 

On Friday’s Thought for the Day Richard Harries gave a hint of an answer. He talked of being being shaped by the assumptions and prejudices that were part and parcel of the culture he was born into, some of which he now sees as clearly wrong and he wondered how many of those prejudices were still swirling around in society, indeed how many of them were still lodged in his own understandings. 

Being true means learning to recognise and confront some of the evasions and self-deceits by which we usually live our lives. It’s part of the work of Lent but not a work we do alone Jeremiah speaks of God’s help

“I will put my law in their minds

    and write it on their hearts.

I will be their God,

    and they will be my people.

The reward is that the more we can lose of the baggage that skews our understanding of ourselves and the world around us the closer companionship we can have with Jesus as we walk in his way.

Books to be read during Lent

 A Lenten Interlude - which will largely be about the books I’m reading as a discipline - though discipline is not quite the right word.

The books I have read have always been a piecemeal selection and there are many glaring omissions. Since 2004 I’ve been using Lent to fill some of those gaps.

Some books are obviously christian, but the majority are there because I felt I should have read them, or need to read them again. Some have been hard work, others a complete delight e.g. To Kill a Mockingbird, which was in the first clutch of books chosen and one of the reasons it seemed a good practise to continue.

I’ve decided to put this interlude into a blog for two reasons a) one of this year’s books -  a reread of Bird by Bird - suggests writing regularly and this seems a good way to enforce it, and b) I hope it will encourage attentiveness to what I’m reading  

This year’s books are:

Demon Copperhead - Barbara Kingsolver√

Small Island - Andrea Levy√

Tesserae - Denise Levertov√

Bird by bird - Anne Lamott

Magisteria - Nicholas Spencer√

With a subs bench of

Light Perpetual - Francis Spufford

The Underground Railway - Colson Whitehead

Christian Wiman - The Long Home√

Getting Better - Michael Rosen

A memoir of my former self - Hilary Mantel

This is the story of a happy marriage - Anne Patchett

Killing the Black Dog - Les Murray√

Baptism of Christ

 7/1/24.                    St Peter’s Birkdale             Baptism of Jesus

Genesis 1:1-5                                                          Mark 1:1-11

Last week Rod preached on  six words that spoke about Jesus

‘And_ the_ word_ was_ made_ flesh’  

Jesus - God incarnate.  Jesus - fully God, fully human. 

This week I’m going to speak about the relationship of the Father to the Son but  I’m going to need twelve words - though they are in two groups of six. ‘You_are_ my_ Son, the_ Beloved;   with_ you_I_ am_well_ pleased.’

What wonderful, encouraging, reassuring words these must have been for Jesus to hear. 

But we might ask why did Jesus the Son of God need encouragement? Because he was as also human as we are. And he was going to do something quite new - which left even his cousin John the Baptist bemused.

How so?

Well we have grown up with gospel stories of Jesus so we think ‘How else would you expect a Messiah to speak or behave?’ 

John the Baptist was expecting someone quite different. He recognised who Jesus was - but Jesus wasn’t the Messiah the prophetic tradition had led him to expect. John imagined a hard nosed fire and brimstone Messiah - like him but more so.

Jesus confounded those expectations. His way was so much kinder, so much more welcoming than John had expected that he began to wonder if he’d made a mistake - listen to this passage from Luke 

 ‘When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him,“Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Jesus answered them, “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.”’  This was not the Messiah John had expected. 

John was confounded. What were Jesus own expectations?  We don’t know

Jesus came to John to be baptised and so began his public ministry. 

What was he going to do next? There were no guidelines for him. He had, by himself, to find a way of being Emmanuel,  God with us - in his ordinary everyday world - He was filled with the fulness of God but what that was going to mean? 

He discovered it for himself as he taught and healed and restored,  

as he fed people,  and listened to them,  and went to their parties, 

as he confronted difficulties, as he dealt with opposition, as he kept on reaching out however often people missed the point or misrepresented him. 

We his followers have each other as sounding boards but each step Jesus took was into untravelled territory.

There could be no guidelines to show him how to live as Emmanuel. 

In our reading Jesus is at the start of his public ministry, it’s before he knows just how hard it is going to be. He does know his role is unique, he knows there is no closely scripted plan of campaign, he knows it will be relentlessly demanding. He knows the time of the prophets and lawgivers is over, Jesus isn’t simply Moses or Elijah writ large. 

He is certain the time is right for him to enter the public domain hence Baptism , but after that his journey has no signposts, no guides. So with everything else he was feeling there must also have been loneliness.

How encouraging, how reassuring then that the Spirit should descend on him like a dove and that he should hear his father saying, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

He is setting out into the unknown - how grateful he must have been to know he was going with his father’s love, trust and blessing.

‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

This is the first way I read those twelve words but there’s a bit more because in themselves they aren’t particularly spiritual words or even unusual. Indeed the feeling behind them is one we will be familiar with

Christmas is often a time of gatherings - family reunions, catching up with old friends and when Christmas festivities  work well - and they often do - one of the  threads is delight in the groupings we are part of - we are with  our children or our parents or our friends and have looked around at those we love in  joy and gratitude - I know it isn’t always the case, and I know there will always be imperfections and blemishes in any human relationships - but when we are part of it or see it - we know it to be grace, that it’s more than we deserve - as we look around us we can find ourselves echoing the words - slightly adapted for our circumstances - that God said to Jesus. 

The words the Father  said to the Son are not just a theological statement, they are the words of a fond parent.

 

A stage further - in the passage John talked of Jesus baptising with water and the Spirit and  we are shown what that Baptism meant for Jesus. It affirmed him in who he was, it set the seal on his work and ministry, it was an assurance of the Father’s love. 

We are the people of Christ -  those who Paul calls ‘in Christ’ - those who receive the Spirit as part of our following of Jesus, so in some measure we share in the Father’s regard for his son. In some measure this is how he thinks of us. God looks at us and says yes to us 

He has things for us to do - tasks we are fitted for both at home and in the wider world - there is work - but it is because we are in Christ not because of what we have done our starting point is the declaration ‘You are my child, my beloved; with you I am well pleased.’  These words are for us to hear too

The catholic priest Donagh O’Shea wrote this ‘The passion and death of Christ belong to us as fully as if we had suffered them ourselves.' I must have read this in St. Thomas (Aquinas) years ago as I crammed for exams in theology, but it failed to strike root in the mind's weed patch. Having rediscovered it, I think of little else at Mass. Christ is our brother: the Father cannot see us apart from him. So we stand before our Father with pride and joy, not in tortured anxiety.’ 

We get things wrong - of course  - we are far from perfect - we know that,  our behaviour and attitudes often disturb the relationship we have with God -  that’s true but He has always known what we are like and He came anyway.

We don’t have to understand what makes God tick, we can just  be grateful that 'The Father does not see us apart from his Son - ‘the beloved in whom he is well pleased.’