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…or really not here
A little later this morning I am going away for seven days. Whilst I am looking forward hugely to my change of pace and scene, it does mean that I shall have to drop off-line for a week. I shall miss the steady flow of Twitter updates, from the banal to the poignant. I shall miss the stimulus of the discussions on this blog.
Of course, I could easily schedule both tweets and blog updates, thereby creating the impression of my presence even in my absence. It would be a kind of Twenty First Century equivalent of the old “its all done with mirrors” trick. The thing is, it would feel like cheating. It would feel as if I were somehow not playing the game. As I have written elsewhere, it is important that we apply many of the ethics to online encounter that we do to it’s offline equivalent. This should be a real human encounter, even if it happens in virtual space.
A little while ago I met somebody in reality whom I had hitherto only encountered online. The next day she wrote to say that it had been good to meet me “irl”. That little word puzzled me for ages. Was it a typo for “url” or what? Eventually, I worked out that it was “in real life”.
Well, a holiday’s not real life, as we all know – but I’ll settle for that particular kind of unreality for a week.
Mary’s story
Just like that they were gone. The sound of their footsteps fading as they ran from the garden. They had left her … like so many men before. And she was alone. Even though she was the one who had summoned them, blurted out her horror at the empty, defiled grave. No-one stayed with her now – there were more important people to tell.
So she was alone, in the stillness of the garden, with her thoughts. They were bad company, her thoughts, always had been. There was a time when they had shrieked and flapped inside her head – beating the insides of her mind and tearing at it with their outstretched claws. Then Jesus had clapped his hands, scared them off and sent them flapping away into the far distance. That seemed so long ago now – before the dark night in the city, before the long day at the cross. Now she could feel them circling again, just beyond the horizon – eyeing up their prey … ready to swoop.
Ducking away, she had stolen a look inside the tomb. She was frightened of what she might see. Afraid that the smell of death would find its way inside of her. But no. There were two angels, shimmering with a light brighter inside the cave than the blazing sun outside. They asked her what was the matter, their heavenly voices bouncing off the walls of this very earthly space. And she told them, trying to hide the disappointment in her voice. If the very messengers of God didn’t know where he was, what hope was there?
Blinking back the tears, she could feel the birds circling closer now, their ragged black shapes blocking out the sun. Squinting to see past them, she saw another man, just another man. Those words again, “What is the matter?” That’s when she started babbling, a string of nonsense about going to find him and bringing him back to the grave. She could no more have borne to touch his battered corpse than she could have borne its weight to carry it back.
The birds swooped lower now, claws outstretched, beaks open, hungry for more of her. “Mary,” he said and they were gone. “Mary” – her once shamed, then restored name. “Mary”. Thank God. She felt wounded at first by his words. Why? Why shouldn’t she hold on to him, now she had found him again? Why shouldn’t she grasp his hand, warm again now? Why shouldn’t she run her fingers down his face, clear and smooth again now? But as she turned away on an errand for him, she, Mary, charged with an errand by this magnificent Jesus, a strange thing happened. She never looked back. She never once checked over her shoulder to make sure he was still there. In the days and years that followed, she would never need to touch or see. He would ALWAYS be there. Instead of looking back, she looked up, smiled at the birds circling overhead, and felt only joy, not dread.
A Paschal pause
For many preachers today will be a very busy day. They may be involved in services from sunrise to sunset – literally. Few will have time either to read a long post on here, or to sit quietly with the wonder of this resurrection morning washing over their soul.
It is with this in mind that I give this to you, and may God bless you this Easter. By the way, be warned that if you touch keyboard or mouse after clicking the link, you may spoil it…
Seriously?
As you can see from the date on this calendar page, I have kept it for several years. Every time I go back to it, it makes me smile.
Read carefully, and enjoy. Its not so much what’s missing as what’s there…
#RIPJesus
This is the only day the whole of eternity when God the father was bereaved. On this day, the terrible consequences of Good Friday come home to roost, resulting in a separation where there has only ever been community.
Why is it that this day serves only as a pause between the solemnity of Good Friday and the joy of Easter Sunday morning? Is it, perhaps, that we do not have a language to describe this kind of cosmic grief? Perhaps we do not want to intrude on the holy space where a father grieves for the loss of his son? Perhaps that is the right thing to do.
However, there are surely some for whom the only God they could look in the face just now is the Easter-Saturday God? Years ago I was studying Jurgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God at college, and making little headway with his hefty theology. It was only when there was a tragic death in the church that his vision of God started to come into sharp focus.
Maybe there is more to be said about the Easter-Saturday God?
Unbeaten path
When W Y Fullerton (*) went on his travels through Italy and Switzerland, he visited the little town of Domo D’Ossala, as many had before him. Like most visitors he visited the town’s ‘Calvary’, with it’s set of chapels dedicated to different parts of the Easter story. When he visited the chapel of the crucifixion with its magnificent depiction of today’s events, he thought that was it. However, on closer inspection he discovered an overgrown path behind the chapel. Following it, he discovered that it led to another chapel – the Chapel of the Resurrection. Clearly very few people had bothered to go beyond the crucifixion chapel to the resurrection one. Do we do the same, I wonder?
Image: illagomaggiore.com
I first came across this in George Beasley-Murray’s little book Christ is alive, and have used it many times since.
(*) Fullerton wrote the words to the hymn ‘I cannot tell why he whom angels worship’
Like this:
Ironic earth
When I logged onto Google this morning, I was pleased to find one of their occasional ‘special’ graphics. Not only do these liven up any searching task, but also they alert me to all kinds of anniversaries of which I might otherwise be unaware. These headers have been responsible for altering me to the work of great scientists, musicians and poets. Today’s header is a pleasant scene with a waterfall,pandas, penguins and trees:
Since there was no clue on the graphic itself as to its significance, I clicked on it to find out more. Apparently, today is Earth Day, now in its 22nd year. The day helps people to focus on Planet Earth and our responsibility to care for it.
For Christians, though – how ironic that it should fall on this day – Good Friday. For us, this is the day when the earth behaved unnaturally. For us, this is the day when the sun refused to shine for many hours on the barbaric assassination of it’s saviour. For us, this is the day when the branches of a tree, whose every cell was designed by Jesus, stretched out to embrace his quivering, dying form. For us, this is the day when the earth itself shuddered with an involuntary quake of horror at the moment when the eternal one died.
Of course it doesn’t mean we can’t join in with Earth Day, just that our perspective on it might be different…
You are welcome
On the front of our church just now we have a large, friendly sign displaying the times of all our Easter services. At the bottom of the poster it says ‘you are welcome to all these services’. On Sunday evening a lady with her small toddler enquired whether the welcome included her. Not surprisingly the stewards assured her that it did – and so she came in with her lively toddler. People did their utmost to make both of them feel at home, and rose to the challenge at a service normally geared for adult reflection rather than toddler occupation. This, surely, is what the word ‘welcome’ on the poster meant?
The thing is, although we set very high store by the church’s welcome, we are nonetheless nervous about the world seeping in through the porous walls of the church. We can maintain our welcome just so long as we control our ‘output’ to the world. In other words, people are welcome to share what we have, but an interaction going the other way feels decidedly more risqué. Later on this year we are holding a graffiti workshop here as part of our Biblefresh programme, and the graffiti art will be indoors. Why so? So that people won’t deface it, and also so that they don’t feel inclined to add to it by putting graffiti anywhere else on the building.
These are sensible decisions, of course, but they challenge our ideas of boundaries and protection. Earlier this year American artist Candy Chang set up a project on the side of a disused building in New Orleans. On it members of the public were invited to express their hopes and dreams about the future by completing the sentence ‘before I die’. Within days there were people adding enthusiastically to it, as you can see below.
Image: candy chang
Would we, could we, ever consider placing such a thing on the outside of a church, I wonder?
The grammar of Easter
Not sure exactly what put this in mind for Easter last year. It might have been an item I heard on the radio about the search for the elusive pangram – a sentence which includes every letter in the English language, but only once. It might have been watching an old Two Ronnies’ sketch about learning Swedish. Either way, the little talk below was born. Five A3 placards with a vowel on each were issued to different members of the congregation, and they were encouraged to stand when their vowel was said.
A up, said Peter,I don’t know about U, but I can’t just sit here thinking. ‘E,’ said John, who had developed an inexplicable Northern accent, ’I reckon u are right’. Just then, Mary burst in through the door.’O Peter’, she said, ‘O John’. ‘U won’t believe what I have just seen. ”What have U seen?’ chorused the two men. ‘E’s risen’, she said ‘E’s risen I tell U‘. ‘O‘, said the men, ‘thank U for telling us’.
Quick as a fox jumping over a lazy dog, John & Peter took off for the tomb. John was a little bit quicker, and E got there first. ‘O‘, E said. ’E‘, said Peter, standing in the midst of the empty grave. ‘U are not kidding, O’s the word. E’s really risen’. ’This is a new day for U‘, they said, pointing at each other.
___________
After the hilarity had died down, we talked a little about how language doesn’t work without vowels (see below). In the same way Christianity without resurrection cannot function. It is a shabby thing which makes no sense.
A gentle word turns away wrath (Proverbs 15 v.1)
The first time I saw this advert I was shocked. The next time I watched it I was intrigued. Now I am inspired. Wordsmiths of any description live in dread of saying the wrong thing – but overall it is so very much better than saying nothing.
When I was writing the final words of my next book, Who Needs Words, I lingered hard and long over the last sentence. What should it say – after all those months of writing and agonising? In the end I opted for “for God’s sake – keep talking”.
Wouldn’t you agree?
preachersa2z
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