Easter all age eucharist 20th April 2014

The workmen in Lindfield let me take a Road closed sign that had been run over, possibly by an angry motorist, which was destined for a skip in any case!

For 13 weeks we’ve driven to Haywards Heath via Ardingly or Walstead  instead of Lindfield. Renewing the water main in Lindfield has made life that much harder in Horsted Keynes. We’ve had to take a long road, or, if by Walstead, a bumpy potholed road without edges at times, to get to the station.

Some of our commuters have lost an extra half an hour a day for 13 working weeks which I make 32.5 hours or well over a day of their life. Now the road is open alleluia! Traffic lights, yes, from Tuesday but it’s open – the way to Haywards Heath is no longer closed.

It’s Easter Day and there’s another road been opened.

We have little roads in our cemetery to carry the remains of people who’ve died to their graves. The children have just been running there.

Those paths – one more is due – lead to graves but on this day the Man who’d been carried down the path to his grave on Good Friday was there alive in the cemetery.

Remember what they said in the reading we just heard: They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.

The Road death closed was now open!

It isn’t my job to explain how it happened but to point upwards, as those first witnesses did, to the One who did it, who mastered death for us, opening the then closed way to glory.

The Bible passages we read today point to an historical event, probably in April 27AD – the time keeping lost 6 years somewhere –  an event that is held by a third of the earth’s population today to reveal a love extravagant enough to make death pale away into nothingness.

When Jesus Christ suffered and died God was in him. There was a sort of divine judo at play. Death flew at God and ended up upside down and out at the count.

For, as we shall hear in a moment, when Peter came to Jesus’ grave he saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself.

God had been at work, for Christians a God who’s big enough to work his way through death.

God is still at work, not least here in Horsted Keynes.

One of the great joys we’ve had at St Giles recently is seeing eight of the regular church attenders now receiving Holy Communion with us.

All eight were confirmed by Bishop Mark last month and on Sunday we’d a lovely lunch to welcome them organised by our outgoing Churchwarden James Nicholson with other church members. It was a great occasion.

I’ve invited one or two of them to share something of how they came to make this move and how God’s been at work in their lives.

Nick, Raychell and Karoline share about how God’s been at work in their lives of late.

God’s at work – he’s still at work opening up the dead ends we encounter in life.

Many of have taken time these last weeks of Lent to write these letters to God to be shortly consigned to him via a flame from the Easter Candle. I don’t know about yours but mine’s things for which I want resurrection in my life and that of St Giles.

You’ve still got a minute or two, maybe after communion to write a sentence or two inside the envelope to join the other letters as a sign of offering. Why not give him some of the seeming dead ends you’re facing?

Resurrection, Easter, is about breaking through dead ends, of which driving again via Lindfield to the station is a significant reminder.

It’s a parable of life, for few of us avoid times when ‘you have to drive through Ardingly to Haywards Heath’. Times when we must take a long road on account of unemployment, cancer treatment or bereavement are our making or un-making.

The Christian faith commends that long road in life as Jesus hands us suffering and death to be the way to grow into his resurrection stature. Positive resignation to the will of God redeems every circumstance because it brings with it the Holy Spirit’s anointing.

At Easter that ‘Road ahead closed’ sign left the road to Lindfield just as we begin to celebrate the rising of God’s Son who has taken the same sign away from the hour of our death.

To continue the analogy, we of faith press on in our journey to God taking courage from him to bear its twists and turns, bumps and potholes believing the pains of life will one day be lost in the praise we sing.  Alleluia!