St Mary Balcombe Trinity 2 (11th of Year A) 18.6.23

 

One scheme of preaching is to hold the bible in one hand (show) and the newspaper (show) in the other and see how they come together. 

I followed this scheme on Wednesday after Alison sent me our scripture readings and, as I did, I noted first a verse from each of today’s three readings touching on the unconditional love of God. 

Here they are: ‘I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself’. Exodus 19:4b

‘God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us’. Romans 5:8

‘Jesus had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless’. Matthew 9:36a.

Inspired by these texts I picked up The Times and this passage leaped out at me under the pictures of two fine looking young people, Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar (show): 

‘The residents of Ilkeston Road, a built-up and busy student area of Nottingham, were used to the raucous night-time sounds of drunken revellers and police sirens. But the scream that cut through the heavy summer air in the early hours yesterday was clearly more sinister. Two university students, set upon and stabbed as they returned to their digs after a night out, were the first victims of a 90-minute rampage that resulted in a third killing elsewhere, three more people injured in a vehicle ramming attack, and a city in shock.

‘Ilkeston Road was relatively quiet at 4am when there was a “blood-curdling” scream and the two young victims, who attended the University of Nottingham, were seen tussling with a black man dressed in dark clothing and wearing a hood. Barnaby Webber, 19, a cricketer who previously attended Taunton School, was stabbed multiple times before he died in the street. His female companion, named locally as Grace O’Malley-Kumar, also 19, screamed “help” before staggering to a nearby house and collapsed at the front door. They had been returning from an end of term party and were just a few minutes walk from their homes’.

The tragic loss of two lovely young people of immense potential vexed my spirit. I found myself praying for Barnaby and Grace and another older victim, Ian Coates, with prayer fuelled by the scripture passages for Trinity 2 that had just impacted me, part of the three passages we have just heard in St Mary’s as preparation for pleading Christ’s Sacrifice at the parish eucharist. 

‘That blood curdling scream, Lord, echoes in my heart’ I prayed. ‘That loud cry you made upon the Cross out of fear and pain, may it avail for Barnaby and Grace, ‘My God, my God, why have you deserted me?’ You prove your love for us in dying for us. Jesus have compassion on them and their families and Nottingham and all impacted by this news report for we feel harassed and helpless in the face of this event. You, Lord, are mightier than the eagles so bear their souls as on eagles’ wings to bring them to yourself. Amen’.

That prayer flowed out of my immersion in both scripture and Wednesday’s news and it is a privilege to pray it with you. Maybe it will inspire your own prayer in the challenging situations you meet day by day not least through news media. Scripture, because it has a particular authority as 'the Word of God' is a particularly 'graced' servant of prayer. The very existence of Scripture is evidence of dialogue between human beings and God. To pray with Scripture can be, quite simply, an entering into that conversation, as demonstrated in the Book of Psalms. 

As Our Lord voiced the dereliction he felt upon the Cross using the opening verse of Psalm 22 so we can use bible passages we identify with to lead us into dialogue with God, engaging him with our circumstances and the circumstances of others, be they uplifting and joyous or sorrowful and challenging such as those of Barnaby, Grace and Ian recorded in Wednesday’s paper.

We all benefit when we’re told we are loved and the Scriptures act as a wonderful reminder of God's love for us as we find especially in today’s readings.

St. Teresa of Avila taught people to pray in this way. "Imagine", she said, "that you see Jesus standing before you. He is looking at you lovingly and humbly. Prayer comes as you notice he is looking at you lovingly and humbly". The circumstances on the front of Wednesday’s paper seemed to me initially a long way from that loving gaze of God until they took me to the horrendous killing of his Son and that scream on Mount Calvary which is one with that of Barney, Grace and the cries of so many down the ages. ‘That loud cry you made upon the Cross out of fear and pain, Lord, may it avail for Barnaby and Grace, ‘My God, my God, why have you deserted me?’

Peter Abelard, controversial 11th century theologian, is the subject of a brilliant novel by Helen Waddell. One scene from her book has the theologian living in disgrace in a forest with his young friend Thibault. Abelard and Thibault hear a terrible cry in the woods.  At first they think it is a child in agony, but they discover this terrible cry comes from a rabbit caught in a cruel trap. I quote from the book: ‘Thibault held the teeth of the trap apart, and Abelard gathered up the little creature in his hands. It lay for a moment breathing quickly, then in some blind recognition of the kindness that had met it at the last, the small head thrust and nestled against his arm, and it died. It was that last confiding thrust that broke Abelard’s heart. He looked down at the little bedraggled body, his mouth shaking.’  ‘Thibault,’ he said, ‘do you think there is a God at all?  Whatever has come to me, I earned it. But what did this one do?’ Thibault nodded. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Only - I think God is in it too.’ Abelard looked up sharply. ‘In it?   Do you mean that it makes Him suffer, the way it does us?’ Again Thibault nodded. ‘Thibault, do you mean Calvary?’ Thibault shook his head.  ‘That was only a piece of it – the piece that we saw – in time. Like that.’  He pointed to a fallen tree beside them, sawn through the middle. ‘That dark ring there, it goes up and down the whole length of the tree. But you only see it where it is cut across. That is what Christ’s life was;  the bit of God that we saw.’ ‘Then, Thibault,’ said Abelard slowly, ‘you think that all this,’ he looked down at the little quiet body in his arms, ‘all the pain of the world, was Christ’s cross?’ ‘God’s cross,’ said Thibault.  ‘And it goes on.’

‘I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself… God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us… Jesus had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless’ we read in today’s scripture pointing back to the cry of the Saviour on the Cross. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and always. With us he hears the death cries we hear or read of. ‘This is my body which is given for you… this is my blood which is shed for you’. As we take broken Bread and Wine from crushed grapes we take with them the invitation to be alongside the agonies of those in our circle and reported to us in the newspapers. 

Let us take the preacher’s lesson holding the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other, putting faith in a God whose love exceeds all we can imagine, whose ears are never deafened to human anguish and who expects nothing of us that he has not been prepared to endure himself.

Giggleswick school address 11 June 2023

It's good to be back under the Dome where I was confirmed into the Church years back as a 15 year old and where some of you may one day kneel, like me, before the Bishop.

I was standing under another sort of Dome in London’s Science Museum two weeks ago. It was a spaceship taking me on a virtual journey. The new Science Fiction exhibition open until 20 August has the sub title ‘Voyage to the edge of the Imagination’ and I commend it to you.

Giggleswick science first got my imagination on the move through Mr Brocklebank and Mr Burgon. It took me to Oxford and a Chemistry doctorate linked to producing lightweight materials that would conduct electricity at room temperature, the components of today’s smartphones. 

In our virtual spaceship journey we were encouraged to reflect on human imagination let loose in research and what a difference it can make. 

Years back science fiction imagined alien worlds. Now human imagination and endeavour have achieved discovery of 5,000 planets beyond our Solar System, the so-called exo-planets. 

The Science Fiction exhibition gets you thinking about Artificial Intelligence and I thought I’d get some of your views on AI this evening. 

I’d like you to start thinking of one benefit of Artificial Intelligence and one concern you have about it.  While you’re thinking I wonder whether you’ve talked online to Digital Einstein? To quote ‘[he or it]  is a taste of what experiential AI offers people today – a friendly face, a deep conversation and an interaction offering… real human connection’. AI brings Einstein to life again!

Put your hand up if you’ve got those two thoughts, a benefit and a concern about AI, to share.

Feedback

Help to learning - don’t need teachers! Phone diaries - can easily fit more into our lives! Yet we know more but don’t apply it - look at addressing climate change… We can send drones rather than manned planes to bomb places - but what if AI decides to turn military drones on its human creators.  AI is on the global political agenda because human imagination has created a wonderful yet fearful intelligence.

Well - let’s move our imagination back from the spaceship dome of the Science Museum and land it here again under the Dome of Giggleswick School Chapel.

The Dome is itself the fruit of human imagination built to be a beacon of faith. Our Chaplain has recently been helping us think through the inscriptions inside it. Since Walter Morrison imagined it and Thomas Jackson laid the foundation stone in 1897 and built it, Chapel’s been a sight of the Dales. In my youth it stood out more, with its blue copper verdigris, and that, we’re told, will slowly return after its 1997 refurbishment.

Imagination is the capacity to see what is unseen and sometimes bring it about. 

It influences everything we do and it's linked to faith which the Bible describes, in our reading from the Letter to the Hebrews this evening, as ‘the conviction of things not seen’. 

The gift of faith provides us with inner eyes that discern what life is really about. The intelligence that built this Chapel and our smartphones is GI not AI - it's lent from God. 

We come from God, we belong to God, we go to God. ‘Do not abandon that confidence’ our reading pleads ‘it brings a great reward’. 

As a scientist I see faith as a form of wisdom that goes beyond but not against the knowledge accessible to the human mind. 

How can I believe in a God I can’t see? I have made a well thought out decision based on the evidence for Christ’s existence, death and resurrection as supreme demonstration of Love in the universe. That is what faith is – a careful decision to act as if God were there and be energised by the power outside and beyond myself leading us to glory. 

Some things in life can’t be tied down rationally. God is one such thing, and so, to choose just one area, is quantum physics. Contrary to popular perception the revelation of truth in physics relies on the subjective imagination of the scientist as well as the objective truth awaiting discovery. Similarly pursuit of truth in Christianity relies on stubborn historical research to weigh it against other worldviews as well as imaginative thinking and praying. There are analogies - such as the elements of surprise in both fields. Superconductivity in metals at low temperatures breaks Ohm’s law of electrical resistance as surely as Christ’s resurrection breaks the universal law of mortality. The moral in imaginative truth seeking is a healthy distrust of popular belief that what usually happens is what always happens. We come to Chapel on Sunday because Someone rose from the dead!

By faith we welcome moment by moment the evidence of God the Creator's love and truth in the disarming warmth of a smile or in learning something exciting. To have faith is the greatest privilege in the world enabling us to see beyond what meets the eye.

As we leave worship in Chapel for a last time this school year may our imagination and faith continue to reach out in study and prayer. ‘Remember your creator in the days of your youth’ the Dome says and it's a privilege as an Old Giggleswickian to hand on that reminder. 

Picture from the Science Fiction Exhibition at London’s Science Museum open to 20 August 2023

St Richard, Haywards Heath Visitation of Our Lady 31 May 2023

 Why do we share our faith? 

Because of who we are – we are Christians, members of the body of Christ and so Jesus Christ is in our life.

You can’t share about Jesus unless you realise this and get yourself reminded regularly about it – which is why we pray, read the bible, come to church and keep our feasts.

In the Church calendar the last day of May is set apart as the Feast of the Visit of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Elizabeth. 

When Jesus first came to earth he lived in the womb of Mary (Luke 1:35). Weeks after she became pregnant Mary visited her cousin Elizabeth. Even as she greeted her cousin, Elizabeth felt a touch of the Holy Spirit as Mary spoke, so that her own unborn son, John, leapt inside her. 

The words of Mary gained power from the depth of her being, where Christ dwelt. 

In the story of the Visitation which ends with her Magnificat song (Luke 1:46-55) we see an exuberant overflow of faith.

If Jesus is in our life we are like Mary joyous ‘Christ bearers’. 

We are gripped by a vision of truth, a purpose for living and a reason for dying. 

We hold inside us a boundless source of love lending us compassion in the face of human need. 

We gain enthusiasm, a spiritual power which serves to help us both in witnessing to the truth that is in Jesus and in demonstrating his love for the needy.

We share our faith because if Jesus is in your life it’s the way things go.

Let us reflect for a moment on Christ within us whose presence will shortly be renewed in his gift to us of Holy Communion.

Picture Abbey Church of Guîtres 12th century of Mary embracing Elizabeth with passion.

St Bartholomew, Brighton Pentecost Sunday 28.5.23

A tale is told of a monk who became so holy people touching his garments got healed.  

Marvelling at such wonders, especially as the monk seemed outwardly little different to his brothers, his superiors called him to account.  

‘What causes all these miracles?’ they asked. 

‘I am quite mystified’ he replied.  ‘All I do is try hard to will only what God wills.  Prosperity does not lift me up.  Adversity does not cast me down.  I am persuaded that God does all things, or permits all that happens, for his glory and for our greater good; so I am at peace no matter what happens and pray as best I can that God’s will may be done fully in me and through me’.

Now you or I may not be monks but we are certainly called to take a leaf out of this monk’s book.  

We may yearn to be people who heal before they hurt other people, but where is the secret of being such a healer?  

Surely it is in a deep acceptance of our circumstances as being in the will of God?  

How simple – and yet how challenging – is the route to holiness.  

It’s making our wills one with God’s will; as best we can, in all the circumstances of our life, that brings with it anointing in the Holy Spirit.

That anointing first came today, the Day of Pentecost, when ‘the disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit… and the crowd gathered and was bewildered, amazed and astonished’ (Acts 2:4,6-7)

As Pope Francis has said, the Holy Spirit is the best Easter present. This evening the Paschal Candle is removed to signal the end of Eastertide but the risen Christ’s greatest gift remains with us.

What a wondrous gift! Associated with creation itself, ‘breathing on the face of the waters’, associated with the resurrection in today’s Gospel where Christ breathes the gift upon the apostles and, in today’s first reading, associated with fire and power and speaking in strange languages on the Day of Pentecost!

What a wondrous gift - and yet also an everyday gift! One for people who make their wills one with God’s will in every circumstance of their life.

‘Come down, O Love divine, seek thou this soul of mine and kindle it thy holy flame bestowing… for none can guess your grace ‘til they become the place wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling!’

In March I went on retreat to Crawley Down monastery praying, among other things, about the struggle we have at home with a family member diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. 

A remarkable insight came to me linked to the Holy Spirit about how God can work through dementia where there’s faith in him. When memory fades you live more in the present moment. This means being left behind somewhat by family and friends with busy diaries and work and recreational commitments. 

As I prayed on retreat I recalled a book I’d read by the contemporary novelist Santa Montefiore. entitled ‘Here and now’. The key figure, Marigold, spent her life taking care of those around her, juggling family life with the running of the local shop, and being an all-round leader in her community. When she finds herself forgetting things the story underlines how she is blessed to dwell more and more with supportive family and friends in the ‘here and now’ which is the book title. 

Are we not all meant to attend to every moment of life as best we can, to be as present here and now as we can be? I thought. And God - this was my key thought on retreat - God too is found in the here and now. Not so much by pondering the past or the future. 

The Holy Spirit has been defined as ‘God in the present moment’. Living with dementia is therefore potentially about living with God and others close to you through rediscovery of the ‘here and now’ - and the joy of living in God’s presence can often be manifested in those suffering this ailment. 

Hardships of every kind throw us back on God and our friends. The readings today remind us how the anointing of the Holy Spirit comes in shared circumstances. In Acts 2v1 we read how ‘they were all together in one place’. In 1 Corinthians 12v13 ‘in the one Spirit we were all baptised into one body - Jews or Greeks, slaves or free - and we were all made to drink of one Spirit’. The Gospel from John 20 recalls how on Easter Day evening ‘the doors of the house where the disciples had met being locked out of fear, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you… Receive the Holy Spirit”’.

Today is the birthday of the Church. The anointing of the Holy Spirit comes into the day by day circumstances of believers whose faith engages week by week with the meaning and power of scripture, the Breaking of Bread together. Preaching and music at St Bart’s always has an eye to leaving time for fellowship at the end of Mass, and that fellowship, often with conversation about Christian Faith, sometimes continues over food. Thank you, Holy Spirit for your work among us as a congregation, part of God’s never ending family, the holy Catholic Church!

How simple – and yet how challenging – is the route to holiness.  It may be that you are in a trial of one kind or another. I invite you to a deeper acceptance of that trial as being within the will of God. Such acceptance, as the monk said in my story, brings with it the anointing of the Holy Spirit.

Easter season which ends tonight brought me to producing a radio series available on listen again at www.premierchristianradio.com/joy. Finding joy in the Lord relates to our turning in faith and repentance to the risen Lord Jesus and welcoming his Spirit into every circumstance of our life. The joy of the Lord becomes our strength as knowledge of Christ grows. It takes courage though to leave aside regrets about the past and anxieties about the future to attend to the present moment where the Holy Spirit, God’s Easter present, can be found whatever our circumstances.  

I close with the prayer of Saint Paul in Romans 15:13: ‘May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit!’

St John, Burgess Hill & St Richard, Haywards Heath Masses 17.5.23

 

There’s some good teaching practice in our first reading where we go with Paul to Athens. The good teacher he was Paul had done his own homework. Though Christianity was novel to the Athenians the apostle saw in their shrine to an unknown God a pretext to say how Jesus Christ fulfils their aspirations in giving a face to the divinity worshipped without a face. He goes on to quote Greek poets and the consensus about God that ‘in him we live and move and have our being’.

I once walked up the Acropolis to the Parthenon in Athens in conversation with a few friends I made there on pilgrimage. We were from Roman Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox and Protestant churches on pilgrimage with some 700 people including 100 bishops and priests under the auspices of True Life in God and there was much helpful dialogue. The pilgrimage meant spending time with people formed in different Christian traditions. Our dialogue with one another happened mainly as we sat in conversation on longish coach journeys to holy places like the Parthenon.

We learn from one another as we get into conversation with one another.  Paul questioned the Athenians about their Unknown God. He quoted their poets. He had researched Greek culture to find an opening for the good news of Jesus. My visit to Athens reminded me Christianity is no monologue, just us speaking of Jesus, but a dialogue in which we listen and speak within our culture. Dialogue takes more humility than monologue. It takes time and patience and, above all, love. Just as dialogue between Christians and non-Christians can be transformative so can conversations among believers of different hue.

One fruit of such conversations on my visit to Greece in the footsteps of St Paul was catching onto the Jesus Prayer used among Eastern Orthodox Christians. This form of prayer repeats the sentence ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’ constructed from the Gospels. It is one expression of faithfulness to Paul’s call to the Thessalonians to ‘pray without ceasing’ (1 Thessalonians 5.17). The devotion is seen to centre prayer in the heart and cools an over busy mind.

‘In God we live and move and have our being’. The ancient Greeks saw this and Christianity makes this plain. In practising the presence of Jesus Christ we are drawn closer to God through prayerful reflection upon scripture and our entering into the movement of Christ’s self offering in the Mass. In closing I invite you to listen to me say the Jesus Prayer three times and then go on for a minute or so making the same prayer in the silence of your heart.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.

Lord God, at this Mass we ask your help as we help spread the good news of your love. Allow us to see you in all the people and tasks you put before us.

Give us generous spirits to be enthusiastic and sympathetic as we engage with others about you.

St Richard, Haywards Heath Feast of SS Philip & James 3rd May 2023

We just asked the prayers of SS Philip & James for our faith journey, that we be given a share in the passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ so we can go to God and behold him for ever. In the second reading we heard how James saw Jesus risen from the dead and our Gospel included Philip’s stated desire to see God. By describing himself as ‘The Way’ Our Lord reminds us of the direction we can find in life that leads to the vision of God.

We come from God, we belong to God, we go to God.

As Christians we don’t expect to be dragged to God as we approach death but to be gladly going to God as part of  the forward movement of life in Christ even if that brings increased frailty, loss of mobility and the need to depend on others. The passion of Our Lord takes the strain as we give our pain to him. On our way to God pains are sweetened as we keep close to Christ in his passion and resurrection. Grant us … a share in the passion and resurrection of your Only Begotten Son that we may merit to behold you for eternity.

As Christians we travel to God like anyone else through suffering and joy but with the difference of thankfulness for the joy and assurance of God’s love in the suffering. 

Our Lord who’s the Way has trodden that way before us and expects nothing of us he’s not been through himself, which is the message of Holy Week.

We come from God, we belong to God, we go to God.

You and I, each one of us are on that journey with Our Lord who is himself the way.    On that journey keeping close to him in his passion and resurrection sweetens our sorrow and deepens our joy, as does the fellowship we have with one another in God’s holy Church. 

Through this festal Mass may we be heartened for the ongoing journey of faith which will one day, as it has for many we love but see no longer, vanish into sight. Then, in a prayer I’ve said many times at the altar when every tear is wiped away we shall see God as he is. We shall become like him and praise him for all eternity. 

Grant us, Lord, a share in the passion and resurrection of your Only Begotten Son so that we may indeed merit to behold you for all eternity.

Picture Fr John Twisleton’s First Mass at SS Philip & James, New Bentley, Doncaster 4 July 1977

St Wilfrid & Presentation, Haywards Heath Easter 4 30 April 2023

 

I love the fifty days of Eastertide. They balance and outweigh the forty days of Lent lending our lives a dynamic of life, growth and movement which is well captured in today’s readings.

‘I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly’ we just heard in John 10:10 at the end of the Gospel - what a summary of Christianity! 

That life has its origin in the events of Holy Week as the second reading reminds us, especially its last two verses 1 Peter 2:24-25: ‘Jesus Christ bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness… for you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls’.

To know you can be freed from sin is life giving. I had the joy of giving someone one to one assurance of God’s forgiveness last week. The man arose with new energy, a lighter speedier step to his life. That’s an occasion when priests very much act as ‘under shepherds’ for the Good Shepherd to bring his sheep healing into righteousness, literally right living.

Life, growth and movement. We see that movement and growth in the Acts Sunday readings of Eastertide as today, Acts 2:42, 47:  ‘They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers… and day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved’.

Then lastly in our Gospel from Saint John in Chapter 10 that movement is captured in the action of the Good Shepherd, earliest image of the risen Christ, who: ‘calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice’.

We Christians have life, and have it in abundance, and its a life on the move which draws others into its dynamic since we follow the risen Lord who gives us that life through scripture and the Breaking of Bread through his ‘under shepherds’, we priests with the bishops and, thinking of Saturday, Christian leadership in our nation.

This morning as we ‘devote ourselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers’ we gain like my friend earlier in the week, a new spring in our step. We leave Church with a new eagerness as resurrection people who know more surely that our risen Lord the Good Shepherd treads before us out through the Church door. We, his sheep, ‘follow him because we know his voice’. As today’s Post Communion prayer implies we believers are ‘kept always under his protection, and given grace to follow in his steps’.

That’s our Christian faith, knowing the promise of God to give life to the full and forever in Jesus Christ was fulfilled on Easter Sunday! Its something infectious, just as it was seen to be in the Acts of the Apostles when ‘day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved’ (Acts 2:47). 

As you may have read in the weekly bulletin I’ve been busy on a series for Eastertide being broadcast on Premier Christian Radio Freeview 725 every Sunday 7.30pm until 21 May. 

‘Finding Joy in the Lord’ has five 20 minute episodes with Easter hymns and readings. The second programme is tonight and all episodes will be available on listen again at premierchristianradio.com/joy. The first episode is already available at that address. I mention this series because it was motivated by the love for the fifty days of Eastertide I mentioned earlier which balances and outweighs the forty days of Lent lending our lives a joyful spiritual dynamic.

This first episode centres on joy as the gift of the risen Lord Jesus to all who believe and trust in him. I’ve been reflecting a lot on joy as we have a family member struggling with Alzheimer’s. It's a learning curve for us all in which we feel hurt by circumstances in which someone we love is growing in forgetfulness. Happiness eludes our grasp many times so far as our emotions go but we possess a joy which goes deeper than happiness. 

Jesus Christ is risen - that’s our faith - and in his presence is the fullness of joy. The joy sustaining us links to our belonging to the Christian community, a community founded on the resurrection whose existence can’t be explained without it. The New Testament record of how Christ’s sad and defeated disciples were changed into fearless missionaries is hard to explain without a cataclysmic external impact upon their lives. The abandonment by devout Jews of a weekly tradition of Friday Sabbath to keep Sunday as the day of resurrection has no rival explanation. There is no grave venerated for the founder of Christianity compared to founders of other religions, only the empty tomb in Jerusalem. These considerations are brush strokes painting a picture of an event pointing beyond itself to the unique action of God in raising Jesus from the dead, pledge of an imperishable hope and source of joy to a third of the world’s population today.

We may not have Alzheimer’s but each one of us will one day develop a terminal illness and life is either totally meaningless or totally meaningful, depending on the vantage point we have on that fact. Thornton Wilder paints the dilemma of two vantage points, one without and one with the perspective of the resurrection of Jesus: ‘Some say that…to the gods we are like the flies that boys kill on a summer day. And some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God’. What we see about death depends upon our vantage point. The atheist Bertrand Russell had this to say about life and death: ‘There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within.  There is no splendour, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment and then nothing’. Contrast this sad vision of death with a joy-filled statement of resurrection faith from the writings of the nineteenth century theologian Kohlbrugge who once imagined someone finding his skull a century later: ‘When I die - I do not die anymore, he wrote. If someone finds my skull, let this skull still preach to him and say: I have no eyes, nevertheless I see Him; though I have no lips, I kiss him; I have no tongue, yet I sing praise to Him with all who call upon His name.  I am a hard skull, yet I am wholly softened and melted in His love…All suffering is forgotten’. 

Finding joy in the Lord links to such a conviction about the love, truth and empowerment that lies in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ witnessed to by the New Testament. Our joy as Christians is founded upon the supreme power of love seen in the risen Lord Jesus Christ. We believe that by dying Christ destroyed the power of death, and by rising again opened up a new and imperishable life to all believers and says to us ‘I came that you might have life, and have it abundantly’. That life is all that matters ultimately. Yes - the only meaningful thing in life is what conquers death - not what but who! In Jesus Christ we gain not ideas, doctrines, rules but Life, life that breaks out beyond this world in the joy of the resurrection - alleluia!