| The Foundation of Lady Katherine Leveson at Temple Balsall | ||
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St
Mary's Church
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Easter Day Luke 24. 1 - 12 Sermon preached on Easter Day, 11th April 2004 by Human life is very beautiful. It is also fragile, frail and finite. At some point or another in all of our lives we ask or are forced to ask questions about the meaning and purpose of this beautiful life. The world this morning is full of light and darkness: despair and hope. The resurrection of Jesus Christ faces our questions head on and sets them in a wider and larger context. The resurrection sets life's experience within the perspective of God's purpose for our lives from beginning to end. God's great purposes for the whole of being and time: his acts of creation, redemption and salvation. In this greater perspective, Christ who is risen becomes the touchstone for meaning: he is the light in our darkness, our hope in despair, the triumph in tragedy. For in the resurrection we see the truth that God, in Jesus Christ, has entered into our deepest darkness, bringing new light and life. He is the one who gives hope for ourselves and for our world. This is the God who leads us into light. The event of Christ's resurrection which today we celebrate with great joy, embraces past, present and future. Yes, it is an event in the past. At the heart of each of the Gospel accounts there is the surprise discovery by the women on that first Easter Day that the unexpected had happened - Jesus whom they had buried in the tomb on the evening of Good Friday, now stood before them in the Garden. But it is an event also for the present. Christ is risen, this day and every day. The freedom for life, the transforming power of the same good news continues in the Church, through the Church, by the Church for the sake of the world. We proclaim life; the power of God; the presence of God. What other motive or reason could there for those who are still prepared in self-sacrificial ways to give of themselves and their lives wholly to others? The Church puts into practice this love through the work of ordinary Christians across the world. I think of those people who put themselves on the margins by working with the homeless, drug addicts or those who risk life to bring comfort, support or aid to those in need in developing and impoverished countries abroad. Or I think of those people who are called into the particular life of a religious community to live out the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Or what about those Christians who give themselves in service to others in every place and among every kind of person, rich or poor, young or old: there is always a cost to that service, some form of sacrifice, which witnesses to the Spirit of Christ alive in their hearts. So many people in so many different ways living out the abundance and truth of God's life and eternity present in the world and in other people. We live lives so utterly immersed in the increasing drivenness and activity of the 'now'. Today, the resurrection of Jesus Christ bids us raise our hearts and our eyes to that altogether larger and fuller vision and all that it encompasses. Our happinesses and the joys as well as our pains, the struggles, the frustrations and our questions - in the resurrection these different experiences of life find their pace in the light of eternity. So, far from being so focussed on what seems pressing and immediate
in our lives at present, Easter calls us to see with new eyes - to look
in the light of God's loving and eternal purposes for us and his entire
creation. We need to be attentive to those deeper spiritual values which
let Christ's eternal life flourish in the here and now among us - not
just in Church, but also in the neighbourhoods and communities where
we live - looking for where God is replenishing our own aliveness, and
seeing where God is replenishing the abundant aliveness of others too.
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