Easter Sunday, Rev Canon Ann Philp
Starting on one Sunday morning early in the first century a group of people began to make extraordinary claims about someone who had been killed two days before. Something had happened to him and something had clearly happened to them. Over a period of twenty to thirty years or so these people both talked of what they had experienced and began to develop some kind of understanding of it. A few of them began to write it down.
Because of what they had experienced they were able to work through their memories and understand even better their relationship to and the experiences they had shared with the man who had died. They began to understand what this man had begun to do and teach...Of course they related it to their Jewish faith and their ancient scriptures and began to make links and connections with their own experiences and that of others who went before them. Thus the New Testament was born and the church began to grow.
All of it was founded on the experiences of that first Easter Sunday and all of it was built on the few things that the man had asked them to do...go out and teach and baptise and share a simple meal of bread and wine together...all designed to keep them together and keep them anchored into those things he had taught them.
The writings they produced tried to explain all this and acted as mirrors to what the man had done and what their ancient scriptures had said.
Why begin at this point this morning? The reason is that so many people think of the gospels as some kind of history ( a hundred and one impossible things to believe before breakfast)..some kind of Life of Jesus. This is not what the gospels are. They are the experiences of those first Christians set in the context of the death and then what they began to call the resurrection, of the man Jesus. The writings are not all the same but they do grow out of the same experiences...the same belief that the world was not lost, that death was not the end and that hope really did exist. God loved them and he would not let them go. Jesus they believed had overcome death...they had seen him, sometimes clearly sometimes like a shadow along the road, sometimes in the depths of their relationships, sometimes in the figures like the gardener...after all God had created a garden and given it to Adam and Eve...Jesus had struggled in agony in a garden and now in the light of that Sunday morning, the gardener is still at work...and no Mary could not cling on to him, could not keep him for herself..
He had to go so he could be there for everyone...it was a hard lesson to learn but once grasped these first Christians expressed it in story as the Jews had always done and they knew he was alive because they had experienced him. Mary recognised him when he called her by name. The two on the road to Emmaus recognised him in the breaking of the bread. Thomas recognised him as God's presence with us even through his doubts. And God still reveals himself to us, still calls us by name into a personal relationship with him...a relationship in which we will be enfolded in his love if we will but accept it... a relationship in which we will have some service to do for him and those around us. He still comes to us in certainty in te quietness and depths of silent prayer and meditation.
On Good Friday some of us pinned to the foot of the cross those things of which we are afraid, those places where we hurt...today we know that all is well. The hurts and pains and fears we have as human beings have been transformed, dissolved into that sea of God's love where there is no place for despair...for pain and the death is not the end...it is rather a glorious beginning
Easter is about joy, it is about hope, it is about the knowledge that God does love us and does want us to experience him...and if we ask in the moments of our own darkness for him to come and be known to us...he will come, we will know him in the depths of our being and we, like those first disciples, will have a strength we never dreamt was possible. Those first Christians went to their deaths in wave after wave of persecution for their belief in what happened this day; and those who were terrified gained a new confidence and courage. Like Peter who far from denying his Lord as he did on the night of the trial stands in public in the streets of Jerusalem and talks of his faith and ends up in prison but now he has the ability to witness to Christ with a joy and certainty that gave him power and ability to lead.
In a few moments we will reaffirm our baptismal vows...this is no meaningless ritual for in this the first of the two great sacraments that Jesus gave us...we entered into his death in the waters of baptism and have come up out of those waters into a new life and that is a life which cannot be destroyed by death and marks our every day with new possibilities, new hope and new joys...and if that is not enough we have each other in this new fellowship. Look around you...be grateful for each other.
Easter day in the earliest days of the church was the day when new Christians were made, when baptisms took place. Lent was the time of preparation. To reaffirm our promises is to join with them.
St Paul writing of baptism says, 'Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?'
'Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.'
'For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.'
We are the people of Jesus in this place called out to serve all people in his world, for all people are God's children. Sustained by the common meal of his fellowship and rooted in the faith of those first Christians, we are called to go out and tell others that Jesus is alive and well and living amongst us...even in the Woodford Valley and Archer's gate.
Jesus said, 'I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.'
Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, 'I have seen the Lord'
We can do no less
Thank you for being the people of God in this place.
Rev Canon Ann Philp 2010