April 21, 2013

Jeremy Younger

Easter 4

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It's so easy to be seduced by the desire for a happy ending. My mother always felt cheated if, when the credits rolled at the end of a film, the hero and the heroine weren't locked, arm in arm, walking into the sunset.

If we are not careful, I believe it's equally easy in the Easter season to be seduced by the same desire for a happy ending: after the blood and the scourging, the nails and the crown of thorns, after we've gone home empty and weeping, at least we know that Easter Sunday can't be far away, when wounds are healed, tears are dried and the dead Christ is raised and we cover the cross with flowers, sing "alleluia! Christ is risen" and with our fingers crossed hope that all this - the cross and the agony - wasn't just for nothing.

It seems to me that if we see Easter in these terms we're most probably whistling in the wind, we're fooling ourselves.

I look round the world and that's not how it feels, that's not how it is.

Nothing really seems to have been sorted by the resurrection of Jesus. New life looks and feels very much like old life: atrocities continue - bombs in Bostonand countless other places, millions are dying of starvation and the sick are still sick, the lonely still lonely, and I'm still the vulnerable, struggling mess I've always been.

I believe we're foolish to pretend otherwise; if this Easter season is about resurrection life then it doesn't seem to be up to much.

So I reckon I've got a problem, preaching in Eastertide - preaching the resurrection as a story with a happy ending. It goes against my experience every day as I see it in the news, in the streets, and in my own heart.

In the Easter story we have love and hate side by side, we have good and evil sharing the same stage.

The story of the passion and resurrection, I believe, invites us to recognise that love and hate are both part of creation and always will be - that we are called not to a naïve belief that everything has been sorted out at Easter, but the far harder task of recognising that hate and love inevitably exist bound up with each other, and we are called to hold both together in our hands and in our world at the same time.

Tolerating this ambivalence, being able to feel both love and hate at the same time, does not mean that love and hate are locked in some battle to the death in which eventually love triumphs over hate.

If you look at the world it isn't like that. The passion and the resurrection are not about some moral victory of life over death.

Such a dual between good and evil, God and the devil, leaves us with an inadequate part object God - a divine prime minister struggling constantly to stay on top of the devilish leader of the opposition. And it leaves us, men and women, as mere political pawns in some horrendous maelstrom and without even having a vote!

Easter I believe is not about victory, but about transformation, tranformation where hate as well as love, death as well as life, must be borne together as Christ bore them both in himself.

In the acceptance of this and the struggle with this, I believe God's transformation is made real. It's not a comforting, ecstatic, magical gift from above, but a discomforting, realisation that we are the raw material of God's life now, and it is our task, lived out of our creative spirit which is for ever holy, that we face the world as it is and ourselves as we are - that we are called to think, and feel, and act, with no false illusions and no Mickey Mouse theology in which we try to tidy everything up.

Difference, hate, failure of love are surmounted at Easter not because love wins in the end, but because love and hate can be tolerated as real - first in the story of the passion and then throughout history and throughout the world in all our stories.

The pain and hate of the cross remains throughout Easter Sunday and throughout the centuries, and throughout the world. It isn't airbrushed out.

This inclusion of wracked feelings and dashed hopes is motivated not by a compulsion to restore unity and find a happy ending but out of a desire by all of us to be less resentful, less afraid of anger, less terrified by conflict and loss, less punitive toward what we desire.

So alongside love, peace, joy, hope, long-suffering, if we are honest about our world and our inner selves, we also find hate, fear, violence, jealousy, loathing, anger.

Here at Easter we are invited into the reality of God, and of God's creation as it is and not as we might pretend it could be. At Easter we are given a chance, in the story of the cross and empty tomb, to go beneath the surface of the world as we wish it was and the people we would like to be seen as and face (and if we are brave enough embrace) the whole of our world and ourselves.D

For in this God created death and resurrection story, as in our God created selves, we find all this - love, joy, peace, hope, long-suffering, and hate, fear, anger, and jealousy: - the abused and the abuser, the terrorist and the terrified, the powerful and the powerless, the crowd and the lonely, the loved of God and the abandoned of God.

I'm inviting you in this Ester season to risk this story - to risk your story - just as it is - so that here - just for a moment - we can attempt together to meet and welcome hints of the truth of God and ourselves - a chance to understand ourselves a little better.

The story of death and resurrection and our story come together in a moment - mirrored here in bread and wine.

God in God's total self making communion with us in our total selves, the loving and the hateful, the frightened and the vicious, the peaceful and the violent, the lonely and the gregarious.

This is where our Easter celebration begins each year, where the 'Alleluias!' can start, perhaps more muted than we might like but perhaps more realistic, perhaps more true to God and to ourselves.

And then all we can do is struggle on till we discover that Easter is not about the transformation of hate, but rather the transformation of ourselves and our world as we risk holding together as honestly as we can both love and hate, death and life, despair and hope as they were held together in the person of the Christ.

Something then might happen to transform everything.

Wait and see...