SERMON FOR THE SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER 2020 - EASTER HOPE

Alleluia, Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed, alleluia!

Our first reading today refers to one of the few jokes in the Old Testament.  The psalms, and Isaiah, comment on how daft it is to worship something made of gold and wood, which cannot see or hear, let alone do anything.  Those who make and worship them, are like them, they say - in short, they are blockheads.

If this weirdest of all seasons has taught us anything, it must have taught us what is really important.  Those idols we may have been worshipping (status, possessions, being so very busy, being so very necessary) have all been exposed.  The lowliest paramedic is, rightly, more valued than me.  The least paid are more necessary than I am.  My possessions are worth nothing when I have no freedom.  My great job has gone and it appears all that busyness was just air.  Those things I thought were important were all air.  But, lo and behold, I am still alive, people still love me, and there is life without work, or fancy things, or being important.  It’s just I have now to learn how to live it.

Richard Rohr, the Franciscan, has been writing in his daily emails about what he calls the liminal space.  That place where we never choose to go, because nothing is as usual there and our habitual ego-building is of no use.  The usual image for this is the desert, but you can replace that with the life experiences which throw us, all unwilling, into that space: redundancy, bereavement, severe illness - and for all of us, over the past two months, lockdown.  He says liminal space is where we have to let our self-absorption and self-aggrandising go, where all our idols show their true colours.  We cannot operate with business as usual.  We can choose to panic and sink into depression.  Or, like Peter when he was sinking into the waves, we can call out, “Lord, save me!”  It is in those liminal times that we learn what trust in God is all about.  Celtic spirituality talks about “thin places” in the landscape, where humanity and the divine draw close.  What thin places do in space, the liminal in our lives does in time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Upper Room over these past weeks.  At first the disciples locked themselves in for fear.  Like us, they were in fear of their lives - and nothing had worked out as they expected.  In the middle of that fear and uncertainty, Jesus appears and nothing is the same again.  It is a liminal space.  It undoes all their former thinking and replaces it with trust in the unknown - in this new Jesus: once very certainly dead, now very much alive.  

The resurrection changes everything.  Out of the liminal space emerges a completely different life.  Many people are talking about “going back to normal” but for the resurrection people, that is not at all what they want.  For us, there is joy in the thought that life could be different.  Let that joy slowly fill you from inside, let it become the medium in which you live and move and have your being.  Roll the Easter stories around in your head, carry them with you through your locked-down days.  Inhabit that new hope.  Sweep your Upper Room and make it ready for the coming of the Spirit.  However you do it, try seeing things just from the perspective of new life sustained by love, for these last weeks of Easter.  Be a resurrection person, with fresh eyes, fresh heart, fresh hope. 

Our world always needed that hope - it needs it now more than ever.  Our world needs people who see its pain and injustice through resurrection-tinted lenses, which do not mask the truth, but see hope, too.  In our confusion and anxiety about lockdown and the future, in our sorrow for the sick and the dead, let’s allow the risen Christ into our Upper Room.  Let’s become the Easter people who can change the world for the better, one bit of love at a time.

Alleluia, Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed, alleluia!