St Giles’ Easter Sunday 2010

Luke 24: 1-2: The Point of it All
 
This is the most important day in the Church’s year.
This is the core and the centre, the pivot point and the highpoint. This is the day of glory and of hope and of purpose.  More than Christmas, more than Good Friday, this is the day when we most clearly understand and experience what it is to be a Christian.

In a country which no longer really understands Christian Faith, and in a church where we so often fall into the English heresy of reducing faith to morality, we need to come back to the Resurrection.

What am I trying to get at ?
What is the point of this sermon ?

It’s this: the old way of being a Christian in this country and this Church of England has been running out of steam for the last 50 years. The old way that said that the most important thing about being a Christian was that we try to be good people - good family members, good neighbours, good citizens – and that what we believe comes second to that; that old way of being the Church is dying.

Because if the only things that define a Christian are a desire to be a good neighbour and a general hope in life after death, then why bother with the Church ? Why bother with all the hassle of worship and the demands of being a member ?

Let’s step back from all this for a moment and ask ourselves some simple questions.

First question: does life make sense ?
At one level it does. We are born, we grow and are educated, we flourish as human beings, we fall in love and marry and have families and so our memory is passed on.  All that is good. And I mean that. These are all very good things.

But life is also so terribly fragile. These good things can so easily be lost, and are lost to people who live in the streets around us. Life is stalked by tragedy: the road accident, the life-limiting illness, the loss of a loved one to dementia. And we have seen more than our fair share of the tragic loss of life in our parishes over this last year. Half a dozen young lives lost where drugs are part of the story…

And that is just here. We only have to look overseas for a moment, to see that our dreams of this simple happy life are fantasy to those living in war-zones or earthquake zones.

And of course we might just be random collections of atoms which emerged by chance from the gunk of the universe ! Truly meaningless.

(My argument with atheists is that they are not honest enough. Without God, human life often seems profoundly absurd. “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow you die” makes much better sense than “love you neighbour as yourself” !)
Second question: is Christian faith true ?
If it is true, then it is worth the effort. If it isn’t, then apart from the fact that we might like being in ancient buildings and hearing beautiful music, then we would be better off packing it in and doing something else more real with our time.

And Easter Sunday, like no other day in the Church’s year forces us to face the question: is Christian faith true ?

Why do I say that ? Because the centre of Christian Faith is the Resurrection. It is not the teaching of Jesus.

The default mode in our society is to say that Jesus of Nazareth was a good man. He surely was and his teaching is remarkable still. We can’t read the Sermon on the Mount without longing for life to be like this. And we know that this was how Jesus lived and so it becomes all the more poignant.

But the simple fact is that we only remember the teachings of Jesus because he was raised from the dead. The ancient world was full of wise teachers. Some of their teachings have survived. But many have just been forgotten. And the reason Jesus’ teachings were preserved is only in part because they are true and beautiful. They were preserved for us because his disciples believed he had been raised from the dead and therefore his words mattered.

Christian Faith and the Christian Church began on Easter Sunday. It was Christ’s resurrection that inspired and re-gathered the disciples and then sent them out to live and die for this faith all across the ancient world. It was Christ’s resurrection which was the dominant theme in their preaching. It was Christ’s resurrection that gave them the courage so often to face terrible deaths at the hands of the Romans.

I can not prove to you that the Resurrection happened. There are Christians who appear a little over confident about the certainty of the Resurrection. This remains ultimately a matter of faith.  But having said that, there are pointers which I think merit attention.

Notice that the accounts of the Resurrection are different. This morning we read Luke. Last year it was Mark.  Quite different. Critics point to this variation and say that it shows that the Resurrection is fake. I see it another way. These accounts were preserved in a world where most ideas were passed on verbally. And if things were written down, they were written down painstakingly and infrequently on expensive parchments or papers. No computers. No dictaphones. No mobiles to check out the story with the neighbouring church. Of course the Gospels are varied. It would be dodgy if they were not !

What is fascinating is that we have actual copies of the Gospels which are far older than almost any other ancient text, for example even the writings of Julius Caesar.

It is also striking that the key elements of the stories are the same:

• none of the disciples believed the Resurrection was going to happen before it did;
• the first people to the tomb were women, the most unreliable witnesses to anything in the ancient world;
• and even then not all the disciples believed immediately;
• and there is no attempt to explain what happened, there is just the reporting of some of the meetings with the Risen Christ.

But let’s ask ourselves a final question. Why does this matter ? Why might it matter to us that the Resurrection really happened ?

It matters because, as the Earliest Christians understood, it was a vindication of Jesus’ words. He had predicted the Resurrection.  He had in part been executed for claiming to be the Son of God, able to forgive sins and give eternal life. And now he had been raised from death and it looked as if God was confirming all his claims.

 At the very least, it gives us a deep and unique confidence that there is life after death. We follow a Saviour who has been through death for us and before us. And as we often say in our liturgy, through the Spirit this Risen Christ is present with us today.

The Resurrection is the clearest sign - baffling though it is - that the Church’s claims about there being a spiritual reality which exists alongside our material world are true. It really is true.

Therefore despite the suffering and sadness of life, it is not meaningless.

We do not stand at the graveside with desperate longing but with a quiet confident hope that we live on in paradise with Christ.

And more, all that effort involved in trying to be good – good family members, good neighbours, good members of the Church – is worth it because goodness will triumph in the end. That’s what the Resurrection shows. Therefore it is worth it to take the risk of putting ourselves second, of caring for others, of giving our best time and energy and resources to God.

Being a Christian is not a quaint hobby or a nice pastime to keep us occupied. It is a radical claim that life has meaning and that life after death is real.

It is this faith that will renew the Church.

I wish I could transport you all to Rokon, that little town in Sudan where I was 2 Easters ago. Not because the Church there is perfect. Far from it. But rather because in that war zone – where the church had been used as the arsenal and the houses demolished to create open spaces for the machine guns to fire, and where you can pick up bullet cases from the ground – they lit a Paschal Candle in their burnt church. A sign of the Resurrection. And apart from the faith that helped the Christians there to survive 2 generations of war, they are also building new houses and health centres and schools, because life is worth living.

The Resurrection is true and makes all the difference.

Alleluia, Christ is risen.
He is risen indeed. Alleluia.
Amen.