Bloomsbury Central
Baptist Church
Provoking Faith -
Easter Sunday - 12/4/20
Listen to this sermon here: https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/resurrection-again
Mark 16.1-8
Mark 16.1-8
This is a very strange Easter Sunday,
and the least
strange thing about it
is that I’m
giving my sermon in my kitchen.
Normally, by this point in our journey from Palm Sunday to Easter
Day,
we have shared
the meal in the upper room,
waited through Gethsemane,
wept at the
cross,
sat through the darkness of
Saturday,
and reached,
finally, the moment of resurrection and new life.
Except, today, we are in a strange situation:
we are
proclaiming and celebrating resurrection
in the midst of a
time of fear, death and suffering.
Our usual messages of hope and joyful Eastertide are not the
message for today.
Because today we
join with those who, throughout Christian history,
have had to work out what it means
to proclaim
resurrection when there is very little good news in sight.
Today we stand with those who have celebrated Easter
in times of war, in
famine, in disaster, and in plague.
And my hope is that as we do so,
we will discover
a fresh revelation of God’s faithfulness,
that will sustain
us over the days, months, and years ahead.
Because, of course, the world is never free from suffering:
Easter is always
celebrated in a world where darkness casts a long shadow.
And for the good news of resurrection to have meaning at any time,
it has to also have
meaning today.
The Good News does not only apply
when the news is
good.
And this is why I’m glad that this year’s Easter Bible reading
comes to us from
Mark’s gospel,
stopping where Mark originally intended his gospel to end:
at the empty tomb,
with the women
fleeing in terror, amazement, and fear.
These first witnesses to the resurrection of Christ
experienced it in
the midst of grief and fear,
and their discovery that the tomb was empty
was something that
added to, rather than immediately alleviated,
the intensity of
their emotions.
The conviction that the power of places of darkness is broken
is not easily won,
and the significance of the empty tomb
is not easily
understood.
For the women,
who had gathered
around Jesus at the cross and watched him die,
along with all their hopes, dreams,
and longings for a better world,
the tomb was
supposed to contain nothing but the evidence of further decay.
The unexpected absence of the evidence of death
was not, for
them, an immediate panacea
that restored
everything they had lost.
What it was, was a disruptive indication
that the evidence
of Death’s power was no longer where it should have been,
and that in its
place was an empty space….
They weren’t immediately confronted with the resurrected Christ,
just a mysterious
young man, sitting where the body should have been,
telling them that the one they sought was no longer there,
and that they needed
now to go and tell Peter and the disciples
that Jesus would
be found in Galilee, back where the whole thing had started.
And so the gospel ends, at least in its original form,
and it seems that
the story is circular.
The disciples encounter Jesus, they hear his call,
they follow him,
and realise that he is the Messiah;
but then death and suffering comes,
and their
misplaced hopes for revolution are nailed to a cross.
And then they have to find him all over again,
and, I would
suggest, again, and again, and again.
T.S. Eliot captures something of this circularity
of the experience
of life lived in faith,
in his poem Little Gidding,
What
we call the beginning is often the end
And
to make an end is to make a beginning.
The
end is where we start from.
We
die with the dying:
See,
they depart, and we go with them.
We
are born with the dead:
See,
they return, and bring us with them.
We
shall not cease from exploration
And
the end of all our exploring
Will
be to arrive where we started
And
know the place for the first time.[1]
It turns out that the significance of the resurrection
is that it is not
the end.
Rather, it is that which enables
the living of
life in a new way to begin.
Resurrection is that which brings new life into being
precisely where
it is most needed and least expected.
Resurrection is a journey through suffering,
which breaks the
power of sin and death
to determine the
value of a human life.
Resurrection is not release from suffering,
nor is it an
excuse from mortality.
Rather, it is the invitation to live anew,
to start again,
and again, and again;
to experience freedom and hope
in the midst of restriction
and despair.
Resurrection is the gift of faith
which is the assurance
of things hoped for,
and the
conviction of things not seen. (Heb 11.1)
It is the hope of new life,
and the
anticipation of a new start.
Ched Myers says that,
‘the power of Mark’s gospel ultimately
lies
not
in what it tells the readers,
but
in what it asks of them’.[2]
The challenge to us of the resurrection
is for us to
start again, and again, and again,
this path of discipleship
that many of us have been treading for so many years.
Just as the disciples had to return to Galilee to find the
resurrected Christ,
so we too have to
return to our lives, for our experiences of resurrection.
Like the women, we too lack definitive proof of resurrection,
and at times like
this, the power of death can overwhelm the hope we cling to.
But this is precisely when resurrection breaks in upon us,
as we look into
the darkness of the tomb,
expecting to encounter nothing but
the stench of death,
and finding
instead an emptiness that points to something beyond.
The open-endedness of Mark’s gospel
means that, with
the first disciples,
we have to look
to the future, and to the community of faith
for the evidence
of resurrection.
We have to look into the tomb,
and work it out
again, and again, and again.
And we will discover our resurrected faith
as we seek Jesus in
the ordinariness of our lives;
waiting, and waiting, and waiting,
trusting ‘that
the message we proclaim is pointing us beyond this moment,
into God’s
ultimate purpose which is life’.[3]
I’d like to close with a quote from a friend of mine,
who just happens
to have been elected as the next President of the Baptist Union.
His name is Geoff Colmer,
and he wrote an
article this week in the Baptist Times
in which he said:
The
counterpoint to waiting is hope.
Hope isn’t optimism, positive
thinking, glass half-full.
Hope
isn’t wishful thinking.
It isn’t a fantasy that someday our
boat will come in.
It
isn’t the ability to watch the news
and
pretend that everything’s ok really.
Hope
is a vision of life that is defined by God's promise,
irrespective of what the situation
looks like
and
then, without denying the facts or turning away from the news,
lives out that vision based upon
God's promise,
trusting
that the God who is love is with us, and for us,
and intimately involved in our lives,
and
relentlessly at work bringing good out of even the most painful situations.[4]
[2]
Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man, 403.
[3]
Quote from the Narrative Lectionary Podcast.
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