Morning Worship on the Fifth Sunday After Easter
This is the sermon for the Morning worship on the 15th of May 2022, the fifth Sunday after Easter.
Rachael is an ordinand at All Saints, and currently training at Ripon College in Cuddesdon, Oxford in the hopes of entering into Ordained ministry in a few years.
The readings she is reflecting on are taken from Dr Wilda Gafney's 'A Women's Lectionary for the Whole Church' and are:
The sermon starts at 30 minutes and 17 seconds into the recording.
A transcript of the recording:
May these words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts
Be pleasing to you
Oh God
Amen
Today is the 5th Sunday of the season of Easter
It is still the season of celebration following Jesus’ resurrection,
The season of miracles.
Our Paschal candle is lit and each week we sing praises and give glory to God
Alleluia!
Easter is a time of new life, snowstorms of blossom
and discounted Easter eggs.
Our readings through Eastertide are filled with miracles.
We are celebrating the conquering of life over death
And hearing about the establishment of the early church,
The promises and the possibilities of faith
Of which we are all a part.
This week’s readings are no exception.
In our reading from John we are told of how God who has life in themself,
has granted the Son, Jesus, to also to have life in himself
That this life is then passed to those who hear Jesus’ voice.
The believers.
The believers who then speak and ensure God’s grace extends to more and more people.
People, like us, who then in turn are thankful,
and sing praises and give glory to God.
Alleluia!
What joyous news What simple instruction.
Believe and speak
Hear and live.
Come and be healed.
Is it simple though?
It’s a big ask isn’t it? To believe in this promise of life,
To inhabit the hope for 7 whole weeks and then carry that forward through the year.
It’s a big ask because it’s not often how the work of healing, or a life of faith looks.
Life has a nasty habit of fragility, instability and unpredictability.
Death can feel ever present, inevitable, unquenchable
Even now behind me, the branches in our easter garden begin to fade and dry out.
Our Paschal Candle slowly burns down.
It can start to feel disingenuous and difficult to shout about the hope of resurrection when we are opening a new bill from your gas and electricity company
Or seeing the latest bit of abuse on twitter
Or hearing the most recent atrocity being reported by those fleeing Ukraine
Or learning of yours or your loved one’s life limiting diagnosis.
Or even learning of your loved one’s death.
The energy of celebration can be hard to sustain, blossoms brown and fall after all
And a diet consisting of nothing but Easter eggs will eventually make you pretty sick
Some weeks I don’t really have the stamina for alleluias.
Last week that was very much the case.
I knew as someone decon-ing at the front, I was going to have to stand next to Wendy enthusiastically yelling Alleluia.
I also knew that I was going to a wedding that evening for someone who is living with a terminal cancer diagnosis and frankly I wasn’t feeling it.
How should we speak about God’s promises when they feel pretty far off?
How do we shout praises to a creator God whose design can feel pretty far out from the intended blue print?
It feels hypocritical when one is filled with anxiety or even fearful.
Fear of disappointment, Fear of giving false hope or fear of death
Is it ok to feel these things and yet still say Alleluia?
Despite their seeming new found power over life and healing, fearfulness and insecurities are written into our passages about the early church.
Solomon’s Porch was an open sided area on the east side of the outer court of the temple of Jerusalem.
It was a space for those who traditionally struggled to gain full access to the more ‘holy’ bits of the temple. A space for those who longed to connect and felt in need of this healing and restoration. Who thirsted for this promise of life yet had to settle for droplets. It was a place where Jesus taught.
And so, standing where their teacher had once stood the apostles gathered.
To preach where they thought they would find those most in need.
But this place of preaching and possibility was also a place of fear. It was a place of death. It was a place of danger. The apostles were at risk of arrest or worse and their teaching was not popular amongst the authorities.
So far from raising the roof with their alleluias and racing to join them the normal crowd,
the daring to hope held back unsure.
We are told that, yes signs and wonders came, but it was in spite of the fears.
These new believers came but with uncertainty.
They’d heard word of miracles born on the wings of gossip and hearsay.
They helped by laying out of cots for the ill
They had faith in the passing by of a shadow which belonged to a man who lest we forget denied Jesus three times in one night
This is how revolutionary restoration occurred.
Through word of mouth in relationship
Through the practical help from friends to reach those most in need
Through a persistence from those who have failed before.
In spite of fear,
in spite of death,
in spite of setback
Now we are told that they all were cured and I’m not going to debate that.
I’m not here to debate the efficacy of prayer for healing.
Personally, I have prayed for people who have gotten better against the odds.
I have prayed for people who have gotten worse against the odds.
I don’t personally believe that I have cracked a particular prayer formula for healing which ensures the kind of outcomes described in Acts.
And yes, when that is our reality, that can start to feel unfair.
Where is our high-level, holy spirit, dose of signs and wonders?
What miraculous tool kit is at our disposal to sooth mental illness?
Or fix chronic pain?
Or bring restoration to damaged relationships?
Or save those we love from dying?
I don’t know that we get the full answer.
And that can be really painful.
And it can feel a little crazy in the face of all of that pain to read these kinds of passages.
To believe in God.
To speak of resurrection and restoration and life.
It can feel like we too are grasping at shadows for hope.
It can be that we confuse belief in God
For belief that nothing bad can happen to us - because God will protect us.
And that’s hard when our lived experience shows us something different.
Many of us here will sadly know, from painful experience that believing in God, believing in new life from our belief in God, doesn’t actually mean superman style immunity from pain, illness or death.
After all most of the apostles died young.
I’m on the warden team, which means I have a key to church.
Which is a huge warden team perk, if you were interested in joining.
So last week when I wasn’t feeling the alleluias.
I came quite early, before morning prayer and I lit a candle in our little sand pit.
I prayed and then I had a wonder around the church building.
I don’t know if you’ve ever stopped to notice this?
It’s kind of one of those not obvious, obvious things.
Christians who worship in traditional church buildings like ours, are often surrounded by graves.
Amongst the parish green and under our feet rest the people of our parish.
Our high ceilings to which our Easter anthems soar and reverberate, give way to walls filled with names and memories from those who died at ripe old ages to tiny week-old babies.
The light refracting through our stained-glass windows is in part blocked by the names of those whose grieving loved ones helped to create them.
Our buildings in which we shout alleluia, in which we speak of belief are as marked by loss and prayers of hope and grief as any one of us who sits here today and worships. All the love that is left unfocused and untethered in grief has been channelled instead into the very stone and glass of this place in order to bring comfort.
Just like Solomon’s Porch we inhabit a space for those in need, who feel far from God, who search for answers or peace, who long for teaching and healing and restoration. Just like Solomon’s Porch our space, our faith is not free from fear or death.
Our worship, our building, our Eucharist and our belief are built on the acknowledgement that death and hurt and pain are part of our world.
All the beauty and wisdom and life that may follow on from a great loss does not take that pain away.
It may dull it, but it still happened.
Jesus after all did not appear again to his friends with smooth unblemished skin.
Our God is a scarred God.
It’s frustrating there are not always answers as to why something awful happens
But the God and stories we believe in do hold space for the pain and the questions.
When Paul says we believe and therefore we speak he is thought to be quoting from psalm 116 which in full says
“I believed, therefore I said ‘I am greatly afflicted!’
Or even in the NRSV: ‘I kept my faith, even when I said, ‘I am greatly afflicted’
Our belief is not apart from death, it is not apart from grief it is not apart from pain.
It is built on the acknowledgment of both death and life
In order for there to be resurrection
It is true that something has to die first.
Shouting Alleluia Christ is risen, without the acknowledgment that he first died makes no sense.
When we don’t make space for grief, fear, pain, defeat, doubt and death in our faith we don’t get the full story.
Our Paschal Candle burns precisely because there are places in obscurity and death which still need warmth and illumination.
I believe an alleluia through gritted teeth and shaking breath is just as heard and hallowed by God as the alleluia of the most impact-fully scored and masterfully sung choral arrangement.
Our Easter alleluia is not because we believe in no more death
It is an acknowledgement that death happens but it is not the final word.
Our Easter alleluia is not because we believe that pain doesn’t happen,
but it is an acknowledgment that pain does end.
Our Easter alleluia is not because we need to mask over our grief
but it is an acknowledgment of that grief and that what we have lost may yet still be found.
Our Easter alleluia is a cry of acknowledgement that even in the tomb
God is not done yet,
that there is a chapter none of us has read yet.
Promises which they have not kept yet.
It is a cry of hope as much as of praise,
It is a watchman’s cry
It is a cry of accountability that all is not well in this world yet.
It is a cry of defiance we shout into graves.
I believe there is room in our Easter praises for:
I suppose I’ll say Alleluia
Nevertheless, Alleluia
Even though it hurts Alleluia
In spite of all this, Alleluia