Going to the Father
1991 (Year B), 28 April /
Easter 5
St Peter de Beauvoir Town
We read things in church week after week and – in the course of time – we become immune to them. Familiarity doesn’t breed total contempt, but the impact of the words lessens. I suppose it’s just like watching the news on television. Only rarely do we sit up and take notice. Even in liturgy it’s the same. Each time I take a funeral service I read the words from St Paul we heard in the second reading this morning but lake very little notice of them so let’s just listen to them again and this time listen.
‘I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’
Well maybe here, in this holy place, where we feel the presence God, we can nod in agreement. But the minute we leave here it’s a very different story. After all we live in communities which spend their days in terrible fear of crime. The truth is that whenever we come home from holiday, the first thing I do is open the door and look round just to see if we’ve been burgled or not. We live in communities which lock themselves inside their homes, as protection for themselves and their possessions. We refuse to become involved in the need of our neighbours or depend on them for our own needs. If we were financially able to, many of those who live here would move away.
Crime is not the only thing which oppresses those who come here week by week for worship and Eucharist. Bad housing, the effects of living in the middle of a vast city, isolation, vulnerability, the list can go on and on. All of it cries that at best St Paul is either mistaken or at worst telling a lie, when he writes that there is nothing which can separate us from the love of God. There is so little love. There seems more often than not to be an absence of God. Yet there are the words ‘Nothing in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’. And they will not just go away.
The reality is that I ha e become more and more aware, the longer I live here, that there is immense power and truth in those words. They are true and that’s why they can’t be dismissed or ignored.
Despite all this darkness there is light in the midst of it. Remarkable efforts of pulling away from selfishness, fear and despair. We heard about them in the Lenten sermons. Grace filled and graceful actions of self-sacrifice, devotion and love are seen with the elderly, with children, with the handicapped and in ordinary families. It’s Holy work. There are people in this congregation whose lives proclaim that there really is nothing in the whole created universe that can separate us from the love of God. What is also remarkable is that there are a whole host of people who would never darken the church’s door yet whose lives proclaim the same truth.
Now the traditional image which the church has taught is that we are on a kind of journey to God. It started at baptism and will finish at death. And at that point great new awareness’s and visions of God suddenly become possible. I’m not at all sure that we’ve been told the whole truth. For the fact is that all we have to do is open our ears and our eyes to see it all here and now.
Of course St Paul says that as yet we see things only dimly, then we shall see clearly. Yet we are. So for God’s all glorified now, we are forgiven now. The world has been redeemed now. That’s the message of Easter sake let’s start living like we believe that it to be true.
The message of Easter is this. That God is present in this world, in a cheerful greeting in a garden on a Sunday morning. In an encounter with a beloved friend. In a walk down a country lane. At a meal in a village pub. Whilst cooking breakfast for friends, and in the pain and grief of bereavement. And if you don’t believe me go and read the rest of the resurrection appearances. And it’s just because these that we can leave here anticipating encounters with God in our lives this coming week. AMEN