Sermon for 2 Easter 2022
The room where I wrote this little sermon, staircase 5, room 2, once belonged to an anglican priest called John Wesley. Many of you will know that he went on to found a movement of renewal in the Anglican church called Methodism and eventually became the Methodist Church. Together with his brother Charles, wrote around six thousand hymns, a handful of which remain staples of Christian worship around the world.
While he had been a practicing Christian all his life, the moment in Wesley’s life that made all the difference came on the 24th of May in 1738 — hearing a reading from Martin Luther’s commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans, in which Luther expounds his theology of salvation in God through faith alone, Wesley writes that, like those disciples on the road to Emmaus, he “felt his heart strangely warmed.” Wesley goes on, “I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”
Wesley, like many Christians before and since, had been concerned about the fate of his soul: was there any way that he could know that he would be saved from an eternity of punishment and suffering when he died? For untold generations, faithful people found themselves paralysed by anxiety, unable to bring together in their minds or in their hearts the seemingly irreconcilable realities of God’s love for God’s creation and the sense that justice must be served in some eternal way: surely, it is thought, God cannot let the wicked get away with it in the end, and how am I meant to know that I am not, in the end, one of the wicked?
If you do not feel as exercised by this question as Wesley did, you are not alone. Research has found that a driving belief Hell has dropped off precipitously among Christians, around the world, of all denominations. No one is quite sure why this is, yet, but it does make some sense in the context of this season of resurrection in which we find ourselves. Throughout the Gospels, when people meet the risen Jesus, their response is not one of relief or a sense of having been saved from imminent or eternal peril. Rather it is one of recognition: recognition both of the one who has risen and of themselves as they encounter him. In the garden, Jesus calls out Mary’s name and she sees Jesus for who he is — as she is known by him, he is known by her. Thomas, the one who was called the doubter, becomes the first to recognise Jesus as God when the risen Christ speaks his name. And these hapless disciples, walking forlornly away from Jerusalem, away from the site of the death of their friend, recognise Jesus in the bread which he breaks and shares with them, in the very food that sustains and becomes them, making them who they are and giving them the strength to return rejoicing to their friends in the city.
The scriptural witness of the experience of encountering the risen Christ is one of affirmation: affirmation of an ongoing relationship to God, the one who is life itself and who loves the world into being, and an affirmation of the power of that life and that love to persist even beyond death. It points us to a way of seeing ourselves and the world that is not bounded by death and loss, but somehow carries with it, like the cool breeze of a Spring morning, the promise of new life and boundless surprises. It points us to a promise that somehow, the tragedies of human life are held within a life and a future that cannot be so easily defeated.
Sin has been helpfully described as that which distances us from God — anything which prevents us from embracing with open hands the one who makes and who knows us, who speaks our name in the cool light of the garden. We do not speak here of something which warrants condemnation, but rather a bond from which to be freed and a illness from which to be healed.
Encountering the resurrected Christ brings healing from the sicknesses that come from oppression and from being oppressed. From the doing of violence and the suffering from it. The Good News of the resurrected Christ is that none of us must suffer either as persecutor or persecuted, insider or outsider. Today, Christians in Ukraine are celebrating Pascha, Easter, as mortars fall on their cities and armies advance. In Eastern Orthodox churches, like those in Ukraine, Easter is proclaimed with the words “Christ is Risen from the Dead, Trampling down Death, by Death, and on those in the Tombs bestowing Life” — Christ is Risen from the Dead, Trampling down Death, by Death, and on those in the Tombs bestowing Life. This Easter troparion speaks of the witness to the very weakness of death in the face of God’s love, the fragility of that which would say that your life is not worth being cherished by God and by the world.
If you have found yourselves in the tombs, the tombs of anxiety or fear, of misgendering or mis-recognition, of misogyny or racism, of wondering if you are worth it or wondering if this is all worth it, may this Eastertide find you encountering this life that is freely bestowed and without precondition.
As we begin this Trinity term, putting behind us with some degree of care and no little amount of hope, the sorrows of the past two years, it is my prayer for each of you that, like John Wesley and those anonymous disciples on the road, you will find your own heart strangely warmed: warmed with the knowledge that you are loved, that you are known, and that the love which, as Dante put it, moves the sun and other stars also moves you to participate in its drawing all from death into life.