St James's Church Piccadilly London Easter Day 20 April 2014The Revd H - PDF document

St James's Church Piccadilly London Easter Day 20 April 2014The Revd Hugh ValentineActs 10.3443; John 20.1 Never unrecoverable, unforgivable, unrecognisableunwelcomePhew!It is such a relief to have got here. To Easter Day I mean. You may feel the same if you've had your head down, in the Lenten furrow, these 40 odd days. It’s a long time to there, with them, it seems to allow you and me a degree of latitude in our managing to see and perceive the presence of Christin our own day. More than that: these ambiguities may be purposefulToday's Collectgives a clue:Eternal God, we seek you in the places you have already left, and fail to see you even when you stand before us...We seek you in the places you have already left.Seeingerceiving, perspective, angle. It always seems to come back to this. What is this human adventure but learning to seeclearlyto see differently, to see afreshThis is nothing to do with 20/20 vision. It is a way of apprehending what is.It is a way of understanding.We seek you in the places you have already left. We fail to see you even when you stand before us. An obvious candidate for being the wrong place to seek the Risen Christ is the Church the very place many people look. That's a cheeky way of putting it, I knowIt needs qualification of some sort, though I suspect you will know what I mean: the institution charged with perpetually witnessing to the presence and meaning of the risen Christ has, in certain of its manifestations, become the last place where he seems to be found. And conversely when he crosses our path in the tax office, the brothel, the nightclub, the hedge fund HQ, the supermarket slowmoving queue, the work place, the crowds on the pavement, the bus queuewell, we are apt to let him pass unrecognised. As if, in his recorded life, he was not to be found in such places with such people. Funny, how we 'know' this yet do not know it. So let us take comfort in the muddled witnesses of whom John speaks, for we on occasion are also easily muddled.If the resurrection of Christ as dogma and doctrine seems to you a little hard get hold of, be glad. For then you have no choice but to look elsewhere, further afield, because the obvious tomb turns out to be empty. Thfurther 'looking' may not necessarily be beyond the Church only beyond doctrine and dogma. And wherever we search, let's remember that we're asking for our accustomed seeing and perspective to be disturbed, inconvenienced, disarranged. This carries risk, of course.But what is the Christian claim but that the maker of all things took a risk and seeks us out?I can't be the only one who saw this week mention of the cancellation of a Passion Play, to include a reenactment of the crucifixion, because a formal risk assessment had not been done. Best not to jump on the bandwagon of anti Health and Safety anecdotes, but it is a rather delicious idea. As if the Crucifixion could be made risk free as if it wasrisk free. And the same for today's feast. We claim that the Nazarene Jesus who died on Good Friday was raised from the state of death and decay by the power of God. Why would God risk so crazy an intervention for our sake? The tradition answers this by saying: because God loves us. I can't begin to understand why. We say this phrase so often in our common church life but, really, how can we grasp this?Perhaps only obliquely, occasionally and from unusual perspectives: moments of illumination reached not by the intellect but by a complementary faculty for which we use the shorthand of 'heart'; through the agency of other people, though the wonder of our planetand the cosmos, through art, fun, touch, wellbeingthrough useful work well done, sometimeeven through the hard disturbances of bereavement, depression, loss of health or loss of hope.George Herbert wrote poems about the great courtesy of God, and of our being God's beloved guests. This disturber God is also a welcoming God, a generous hostAnd all this makes me want to say, makes me want to ask you, to consider Easter, this Feast of Christ's Resurrection, to be an invitation, made to you,to be God's guest; to see yourself and the rest of us as God's honoured guests. I have had theexperience, and perhaps you have, too, of being a guest but receiving rather uncostly, mechanistic hospitality. There is little serious interest in the guest; it seems all rather impersonal and there is the suspicion that as soon as you have left, you are forgotten. What the birth and life and death and resurrection life of Jesus Christ say is that with God it is different. No sparrow falls without it being noticed; the hairs on our heads are numbered; the lost sheep are sought for and brought home; and no condition into which we venture or sink is so shocking as to make us unrecoverable, unforgivable, unrecognisableor unwelcome. Ultimately and astonishing as it seems God restores us even from deathAlleluia. Christ is risen. He is risen indeed, alleluia.Hugh Valentine Easter Day 8 April 201