A Mission to Somerset
This Holy Week a group of trainee vicars from Cambridge went to the Hardington Vale group of parishes in Somerset to assist with a parish mission. The week involved a sports holiday club, any 'Any questions for God?' evening, Maundy Thursday shoe polishing and preaching at Holy Week services. Here is the sermon that I preached on Easter morning...Well it’s been quite a week hasn’t it. I wonder what you enjoyed most about the Mission? What did you learn about Easter through those activities? Well I too have learnt things, as the week has gone on.
I‘ve learnt how much energy your young people have. How much you value family and how fattening mission can be as we have been to dinner parties with people in the parish every night this week! So on behalf of all of us from westcott, we would like to thank you for your welcome and hospitality.
It has also been quite a week in our Gospel story as well. If you cast your minds back to Palm Sunday crowds were excited- but everything was on a knife edge. The religious and imperial authorities saw Jesus message of love as a threat to their power. As the week has gone on, things have gone from bad to worse as Jesus was arrested, tried, flogged, paraded through the streets and hung on a cross to die. A terrible end to a life that held so much hope…But, it isn’t the end & that is what Easter is about.
And that brings us to our Gospel reading this morning. We read of the women going to the tomb in sadness and confusion and then finding no body. There are strange heavenly figures telling them that Jesus is raised from the dead and so they rush to tell the disciples…What do you think was going through their head? What do you think that they felt?
So, should we believe these women? Or is this just an ‘idle tale’, ‘nonsense’, wishful thinking! You know what women are like! Well we perhaps ought to at least consider what they say, because they were known to the disciples, they were witnessing to something that they had seen at first hand and as a group their testimony seems to agree.
The question that the disciples must have had is ‘How did Jesus rise from the dead?’ I’m sure that it is the question we too ask. The short answer is that we just don’t know, we were not there. But something happened that meant Jesus’ body could not be found. Something happened that allowed the risen Christ to appear to the disciples in locked rooms and on road to Emmaus. Something happened that turned a scared and bewildered group into a Church that within 300 years had spread across the known world. And something happened that has drawn us to be here today, this Easter morning.
Perhaps we too are a pretty ropey group of followers, perhaps we hope more than we believe and perhaps we are driven more by our fears than by our hopes. But as with the first disciples, this morning the risen Christ is here to greet us. He is here to proclaim that life has overcome death, that love is stronger than fear and that this ‘wishful thinking’ is no lie but is an amazing truth that can liberate us from the lies and nonsense of this fleeting world.
A world which suggests that we are worth no more than we can earn or says that our god is fine as long as he is kept as a Sunday morning hobby. Yet our Easter story proclaims that our God cannot be kept in tomb, put in a box or contained in a Church, even one as beautiful as this!
So brothers and sisters as we greet this festival day, I invite you to be amazed. And to live in the confidence of God’s overflowing love, revealed in Christ. A love that calls us to love one another and put that love to work in the humdrum decisions of our daily lives. And in a small way, that is what we have tried to do in the mission this week.
Now, if you are relieved its all over. I have good news and bad new. The good news is that the crazy ordinands with their odd T-shirts and smelly incense are going home! The bad news is that it is not a Hardington Vale mission that we are involved in but God’s mission to his world. A mission in which God sent his son into the world as a sign of his love and in which we are witnesses to that love as Christ’s hands and feet to do God’s will in the world. As we bring up our children, as we volunteer our time and talents as we consider our work, our lifestyles and the best use of our money. This mission goes on.
So in the words of our Gospel story this morning I invite you, like Peter, to come to this Holy place and meet the risen Christ and to return home amazed at what has happened this week and committed to living this out in our lives.
Alleluia, Christ is risen!
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