An Easter Sunday Sermon -

What do we make of this story that we hear every year on Easter Sunday? The story of the resurrection.

Some folk take this story as yet more evidence that Christians are cranks, required to believe six impossible things before breakfast-time. They dismiss it out of hand. Someone back from the dead? Appearing and disappearing at will? Pull the other one.

Others give the story a little more credence, but try to sift out the supernatural elements and find rational explanations for what happened on that first Sunday morning. Jesus had only swooned, the disciples took his body, it was all some kind of mass hallucination – that kind of thing.

And though they differ, the starting point of both those perspectives is more or less the same. They both start from the assumption that it can’t have happened.

But why? Why can’t it have happened? The answer you’d get back is  Because none of us have ever seen anything like this! Because the world doesn’t work that way!

Well, find a tribe of natives deep in the Amazon rainforest, point to the moon one night and tell them that men have walked on it, and see if they believe you!

Or travel back in time, even a couple of hundred years, and tell people about iPads and chartered aeroplane flights and television and electricity and they’ll think you’ve lost the plot.

Just because something is beyond our present understanding, it doesn’t mean it can’t possibly be true.

I’m not embarrassed by the resurrection stories, even as a scientist. Because if it’s true, and I believe it is, what’s happening in the resurrection is something so new and so alien and so unique that we can’t measure it by what we presently know.

Those of you who’ve seen the movie 2001 will remember the scene when the astronauts discover this massive, perfectly rectangular black monolith on the moon. It’s an utterly alien presence – totally beyond what they know. It’s an unambiguous sign of another intelligence, another power, at work in the universe.

For me - that’s what we’re seeing in the resurrection. The breaking into our world of another world. Small wonder we can’t get our heads around it.

But where’s the evidence for it?

Well we’ve been down this avenue many times before – too often to go over the same ground again. But the telling thing for me has always been the change in the disciples. What took them from being cowards, hiding away in a locked room, to preaching fearlessly that Jesus had been raised and risking prison and death for saying so?

Eleven of the twelve were martyred for preaching the resurrection of Christ. If it were all a hoax they’d cooked up, you’ve got to admire their commitment to it!

But aside from that, the resurrection stories themselves give us some strong literary hints that they’re authentic and not fabricated.

If you were making this stuff up, you wouldn’t have women coming to the tomb first and being the first witnesses. You’d make sure it was men, because in the ancient world a man’s testimony was thought to be more reliable than a woman’s.

But all four gospel writers tell us that women came to the tomb first.

Last at the cross and first at the tomb. Full marks to the girls!

And there’s more evidence that the story’s authentic in today’s reading, and it’s the fact that for reasons that aren’t clear, Jesus seems hard to recognise.

Now if you were making this story up, why would you introduce that element of confusion?
Surely what you’d want is for everybody in the story to recognise him straight away?!

“Jesus – it’s you! You are unambiguously raised from the dead!”

But here, John records that Mary was confused over who Jesus was, at least at first. And the very fact that John’s included that ambiguity in his account is strong proof that it’s authentic. Why put it in otherwise?

And it’s that little detail I want us to think about for a moment. The fact that in the story of Mary at the garden tomb, she didn’t recognise Jesus at first.

That sounds daft to us. How could she not recognise him? Well you don’t have to resort to theories of Jesus shape-shifting to explain it. Maybe she was struggling to see anything properly because she was beside herself with grief. Or maybe Jesus was trying to be incognito to avoid re-capture. Thousands of hoodies up and down the country know how easy it is to hide your identity by the simple act of covering your head.

That Mary might not recognise Jesus isn’t as daft as it sounds, and I have anecdotal evidence to back that up!

I take weddings every now and again. It’s a professional hazard. And this phenomenon nearly always happens at the weddings I take. I’ll be standing in front of the congregation for a full half-hour or forty minutes. And I know I’m not the centre of attention, but they’ll be looking in my general direction for all of that time. And there’s always be a spell when the bride and groom sit down, and the congregation will see and hear only me for a good ten minutes.

But I guarantee you that later on in the day when I’m chatting to the other guests, and I’m in my civvies, on at least two occasions someone will say to me “so – how do you know the bride and groom?” and they’ll be mortified when they realise I was the guy who just married them and they haven’t recognised me.

That either says I have an eminently forgettable face. No comment. Or it says that when we see people out of context, and dressed differently, it’s not always easy to recognise them.

Perhaps it’s not so strange that here, and in other places, people are initially slow to recognise the resurrected Christ. They certainly weren’t expecting to see him.

So what we can take away from that for ourselves today?

Well, here are a few thoughts to leave you with.

Firstly – Maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised that Jesus was hard to recognise. Here is God born into the world, and only a few ever recognised him for who he was. Last week we read the set texts for Palm Sunday and remembered Jesus looking out over Jerusalem and lamenting. Why? Because they did not recognise the time of God’s coming to them. He was right in front of them, and they didn’t recognise him.

In Mark’s gospel there’s this strange motif of what’s called the Messianic Secret – Jesus seems keen to keep a lid on his identity. He heals, but then he tells the people who’ve been cured not to say anything about it to anyone.
And when he teaches, so often he chooses to tell parables. Stories that draw you in, but leave you with as many questions as answers.

And all of this adds up, to me.

I wonder if Jesus was playing hard-to-get. If he was deliberately being a little obscure so that only those who really wanted to know him would make the effort. Who would go the distance with him? Who would stick in? They were the kind of people he wanted to gather around himself.

And gather them he did.

And it’s no accident, secondly, that they are the people he appeared to once he’d risen from the dead.

He didn’t turn up in Herod’s palace, or Pilate’s courtyard, or in the middle of the Sanhedrin and say ‘told you so’. In some senses that would have been the natural and logical thing to do. To prove it. But that was never his way. He didn’t have to prove anything, except to those who loved him – and it was to them that he appeared.

The folk who followed, who lingered with him in his life, were the same ones to whom the risen Christ made himself known.

And maybe that’s a word for us today.

And one final observation – it was when he said or did something that was personal for them that they realised who he really was.

It was only when he said ‘Mary’ in the way he always had, that she recognised him in the garden.

It was only when the Emmaus disciples saw him break and bless the bread that they realised who he was.

It was when the disciples in the upper room saw the nailprints in his hands, and the spear wound in his side that they believed.

The truth of all of this hits home when we receive it in a personal way. When we know that the risen Jesus is speaking directly to us.

Because he still does. Not in words or presence, perhaps, but in a call that comes straight to our spirit and demands a response.

To the disciples, and to Thomas in particular, the resurrected Christ says ““Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

That’s a word for me and you this morning. That was my experience as a young man. I’d been in the church since childhood, but it was only when I started to seek Christ for myself that it all became real. As I lingered over some verses in John’s gospel, I knew in the depths of my being that he was asking for my life and my commitment. This was personal. He was calling my name in the garden.

We live in an age of instant everything. Instant relationships, instant coffee, instant information, instant communication. But there’s something about the way God deals with us that won’t be rushed, that can’t be understood by those who aren’t prepared to look for him and linger.

So what are you waiting for this morning? A thunderbolt from heaven? Writing on the wall? Some final logical proof that this story is real?

My fear is that you can wait from now ‘til kingdom come and it’ll never come. It doesn’t work that way.

Here’s how it works – you have to take the initiative. “Ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened unto you”

Take a risk. If you’ve never done so, ask Christ to come into your life. Ask him to accept you as you are, but to change you into what you can be, in him.

If you’re willing and able to pray that kind of prayer, you’ll find – as countless others down the centuries have found – that he’s not nearly as ‘hard to get’ as people might like to believe.

When I'm Gone

(This sermon was preached at our Memorial Service, where we're joined by the relatives of folk in the parish who have passed on in the previous calendar year. Their names are read out and family members can light a candle in their memory if they wish as part of the service.)

Two observations and a story to begin with this morning.

I wonder how many times those of you who drive have come to your senses after you’ve been thinking about something, or listening to the radio, and realised, to your horror, that you have no recollection of driving the last three or four miles you’ve just driven.

And I wonder how many of us have had the experience of chatting to someone on a Monday morning and when they ask you what you did at the weekend, your mind goes completely blank. What did I do?

There are enough smiles around to suggest this isn’t just me!

Hold on to those observations as I tell you the story, which comes from the Eastern tradition.

Tenno had completed his ten years apprenticeship in Zen Buddhism and had risen to the rank of teacher. One rainy day he went to visit his master and as was the custom, he took off his clogs and left his umbrella outside the front door before entering.


As he walked in, his master smiled and welcomed him. Then he said “Tenno, you left your clogs and umbrella outside, didn’t you? Tell me – did you place the umbrella to the right side of the clogs, or to the left?”


Tenno was embarrassed because he didn’t know the answer. He realised that he lacked awareness. So he apprenticed himself to the master for another ten years so he could learn the art of constant awareness.

Two observations and a story that help give some substance to a thought. How much in life passes us by.

We’re so busy getting from A to B that we overlook the journey.

We’re so preoccupied with getting things done that time and experience slip past almost unnoticed.

Without determined effort on our part, we don’t cultivate the discipline of awareness that adds depth and richness to our living.

To quote Pink Floyd – a phrase which gives you an insight into just how contemporary my CD collection is – “And then one day you find ten years have dropped behind you, no-one told you when to run. You missed the starting gun”.

Life runs away while we’re still tying our shoelaces. Life happens to us, whether we’re ready for it or not. We’re born into the world and before we know it we’re being swept along in a crowd that dwarfs the London Marathon, running hard, trying to keep up, focused on what’s round the next bend, keeping our heads down, puffing and panting our way to the end of the human race.

But every now and then something happens to us that makes us pull up and stop running. Something so significant that we have no choice but to pull up a chair and sit on the sidelines for a while, as the rest of humanity goes streaming by.

Sometimes it’s one of life’s great gifts that hauls us out of the fray for a while. An encounter with beauty, in music, or words; in art or in nature. The birth of a child. The blossoming of love.

Miracle as they are, these things can never be hurried along. They deserve to be savoured. And in those moments we come to our senses and realise again that the human race means very little if we don’t take time to enjoy the journey.

But, and this is why many of you are here today, there are times when what stops us in our tracks is not gift, but grief.

A phone rings, a conversation takes place, information is exchanged, and you put down the receiver a moment later in a world that is changed utterly. Someone is gravely ill. Someone has died.

You find yourself sitting at the side of the road with your head in your hands wondering how on earth all these other people can keep obliviously running, when the world – your world at least – has stopped turning.

I got a call like that in January of last year – many of you know the story.

My father was going into hospital for surgery and on the day he went in, my mother had a stomach aneurism and nearly died. I had to drop everything and go back home straight away. Poor Mary Reid stepped in to take the Sunday service, and little did we know what the rest of the year would hold in store for Mary and her family.

Mum had 3 months in intensive care, and another three recuperating in hospital before she finally got home. And within her limitations, she’s doing pretty well now, though her health is still very fragile.

But those were strange days. Normal life was on hold. In the beginning it was hard to focus on anything other than what had happened to her. The family closed ranks, pulled together and got through, but we lived in this heightened atmosphere where her illness, for a while at least, became paramount for us. We lived daily with the prospect of losing her.

Why, for so many of us, does it take a brush with death to make us really appreciate what we have in life?

It’s a year and a half on, now, and I’m back in the human race again, jogging along; but something changed for me in that time – something that’s hard to put into words.

I think it’s the realisation that time isn’t just short, it’s precious. And in the time we have left, I want to find ways to be with my folk in ways that are truly meaningful. I want to know them and be known by them.

One of the saddest things in my time as a minister in some of the tougher corners of Glasgow was the experience of going to visit families who’d lost their mother – and it always seemed to be a mother – and when I asked them to tell me about her, all they were able to say was that she liked the soaps and she loved the bingo. Seventy, eighty years of life, and that’s all they were able to say about her.

Thankfully, that was a rare occurrence and I’ve not found the same thing up here. More often than not, the problem I’ve had is trying to condense everything you’ve had to say about the person who’s passed on!

And that overflow of stories and memories and laughter and tears that pours out when I visit bereaved folk highlights the point that I’m trying to make: when death visits our families, and none of us would ever want that visit, it leaves us a strange and unexpected gift. A heightened appreciation of the richness of this thing called life. For a few days or weeks or months we get it. We understand just how precious the gift of life really is.

But that heightened appreciation doesn’t last forever. It gently fades away like the ring of a bell. In time, some of us return to a life that seems infinitely greyer because that dear person has passed on. Others tie up our laces and fall back in step with the rest of the human race. Either way, the danger is we forget what we learned in those fraught days and weeks and months: that life is precious. That our lives are precious: not to be wished away or frittered away on things that don’t really matter. We only get the one life – we need to make the most of it.

I’ve never heard that idea better expressed than in the words of a song called “When I’m Gone” by Phil Ochs.

There's no place in this world where I'll belong when I'm gone
I won't know the right from the wrong when I'm gone
You won't find me singing on this song when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here


My days won't be dances of delight when I'm gone
The sands will be shifting from my sight when I'm gone
Can't add my name into the fight when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here


I won't see the flowing of the time when I'm gone
The joys of love will not be mine when I'm gone
My pen won't pour a lyric rhyme when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here

I won't breathe the bracing air when I'm gone
I won't be worried about my cares when I'm gone
Can't be asked to do my share when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here


I won't be running from the rain when I'm gone
Won't even suffer from the pain when I'm gone
Can't say who's to praise and who's to blame when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here


And I won't be laughing at the lies when I'm gone
I won't question where or when or why when I'm gone
Can't live proud enough to die when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here

He puts it well, I think. We owe it to those we love to make the most of the time that we have been given. But where Phil Ochs and I part company is in his assumption that death is the final end.

Christianity dares to hope for more than that, and I want to finish this morning with these words from writer/minister Fred Buechner:

“Unlike the great oriental religions, Christianity takes death very seriously, which is of course why it takes life very seriously, why there is such urgency about living it right and living it now. In the New Testament there is no doctrine of endless rebirths on the great wheel of life, no doctrine of a soul which by its nature cannot die. On the contrary, by our nature we do die, as Christianity sees it, with our bodies and souls as inextricably one in death as they are in life.


But if death is the end in Christianity, it is not the final end; it is the end of an act only, not the end of the drama. Once before, out of the abyss of the unborn, the uncreated, the not-yet, you and I who from all eternity had been nothing, became something. Out of non-being we emerged into being. And what Jesus promises is resurrection, which means that once again this miracle will happen, and out of death will come another realm of life. Not because by our nature there is part of us that does not die, but because by God’s nature he will not let even death separate us from him finally.


In love he made us and in love he will mend us. In love, he will have us his true children before his work is done”.

Thanks be to God for life now, and the promise of life hereafter. Amen