Easter Sermon from David Berryman

Sermon for Easter 2008 St Matthew's Gospel

Welcome to all of you who have come for Lucas' Baptism. I am speaking today to the people of St Mary's - which does not include all of you - yet at any rate! But what I say makes one assumption and that is that Jesus Christ is alive and wants you to discover this and take him into your life. If you want this deepest experience then talk to me about it. It's an experience of which we all need to be reminded.
Ch.28, verse7 'Then go quickly and tell his disciples, "he has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him".'

'Then Jesus said to them, "Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me".'

If we turn to Mark's Gospel, it is even more starkly expressed:

'Go tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.'

Now Jesus was crucified outside Jerusalem and the risen Jesus is present there, but in this morning's Gospel Matthew, like Mark in his account, tells them that they WILL see Jesus if they go to Galilee and that Jesus has GONE AHEAD of them.
Why Galilee? Well, it was where Jesus came from; it was where his followers first met him. It was in Galilee that he first called them to follow him.
So what does this tell us? It tells us to go back to the time and place of our calling.

Can you identify times and places and situations and people when you felt the presence or the touch of God? Can you remember a moment when you felt you could give up everything for Jesus? We are being told today to return there in our minds.

We are being told to find our Galilee moment. And we are being told that if we can return we shall find Jesus waiting for us.

And remember they said '…go and tell his disciples and Peter'. Why 'disciples and Peter'? Any ideas? Because Peter, just as Jesus was on trial for his life, pretended he didn't even know him. It does not matter how far we have strayed from that first great moment of our discipleship, it does not matter how many times we've behaved as if we'd never heard of Jesus - we are still encouraged to revisit those times of faith and encounter with the living God - because if we do, with our failures, regrets, and with as much honesty as we can muster, we shall find Jesus waiting to accept and forgive and renew the challenge.
So Galilee is back to square one. Let's make the coming months times of renewing our faith of being prepared to join groups and study our faith, share our ideas, thoughts, hopes and fears, successes and failures, to start again as the first disciples did. Jesus will be present and will lead us into new discipleship. I do not believe this is an option; rather it is the only way to be a church that knows its risen Lord.
But there is more to it than that. We might well ask why Galilee and not Jerusalem.
Jerusalem was the sophisticated capital city…………..

Galilee was definitely 'North of the Watford Gap'. That's a service station on the M1 at which point Southerners think they've gone really too far out of their comfort zone.

There was a Jerusalem accent and there was a Galilean accent. No prizes for guessing which was more acceptable!
At the centre of Jerusalem was the great temple, the place where they really knew how to worship and what was the value of tradition………….At the centre of Galilee was a lake and farming country where, it was assumed, they'd all be comparatively ignorant of what really matters in establishment religion.
Jerusalem was the centre of religious power, Galilee was looked down upon, not least because of mixed relationships watering down all that was Jewish - kosher.
Jerusalem was where the occupying forces had what in Baghdad is the Green zone, their Headquarters, where the delicate and not so delicate decisions were made as to how they compromised with the local authorities and vice versa………

Galilee was a place of troublesome peasants.

In other words, Jerusalem was a place at the centre of things….
Galilee was on the edge.
The people of Jerusalem knew what was what……
The people of Galilee did not count.

The people of Jerusalem would have kept Range Rovers and the people of Galilee would have kept ferrets and greyhounds.
Of course I exaggerate, use a bit of inventive imagination, but the fact remains that one was at the centre the other on the edge.
So to be a Resurrection Church, a Church of the Living Christ, we need to be on the edge. We need to be uneasy with mere tradition, we need to be uneasy with a faith which ceases to challenge us, and we need to be uneasy with the temple and open, like the waters and fields of Galilee, to the presence of the Spirit of the Risen lord.
We need to be open to people we don't think are really very kosher - people on the edge - more than that we need to be reaching out towards them. If we like churches to be museums we shall one day discover that that is just what they have become. If we like our worship to stay in our comfort zone we may well discover that we have followed the example of the temple authorities and called for the death of Christ.
A lot more than granite was blown open when the tomb exploded with new life!
Of course Jesus did appear in Jerusalem - he comes to his people everywhere. Even when the church has been power mad, even when it supported the bombing of Guernica in Northern Spain by the fascists, Christ came to it in the Sacraments and in his words, echoing through scripture through the centuries.

And the artist Picasso, a long way from the church, captured the suffering of the town in an amazing abstract painting.

Now here's a thought, where would you find the Spirit of Christ? In the churches of Spain? With the cardinals virtually appointed by Franco? Or in a portrayal of the suffering of Guernica by an immoral agnostic? It's in the latter because, if you see what I mean, Jesus the Christ has gone on ahead of us to Galilee - he's already there in the brush strokes of Picasso. And when we go to those on the edge we shall discover that Christ is already there, that's what following him means.

One of the most moving times of my ministry was at the bedside of a dying faithful Christian. In death, of course, all the tradition he loved had to be transformed into the reality of meeting the Risen Lord Jesus. The respectable Christian in the bed next to him complained bitterly to my friend about her vicar whom she expected of being gay - my friend's MALE partner visited him. He was, of course, in great distress and on my advice, thank God, the staff treated him as the anxious devastated grieving partner he was. So where was Christ? - in the staff of many faiths and none, who cared for both men with compassion? in the grieving partner? In a holy death? or in the embittered Church leader? I think you know the answer.

But Christ still visited him in his comfort zone in Sacrament and Scripture, showing him his wounds - just as he'd shown them to his disciples in Jerusalem when he'd come to them in their comfort zone, behind locked doors which he broke through, with words of peace and with his scars to give them faith. He tells them to receive from him the Spirit of God.
And He comes to us in our comfort zones, sometimes he has to break in, and he gives us words of peace and he strengthens our faith and he asks us to receive the Spirit - the Spirit who led him into the desert, the Spirit who inspired the first Galilean disciples to leave everything - the Spirit who challenges us to head off for our own Galilees and to find the risen Christ, already there, already waiting, to create a living community and a living church.

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