Living Easter - 13 April 2012

I had a fascinating Easter Day last Sunday. All on my own, all day... Around our neighbourhood the blokes were out in the sunshine, happy in their black singlets and baseball caps, starting up their tractors and hauling their boats around. The Vicar of Warkworth informed us that being an Easter Christian does not mean just wearing a cross -- Madonna does that much, she said. Well me too -- I had thought that morning, in honour of Easter Day and my rare epiphany at church I should wear my Benedictine Oblate cross. So that’s two of us, Madonna and me. But then I went home, turned on the web, and found that the Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of Edinburgh said that all Christians should now wear a cross to make the point that there are some things we believe and stand for. Best of all for me, as always, were the words I heard in the liturgy: Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us, therefore let us keep the feast, not with the old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth... (KJV) There is an excitement at Easter, if and when we turn our attention to it. It is a permission to say that death can be very terrible, but it can never be the worst thing or have the last word. It is a permission to live life without labels and discrimination -- free from those things -- neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither male nor female... all are one. It is a permission to say no to evil in our culture, to evil compromise -- and to become who we are in Christ. It is permission to spot, to identify, whatever is true, loving, kind and hopeful. The angel said to the women he was not there, where they were looking for him, because he was risen. We know him no longer after the manner of the flesh – and that includes the manner of the imagination. He is not what we think. He is here in all that happens, prior to us, waiting for us, life and hope and love. To meet him we require to be still, receptive, needy and consenting to change.