What needs to be done tomorrow? A Holy Saturday reflection

It's an odd day, Holy Saturday. An 'in-between' day, but a day which, if we inhabit it fully, is not 'in-between' anything - it is simply 'after'. After the so-called 'Good' Friday where the forces of death and destruction have, as far as anyone can tell, won the day - silenced life and hope, destroyed love and peace. There is, as far as anyone can tell, nothing ahead, nothing to look forward to, nothing to wait for.

So what are we left with? What remains?

When all that is, is what has been, we can be left with nostalgia for the good times - or grief, and guilt, and angry blame, for what has gone awry.

If I had been one of those first disciples of Jesus, I can almost feel the desperate fury at the chief priests, at Pilate the Roman governor, at Judas the betrayer, for what has happened to Jesus. A desperate fury that so many are feeling today, of all days, at what our present government, the chief priests and Roman governors of our time, are doing to people on the lowest incomes, to people in social housing, to people with disabilities and chronic illnesses, to people who are newly-arrived in the country.

But the Passion story we have re-enacted and lived through this week will not let us get away with righteous indignation - not indignation from a point of innocence, at least. We cannot pile all the blame onto 'the powerful' and, mirroring Pilate, wash our own hands of it all. Because we are the crowd. We are the ones who, all too fickle, greeted Jesus on Palm Sunday with joyful 'Hosannas' and yet, days later, shouted 'Crucify'. We are the ones who collude with the system, whether with the votes we cast, the money we spend or save, the 'news' stories we uncritically absorb, the opinions we parrot - or, perhaps most crucially, the silence or inaction or helplessness we allow ourselves to be sidelined into. We are complicit in the crucifixions going on around us - there is no place of innocence on which to stand.

And so the story goes. Nothing remains. Even Jesus' most faithful disciples have betrayed, denied, and scattered to the winds - their promises to stick with him to the end lying in tatters. Guilt is all consuming, shattering, paralysing. We are helpless, hopeless, until in Easter God comes breathing forgiveness.

That is one story of Holy Saturday. And it has much truth to it. But here, tentatively, is another...

The other, rarely told, rarely heard story of Holy Saturday is a story not of helpless guilt, but of responsible presence. Where the traditional telling places us 'somewhere else', anywhere else, but with the crucified one, this other story - a story of a handful of women, no less - is one of doggedly 'being there', staying, in the place of responsibility, of compassion, of - in a strange way - action.

There is a small group of women who, when the male disciples have fled in fear, follow Jesus all the way to the cross, and stay nearby, watching. They are witnesses. They are listeners. They hear his cry of god-forsakenness, they see his last breath.

This same group of women, so this submerged story goes, help take down the dead body and bury it, and get ready to return, a little over 24 hours later, to continue the work of caring for it - anointing it, embalming it, giving it those final touches of respect and love.

If, in the first version of the story, Holy Saturday is not waiting for anything, then in this second version it is most certainly a waiting time. Because these women have left the body in the tomb for the Sabbath - for a day, and no longer. They are pausing, stopping, because that is what the rhythm of the week demands, but they will return as soon as they can to do what needs to be done - 'early in the morning', 'while it is still dark', even.

In this version, we might imagine the Holy Saturday conversation going on around the kitchen table of one of the women. There is, of course, the grief at what has been, the bewilderment, the anger, the lostness and more. But there is also a doggedness, an insistence, that what the Romans and the priests imagine is the last word most emphatically shall not be. 'What needs to be done tomorrow?' is the question they will be chewing over, through tears and hugs no doubt, but with steely determination in their eyes.


Tonight, here in Hodge Hill, a handful of the more foolhardy amongst us will gather, as the sun goes down, in the wasteland on the edge of the Firs & Bromford estate - the rubbish-strewn no-man's-land in the shadow of the M6 in which, just last Sunday, we enacted the scenes of the Passion Story, from the Garden of the Gethsemane to the crucifixion at Golgotha.

When I advertised it, I suggested people brought something to sit on, a flask of tea to keep us warm, a lantern or torch for when it gets dark (there are no street lights in the wasteland), and a story of hope to share.

One of my newer friends and fellow-travellers here replied to the invitation: 'I can do trying to be hopeful - do you think that's as good as actually being hopeful?'. I replied that I thought that was 'a very Holy Saturday place to be,' that 'today is the ultimate day of loose ends, and of feeling whatever you're feeling.' When I invited people to bring 'stories of hope' tonight, I imagined that some might bring 'neatly tied-up stories of hope fulfilled', but that many more are 'likely to be loose-ended, elusive stories of hope glimpsed, deferred, reached for' - even apparently beyond our grasp.

We will finish, tonight, by throwing seed bombs, made earlier today in our community activity morning, into the hard-to-reach, bramble-entangled, rubble-ridden corners of the wasteland that framed our 'Bromford Crucifixion' last Sunday. A ridiculous, defiant gesture. But laced with the smallest seeds of a dogged, determined, barely-imaginable hope.


Easter will come to our helplessness and guilt, with the breath of forgiveness and liberation. But Easter will come too to our resilient, determined staying put and returning. As with that handful of women on that first Holy Saturday, God will come and do something with our stubborn presence, our small 'cracks' in the 'finishedness' of the story - and turn it into an eruption into the world-as-we-thought-we-knew-it.


We will stay with the crucified. We will keep our eyes open to their torture, and our ears open to their cries. We shall not be moved. We will doggedly show our compassion and love by our continued presence.

And together, we will rise.

What’s the point of Lent?

(A sermon at Hodge Hill Church, 26/2/12)

The desert waits,
ready for those who come,
who come obedient to the Spirit’s leading;
or who are driven,
because they will not come any other way.

The desert always waits,
ready to let us know who we are –
the place of self-discovery.

And whilst we fear, and rightly,
the loneliness and emptiness and harshness,
we forget the angels,
whom we cannot see for our blindness,
but who come when God decides
that we need their help;
when we are ready
for what they can give us.

(Ruth Burgess)

One of the gifts of the ‘Everybody Welcome’ course that we’re following during Lent in Hodge Hill is the way it seeks to open our eyes to how church looks and feels to someone who comes as a ‘stranger’ – passing by, coming in, meeting people, joining in, for the first time. And thinking about this again, I was moved to remove a poster which has been bugging me for, oh, the 18 months or so since I started here.

The poster has a simple message: “Life before Jesus” (sad face), “Life after Jesus” (happy face), “Any questions?”. I have two big problems with it. The first is it’s not true. Any of us who have lived through the loss of a loved one, or illness, redundancy or divorce, or who have suddenly found ourselves unable to do what we’ve always done or loved dearly, or have found ourselves suddenly ‘not at home’ – we know it’s not as simple as that. As if being a Christian somehow makes it ‘smiley faces all the way’, no questions, no doubts, no struggles.

My second big problem with it is that it’s not anything like the gospel. Or to put it in Lenten mode, it hasn’t been ‘tested in the desert’. In Mark chapter 1, just before the desert, we see Jesus baptised: the heavens are torn apart, the Spirit descends like a dove, a voice from heaven says, “you are my son, my beloved, with you I am well pleased”. Wonderful. Awesome. Joyful. And then he’s slung out into the desert.

And then just after the desert, out comes Jesus, proclaiming to anyone who’ll listen, “the kingdom of God has come near – repent, and believe in the good news”. But he doesn’t just proclaim it, he lives it – he brings the ‘good news’ to life, and specifically among those who have been pushed to the very edges of society. Those who know the desert as he does.

The ‘good news’ of Jesus is good news that has been tried and tested in the desert. We talk about Lent as a journey, and it is – but a journey through the desert – the ‘testing place’, the ‘training ground’, of Christian faith. The place where we learn to live with limits (some chosen, many more unchosen). The place where we discover our attachments (what are the things we think we can’t do without?). The place where our insecurities emerge (what are the things that make us ‘edgy’? what inner voices come out when we’re not feeling ‘at home’?). The place where we learn to live with boredom! The place where we find ourselves wrestling with ‘internal dialogues’ like this:

Are you hungry?
I am famished.
Well, what's wrong with that?  Are you dying?
No.
Can you stand being hungry for a while longer?
Maybe.  I guess so.
Okay, so what else?  Are you lonely?
Yes, I am!  I am terribly lonely!
What's wrong with being alone?  Will it kill you?
I don't like it.
That's not what I asked.  Can you live through it?
Probably not, but I'll try.

(Barbara Brown Taylor)

I want to offer three ‘rules of thumb’ for the desert journey of Lent. The first comes from the Iona Community’s daily liturgy: “We will not offer to God offerings that cost us nothing”. Or, we might also say, “We will not offer to others ‘good news’ that has cost us nothing”. The second is this: “We will not give up, or take up, anything during Lent that we don’t expect to leave us changed by at the other end.” What’s the point, if it’s just a 40-day blip and then ‘business as usual’? And then the third: “We must expect to be changed, not just for our own good, but for the good of others.” The desert is for anything but self-indulgence, or self-improvement. In the desert, we learn to resist turning stones into bread for ourselves, so that we come out of the desert ready to share our bread with our neighbours.

And if none of that is specific enough, let’s remember the five ‘values’ that we as a church committed to nurturing, just over a year ago – compassion, generosity, trust, friendship and hope – and which we explored together last Lent. Easy to say, harder to do. But let me share with you just a little of the hard-won, painstakingly-learnt wisdom we shared and discovered together last year, that points us not just to the ‘what’, but the ‘how’ of Lent. Maybe pick one, rather than feel like you need to try all five. And stay with it for the next six weeks. And see what happens…

1. Let a stranger in. Physically perhaps, but certainly ‘emotionally’. Notice someone – maybe in the news, maybe on the street, perhaps even your next-door neighbour. Maybe someone who’s been labelled: ‘old’, or ‘young’, or ‘disabled’; ‘single mum’, ‘homeless’, or ‘asylum seeker’. And try asking them (or, if that’s not possible, ask yourself), “what’s your story? how do you feel?”. And you’re learning the beginnings of compassion.
2. Give up grumbling, take up gratitude. Simple! Well, for some of us, moaning takes a lot of ‘weaning off’, so 40 days might end up feeling like an eternity. But as we discover the gifts that we have been given, and slowly open our hearts to be thankful for them, we discover that we are freed to share those gifts generously with others too. And we discover that generosity, like gratitude, is infectious.
3. Admit a mistake or two. This is one that I find really difficult. I hate having to say I’m wrong. But how about finding someone that I need to say ‘sorry’ to, or even just to tell them that I’ve screwed up somewhere, each week of Lent? What better way is there to restore, and nurture, trust?
4. Listen to someone. I mean really listen. Not necessarily a stranger – maybe someone you know well. But give them a good listening to, rather than our normal half-distracted efforts. And don’t try and get in there with ‘answers’. Don’t try and ‘fix it’. Don’t even dare to suggest you ‘know how they feel’. Try practising a bit of gentle, patient attention. It’s how real friendships are grown.
5. And finally, how do we nurture hope? It’s easy to tell people there’s hope, to talk about hope, to encourage people to ‘be hopeful’. But that’s to fall back into offering good news that hasn’t been tried and tested in the desert. It’s not about talking, it’s about doing it. ‘Enacting’ hope. Making it a reality that can be seen, felt, lived in. Gandhi said: “Be the change you want to see”. We can’t do better than that.

(with thanks to Stephen Cherry for many of the insights here)

Making Easter faith visible – some quotes

(from an article by Kathy Galloway, ‘Hope in a time of war: a religious perspective on peacemaking’, Annual Public Lecture of the Movement for the Abolition of War, London, November 11th 2008)

http://www.iona.org.uk/ebulletin_feature.php

and see also www.for.org.uk/files/hope_galloway.doc

The Japanese-American theologian Kosuke Koyama writes:
What is love if it remains invisible, inaudible, intangible. ‘Those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.’ The devastating poverty in which millions of children live is visible. Racism is visible. Machine guns are visible. Slums are visible. Starved bodies are visible. The gap between the rich and the poor is glaringly visible. Our response to these realities must be visible. Grace cannot function in a world of invisibility. Yet in our world, the rulers try to make invisible the alien, the orphan, the hungry and thirsty, the sick and imprisoned. This is violence. Their bodies must remain visible. There is a connection between invisibility and violence. People, because of the image of God they embody, must remain seen. Faith, hope and love are not vital except in what is seen. Religion seems to raise up the invisible and despise what is visible. But it is the 'see, hear, touch' gospel that can nurture the hope which is free from deception.¹

Bearing witness is about more than just making violence visible. David Stevens, the Leader of the Corrymeela Community in Northern Ireland, writes, (Christians) are called to make this reconciliation visible – visible in terms of a quality of relationships, visible in terms of openness and hospitality. It is a visibility which serves the same purpose as Christ’s visibility, namely, to reveal God and God’s reconciling love. This is true holiness and is the ministry of reconciliation.² Bearing witness is also about making reconciliation visible, about making alternatives visible.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
April 1996, East London, South Africa
On the first day
after a few hours of testimony
the Archbishop wept.
He put his grey head
on the long table
of papers and protocols
and he wept.
The national
and international cameramen
filmed his weeping,
his misted glasses,
his sobbing shoulders,
the call for a recess.
It doesn’t matter what you thought
of the Archbishop before or after,
of the settlement, the commission,
or what the anthropologists flying in
from less studied crimes and sorrows
said about his discourse,
or how many doctorates,
books and installations followed,
or even if you think this poem
simplifies, lionizes,
romanticizes, mystifies.
There was a long table, starched purple vestment
and after a few hours of testimony,
the Archbishop, chair of the commission,
laid down his head, and wept.
That’s how it began.³

1. Kosuke Koyama, from an address given at WCC General Assembly, Harare, 1998.

2. David Stephens, from ‘The Land of Unlikeness: Explorations into Reconciliation', The Columba Press, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, 2004

3. Ingrid de Kok, from 'Terrestrial Things: Poems', Snailpress, Plumstead, South Africa, 2002.

What do we do now?

(notes from a sermon preached in Hodge Hill, 8th May 2011 – on Luke 24:13-35)

In Jewish tradition (in the Talmud), as the Israelites escape through the Red Sea and the waters come crashing down on the Egyptian army, the angels of God burst into songs of praise and celebration. And God silences them: “the works of my hand are drowning in the sea, and you would sing in my presence?”

There has been cheering, singing and flag-waving outside the White House this week, and claims inside it that ‘justice has been done’, because a man has been killed. Assassinated, it seems, quite deliberately. But what has really changed? Al Qaeda lives on, and martyrdom is in their bloodstream. There are threats of revenge attacks already. And what has the USA communicated clearly to the world? That whoever is strongest, wins. The spiral of violence continues. What do we do now?

Much closer to home, in Comet Park, just down the road from where I live, £30,000 of new play equipment was installed, some 6 weeks ago, after a long battle by local residents to get the money and see the results. On Palm Sunday, one of the three pieces, a big climbing frame, was completely destroyed by fire. Last Thursday, the huge 12-seater swing was totally destroyed in a similar way. Destruction seems to have won the day. What do we do now?

The two disciples walking back home to Emmaus are on no gentle afternoon stroll. They are going home because it’s all over. The one they followed, placed their hopes in, has been brutally executed by the authorities. Now they are running for their own lives. Their words to each other are full of fear, grief, and perhaps more than anything, crushing disappointment. “We had though he was the one…” But now he’s dead. It’s all over. What do we do now?

And then someone joins them on the road. A stranger. A strange stranger, by all accounts – one who seems to have missed the recent headline news, but has some challenging things to say of his own. And here’s a small miracle: these crushed, grieving, fearful ex-disciples dare to let this stranger walk with them, open their hearts to him, listen to his strange words, and invite him home to eat with them. This is brave hospitality in deeply troubling times.

And what do they discover? Their stories, as well as their bread, given back to them, broken open, re-told as if a different world had just dawned…

Firstly, that the judgment of the authorities, the ‘powers-that-be’ was wrong – that not justice, but scapegoating, had just happened: that getting rid of the troublesome one to make everyone else feel better; that division of the world into the ‘baddies’ and the ‘goodies’, that turns out to be a lie.

Secondly, that violence, and the powers that rely on death and destruction, don’t have the last word. However much the Empires and the lynch mobs may want to believe they can make full stops, dead ends, they’re deluding themselves. Here is a witness that says “it was inevitable… but…”.

But thirdly, and crucially, this victim returns without the faintest trace of victimhood, resentment, blame or vengeance. He is completely free of that whole destructive game. He returns to those who had given up on him, and to those who had betrayed, denied, judged and executed him too, breathing peace, gratuitously offering new life: ‘open your eyes, turn around, begin again, trust me, love me, follow me…’

This is why we need seven weeks of Eastertide, and year after year of repeating it. It’s barely believable, so alien to common sense, what is being given back to us here: our imaginations are being broken open, slowly but surely, to learn to live this different story.

We follow Jesus by following in the footsteps of those Emmaus disciples. Easter faith begins with a receiving what the risen Jesus offers us. But as Christ’s body, we, the community of Christians, aren’t just passive recipients – our actions and words and ways of living are also deeply shaped, ‘patterned’, by those of the risen Christ himself:

• coming alongside the grieving, the disappointed and the fearful – in gentle humility, as guest
• listening to others tell their stories, ‘hearing into speech’ the laments
• finding God’s grace and imagination to gratuitously ‘give back’ what we have heard, what we have been offered (by our neighbours, even by our ‘enemies’), peacefully, creatively, within a bigger story, in a way that doesn’t close down, but opens up new life between us and beyond us
• in the journeying, in the listening, in the re-telling, in the breaking of bread, making love visible, to ‘see, hear, touch’…

This ‘making visible’, this ‘telling’, this ‘bearing witness’ is perhaps the core ‘resurrection practice’ for Christians. It begins, often, with lament: making visible, heard, the suffering, the anger, the pain, the crushing disappointment, that is so often hidden, silenced; ‘watering the cracks in dry ground’ with tears shed and shared. And somehow, this lamenting makes space to make visible something new – something creative, hopeful, peaceful – reconciliation, restored community, new creation.

At dusk on Easter Eve, in Comet Park, half a dozen of us from church gathered for our Easter Vigil, making a circle of makeshift seats in the ashes of the burnt-out climbing frame, with lanterns to help us see each other’s faces as the sun went down. We had come armed, with ‘seed-bombs’, the weapon of guerilla gardeners – clay, compost and wild flower seeds – designed to bring splashes of colourful new life to otherwise inaccessible patches of waste ground. And we’d come with stories of hope to share – to remember the possibility of new life, even in the darkness of night. We’d planned to be here several weeks before the fires, but it felt all-the-more right to be here now.

And as we gathered, so too did a group of young people. Muslim young people, as it happened. They had come to the park to play, but they were intrigued by us – not so young, and here with no doubt strange accessories and strange purpose. We tried to explain. And the seed bombs we’d planned to spread around on our ways home, we shared with them, and they went away, with just a little hopeful excitement, it has to be said, that they might be able to grow something, from an unpromising grey ball. We went away, of course, with the great privilege of having made some new friends. One of the stories we told that evening was of a sunflower which once grew on a bomb-site, which was trampled into the ground in a fit of mindless, angry destruction – but which, entirely unexpectedly, a year later, was to leave a patch of waste ground covered in bright yellow life.