This month - The significance of being in-between - Easter thoughts: A story of hope - Easter thoughts: Mary becomes a duchess

The significance of being in-between

  Each year, I face the same problem: our church wishes to conduct some event of mission on Easter Saturday.  The problem lies in deciding what authentic missionary word our church has to say to the world on the Saturday of Easter?

  You can argue that the gospel may be proclaimed at any time and yet, if Holy Week is the time when we seek to deepen our experience and understanding of that first Easter then, on Easter Saturday, it is premature to speak of the resurrection.  Sunday has not yet come - and, similarly, Friday has come and gone, so it’s a little late to speak of the crucifixion.

  That first Saturday was a Sabbath but the gospel writers give us little insight into the disciples’ experience at that time.  It must have been a difficult synthesis of devastating fear, uncertain waiting and hopeful longing.

  While such themes don’t lend themselves easily to be the themes of street mission or even church worship, maybe Easter Saturday calls us to think again about the waiting ‘in-between’ moments of life.

  Easter Saturday is an icon for these in-between moments: an awkward pause in which we, almost embarrassed at its presence, tend to rush through from what we ought to have done yesterday to the busy-ness of what we intend to do tomorrow.

  To be human is to inhabit the present in-between.  It is to know that there was once a beginning before we existed and it is to be aware that there will, one day, be an end.  To be human is to embrace the times and spaces that are found in-between the mysteries of the alpha and omega.

  A consequence of Eastertide is that the mystery of the Divine must forever hold within God’s self, Sunday’s celebration of resurrection, Friday’s pain of crucifixion and Saturday’s ‘separation of God from God’ that marks the experience of being in-between.  Saturday is that day when even God is in-between.

  The tensions that pervade Saturday are part of the God we worship and to whom we seek to bear witness.

  As Jurgen Moltmann argues: ‘The cross was an event between God and God.  It was a deep division in God himself, in so far as God abandoned God and contradicted himself and, at the same time, a unity in God in so far as God was one with God who corresponded to himself.’

  The Psalmist discusses the experience of waiting and longing in the moments of in-between (‘in the night there may be tears but the morning brings rejoicing’).

  Over the years, the church has been good at ‘mornings of rejoicing’, particularly at celebrating a victorious Easter Day and revisiting it in our regular patterns of worship.

  While some people come to worship every week ready to proclaim God’s mighty works of victory in the previous week, others do not.  They come burdened with guilt or loss, or paralysed by doubts and fears.

  It cheapens our worship and witness and diminishes our relationship with God if all the church can offer such people is the chance to sing the chorus of another up-beat triumphalist song.

  We need to develop complementary liturgies, hymns and other acts of worship to address our specific fears over terrorist atrocities, climatic devastation and so on.

  Some people live between the highs and lows of Sunday and Friday.

  Tests have been completed and the doctors will announce a diagnosis - but not yet.  Or the tickets are bought and the farewells said but it is not quite time to depart.  Prayers have been offered but there is no answer, no conviction and no peace.  For now, people in these and similar positions are in-between.

  To offer ourselves in authentic worship; to speak to others of the mission of God, means giving time and space to the reality and the diversity of these in-between experiences.  If we do not address ‘Saturday’ issues in our worship and mission, we fail to reflect the character of God.

  The difficulty has always been to find a way to describe God that does justice to how such diversity is held in simultaneous unity.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer argued that the way in which music - particularly a fugue - could hold together a melody and counter-melody provided a powerful illustration for the doctrine of the co-existing divine and human natures of Christ.  In the same way, Christ’s belonging to heaven does not restrict his belonging to earth and, in the incarnation, both ‘belongings’ can be ‘sounded’ simultaneously.

  This helps us understand how, in God, melodies of desolation, separation and victory can be held together.  Good Friday, Easter Saturday and Easter Sunday can inter-penetrate and inform the life of God in such a way that Robert Jenson has argued that: ‘God is a melody. And, as there are three singers..the melody is fugued...’

  If God, the Three in One, is by nature polyphonic, then each One of the Three is polyphonic too.  Each Person indwells in and is indwelt by the others.  The church’s worship and mission should be polyphonic too: inter-weaving the themes of heaven and earth to make both audible.

  So, in the silence of Saturday, as we wait, we can acknowledge our belonging to the ‘in-betweens’ of life and appreciate the inherent value of those moments when all that we can do is wait and watch, and hope for the dawn.

Abridged by Robert Little from an article by Craig Gardiner, previously published in The Baptist Ministers’ Journal.

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Easter thoughts: A story of hope

  My children love to hear stories of their babyhood.  It has felt to me as though these stories are proof to them, on an intuitive level, that they are real beings of substance and importance; that they have a centre; that they have been nurtured with tenderness and knit together with grace and experience into the people they are.

  If you read Matthew 28:1-10, you can read our story: the story of how we were knit together as a people by the loving hand of God.

  We were knit together through the stories of creation - when innocence was our experience and we only looked forward.  We were knit together through the shame of sin and division, as we struggled to get up when we fell and in our struggle to make a new life when everything changed - and we realised that it was God who picked us up - again and again.

  We were knit together through all of the exiles - the hopes for a different and better way; the vision laid out in splendour by prophets who listen to God, who never gives up on us.

  We are formed by the real things that we hold in our history; by the strong, tender and merciful movement of God.

  We are knit together by our responses of fear, delight and hopeful imagination to the life we live and to the God who made us.

  Our story knits us together and reminds us of who we are.  It brings us to this minute.  And now, reading Matthew 28, we stand together, once again, at the entrance to the empty tomb.

  The truth of our story beckons us to bend down and look in the tomb.  

  What might we see there?

  We have been put to death in so many ways - and buried.

  Sometimes, it terrifies us: the old fears and shame; the outward and inward violence on our streets and, sometimes, in our own homes - and the politics of some who have too much and of far too many who have nothing at all.

  This Easter time, we stand as witnesses to the fact that we can hope to see something more in the open tomb.  The angel told the women not to be afraid.  He told them that, while they expected to find death in that tomb in all of its stench, sadness and horror, what really awaited them was hope.

  It was a way to go on, right in the middle of all the accoutrements of death.  Jesus met them on their way.  He showed them that, somehow, life walked out of that tomb and flowed lavishly into the world.  He was alive - and so are we, no matter what, for ever. Alleluia!

By Debbie Organ, assistant professor of homiletics at the Saint Paul Seminary School of Divinity in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in the USA, and previously published in ‘The Preacher’.

Easter thoughts: Mary becomes a duchess

  In Shaw’s play, ‘Pygmalion’, Eliza Doolittle tells Henry Higgins: ‘The difference between a flower girl and a duchess isn’t the way she behaves, it’s the way she’s treated’.

  Mary Magdelene would probably have agreed with that sentiment.

  We can infer from the gospel stories that Mary was devoted to Jesus - perhaps because, neglected, rejected and maybe abused by other men, she found, in Jesus, one who treated her with loving respect.  She was a flower girl whom Jesus treated as a duchess.

  So she was devastated by his death.  His death was her death: she was just a flower girl on the streets again.

  In the garden at dawn (John 20:1-18) - devastated, blinded by tears - in the half light she didn’t recognise Jesus.  Then she hears her name, spoken by the one person in the whole world who could speak it.

   It was a transforming - a resurrection - moment.

  If Jesus’ death was her death, then his resurrection was her resurrection.  She is a duchess again - and she rushes off to tell the disciples.  Mary has become breathing, moving, living evidence of the Resurrection.

  The evidence of the Resurrection doesn’t lie in written words - even those of the Bible. It doesn’t lie in some ‘undeniable fact’ which, if we could get at it, would silence critics for ever.

  The evidence of the Resurrection lies in the lives of people who have somehow ‘met’ the Jesus of this story (often not once but many times) and who have been changed by that meeting (maybe progressively, if not suddenly).

  The evidence of the Resurrection is the people of Jesus - the church.

  At Easter time, people start to go to garden centres again - to get plants, soil, and other things to make their gardens look nice over the next few months.

  In many ways, churches are God’s garden centres.

  God’s story begins in a garden and it comes to its climax as Mary meets Jesus in a garden.

  Here in this ‘garden centre’, not only at Easter but through every season of the year, we display the flowering and fruit of the gospel in the life of God’s people.  Moreover, we experience the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which bring us resurrection from a spiritual winter, time and again.

  At that first Easter, Mary met Jesus mysteriously.  At Easter - and at other times - we meet Jesus mysteriously too: in the bread and wine of the communion service.  There, we can hear him call our names, one by one, as he feeds us.  And when you’ve heard your name, then you’ll walk from this garden centre feeling like a duchess - or a duke.

By Paul Johns, a Methodist local preacher and Director of the College of Preachers. This article was previously published in ‘The Preacher’ magazine.