As I have loved you – Easter 5

 AUDIO

John 13.31-35   Acts 11.1-18

We all have different reactions to new things.   The words “New shoes”,  are always music to my ears, but probably less joyfully heard by  the bank manager ( if  he or she even exists these days!)

For others, its new technology,  a shiny new gadget…

Or a new book, and the prospect of a good read.

Maybe you prefer the old & familiar, the comfortable walking boots you’ve had for years, or the saggy old sofa ( I have to confess, I have a couple of those, and  you couldn’t persuade me to get new ones!)

But what about new ideas, new ways of doing things?

In our Gospel reading today we’re back in those hours before Good Friday, Jesus & his disciples are celebrating the Passover – a meal with its roots  in the beginnings of the Jewish faith, a meal which represents history and tradition,

Community and cohesion and  celebration

And in the midst of all this “looking back” Jesus says to his friends

“A NEW commandment I give you,”

He’d already turned things on their head when he took the role of a servant at the start of the meal and washed the feet of those with him.

Now he talks to them, about what that had begun to  signify

Love one another –

But more than  that

As I have loved you, love one another..

So he commands, and at the same time teaches – he gives them an example to follow

This love he’s taking about is not abstract or nebulous

Its not a nice feeling or a concept that everyone can philosophise about

Love one another – as I have loved you.

Its inherently practical,  and radical, because was not living his life  in a way that was old & comfy and familiar, like my beloved sofa

He was turning things round, and starting to make people think.

*this* is how  you will be known as my disciples..

Not because you speak like me, or defend my teaching or build structures and organisations

This is  how you will be know.. because you love one another – as I have loved you.

Down the years this challenge comes to us too.

Even now 2000 years later, this commandment of Jesus is still new & radical in our world of self, and self interest.

Loving as Jesus loved is not a comfortable place to be,

-How *did* he love? What is our example?

1) He loved individually:

Each of his disciples was called  for themselves –Jesus drew each one of them to him in different ways and for different reasons. He knew them all, and knew their stories. He used their names – he challenged them not in general but from where they were. Whether they were mending fishing nets, or collecting taxes for the Romans, he met them where they were and called them to follow him.

He knew them, as people, as names, as his friends, he knew them as individuals.

Perhaps this is a challenge to us. Do we know people for  themselves, or are they “ the school children” or “ the young mums” or “ the older people”

Do we make the effort to find out ?  to break through stereo types? Do we look at others as Jesus did, individuals, dearly loved ?

2) Jesus loved inclusively:

There were no barriers to the way Jesus loved those around him, and it didn’t gain him friends or influence! His immediate disciples included fishermen, political activists, a thief & traitor,  a tax  official – they would have come from all social strata, and all sorts of experiences.

He got himself into trouble with the authorities & self appointed arbiters of “ rightness” by mixing with people of dubious morality,  party animals and drinkers,   prostitutes and  foreigners,  he treated women as equals and didn’t stand on ceremony with anyone because eof their rank or job or family background.

He had a no holds barred no barriers love for those around  him.

Radical and inclusive, this is how Jesus loved, and how we are called to.  No one was left out, no one was considered wrong or too sinful,  too poor, too messed up, too smelly or too disturbed.

Love your enemies –turn the other cheek. Even those who we find hard to love, those who wind us up, those who make us angry because of their behaviour to us or  to others, all of these too Jesus loved.

no one was excluded from his love.

Can we say that about our churches and communities?

Can we say that in our own lives? I know I can’t,  but this is how Jesus loved and how he commands us to.

3) Jesus loved practically:

The Gospels are threaded through with practical examples of Jesus’s love & care.

The physical reality of his love

Starting with the miracle of water into wine at the wedding, its continues in that vein..

Feeding the crowds,

healing the sick. Making sure those he healed , or indeed raised from the dead, had food –Peters’ Mother in law and   Jairus’s daughter for example

Practical arrangements for the Passover meal

Fish on the beach after the resurrection

It doesn’t seem to me any coincidence that  so many of these are connected with food & feeding.

Like the Jewish community in which he grew up,  for Jesus feeding was an important way of showing love,  practically and symbolically.

Right at  the heart of our faith and our imperative to love each other, is the amazing practical  and powerful gift of food.

At this same meal where Jesus is commanding his disciples to love, he also institutes the very meal by which we remember him and meet him here each week. The Mass, the Eucharist lies at the heart of our faith, our expression of love  and our mission,

It is no coincidence at all that  in our reading from Acts, when God wants to speak to Peter about the way everyone is to be included in the community regardless of their ethnic or religious origin, he starts by giving him a vision of food – food is so central to our community life – to our family life – we gather around tables to celebrate, to mourn, to care, to argue & debate. The radical inclusivity that the new born church is called to  model and live  is symbolised in food – shared, without boundaries

From the humblest value rich tea biscuit to a full on banquet, we offer each other food to show our love.

Its central to our identity and our make up as human beings –

Our God given God created humanity –which Jesus shared, recognises this need to feed each other.

In his life  on earth Jesus fed us,

In  the Eucharist he continues to feed us withhis very self,

From this table we are sent out, fed By the Body of Christ to BE the body of Christ, the body to feed those around us.

Spiritualy, practically.. inclusively , individually, totally

This is what it means to Love as he has loved us.

Few years ago I read a book which really deserves the label life changing –

I know Simon has read it and has very similar opinions on it  too, so  you may well have heard about it already, but Id like to read to you a short passage from “ Take this bread” the story of a woman’s life transformed by being fed by Jesus in the Eucharist –and her very practical outworking, as she was called to feed those around her.

It may seem deluded to assert that people can still be fed with this ordinary yet mystical bread, so besmirched and exhausted and poisoned by centuries of religious practice, in ways that will change our own real lives, not to mention the world, for the better. But this is my belief: that at the heart of Christianity is a power that continues to speak to and transform us. As I found to my surprise and alarm, it could speak even to me: not in the sappy, Jesus-and-cookies tone of mild-mannered liberal Christianity, or the blustering, blaming hellfire of the religious right. What I heard, and continue to hear, is a voice that can crack religious and political convictions open, that advocates for the least qualified, least official, least likely; that upsets the established order and makes a joke of certainty. It proclaims against reason that the hungry will be fed, that those cast down will be raised up, and that all things, including my own failures, are being made new. It offers food without exception to the worthy and unworthy, the screwed-up and pious, and then commands everyone to do the same. It doesn’t promise to solve or erase suffering but to transform it, pledging that by loving one another, even through pain, we will find more life. And it insists that by opening ourselves to strangers, the despised or frightening or unintelligible other, we will see more and more of the holy, since, without exception, all people are one body: God’s.

 

 

Love One another, as I have loved you

Just 8 words,  easy to say, or to sing,

But within them, is the most powerful, and most radical way to live our lives.

To take this seriously is to begin to change the world we live in, and to change ourselves.

It is to turn our selfish notions of love and  community on their heads

It is to practice a radical , inclusive practical way of living,

A way of living we simply cannot manage in our own strength and by ourselves –

But when we gather round the table,

And we feed on him to gave his life for us, so that we might live.

When we group as his family , his body and take strength from him and each other

Then we can turn to the world, and offer them this same love.

Take this bread,

Feed my sheep

Love one another.

This is not an exclusive meal for a chosen few –

This is the heart of Gods love for us, abundant generous and inclusive -

Let us let it transform us, and through us transform our world..

“The promise of his Glory yet to be”

Audio

 

i’ll begin with  the  sonnet  the title comes from that says it far better than I can

We see so little, stayed on surfaces,

We calculate the outsides of all things,

Preoccupied with our own purposes

We miss the shimmer of the angels’ wings,

They coruscate around us in their joy

A swirl of wheels and eyes and wings unfurled,

They guard the good we purpose to destroy,

A hidden blaze of glory in God’s world.

But on this day a young girl stopped to see

With open eyes and heart. She heard the voice;

The promise of His glory yet to be,

As time stood still for her to make a choice;

Gabriel knelt and not a feather stirred,

The Word himself was waiting on her word

Malcom Guite

The glory of the Annunciation  is that it is the  herald of the Incarnation.

God touching earth, becoming human.

It is the beginning of Word Become Flesh;  the start of a journey that continues today.

It’s a glory that starts so small and so fragile;

The entrusting of God himself to human fragility at its most vulnerable

God becoming humanity.

God in all his fullness, hidden and clothed in frail human flesh, an unborn child,  utterly dependent and yet utterly  omnipotent.

All our humanity,  our hopes, our life, wrapped in such an unlikely way.

Our joys our futures, our salvation, our restoration, clothed in flesh & blood, growing unseen.

and all this future was hidden too – unseen, undreamed of; except by the prophets –and they even had not envisaged how  God would “all for our sakes become so poor”. So completely vulnerably, preciously human.

The glory of the Annunciation is its beginning of Incarnation, GOd with us, living & working in & among us.

- because the lesson of the Annunciation is that we cannot tell; we cannot imagine what God will do,

we see, as the poem says, only the outside, only such a little.

When we say Yes to God –we cannot begin to imagine what he can do with that Yes

We cannot tell what the promise of the Glory yet to be will mean for us, for anyone, ofr those yet unborn, for those we will never meet.

Like Mary our yes comes freely – our surrender to God may take longer than hers, but he does not push, he waits;

Heaven & earth stand still & wait for our yes, as they did for Mary’s.

Freely given, nonetheless Mary’s Yes brought with it

- Ostracism bewilderment and wonder – (Nativity)

-Anger and worry & frustration ( lost at the temple)

-mixed feelings and confusion (Mother & bros rejected)

-Pain and grief beyond bearing (crucifixion)

And joy unimagined (Resurrection)

In saying yes to God our life too may take us down roads we never thought we’d travel, bring us joy and pain both in equal measure;

but we have the Word made flesh  walking with us,  and in us.

Because in our Yeses we too are called to be Christ-Bearers –

Through our yes we become Pregnant with possibility

We are bearers of him to our broken world

Bearers of his love in and through the pain

Bearers of his joy in the celebrations,

The Word waited on Mary’s yes,

He waits too on ours,  for our availability and ability to work with him, to work for justice and for truth,

To build his Kingdom and bear his love in our world.

Here am I a servant of the Lord –Let it be to me according to your will.

A story of Thomas, FOMO, Resurrection & being The Body

AUDIO

Missing out is never easy –whether it’s by accident,  -something happens when you’re not there – or events conspire against you, or by design,  a somewhat inevitable  situation

Sometime’s it’s as minor as your team scoring when you leave the room to make a cup of tea or get a beer,

Or it might be not making it to a loved one’s side quickly enough,

Or just looking the other way when a celebrity walks past you & your friends in the street.

Thomas must have felt a bit like he’d missed out in our gospel reading today –

I always feel rather sorry for Thomas –he seems to have gone down in history as the one who doubted – Doubting Thomas – and yet that doesn’t seem such a terribly fair description to be landed with. I think he probably reacted just about the same as any of us would do given similar circumstances

The other disciples had seen & talked with Jesus –they’d  been  in the room , and seen his wounds and spoken with him, He’d blessed them and breathed the Spirit on them.

Thomas, for some reason – we’re not told what, wasn’t there.

And so when they got together again you can start to imagine the grump he was in

So many emotions –the unfairness of it, the isolation, the feeling of being the last one to know anything and the bottom of the pile

So he snaps –unless I SEE him, and his wounds, I will not believe.

This isn’t the voice of a doubter is it?

It’s the voice of someone who feels left out and on the edge

Who feels something momentous has passed him by and he’s frankly quite cross about it

And so, he’s not going to just take their word for it.

It’s all or nothing –

A week later –when doubtless, (!) Thomas has had plenty time to stew on it all,  Jesus appears to them again, and he goes straight to Thomas and shows him his wounds – shows him exactly what he needed & wanted to see & touch.

Thomas needed to be drawn in to the group again, to have the same experience to feel that he was important.

By coming to him specifically, Jesus does that, he doesn’t expect him just to pick up what’s happening from those around him,

HE knows what Thomas needs and he gives that to him.

He brings him back into the group, into the community with their shared experiences and life.

How often do we feel like this?

How often are we aware of others around us feeling like this?

perhaps it’s in our church community, and people feeling somehow that those in the “centre” have some sort of understanding or knowledge that they don’t,

Or maybe it’s us who feel that way

Part of building the Kingdom is about drawing people in, who feel they are on the edges,

Sharing our own thoughts & feelings,  so  that others don’t come away with the impression we have it all sewn up somehow –

This is often where small groups like the home groups & lent groups are important and useful.

Living the resurrection life and building the kingdom means looking out for those on the edges and bringing them in to a full part of the community.

It’s addressing the needs such as Thomas had. Its meeting people where they are.

The story of Thomas says something else to us too,

It reminds us that we’re all physical human beings –

The resurrection itself emphasises this,

If the physical side of our life is not important  -why do we need bodily resurrection?

But here we have Jesus, living once more, in a resurrection body.

A physical touchable body.

Body & spirit are both important –

Greek philosophy held that the body wasn’t – it was just a hindrance and something that got in the way of true spirituality

– but by rising again in bodily form Jesus showed that wasn’t true in God’s way of thinking.

He knew before he died that this connection with the physical was important –

His followers needed tangible things

At the Passover meal, itself a physical reminder of something that happened years & years ago, a tenet of the Jewish faith,

Jesus instituted the lords supper, communion, Eucharist, Mass..

He gave his followers something real physical and tangible to use and work with to remember, to feed on.

The classic definition of a sacrament is the visible sign of invisible grace –its more than just a symbol, but it conveys on the outside something of the working inside.

When Thomas touched Jesus, it was seeing & feeling his Master made him believe – & it cemented in him  something that was internal,  it made what he believed real, and grounded it –

It was proof, but something more.

The Eucharist is a memorial –in remembrance -  but it is more than just that  – it is a reminder our faith is grounded in the physical,

It is faith creating and faith building.

John Wesley who was an Anglican priest and became the founder of the Methodist church,  believed that the Eucharist was what he called a “ converting ordinance”

In other words, it created faith, it was an encounter in the physical elements with the Risen Christ that   faith in people,

Rather like Thomas’s physical encounter with the Risen Jesus

Something visible on the outside, triggered & fed something internal.

Later when Jesus left the disciples,  that physical presence  he’d had with them had grown faith in them,

 

The Eucharist is also  about community

Thomas was angry because he felt left out – he felt excluded and marginalised – until he  encountered the risen Christ for himself and was drawn back into the community

When we eat together, and encounter the Risen Jesus, we draw each other, back into community –

though we are many we are one body because we all share in one bread.

When we invite others to this table, we draw them in too and  offer the chance for  faith to grow in them, and for them to be part of our community.

And the Eucharist is about celebration – its remembering what Jesus did, his death *and* his resurrection,

It’s about looking forward to the great Heavenly banquet and celebrating the life we have in Christ now.

We have something concrete to remember, to draw us in, to feed us and teach us and with which to celebrate –

Like Thomas  -we need something physical, because we are physical beings.

In the risen Christ we see confirmation that our physical natures are celebrated and affirmed, we see community and inclusion made central to our common life and in the Eucharist we celebrate now, we have all these things combined.

Therefore let us keep the feast –Alleluia!

Resurrection Changes Everything

Early in the morning, still dark. A group of women walk silently to a garden across the city. There’s not much talk, if any they’re carrying  jars and they’re intent.

36 hours earlier their closest friend, teacher & companion had been cruely and awfully put to death as a common criminal. The memory is still too raw, and the last hours of inactivity have been too painful. The enforced rest of the Sabbath has been a waiting  in a place of agony and  impotence.

So now, as soon as they possibly can, they come, to do what should have been done two days ago, to prepare his body  properly for burial, to weep, and mourn as is their custom and indeed their need,

No one has slept,  they;’re tense and watchful,  no one is quite sure how they might be received by patrols of soldiers out on the roads, either for being known to be the teacher’s friend, or worse still just expendable women.

We come to this story knowing what is round the corner,  it’s hard to imagine that we don’t,  but let us try to, to  put ourselves in the minds & hearts of these women, walking towards a tomb, and a task that held no hope, that signalled the end of so much promise.

Imagine then the thoughts that coursed through their minds when they came to the tomb and saw the stone gone… are we in the wrong place? What’s happened? What’s gone wrong now?

And as they think these things in stunned, sleep deprived shock, they see the men, the angels before them, who remind them of Jesus’s words to them, and suddenly everything makes sense – even the stuff that had seemed strange and incomprehensible when he said it,  but yes, it was true and it made sense to them!

It was an amazing truth, it might not sound right to anyone else, but  to them the change round was instant and incredible.

Resurrection changes everything.

And so they rush off to tell the men, huddled for fear in a room together, maybe the room they’d hired for Passover,  spices forgotten, mourning forgotten

The message the truth the celebration was the only important thing,

And they arrive, breathless and excited, and yet strangely coherent and focussed.

And they’re dismissed

Brushed off

An idle tale. Women’s fuss & gossip.  Don’t be silly – calm down dear..

If you’ve ever had a message or an idea or something you thought was really important dismissed, you;ll have an understanding of how they must have felt.

Women weren’t regarded as reliable, they couldn’t testify in court, they had no legal rights at all. Marginalised, expendable,  of no real value.

The other disciples  perhaps had tolerated their presence during Jesus’s life,  because he had, and now, well… delusional silly women, what on earth are they talking about?

I’ve often wondered whether later those women got an apology, or whether the celebrations were so great it really didn’t matter.

Their message dismissed because of who they were. Just how silly did the men feel later I wonder?!

The bible is full of prophetic voices, its full of messages that seem to make no sense, and yet are full of truth and grace and reality.

It’s easy to dismiss a message because of the messenger,

It’s easy to dismiss a prophetic voice because it seems so far out there as to be incomprehensible

Combine those two and in a way is it any wonder the disciples dismissed the news.

Who are those prophetic  voices in our society today, in our churches? The voices bringing a message that is so different we find it hard to accept or understand? The voices standing up for justice and mercy, The voices proclaiming the Kingdom of God here and now, the radicals and the visionaries.  Those who bring to us  a message of challenge and discomfort,  a message that is going to change everything

And who are the marginalised in our societies, the voices we ignore because of who they are?

It’s still women in many places, and many situations,  it’s  still too the  economically less powerful , and those  fighting for others rather than their own interests. It’s the victims,  both men & women and it’s those who we find it hard to accept for their lifestyle or their  politics.

Resurrection changes everything

Not all the disciples dismissed the women’s story

Peter,  Peter of the crass  comment and the foot in mouth, Peter who had , when it came to the crunch crumpled, and denied Jesus

Peter went-, he had faith in the women and the message, and he went to see for himself.

He behaved in a  way that was counter cultural, and counter rational, but he’d seen in their story a glimpse of the truth that he had to go & investigate.

We need to be more like Peter, to glimpse truth and resurrection in the most surprising places,

To learn from those we’re surprised to learn from

To remember that God choses the foolish things of this world to shame the wise,

To remember that God entrusted His Son to the weakest and least powerful ,

To a  young girl to birth him and nurture him

To a band of young  illeducated  disaffected men to walk with him

To the poor and sick and immoral  to  love him

To women to mourn him and to be the witnesses to the greatest thing God had done –raising his son to life!

Resurrection changes everything

–If God can trust these people to live his life with him, then we can  too.

We can trust that God uses everyone and anyone -

Including us, weak and powerless as we might be, or influential and strong.

We can look for God’s truth and his message everywhere, and trust that He knows what he’s doing.

We can glimpse the Kingdom in surprising places, and rejoice in its growth and its grace

We can with great joy and confidence  proclaim the Risen Christ – women & men together, young & old, rich & poor,

Resurrection Changes Everything

 

Alleluia

Amen

 

 

saturday

How can I mourn you, you who was my life, my being;

My source of all that was good, my energy,

You who made every day liveable, and right;

Your presence breathing Spirit into my days and my heart

You who drove the black clouds back and held my hand when their shadow loomed.

How can I mourn you, you whose death I saw, whose life I watched ebbing,

But whose presence I can’t let go of,

How can I live, while you do not.

How can the  sun rise without you and the earth continue to sprout shoots,

How can the rain fall at dusk, and the children play in the streets,

How can this be?

And must I now die?

 

AN 2011

at the cross…

 

There are three icons,

 Christ on the cross;

         Mary, the mother of God;  Christ and his friend.

Through music, scripture and poetry we can be present with Mary and John at the foot of the cross.

Let the words and sounds or lack of them speak to you. Let the icons tell their story.

The candles are extinguished slowly,  the Light goes out and the shadows, almost, overcome.

One candle remains – a sign of the hope to come

 

 

Matt 27:27-31

Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the governor’s headquarters, and they gathered the whole cohort around him. They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on his head. They put a reed in his right hand and knelt before him and mocked him, saying, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’  They spat on him, and took the reed and struck him on the head.  After mocking him, they stripped him of the robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him away to crucify him.

See, as they strip the robe from off his back
And spread his arms and nail them to the cross,
The dark nails pierce him and the sky turns black,
And love is firmly fastened onto loss.
But here a pure change happens. On this tree
Loss becomes gain, death opens into birth.
Here wounding heals and fastening makes free
Earth breathes in heaven, heaven roots in earth.
And here we see the length, the breadth, the height
Where love and hatred meet and love stays true
Where sin meets grace and darkness turns to light
We see what love can bear and be and do,
And here our saviour calls us to his side
His love is free, his arms are open wide.

 

This darker path into the heart of pain
Was also hers whose love enfolded him
In flesh and wove him in her womb. Again
The sword is piercing. She, who cradled him
And gentled and protected her young son
Must stand and watch the cruelty that mars
Her maiden making. Waves of pain that stun
And sicken pass across his face and hers
As their eyes meet. Now she enfolds the world
He loves in prayer; the mothers of the disappeared
Who know her pain, all bodies bowed and curled
In desperation on this road of tears,
All the grief-stricken in their last despair,
Are folded in the mantle of her prayer.

John 19:25-27

Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.  When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’  Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.

The dark nails pierce him and the sky turns black
We watch him as he labours to draw breath
He takes our breath away to give it back,
Return it to it’s birth through his slow death.
We hear him struggle breathing through the pain
Who once breathed out his spirit on the deep,
Who formed us when he mixed the dust with rain
And drew us into consciousness from sleep.
His spirit and his life he breathes in all
Mantles his world in his one atmosphere
And now he comes to breathe beneath the pall
Of our pollutions, draw our injured air
To cleanse it and renew. His final breath
Breathes us, and bears us through the gates of death.

Mark 15:33 -37

When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, ‘Listen, he is calling for Elijah.’  And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, ‘Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.’  Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last.

Here is Love

String Heaven -The Kings Chamber Orchestra

It is Finished

Poems from Malcolm Guite’s Stations of the Cross

Wait – Maundy Thursday

Maundy Thursday

AUDIO

Just wait…wait here. Can you wait a minute,  I’ll put you on hold. We’ll have to wait & see. It’s just a question of waiting.

We’re not very good at waiting

We’re naturally impatient,

We want to get on, to move to the next thing, to see progress, movement.

Heavy traffic can be bearable if we’re maybe just moving a little,

The status bar on the computer screen or phone, moves imperceptibly, and we let out a bit of the breath we’ve been holding.

Whether we’re waiting for news, or results, for the arrival of a loved one, a phone call, or just for the working day to end,  waiting can seem hard and painful.

It feels static, but it is not really.

Time is moving on, the world does not pause as we do.

Tonight we remember Jesus and his disciples, they’ve eaten together, there’s a sense of expectation of anxiety in the air.

Some of the more activists disciples are probably wanting to confront the unknown ahead, they’re edgey and unsettled.

And Jesus takes them in to a garden and tells them to wait…

Wait here with me, stay with me, watch with me

And of course, they can’t just sit. They fall asleep. The classic way of passing  what seems like dead waiting time –

Tonight, Jesus calls us too to stop and wait with him.

Practically that’s difficult.

It’s the beginning of a long holiday weekend, there are things to do, visitors to welcome, food to cook, rooms to clean.

There are services to plan and execute,

Do we have time to stop and wait?

Jesus asked his disciples to wait, to stop planning

To stop worrying

To stop campaigning and thinking and second guessing

To stop and spend time, with him, in the quiet.

He knew as they only suspected that things would never be the same again,

That after tonight everything would change, everything would be different.

Waiting can be painful.

Living in the moment is not the carefree act of a child who is oblivious to things around them

Living in this moment often means living in the place of pain and grief,

Waiting means stopping where it’s not comfortable

It means living that pain and that discomfort  – that’s what Jesus was doing

He prayed that it might pass, but he lived those moments as they came to him.

It was for him a learning place, a place to come to the knowledge and acceptance of God’s plan for him.

Waiting can be a learning place for us too. A place to trust, to pause, to accept.

It’s very easy during these next three days to try & rush on ahead.

It’s easy to live in the future – it’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming.

We know what happens of course we do, that’s why we’re here!

Like watching a film where we’ve read the book we want to be able to say to the bemused and confused disciples –it’s ok really it is…

But for now, we need to wait,

We need to live these 2 or 3 days of grief and sadness,  to allow the full weight of what God did  to sink in,

To live without the knowledge of the light ahead.

When we wait in places of pain in our own lives, we cannot tell the outcome.

-some of you may have seen Songs of Praise and Justin Welbys moving account of his experience of waiting in prayer when his daughter was dying –

He describes how real the presence of Jesus felt to him at that time, even as he was told the answer than no parent ever wants to hear.

In the waiting in the place of pain he knew God’s comfort & presence, like never before.

We know the end of this story, but for now we wait in the uncomfortable place, and feel the darkness, and understand the separation felt by so many who feel no hope or no answer.

But in this pain and discomfort, we wait with Jesus, who has walked this road and felt this pain

And because we learn to wait here in the garden, and later at the cross with him in his pain & ours,

The dawn to come will be all the brighter.