Where is your sting?
1 Cor 15: 51- 58
Christchurch, Old Town, Swindon, Easter Sunday 2000
I must admit when I sat down
to think about what to say this evening I was a bit stumped. How do you begin to talk about the
resurrection, the hope that we have? John Stevenette prayed yesterday that God would help us to preach
about the greatest story ever told, and as I stand up to talk about it this
evening I feel that I can never find the words to do it justice. So I hope you will permit me to be a bit
self-indulgent this evening in the way that I talk about what Jesus'
resurrection means to me, or has meant to me since I started to do this work.
Since I came here one of the
main things that I have done is learned how to take funerals. This is the most public face of my ministry,
it's the place where people who might not normally darken our doors come
face-to-face with the church. Yet
knowing how to minister to the bereaved, what to say to those who are in
theagony of grief, is one of the hardest things I am learning. We probably all know people who have been
bereaved recently - even in our own congregation there are those for whom the
pain of death is very immediate. If we
are honest, the question of how we respond to people's grief is intimately
connected with how we understand our own death and hope of eternal life. Mortality, and resurrection hope, is where
the rubber hits the road in terms of our Christian faith.
How many of us feel awkward
when we are faced with those who have been bereaved? Obviously, this will vary accordin to each of our experiences,
but generally we find the words impossible to come by. Maybe this is a symptom of the way in which
our society has tries to take the sting out of death by ignoring it. We anaesthetise ourselves, we don't expect
it ever to happen to us, we invent drugs all the time to prolong our lives, we
always think it will happen to someone else.
It is difficult for us to
talk about. And yet we are the ones who
proclaim an outrageous hope. Here we
are, a church building in the middle of a burial ground. Even in the way that we are situated, we
proclaim to Swindon that even in the midst of death all around us, we have a
greater hope. And today of all days we
celebrate that we believe that death has had the sting taken out of it not by
clever marketing or by subtle forms of denial, but by a miracle so
extraordinary that it is almost beyond our comprehension. We believe that these mortal bodies will
become immortal, that this flesh and blood has significance, our individual
personalities, (look at hand) that we will gain life more real than we know now
through the resurrection, that when we come face to face with God there will be
no fear, nothing to be afraid of because what gives death its sting, our sin
and guilt, has been wiped away on the cross.
The way we view death has
been turned on its head. This is one of
the myriad things that the resurrection proclaims. The southernmost point of Africa is a point which for centuries
has experienced tremendous storms. For many years no one even knew what lay
beyond that cape, for no ship attempting to round that point had ever returned
to tell the tale. Among the ancients it was known as the "Cape of
Storms," and for good reason. But then a Portuguese explorer in the
sixteenth century, Vasco De Gama, successfully sailed around that very point
and found beyond the wild raging storms, a great calm sea, and beyond that, the
shores of India. The name of that cape was changed from the Cape of Storms to
the Cape of Good Hope.
Until Jesus rose from the
dead, death had been the cape of storms on which all hopes of life beyond had
been wrecked. No one knew what lay beyond that point until, on Easter morning,
the ancient visions of Isaiah became the victory of Jesus over our last great
enemy. Now we can see beyond human
death to the hope of heaven and eternal life with the Father. More than that,
we dare to believe that we shall experience in our own human lives exactly what
the Son of God experienced in his, for the risen Christ says to us,
"Because I live, you shall live also." This is the heart of the
Easter faith. The Cape of Storms is for
us the Cape of Good Hope.
As Christians we believe that
we go not from life to death, but from life to life. Death for us is only the introduction to the nearer presence of
God. What has been a wall suddenly
becomes a gate, and although we are not able to say with much clarity or
precision what lies beyond that gate, the tone of all that we do and say on our
way to the gate changes drastically. I
was struck by what Bishop Michael said on Friday. When Desmond Tutu was questioned by the press about why he was
attacking the South African government he said the worst they can do to me is
kill me. This seems to me to be a
living example of what it means to have the sting taken out of death.
We are terrified of death in
our society, we think we have to escape it.
But our joy is that resurrection hope is not vague but real. It has been proved in flesh and blood. So, for us, walking with God means walking
through death. It means living with
death behind as something behind you, rather than something ahead of you.
But, in the light of this
hope which takes our breath away, how do we approach those in our midst
who are suffering bereavement? Is it
with a flippant remark about why don't you cheer up because you know death
isn't real? Surely not. As one writer puts it, "Those who deny
the suffering of death have never truly loved; they live in a spiritual
illusion." Or do we respond with no words, only with tears and
sadness? The hope of our Christian
faith asks us to do neither of these.
Yes we asked to stand alongside those who mourn, even to weep, as Jesus
did at Lazarus' tomb. We need
sensitivity. But we also have such
confidence that there is no victory in the grave, that we are never left
tongue-tied about our hope. This mortal
flesh, our bodies, our personalities, really are destined for greater
things. When Jesus' resurrected body
was seen it showed a glimpse of what it will be like for us to live in God's
new creation. And Jesus' body was more
real than what we know now. That is a
real hope.
So perhaps one way of summing
up our attitude is that of compassionate confidence. It is our love and empathy that will help us to carry others
through the pain of bereavement. But
without a confidence in the reality of resurrection our love will be starved of
hope. Death, for us, has lost its
sting. The more we can grasp that and
meditate on it, the more we will be able to be channels of hope for others.