2010  Easter Day : Hollowell 
Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son
Endless is the victory thou o'er death hast won. 


There's a lot of movement in the air.  I hope we all felt a surge of energy as the clocks went forward a mo nth ago.   Spring is at last bustin out all over and the season of hope and renewal has begun.  
In our secular affairs we'll soon have the option of choosing between the ideas of Gordon  " no more boom and bust" Brown, David  "broken Britain" Cameron or Nick  " a plague on both your houses "  Clegg.    At least everyone, of whatever political colour,  seems agreed that there's got to be sacrifice and renewal here.  It's been a long winter and may be it will be a Spring, Summer and Autumn of discontent. 
But on this Sunday we concentrate on the hope of renewal presented to us by the death and Resurrection of Christ.  It's been a long six weeks but I hope that all of us in some way will have found in Lent and Holy Week some kind of spiritual renewal for ourselves, whether in Bible study group,  the Lent Lunches or doing our bit in our own way for what the politicians call The Community. 
Our belief in the Resurrection is fundamental to the Christian faith  Yet it's been controversial since the beginning.  First and foremost there are the differing versions of what happened on that Easter morning. Who moved the stone has been the question asked many times without any fully satisfactory answer.  It's easy to point to discrepancies in the Gospel Accounts of what happened on that morning.   In the most recent book I see that, according to the reviews in the press,  Jesus is portrayed as a heroic visionary who is crucified for his bold and liberating preaching, and that someone called Christ is his rather sinister elder brother, the elder brother indeed from the story of the Prodigal son who resents the favour showed to his younger brother who has flouted all the rules   The fundamental premise of the book appears to be that the Resurrection is a myth propagated by the ruling classes over the centuries.
We all know that Christ in this story by Philip Pullman  -  for story it is -  is an invented character. So remove him and we are still left with the question who did meet Mary Magdalene in the Garden on that first Easter morning?  Who appeared to the Eleven disciples three times?  Who appeared, as St. Paul writes only 20 years after the event, to 500 people in Jerusalem after the Crucifixion.  Was it a phantom? Was it a fake? Were they all lying? 
Quite possibly of course.  But then you have to wonder why those who concocted the fake story were prepared to spend very uncomfortable lives as missionaries preaching this illusion so ardently and as a result  suffering derision, persecution, whippings, shipwrecks and violent death themselves in many cases.  Where did they find the courage to do all that and die as martyrs?  A fake, a myth could not surely have inspired so many. 
In commemorating and celebrating the Resurrection of Jesus to-day at Easter, the Christian church's greatest festival,  we think of him then as our Lord and Saviour, the Light of the World,  offering us the hope of eternal life.  
Yet we need to bear in mind that in his own day Jesus of course was the outsider: "Foxes have holes, he said, " and the birds of the air have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head."   God showed himself to the world through is only Son and in doing so he consorted with prisoners, lepers, outcasts of all kind, the lame and the sick. He rejected the Establishment and ended his life in the degrading circumstances of the crucifixion at the Place of the Skull, along with two thieves. 
In thinking again last week about the story of  the events that led to the crucifixion and to Easter morning,  and on the characteristics of Jesus' mission as a whole, I thought about how we respond today to those outsiders, the very people to whom Jesus ministered.  At the supermarket I usually put some change in the collecting box of whichever charity is standing outside and generally try to do my bit to help the poor, feed the hungry. 
But what happened at Golgotha, where the sins of the whole world were atoned for by the death of Jesus, presents us with a different challenge . We are by that example challenged to wade into deeper waters.  What about the child murderers, the rapists, the terrorist bombers, the drug dealers  -  the lowest of the low, the men and women, vilified by the tabloids ?   
It's no use welcoming Jesus the Outsider when it suits us to follow his example, but throwing him over when the going gets tough.  The overall message of Easter for me, then, is that no one is outside the hope of God's love and redemption, no one is irredeemable;   and I very much hope that some of the 85,000 odd people locked up in this country today will have heard that message in prison chapels around the country, not to mention those charged operating what we call the Justice System.  
There is no doubt that what we call Christian values are under threat in this country, the principal threat, one could argue,  being indifference to those values.  There may have been over a million people in churches around the country to-day  but how many more find no inspiration in their lives.  Disillusion with the political process and those who operate it, disillusion with the legal process,  a younger generation that too often can see no purpose in their lives  the destruction of family life. All of us, not just the young,  feel that disillusion.  There's plenty to moan about.  
That's the easy part.  We need, however, something to fight for, like Christian values of love for ones neighbour, help for the poor and afflicted, and a firm stand against wrongdoing. 
Over 70 years ago the poet W H Auden wrote about the Spanish Civil War in a poem called  "Spain 1937" and of the inspiration or indifference that it inspired.  
" And the life, if it answers at all, replies from the heart
And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city:
"O no, I am not the Mover, 
Not today, not to you. To you I'm the
"Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped:
I am whatever you do; I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story;
I am your business voice; I am your marriage.
"What's your proposal? To build the Just City? I will,
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision: yes, I am Spain."
This was is an urgent call to Seize the Day, recognizing the literal and symbolic importance of the Spanish Civil War.  By placing it in the context of the whole sweep of history, Auden identifies the struggle between the good and evil as significant not only for the Spanish but for modern civilization. The poem foreshadows this struggle throughout history both within nations and A Republican victory is "To build the Just City" while a defeat would be "the romantic Death"  but both are "choices." 
Had the Spanish Republicans been successful, Mussolini and Hitler might not have been so bold or so successful and history might have taken a different course. Yet the tyrants were unchecked for years, and with the end of World War II, civilization entered our own era where the struggle continues.
Spain was only the landscape of the time for Auden, among thousands of other places in the past and future where people have struggled and fought, where humanity will create its own history through conscious will and effort. between them.
We have our own landscape now. Each of us can contribute to building the Just City in this country  At Easter Jesus'  victory over death should inspire to try that bit harder. 

                 " Thine be the glory, risen conquering Son
            Endless is the Victory thou o'er  death has won. "
                                       
