Sermon: We live in a turbulent universe

We live in a turbulent universe, on a planet whose earth, air and seas are constantly in motion.  Above our heads and beneath our feet everything is in flux.  Ocean currents and drifting air-masses; earthquakes, volcanoes and storms; molten rock churning unseen at the core of our planet, mountain formation and continental drift that it takes geological time to measure.  We might become queasy if we thought too hard about it: we like our planet to be stable and trustworthy.  You know where you are when earth's landmarks stay where the map says they should be.  But one of today's Psalms pictures a world where everything slides around and nothing stands still.  ‘The sea saw that and fled; Jordan was driven back.  The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like young sheep.'  Some extraordinary event must have startled nature into these convulsions.  The Psalm wants to know what it is.  ‘What aileth thee O thou sea that thou fleddest? ...  Ye mountains that ye skipped like rams?'

In Psalm 114, it is put down to one event.  ‘When Israel came out of Egypt.'  The exodus is depicted as literally earth-shattering, when the Hebrews left behind slavery and death, crossed the Red Sea and crossed the desert to occupy a land of their own.  In a few deft brush strokes - just eight lines and around fifty Hebrew words - the psalm tells the story that lay at the heart of Israel's faith.  It will have been rehearsed in every Jewish home on the night of the paschal moon at the Passover Seder this past week.  ‘Father, why is this night different from all other nights?'  ‘Because of what the Almighty did for us this night when he led us out from the house of bondage'.  This psalm, part of festal hallel, may well have been sung.  And everyone will be glad, because they are alive and free. 

The capacity of that story to lift spirits is the focus of our Old Testament reading from many centuries later.  A prophet takes up the old motifs and images to rouse exiles to a new act of hope in ‘the Lord who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters'.  What God did then he can do now.  So we are not surprised to find that this same story provides the New Testament with its central image of what the death and resurrection of Jesus mean for us.  ‘Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us: therefore let us keep the feast.'  It is our exodus, our liberation from the powers to which we were enslaved, sin and death.  In St Luke, when Jesus sets his face to go up to Jerusalem to die, he speaks about the ‘exodus' that he must perform there, one of the most arresting words in the Gospel.  And like the rocks and waters in the psalm, there is a shaking to the foundations in the Easter story.  The great stone is rolled away from the tomb.  There are strange apparitions, and in St Matthew an earthquake.  ‘Take him earth for cherishing' but the earth has opened up and given him back.  As then so now: the ground has moved, its landscape has shifted and settled into a different place. Things are not the same: reality has been cracked open like an Easter egg.  The Lord is passing by once more. 

In our New Testament reading, St Paul quotes a little credo that he says he has ‘received', one of the earliest Christian confessions of faith we have.  ‘Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures; he was buried; he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures'.  Terse, understated, like the psalm, like all the best theological statements, I find these few lines as moving as the paintings in the catacombs, for in them we touch the primitive simplicity and joyful confidence of the earliest Christians.  But how much is contained in so little! - nothing less than that Easter heralds the rebirth and remaking of all creation.  It takes St Paul one of his longest chapters to develop what this means for the human race.  The Easter Anthems quote from it: ‘Since by man came death: by man came also the resurrection of the dead.  For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.'  He rounds off his argument with a triumphant flourish familiar from Handel's Messiah: ‘death is swallowed up in victory: where O death is your victory?  Where O death is your sting? ...  But thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!'  At Easter, we celebrate the dawn of a new day in which God is beginning to grow the kingdom of truth and peace.  Easter promises that the world will be made new through love's redeeming work. 

From hell's devouring jaws the prey

Alone our Leader bore;

His ransomed hosts pursue their way 

Where he hath gone before. 

Triumphant in his glory now

His sceptre ruleth all,

Earth, heaven, and hell before him bow,

And at his footstool fall.  

But when the risen Son harrows hell and rides up victorious to his exalted throne, it is not only the earth that trembles at the presence of the Lord.  There is an upheaval at the heart of personal life too.  ‘Batter my heart three-person'd God' says John Donne in one of his sonnets.  It is not a gentle image. But when life begins again, it is like a birth with labour pains and cries and blood, for giving birth and being born is a costly business. St Paul's little credo goes on to tell how Jesus appeared to Peter and the Twelve; and last of all, he says, ‘he appeared also to me'.  For him, this encounter with Jesus, this birth on the Damascus Road was a huge personal convulsion.  Caravaggio painted it as if Saul of Tarsus had been struck by a thunderbolt, the blinded man toppled and spread-eagled on the ground, his mighty horse rearing up above him.  This painting is charged with an energy that is far from gentle, as if the realisation that Easter is true can be shocking.   

Sometimes the earth shifts violently, sometimes its movements are imperceptible and take time.  But the beginning of faith, conversion of life, is always a turning-round, a new orientation.  When God takes hold of us he remakes us in ways that are new and unforeseeable.  Our lives are not the same when the risen Jesus comes to us.  He disturbs, radically, our lazy certainties and superficialities, this ‘strange language' we have learned over our lifetime of refusals, our endless capacity to look for the sources of life among what is deadening or dying.  He calls us to come out of Egypt and learn to be his people once again; to follow him into the freedom of Easter and live his life of self-offering to his Father which was so perfect a way of being a human being that death could not hold him.  That is the future that beckons to all humanity, to you, to me.  When we say yes to it, the leaping mountains and dancing rivers are as nothing compared to the expectant joy that is ours on Easter Day because, ‘rise heart, thy Lord is risen!'

Can there be any day but this,
Though many sunnes to shine endeavour?

We count three hundred, but we misse :
There is but one, and that one ever.