Easter Sermon 2013
    Easter is a time for new beginnings.    It is the time of new birth, new growth.   In many parts of the word it is the New Year.   Christianity adopted the name of Easter from the old Babylonian Goddess ‘Ishter’  who was the goddess of fertility.
    It is an important time of year - lambing time, planting time, we are supposed to plant our potatoes on Good Friday.   Not for any religious reasons but because it is spring time and there is a full moon.   As the moon wanes, the roots can develop.
    It is a time to spring clean and sort things out.  Sort things out in our lives too.   It is a time to throw out what is old, take in what is new, look at our values - are we measuring up to the mark - or are we just going along with the flow?
    Easter is also about spiritual new beginnings..   Reaffirming what it is we really believe in - asking ourselves if we really do practice our faith.   What does our faith call on us to do?
    Faith calls on us to acknowledge the spiritual, to accept there is a divine order behind everything in this material world; that our God lives.
    Each of us in our minds has a picture of God - for some it is that father figure, for some it is the sacred mother - and for some there is no picture - only a feeling, a kind of spiritual energy that lies behind all things - and in all things.
    ‘Cleave the wood and you will find me, turn the stone and I am there’, wrote the prophet of the Hebrew Bible.   Sometimes we need to cleave that wood and sometimes we need to turn that stone.    Now at Easter time we should do that.
    Many in the Christian faith will say that Easter is not about planting potatoes but about the resurrection of Jesus..   So it is -
But the Easter story is about a new beginning as well.  
    In fact the story of Christianity really begins with Easter.   It begins as a mystery.    A man who called himself the Son of Man after the prophet Daniel had been preaching revolution around the country.   He was popular and many people followed the stories about him.   
    He had started a new community and had followers.   He was a healer and a teacher.  He was not the only one.   Before him there had been another called John the Baptist.   And there were others before that. 
    There was a tradition of prophets amongst the Jews - holy men calling the people to return to the faith, calling on the priests to end the corruption in the temple.  Prophets who had their stories told but never really achieved the changes they called for.        These prophets became part of the folklore of the religion - prophets like Ezekiel, Daniel and Jeremiah and Ezra.   But what did they change?    Not a lot.   Life went on.   The prophets had their moments, wrote their books and faded away into the folklore.
    Jesus the Nazarene would have been just another of them - but for Easter and the empty tomb.
    His mission was to change the Jewish way of doing things.   He was a revolutionary.    His revolution was to proclaim that God was different.   The God of the Hebrews was no longer a capricious God.    No longer a God who punished and rewarded, favoured and cursed at will.   No longer the God of the Jews only.   No longer the God of the Promised Land.   No longer the God who dwelt in the sanctuary of the Temple and who could only be worshipped through the leadership of the priests.
    The prophet Jesus would be part of that Jewish culture.  He would teach in the synagogues.   He would send the ones he healed to be certified clean by the priests - but he wanted them to know that God was different.
    God was everyone’s God.    God loved everyone unconditionally - the woman as much as the man.    The Roman Centurion as well as the outcast Samaritan.     The despised tax gatherer and the woman of the street.    The rich as well as the poor.    They were all one and all equal before the God that he was proclaiming in his revolution.
    And Jesus healed in the name of the new God and cast out demons and evil spirits - and he taught people to pray.  Not to go to the Temple or Synagogue and pass the priest a coin.    Only the priest could say the proper prayer.   He taught people to pray directly to the God he proclaimed in his revolution.   He showed them they could go to a quiet place and speak to God directly.
    This was too much.    People might have been infected by his charisma; followed him through Jerusalem as we follow celebrities across the world today, but the establishment, the priests and the temple wanted none of it - so he was got rid of in the usual way.
    And that should have been the end of it - in fact it was.   It was in Israel.   The fire went out.   There was never to be a Book of the Prophet Jesus written for the Hebrew Bible.
    But something changed.   The embers of this revolution were still hot and they caught fire again.    Because when he should have been dead, he wasn’t.   When he should have been in a tomb sealed with a great boulder, the boulder had been moved and the body was gone.      They said they saw him and they heard him speak and they said they saw him rise up into the sky as a spirit.
    The story of his suffering and death and then rebirth became the same story as the story of all the great mythical heroes of old - who will return transfigured and be a leader and a conquerer.
    His followers were convinced that he was more than a healer, more than a teacher, more than a revolutionary - he really was the son of God who had come down to earth to teach again the message of peace and goodwill.  
    Those followers became known as People of the Way - they flourished not in Israel but in Rome and throughout the Roman Empire.  
    To the Greeks and Romans he became the mystical Christ, the incarnation of that unseen God of Love, an avatar .
    Jesus the prophet was man made into God and God made into man.   He was the universal archetype of the perfect man of peace that is found in the unconscious of every human psyche.
        The teachings of Jesus appealed to almost everyone - to the slaves, to the women, to the rich who were dissatisfied with their hedonism; to the worshippers of Roman Gods who had lost faith in them.   
    The People of the Way formed communities - churches, they cared for one another, supported one another, tried to live a life which respected everyone, man or woman, slave or free, outcast or foreigner.
    The story of Jesus  seemed to have filled a spiritual vacuum.
    Soon the people of the way  would become known as Christians and they really would be revolutionaries - declaring that Jesus was about to return and set up a new Kingdom.   That there was no need to obey any of the laws any more because it was all going to end soon.   
    The Roman Emperor Constantine was himself converted and the whole empire was declared to be Christian - and then began a process of making it conform to one teaching and one belief - and it wasn’t a belief in the God of Love that anyone could pray to - and it wasn’t a belief in that community where all were equal.
    Now for two thousand years, the story of Jesus still transcends the story of his church.   It is till about the teaching and the mystery of his life, it is still about healing and prayer.
    It is still a heroic story - like the heroic stories of old - but he is a spiritual conquerer and his story is timeless.   It means as much today as it ever meant.
    Easter reminds us of the story.      And most people today hear the story with cynical minds.   They see that the Kingdom of God is not here. 
    There is a darkness in the world that seems like a power of evil;    There is greed where there should be care; there is hatred where there should be love, there is fighting where there should be fellowship.    
    In the great religions there is a dark power of hatred and violence that has trodden down the pages on which words of peace were written.    
    The poor, the suffering and the marginalised are blamed for being poor and suffering and marginalised and they are made to pay for the mistakes of the greedy.    The many are cursed and labelled for the sins of the few.
    The message of Easter is about a new beginning, new birth, new growth.   It is about spring coming to the land and spring rising in the heart.
    The religious message of Easter is the same as it ever was - be people of the way.    Be the revolutionaries who follow the God of Love; treat one another as a brother or sister; heal the sick; cast out evil; step out of the darkness and walk in the light of the hero who suffered and died.    Whose story rolls away the stone from all the caves we are sent to die in; whose story is eternal.