2013  Easter Day : Hollowell 
Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son
Endless is the victory thou o'er death hast won. 


We are  -  or ought ot be  -  at the time of year when There's a lot of movement in the air.  I hope we all felt a surge of energy as the clocks went forward this morning.   Spring may shortly be bustin out all over and the season of hope and renewal has begun,  memory and desire stirring, as T S Elliot put it,  dull roots with spring rain. "
But on this Sunday we concentrate on a different type of renewal the hope of renewal presented to us by the death and Resurrection of Christ.  We had a long six, usually cold,  weeks this Lent 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 or something we did or heard during those 40 days.  
Unlike Christmas,  Easter has a story that that does not lend itself much to commercial fuss: no kings or presents.  Easter is the story of sacrifice, torture and death and through it all the triumph over death.  Even in our own time, despite all that chocolate, Easter gives us pause for thought.  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.  And he is alive in our hearts. Someone who is real part of our daily lives. 
Or he ought to be.  It's  quite hard, I concede, in the hard boiled, largely secular world that is this country today, to stand up and proclaim belief in the resurrection of Jesus and what that stands for  Ignorance is everywhere.  I read the other day that when the Pope said the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Mary at the end of the Papal Conclave, that the BBC was covering for radio and television,  the translator was utterly thrown as if hearing that prayer  for the first time. 
 But say you remove Jesus from the story, we are still left with the accounts of events  in the Bible, and the question who did meet Mary Magdalene in the Garden on that first Easter morning?  Who appeared to the Eleven disciples three times?  Who met Jesus and thought he was the gardener  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.  Easter morning changed the world. 
The claim of resurrection is vital to Christianity. If Christ has been raised from the dead by God, then He has the credentials and certification that no other religious leader possesses. Buddha is dead. Mohammad is dead. Moses is dead. Confucius is dead. But, according to Christianity, Christ is alive.[2]
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 his 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 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 many of us  put some change in the collecting box of whichever charity is standing outside and generally try to do our bit to help the poor, feed the hungry.  That's good. A great tradition of charity.  
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 ?   
On Thursday last week, along with half a dozen others,  I spent a day with 22 such people  They had all been on a course called The Sycamore Tree.    Restorative justice.   Zacheus and the tree. Another message of Easter, then, is that no one is outside God's love and redemption, no one is irredeemable 
I thought about Tolstoy's novel  -  Resurrection .  The story is about a nobleman  who seeks redemption for a sin committed years earlier. His brief affair with a maid had resulted in her being dismissed and ending up in prostitution. The book describes his attempts to help her out of her current misery, but also focuses on his personal mental and moral struggle.
Framed for murder, the maid, Maslova, is convicted by mistake and sent to Siberia. Nekhlyudov goes to visit her in prison, meets other prisoners, hears their stories, and slowly comes to realize that all around his charmed and golden aristocratic world, yet invisible to it, is a much larger world of oppression, misery and barbarism. 
The book was eagerly awaited.  It outsold Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Despite its early success, today Resurrection is not as famous as the works that preceded it.[[1]] Too much of a [campaining] piece.  Not published in full [uintil] 1936. 
Tolstoy retained the copyright and donated all royalties to Russian pacifists hoping to emigrate to Canada.[[1]]
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. 
So the message of Easter for me is about not only the triumph of Jesus Christ over death  but also for each of us to think of ways to resurrect our own lives to give them renewed meaning through the Christian message. That's what the 22 men were doing on that Sycamore Tree course.  

Teach us Good Lord to serve thee as thou deservest  

