The Truth by Which we Live and Die – and Live.

During Holy Week, the Bishop told us to pay attention to nature. So here goes. This daffodil is from the Deanery garden. As you can see, it is past its best, and that is important. The last time I saw a preacher take a daffodil into the pulpit was on Easter Day 25 years ago. He said: you will always remember this sermon because of this daffodil and what I did with it. He went on to eat it – all of it. For the next two days he felt extremely sick. That much I remember, as he said I would. I made a mental note never to consume a daffodil. What I have forgotten is what the point of it was.

So this daffodil: forget ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’. Here’s a poem that dances where (as an unkind critic said) Wordsworth plods:

Fair daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;                                     
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attain'd his noon.                                  
Stay, stay / Until the hasting day    
Has run / But to the evensong;                               
And, having pray’d together, we
Will go with you along.  

We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay
As you or any thing.
We die / As your hours do, and dry
Away / Like to the summer's rain;
Or as the pearls of morning's dew,
Ne'er to be found again.

Robert Herrick loves the spring for its freshness and beauty, but how quickly it passes! Carpe diem, he says, seize the day! When Easter is late, the wilting daffodil is a sad symbol of something precious we have lost too soon. And this is the point: ‘we have as short a spring’. Four centuries ago poets didn’t flinch from such thoughts. You never knew when the grim reaper would come harvesting; nature’s births and deaths were a reminder to be ready. Daffodils grow, they flower, they wilt, they die. Just like us.

Holy Week makes us face this fact of life because of its focus on pain and death. It asks us to follow a man to his execution and watch him die. It takes us to his burial place where we linger, waiting for whatever may happen. Early next morning, this morning, we are back among the tombs with the two disciples and Mary, and there is a great mystery. The tomb is empty, the beloved body is gone; ‘they have taken the Lord out of the tomb and we do not know where they have laid him’. So much that is unknown and that discomfits us. Read St Mark’s resurrection account if you need convincing.

And although John’s Easter story is very different there is a shadow across it too. Mary comes to the tomb, and bafflement quickly turns to tears. ‘Mary stood weeping outside the tomb’: you can hear how her throat catches as she says ‘they have taken away my Lord (not the Lord, any more but my Lord) and I don’t know where they have laid him’. It takes the well-loved voice speaking directly to her – how do you do justice to what she hears, to all that is poured into the way he speaks her name? In that moment of recognition new worlds open up. The tears belonged to ‘before’; now it is ‘after’. ‘I have seen the Lord!’ Three short words in Greek re-launch her life and the whole of history.

What difference does it make that Christ is risen? I’m not asking what difference we would like it to make: I guess we want resurrection to be the answer to our questions, the happy ending to all our doubts and fears. I’ve spoken about ‘before’ and ‘after’, but I don’t mean that Easter is closure. Far from it: it pulls us into new journeys whose end we can never predict. So how does Easter change everything?

What it doesn’t do is to wind back the clock, as if this wilting daffodil could somehow regain its freshness and vitality. It’s the opposite. Easter winds the clock forward to the time where there will be a new heaven and a new earth, where everything we know is transformed. The Easter garden where Jesus comes to Mary and calls her by name – this is the paradise that an ageing, hurting world has looked forward to since time began. She thinks he is the gardener, and of course he is, exactly that, the divine Gardener who by rising on the first day of the week has begun to re-make creation and bring beauty out of ashes. And this new Eden is our destiny as human beings caught up in the renewal of creation that is Easter. Our first reading said: ‘when Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory’.  It is coming, yet it has already begun: with Mary in the garden, with the disciples Jesus greets, with those who have not seen yet believed, with all who worship and love and follow him on this Easter Day.

For Easter takes our fear away, and gives us back our lives. We might think that the only honest response to the pain of the world is despair or at best helpless resignation. But Easter shines a fresh light on all that is wrong in life, all the suffering, all the agony, all the oppression, all the loss, all the pain, and then says: never lose heart, never lose hope, for in the resurrection of Jesus life begins again. This is Easter’s gift to humanity, to each one of us. We place ourselves in the garden where Mary stood; there among the tombs we place our churches, peoples, relationships and communities. And where we were once afraid, we hear a voice calling us by name, announcing that everything has changed, hell is vanquished, death has lost its sting, the last enemy is defeated, a new day is dawning.

I’m not saying it is easy to sustain resurrection joy on days when we are close to the tears of things. But as we renew our baptism promises today, why not start living by the New Testament where it says: ‘always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is within you’? That’s not blind optimism, for we know that crucifixions go on even after Easter. But it is to face the reality that even in the darkest of times, we can trust in the good purposes of the God who raised Jesus from the dead and who brings life out of death. Easter gives us the reason to say ‘yes’ to life with a new hope rising within us.

I became a Christian 50 years ago because I glimpsed in the lives of others something touched by – I didn’t know at the time, though now I see it was the Easter truth of Jesus’ cross-and-resurrection. It rang true. It always does. It gives us the courage to strengthen the fainthearted, support the weak, help the afflicted and love humanity in a thousand different places and ways. It cheers with hope the gloomy day, and sweetens every bitter cup. It makes the coward spirit brave and nerves the feeble arm for fight. It takes its terror from the grave, and guilds the bed of death with light. It opens our eyes to the new creation and our ears to its new song. It’s the answer to the transience of daffodils and life’s passing shadow: we sing alleluia even at the grave. For today we cross over into a great new Beginning, Easter’s glorious springtime that will never end. From today, Easter is the truth by which we live and die – and live! 

Easter Day at Durham Cathedral 2014.
Colossians 3.1-4; John 20.1-18

Candlemas

I am glad to be here on your patronal festival, especially as an envoy of the diocese of which your former bishop is now legally the incumbent. We are sorry to have stolen him from you. However, I hope you will still receive the warm greetings of Durham Cathedral, the only other Romanesque cathedral in the northern province.  

Down with the rosemary, and so /Down with the bays and mistletoe;

Down with the holly, ivy, all / Wherewith ye dressed the Christmas hall;

That so the superstitious find /Not one least branch there left behind;

For look, how many leaves there be /Neglected there, maids, trust to me,

So many goblins you shall see.

Robert Herrick was writing in the 17th century.  It sounds like a poem about Twelfth Night.  But it's called ‘Ceremony upon Candle­mas Eve’.  In those days they kept the Christ­mas decorations up for 40 days.  Then, on 2 February, they took them down and, in some rural parts of England at least, burnt them: bonfires to light up dark nights in honour of Christ the world’s true light. In the middle ages, Candlemas was an occasion for elaborate ceremonies of blessing tapers and carrying them in procession to light up churches and much partying.  In Durham Cathedral, a great row blew up in 1628, the puritans alleging that the high church party had lit 60 candles on the holy table, while they claimed it was only two.  Durham has always enjoyed a good argument about liturgy.  There are echoes of pre-Christian rituals here: Roman lighting candles to banish evil spirits, or Celts kindling fires at this time of year to mark the end of winter as the days grow perceptibly longer and snowdrops and crocuses signal that spring will soon be here. 

Candlemas is the last official day of Christmas.  Like the 40 days of resurrection from Easter to Ascension, these past 40 days of incarnation have kept before us the truth of the Word made flesh.  At Candlemas we recall how Jesus is brought by his parents as an infant of 40 days to be presented in the temple and blessed by God.  Simeon acclaims him as ‘a light to lighten the gentiles’: Light of the world, Light of all people, Light of life.  And we who stand by, looking on as Simeon cradles this little human light in his arms, we too are ready to sing our own Nunc Dimittis.  For we have seen all that is worth seeing: we have seen his glory, full of grace and truth.  We can depart in peace.

Those loving parents, and old Simeon and Anna, and the little tiny child – all of humanity is there. Rembrandt depicted this scene many times in his paintings and etchings.  He returned to it again and again, fascinated by the inter­play of themes: intimacy and vastness, child­hood and old age, life's dawning and its eventide, prom­ise and ful­filment, darkness and light. It is the scale of these pictures that is so memor­able: the immense spaces of the temple, and at its centre, the tiny figures of the holy fam­ily, like a fragile colony of life precariously nurtured in a shadowy cave.  You wonder about those lowering shades that seem to press in upon that tiny point of light.  Will the light grow in that darkness and finally overcome it - or is the darkness about to close in upon the light, extinguish it, snuff out what has been carried at such cost in Mary's womb?

They are sublimely accurate, these paintings.  They portray things as they are, the dark-and-light realities God takes on as he comes among us and shares our human condition.  By now, we know that Christmas has not suddenly made the world all right again, though we longed and prayed for it, for peace on earth and goodwill to all people, ‘hoping it might be so’.  The shadows and the darkness are real enough.  The massacre of the inno­cents shows how fragile incarnation is.  According to St Matthew, the infant Jesus had to cling precariously on to life in a world as mis­chievous and as viol­ent and as mur­der­ous as we know it to be today.  The Candlemas story foreshadows the child's destiny.  ‘A sword will pierce your own soul too’ says Simeon to Mary.  It is another annun­ciation that sets her pon­dering in her heart all over again as she feels Golgotha looming over the holy family, foresees another, crueller, presenta­tion of Christ, when he will be handed over into the hands of wicked men to suffer death upon a cross. W. H. Auden has a poem ‘At the Manger Mary Sings’.  He has Mary say to her child, with terrible foreboding yet infinite love: How soon will you start on the sorrowful way?  Dream while you may.

So Candlemas has a poignancy as well as joy about it.  We have said goodbye to the festive cheerfulness that warmed up the bleak midwinter.  The crib will be put away for another year, its pieces disassembled into a forlorn plastic bag.  Tomorrow it will be ordinary time again, and soon Lent and ashes: ‘dust you are and to dust you shall return’.  Christians in the east call Candlemas ‘the meeting’, the strange meeting between old and new covenant, between Christmas and Lent, light and dark, nativ­ity and cross.  In the Candlemas ceremony in this liturgy we shall mark the end of Christmas by carrying candles in procession, and then – get ready for it - blowing them out.  It is a deliber­ate, almost sacri­legious thing to do: to snuff out the very light of the infant Jesus.  In Advent it was darkness to light; now in a way it is light to darkness: the human pattern so familiar in our world today as we watch nations and peoples being drawn inexorably into destructiveness and conflict; familiar to people with no home or livelihood or friends; familiar to anyone who has lost someone they loved; familiar to all of us in a thousand different ways.  It is as if a shadow falls across what light we have.  The cross is always present. 

This time of year is paradoxical.  It makes you wonder about the mystery of things, how ‘joy and woe are woven fine, a clothing for the soul divine’ as Blake says; how our light, glorious as it is, is as yet only partial; how spring tries to prize this world out of winter’s clasp, yet frost clings on to its soul.  God forbid that at this precarious time in our history, the threats we face should hold us fast for ever.  There is the ecstasy of the crib and the agony of the cross and these two belong together.  But it is still true that the days are growing longer, and the sap is rising.  The worst of winter may not yet be over, but February doesn’t last forever, thank God.  Spring will come, and Lent’s lengthening light.  Soon we shall climb towards Easter.  Today we light candles of longing in dark places and even when they are put out, we keep the memory of a precious flame alive for when the day breaks, and shadows flee away, and Christ is the glory of the nations, and hope is emptied in delight.

2 February 2014, on the Feast of the Presentation, Southwell Minster

Luke 2: 22-40