Resurrection and new life in the midst of adversity and hardship

Rev Moses Agyam and I had an ecumenical exchange in Wickford this morning. Moses led the service at St Andrew's and I led at Christ Church. Here's the sermon that I preached at Christ Church today:

Imagine a bed surrounded by the debris of a week’s illness, soiled sheets and slashed pillows, pills and vodka bottles, used condoms and tissues. This is My Bed an installation by Tracy Emin which was first exhibited in 1999. You’ll probably remember reading about it in the press at the time as it prompted the usual “call that art, my two-year old could have done better” kind of articles.

A bed is a powerful symbol of birth and death, sex and intimacy but this controversial installation was perhaps an image of our culture’s sickness and dis-ease surrounded by the remnants of those things through which we seek a cure; sex, alcohol, drugs, tears, aggression. And the bed, like many lives, was empty. The morning after the cure that never came.

Our Old Testament reading from Ezekiel 37. 1-10 suggested something very similar about the people of Israel. Ezekiel saw a valley of dry bones and God said to him that the people of Israel were like those bones, dried up without any hope and with no future.

Sometimes our lives feel like these two pictures - dried up, no future, diseased, empty, dead. Our relationships may have broken down, we may have been abused, we may be anxious, stressed or worried, our work might be under threat or have ended. For all these reasons and many others, we can feel as though our lives have closed down becoming barren or dry or dead.

Our communities and culture can feel like that too. Many years ago now, at the end of the 1970’s, The Sex Pistols sang about there being no future in England’s dreaming. And many people still think that our society is changing for the worse. When I had a holiday in Spain several years ago I stayed on a street that was mainly occupied by British people who had left because they didn’t like the changes that they saw in British society. Such people think of Britain as being diseased and dead with no future for them.

Being in the Church it is also easy to feel the same. We are regularly told in the press that the Church is in decline and my Church, the Church of England, is currently dealing with major conflicts that threaten to pull it apart. Again, it is easy to feel as though the Church is washed up, dried out and dying.

Whatever we think of those issues and views, the God that we worship is in the resurrection business. And that is where we need to be too. In Ezekiel God promised that he would put his breath into the people of Israel and bring them back to life and in our Gospel reading (John 11. 1-45) Jesus said that he is the resurrection and the life and demonstrated this by bringing Lazarus back to life. Jesus was the fulfilment of God’s promise to Ezekiel that he would bring the people of Israel back to life. In Jesus, Israel lived life as God had intended and fulfilled Israel’s mission of bringing light to the rest of the world. In this way, Jesus resurrected a society and culture transforming the entire world as he did so.

He calls us to follow in his footsteps by looking for the places where our society and culture is dried up or dying and working for its transformation and resurrection. I saw several examples of that happening in my time at St Martin-in-the-Fields, particularly in our response to the pandemic.

Here’s how the Vicar of St Martin’s – Sam Wells - described our experience in the book that we wrote about that period of time (Finding Abundance in Scarcity: Steps Towards Church Transformation - A HeartEdge Handbook):

“St Martin-in-the-Fields is a complex organization. It has a large congregation, by UK standards, and a significant public ministry, involving a good deal of broadcasting. It has a trading subsidiary (two cafés, a shop, and around 175 commercial concerts annually). It has a development trust, and two homeless charities, one local, one national.

The pandemic asphyxiated its commercial activity, at a stroke deleting two-thirds of the congregation’s income. At the time of writing, we’ve had to shed three-quarters of our commercial and ministry staff. It’s been a devastating, depleting and distressing experience. Yet online, the congregation, its public ministry, and its music have found a reach, purpose, and dynamism like never before. All is made new. The musicians have recorded music, weekly, for 4,000 churches across the land. HeartEdge seminars have become a hub for innovation and evaluation. A new enquirers’ course has drawn participation from people far and wide, a good many of whom were already inhibited by chronic illness before ‘shield’ became an intransitive verb. The national homeless charity has never been more in demand, or attracted more support, fervidly working to help people find secure accommodation …

our Nazareth Community, made up of people from all classes, including those who sleep outside, seeking the heart of God through shared practices centred on silent prayer [has] grown to 81 people, with … additional … online companions. It models the way we seek to see the assets in everyone, rather than regarding some as needy and casting others as benefactors.

It’s been as if we’re in a cartoon: on one side surrounded by footfall figures, government directives, church guidelines, protective equipment, and spreadsheets of redundancy calculations, earnestly trying to be humane, transparent, and compassionate as we cast staff out into a wilderness of high unemployment and considerable health anxiety; on the other side surprised by joy, with people coming to faith, hundreds of thousands downloading choral offerings, asylum seekers stepping up to leadership roles, donors tendering generous gifts, and the church reopening in July for tentative public worship, only to close again in November and open again in December.

Don’t tell anyone, but beautiful things have been happening – too many to recount. Keep it quiet, but it’s also been a complete nightmare, in which plans made and an institution crafted over generations has been torn apart in ways a raging inferno couldn’t achieve … And yet, like a ram in a thicket, something has been provided, or has emerged, or suddenly changed.”

This happened because at the beginning of the pandemic we realised that “It was in its most bewildered hour that Israel in exile found who God truly was.” As a result, we saw that this was “our chance to discover what God being with us really means.” “None of us would for a moment have wished this crisis on anybody, let alone the whole world. But our faith teaches us that we only get to see resurrection through crucifixion; that we see God most clearly in our darkest hour.” What we found was “beauty, truth and goodness in times of adversity, hardship and distress.”

I believe that each of us can have similar experiences of resurrection and new life in the midst of adversity and hardship. So, together with my colleagues and congregations, I’m seeking to apply the lessons I learnt at St Martin’s in the missional activity we’re getting started here in the Wickford and Runwell Team Ministry. I believe that, as churches in this area, and elsewhere, we all need to be asking ourselves how God wants to use us to bring new life to those parts of our society and culture that are dying.

Raising Lazarus from death was a sign of what would happen after Jesus’ own death on the cross. By rising from death himself, Jesus conquered death for all people enabling us to enter in to eternal life after our physical death. This is good news for us to share with other people around us wherever we are - in our families and among our friends, neighbours and work colleagues. Think for a moment about the people and places where you can share the good news of life after death through our Lord Jesus.

Jesus also resurrected lives before physical death came. Look for a moment at John 11 with me. In the first section of that chapter from verses 1 to 16 we see the disciples struggling to understand what Jesus is saying and doing. He is wanting them to see how God is at work in Lazarus’ illness and death. They keep looking only at their physical and material circumstances - if Jesus goes back to Judea then he will be killed, if Lazarus is asleep then he will get better, and so on. Jesus wants them to see that God can work even through death and in verse 16 he draws out of them the commitment to go with him even though they may die with him. Then in verses 17 to 27, Jesus helps Martha to move beyond her theoretical belief in the resurrection to a belief that Jesus himself is the promised Messiah. Finally, in verses 38 to 45, he helps all those present to move beyond their focus on physical realities to believe in God’s ability to do the supernatural.

Throughout, Jesus is challenging all the people he encounters to move beyond their comfort zones, to step out in faith, to encounter and trust God in new ways. He wants to do the same with each one of us. Wherever our lives have got stuck, have become dried up or closed down or have died he wants to challenge and encourage us to move out of our comfort zones and to encounter him and other people in new and risky ways. He wants us to come alive to God, to the world, to other people and to life itself in new ways.

Jesus is in the resurrection business. Whether it is transforming society, sharing the good news of eternal life or encouraging us to step out in faith, Jesus wants to bring us to life. How will you respond to Jesus this morning? Is there an area of your life that he can bring back to life or will you commit yourself to join in sharing the good news of eternal life with others and transforming society where you are?

As you think about that challenge let us pray together briefly, using the words of a song by Evanescence:

Lord Jesus, we are frozen inside without your touch, without your love. You are the life among the dead, so wake us up inside. Call our names and save us from the dark. Bid our blood to run before we come undone, save us from the nothing we’ve become. Bring us to life. Amen.

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Evanescence - Bring Me To Life.

Can these dry bones live?

Here is the sermon that I preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields during the 10.00am Eucharist:

‘April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain.’ Those are the opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s iconic poem entitled ‘The Waste Land'. April was the cruellest month for the protagonist of ‘The Waste Land’ because the new life of Spring mocked the lack of the life - the depth of death-like despair - that he felt in relation to his life and his society.

The spirit of the Lord set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones ... and they were very dry. Today’s reading from the Hebrew Scriptures (Ezekiel37:1-14) begins in a similar place to ‘The Waste Land’. The valley of dry bones that Ezekiel enters in his vision equates to Eliot’s poem because it is a place with all the life sucked out of it, a place of dryness, desert and death. In his poem Eliot was articulating ‘the disillusionment of a younger post–World War I generation with the values and conventions—both literary and social—of the Victorian era’, while for Ezekiel the Valley of Dry Bones equated to Israel’s exile from the Promised Land and the sense of helplessness and hopelessness felt by the whole house of Israel and summed up in what was a common saying of their time, "Our bones are dried up."

During Lent we actively choose to go into the dryness of the wilderness and be cut off, together with Jesus, in order to pray but there are also times and seasons in our lives and in our society when we think and feel that we are in a Valley of Dry Bones. Meg Warner draws on her personal experience in our Lent book to explain how this feels when it affects us personally. She writes, ‘It may be that you are stuck in the depths of Lent, perhaps facing an impossible choice, or perhaps feeling that there are no choices open to you at all … You may simply be carrying the weight of an unfulfilled longing for something that appears to be quite impossible … Your longing may be for work, for home, for intimacy, for a child, or for a number of other things which you lack and without which life feels unpalatable or pointless.’

In ‘The Waste Land’ and Ezekiel’s Vision, the sense of hopelessness is political as well as personal. Similarly, there is much that we may wish to lament as we look at life on Planet Earth today. We are witnessing the death of environments and species around our world. ‘More than 700 mammals and birds currently threatened with extinction already appear to have been adversely affected by climate change, according to a major review of scientific studies’; a situation not helped by Donald Trump’s most recent Executive Order. Climate change, poverty and conflict are forcing mass movements of people across our world and we are, perhaps, witnessing the death of compassion in response to those who are migrants; as hostile environments are being created for immigrants and travel bans or walls used to keep people out.

Austerity measures are increasingly causing crises in education, healthcare, prisons, and social care. In their powerful book, The Body Economic, David Stuckler and Sanjay Basu show that austerity is having a "devastating effect" on public health in Europe and North America. Thousands of additional suicides and millions of extra cases of depression have been recorded across the two continents since governments started introducing austerity programmes. ”Recessions can hurt,” Stuckler and Basu write, “But austerity kills." 

To give just one example of the impact that austerity cuts are having in he UK, Lady Jane Campbell wrote recently in The Guardian that while the UK has been a world leader on disability rights, now ‘current and future generations of disabled people face the slow, inexorable slide back towards social death once again.’ This is because ‘Disabled people are confronting the spectre of re-institutionalisation as councils and clinical commissioning groups limit the amount they spend on individual packages of support.’ The Care Act, she argues, ‘fails to ensure disabled people’s right to independent living, and swingeing cuts in health, social care and benefits are eroding the availability of support and people’s right to exercise choice and control.’

Eliot’s poem provides only a hint of hope for those who find themselves in their own Waste Land but Ezekiel’s response in his vision is significantly different from that of The Waste Land’s protagonist. Ezekiel spoke prophetically about the situation of sterility and death in which he found himself. We might expect the prophetic voice in that situation to be the voice of Eliot’s protagonist, a lament for all that has been lost and a keening cry for all that has died. Instead, Ezekiel’s prophecy was a word of life. Ezekiel’s prophecy was that the Lord God would cause breath to enter the dry bones so they would live.

As a result, Ezekiel’s prophecy shows us God working with what is there. There is no replacement of the dry bones and no moving of Ezekiel to a better valley. Ezekiel’s vision promises that it is precisely in the place where hope seems to have died that resurrection will occur. This means that God starts with what is already there, the dry bones; so this prophecy is about recognising, valuing and using what we already have. It is about beginning with our assets, not our deficits, and recognising that addressing, instead of avoiding, the problem is actually the way to life and change and resolution.

In their book The Abundant Community John McKnight and Peter Block argue that, by contrast, our consumer society constantly tells us that we are insufficient and that we must purchase what we need from specialists and systems outside of our immediate resources and community. They suggest that when we outsource health care, child care, recreation, safety and satisfaction, we are actually being trained to become consumers and clients, not citizens and neighbours. It is, therefore, arguable that our social fabric – our sense of real community - has been unravelled by consumerism and its belief that however much we have, it is not enough. To recognise that in ourselves and in our communities we already have the capacity to address our human needs, in ways that systems never can, is to challenge the mantra of consumerism.

In the Membership Pack for HeartEdge, the new network of churches St Martin’s is initiating, we argue that this is equally true for churches, their congregations and communities. That we can do unbelievable things by starting with our assets, not our deficits; that we all have gifts to offer, even the most seemingly marginal among us. Using our particular assets (our skills, experience, insights and ideas) we have the God-given power to create a hope-filled life and can become architects of a future where we want to live.

Following Ezekiel’s prophecy further we can then see that the individual dry bones are joined together to form skeletons on which sinews and skin grow to fashion living bodies. St Paul also used this same illustration of a body with each part in its right place playing its rightful role, in his case to create a picture of the Church as the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12). Again, this suggests that we can do unbelievable things, but this time the focus is on our doing them together; starting with each another’s assets, not our deficits. Sharing our particular assets with others and receiving those of others fosters a wider understanding and models the practice of hospitality. McKnight and Block suggest we can nurture voluntary, self-organizing structures in our communities that will reveal our gifts and allow them to be shared to the greatest mutual benefit. By doing this we will find our way to becoming abundant communities that open space for generosity and cooperation.

Similarly, in HeartEdge, we are saying to the Church that rather than beginning with our hurts and our stereotypes, as happens in a community of fear, and finding a hundred reasons why we can’t do things or certain kinds of people don’t belong, if we take off labels like disabled or wealthy or migrant or evangelical or single and instead see qualities like passion or commitment or generosity or enthusiasm or humility, then there’s no limit to what a community of hope can do.

Starting with our assets and those of others around us provides the structure or skeleton that God can then animate with his Spirit – his qualities of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control – to truly bring renewed life, change and growth. That is the journey of Lent, because it is the journey of Christ’s Passion; through the experience of crucifixion and death to resurrection and renewal, and beyond.

We may well, in some senses, inhabit a Valley of Dry Bones or a Waste Land personally or socially. All is not lost, however, as in Ezekiel’s vision by starting where we are with our assets and by coming together to release and share our gifts we find the power to create a hope-filled life and become the architects of a future where we want to live. It may even be that we need to experience the scarcity of the Waste Land in order to then see, appreciate and value the new life of God’s kingdom. As one song says ‘… sometimes, you need the darkness / In order to ever see the light.’ (Michael McDermott, I Know A Place)

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Michael McDermott - I Know A Place.