St. Andrew’s Picton

-we have a saying around our house that goes: The Lukester Dukester I presume

-since he was very young, living with my son Luke has been like living in the midst of a construction site

-you can walk into any room in my home and see signs of his presence: it used to be my make-up or the spice rack or the toilet paper strewn throughout the house; as he got older it was art supplies, colored eggs, costumes made from scratch

-and then came the tools, you name it—the signs change according to the season but there are always signs, some of them disastrous, that tell you that he’s working on another project

-the entire biblical story is intended to provide us with signs of God’s involvement in human history

-there are big signs, small signs, wondrous signs and disastrous ones as well

-but in the Easter story, God pulls out the power tools—this is it, the empty tomb proclaims—this is the sign to beat all signs

-and it wasn’t clear to those disciples who first stumbled upon the sign

-there was confusion, there was fear and each gospel tells the story differently

-what is clear however, once all the stories have been told is that the resurrection event becomes the foundation for a new community, a community re-created by the  power of God

-think of it: Jesus’ friends, a group of bewildered, frightened, fickle men and women almost overnight become a community powered by courage and hope and love

-they pick up their tools and don their hard hats and the world is never the same again

-so what  does a resurrection community look like today?

-it’s really interesting, when I was telling people in Quebec last year that I was returning to ministry and had been called here, you know what the first thing they asked me was??

-well, you can guess can’t you?

-are there lots of young people in the church?

-it was their way of asking: is it alive this church you are going to?

-interesting don’t you think that children have become the sign of a church being alive

-and I’ve heard different people in this congregation say, “it’s so wonderful to see all the children in church—it’s such a sign of hope”

-but I would argue that while the presence of children may be a sign of resurrection they do not constitute a resurrection experience

-let me tell you a story of a church in Quebec

-like every English speaking church in Quebec it has had to fight for its life

-last year at Easter 60 children marched in behind the young girl holding the Christ candle while the congregation sang Jesus Christ is risen today

-those 60 children did represent a sign of a resurrection

-but the resurrection itself took place 5 years earlier when the congregation after a period of visioning decided that it was going to reshape its life, its worship, its Sunday School, its building, its budget and its staff in order to reach out to young families

-do you realize what an enormous risk that was?

-can you imagine how much work, how much courage to commit themselves to being a different kind of community

-to commit themselves to being transformed at a deep level of their being

-but they put on their hard hats and they got to work: big work, deep work

-the young families are now there

-but that church was a place of resurrection long before all the children showed up

-it became a resurrection community when it gave its life over to God to be changed

-the experience of resurrection goes much deeper than a busy Sunday School

-like any resurrection site, something changes in the make-up of the foundation—a team of people put on their hard hats and get to work

-but resurrection stories are not always stories that makes us feel good

-yesterday’s Globe and Mail tells the story of a South African bishop who is defying the Vatican and handing out condoms to the community that he serves, a community called Freedom Park

-Freedom Park is a vast, sprawl of 5,000 shacks made of salvaged scraps of tin propped up against one another with no electricity

-it was given the name Freedom with the end of apartheid in 1994 but freedom has in many ways proved elusive—it is just one of a half-dozen squatter camps that is home to about 100,000 people

-in this community nearly half of the women test positive for the HIV/Aids virus

-the Catholic church does not condone birth control and it condemns sex outside of marriage

-but the reality for these women is that they need men to survive

-but because of their relationship with men they are dying of AIDS

-now the church in Africa the Presbyterian Church included has for years turned its face from the epidemic

-but Bishop Dowling says it’s the suffering of the women that got to him and so he is publicly advocating action that may cost him his job

-is he acting with courage, with compassion, maybe risking the life that he knows?

-yes, yes, and yes!

-sounds like he is practicing resurrection

-the resurrection event  is so much more than the story of God’s redemptive power

-it is an event that invites us to make it our life practice

-it is not always simple, or joyful—it very often comes at a cost and that cost is our old life, our old community

-I have a colleague, an old friend who had to tell his Session last month that he had lost his battle with alcohol and was going to have to take a 2 month leave to pursue rehab services

-sometimes the practice of resurrection will be the hardest thing we will ever do

-sometimes it will be the most exciting thing we will ever do

-because practicing resurrection is practicing the power of God that raised Jesus from the grave

-it is making our lives and our community a construction site

-it is saying, this is not it!

-this is not the world that God intended

-it’s saying this is not the me that God intended

-and then it’s picking up our tools and using the resurrection as a blueprint for building or re-building our lives

-but we do not live in a society that encourages resurrection

-we live in a society that does a lot of window dressing and calls it new life

-God’s resurrection, however happens in the deep places of our lives, places we may be afraid to look at, places that have become hard and heavy, places where we are afraid, places where we have been hurt, places of anger or despair

-but these are the places that God want to build a resurrection site

Thinking about worship at the church she attended, the poet Annie Dillard once wrote,

• “Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?  It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church. We should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping God may awake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return."

-We know about that power, don’t we

-because we each have our own stories that speak of resurrection?

-we have stories of being brought back from the grave

-of stones being rolled away, of hope being reborn

-and some of them are amazing joyful stories—we think of them and we smile

-while others are not stories we cannot easily share—maybe we wish we had been wearing a hard hat at the time

-maybe you are here today because you are grateful to have been rescued from death

-maybe you are here as a way of avoiding the deep places of fear and failure in your life

-maybe you are here because you know that your foundation is crumbling and it’s time to rebuild

-whatever the reason, God invites you to put on your hard hat and be part of a community being remade by the power of the resurrection

-but be warned, there will be no window dressing where God is at work—God’s construction sites start deep in our foundations

-so put on your hard hat—there’s work there is resurrection work to be done

Thanks be to God

-you see we only have the story of the resurrection because a resurrection community was born out of it

-I’ll say it another way, we wouldn’t have the story of resurrection if a resurrection community had not been born out of it

-a group of friends experienced a radical transformation and this was the story they told to explain it

-and if we are to claim that story as our own, we too must have a story of our own, we, too need to become community under construction