Easter Sunday - 11th April 2004
Three images, all involving young people in one way or another, have been in my head as I have approached this Easter Day. The first concerns an encounter with an 11 year old boy in a school. He comes from mixed race parentage and he was thanking me for the stand I initiated in our diocesan synod against the political extremists who would show such hatred towards him. He had read reports in the local press.
Actually the much bigger story is that the church is saying this nationally, so I think my part may have been rather over played by the press. I had a letter the other day referring to my article in the War Cry, which came as a bit of a surprise since I haven't written anything for the War Cry. It’s interesting to see how stories get recycled! Any way, the lad’s mother also came up to thank me and this was very welcome given that some of the post I have received, some disturbingly purporting to come from fellow Christians, has been shall we say less than complementary. Some has been full of hatred, one was addressed to the ‘scabby Vicar of Whitkirk’, so you can imagine the contents of that, and some clearly displaying disaffection with the mainstream political parties. Some were very muddled in their thinking and understanding of Christian faith.
The second image came in the guise of two 9 year old girls who came into the church just over a week ago holding a bunch of freshly picked daffodils - I don’t know where from. They gave them to me and said: “These are to help the church celebrate Easter”. And with that they skipped away. It was the middle of Lent, when we don’t have flowers in church, but we honoured the gift, found a vase and put them in the side chapel.
The third image is of large gangs of youths congregating in the area. Some just looking for something to do, some under the influence of too much WKD or something else and some clearly not able to show any respect for themselves let alone anyone else. Encounters with them are not easy and don’t often start with pleasantries. We have to battle through the presenting behaviour to get to something that can be worked with. Comments like ‘I’ll kick your dog’s head in’ don’t tend to bring out the best in me, I’m ashamed to say! I remember something similar a while ago. It turned out the lad had just suffered bereavement and didn’t know how to express it. After we’d come into the church and lit some candles things calmed down. It just took a frustratingly long time to get to that point!
Encounters like the one on Friday night leave me reflecting on how we learn respect. We learn it by being shown it and this is what we see in how Jesus approached people. Time and time again he went up to people who had no self-respect and who showed less to others, and showed them that they were loved and that this was how to treat people. It is a slow process, it takes a while to get beyond the anger and the abusive name calling or sneering, but the church is called to be different and some how has to imitate Jesus in how we show respect and teach what it means to be respectful.
There is not a lot of respect around at the moment. We see this in how some with money look down on those without it. We see this in how call centre staff are so often treated and the high burn out rates that these jobs have. We see this in demanding customers in shops stressing out those behind the tills. We see this in the expectations people have of public services, and some people approach the church with the same attitude as if it comes on the council tax, expecting everything and giving nothing to sustain it. It is not rocket science but we get out of churches what we put into them.
All of these three images - issues of race, of spontaneous celebration and of respect or the absence of it - flag up the nitty gritty of living the Easter faith, of what it means to be people who have been so caught by the new life and renewed life of Christ that we are transformed by it.
Easter is not a time when we avoid these issues and the struggle, but rather if we enter into Christ’s resurrection deeply it takes us to the heart of the struggle for respect and deep honouring of all creation and all people being created in the image of the same Creator. There is a phrase used about a profoundly spiritual woman from the Desert tradition. It was quoted in the last of our Lent talks this year on the Northumbria Community. People were said to come to this holy woman. The writer continued:
That power of death comes in many guises. There is the physical, brutality of killing. There is the bruising that comes through others’ hatreds and lack of respect. There are the distorted and festering fears that so readily turn to extremism. These extremisms so often have their roots in a quest for easy answers to complicated questions and in not being secure in their own identity. Easter shows that these houses of death can be overcome, are overcome, by the house of love; that security of identity comes not through hatred but through learning respect, being a house that is built by the love of God who raises and overcomes all the powers of death.
Those girls who brought their daffodils showed this in such a simple act of celebration. Out of the actions of babes! We can learn so much from their spontaneous outpouring. In that simple act they knew that flowers show love and they wanted to help us show this to be a house that love built and houses that are built by love have flowers in them. Flowers are signs of life and not death. We can ask ourselves this Easter how much we are signs of life and not death and how much we show ourselves to be a house that love built?
Three images, all involving young people, helping take us to the heart of living the Easter message; to the heart of the Easter challenge to be houses that love built and to show that love to all we meet whatever the challenge they present.
© Ian Black 2004