Memorial Service - 18th June 2006
So what do you think about the current Doctor Who? Perhaps you haven’t seen any of them, but I find them very thought provoking and I think David Tennant has got the character spot on. A recent episode brought Sarah Jane back. She was his assistant back in the 70s when Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker played the doctor. She also had a digital dog called K-9 and he made a reappearance too.
The recent episode saw the doctor tackling some creatures trying to unlock the building blocks of creation. They did this by taking over the minds of the children in a school with some special mind altering oil used to cook the chips. A new twist on the health hazards of junk food! By unlocking these building blocks they could control time and matter. They try to entice the doctor into their plan by telling him that he could effectively turn back time, stop the war that left him as the only surviving time lord. His assistants would remain young for ever.
It is Sarah Jane who replies that everything has its time. Everything comes to an end. Pain and pleasure are linked. Having the time together is worth the pain that comes with losing.
Later Sarah Jane confesses that the doctor was a hard act to follow. No one could compare with him, but she doesn’t regret a moment of it and would do it all over again. She wouldn’t have missed it for the world. Poignantly she says “Some things are worth getting your heart broken for”.
Sound familiar? How much would you like to turn back time, to alter the building blocks and stay perpetually in…, well this is where the fantasy bangs up against reality, because precisely what time would you want to stay in. And if you could do that, what would that mean for the moments that went before it and made it all possible? It’s a dream and we know it can’t be real. Sarah Jane knows this too and says the words we desperately don’t want to say: ‘Everything has its time and comes to an end’. She also says the words we may feel deeply, about having your heart broken.
The Christian faith is built on a mind bending hope, one that is almost too good to be true, that the ending of this life is the gate way to one beyond our imaging. What it doesn’t say is that there won’t be an end to this life and it doesn’t remove the pain of parting because that is real and it is a sign that there has been something that you wouldn’t have missed for the world. It gives us a place to hold that and you might find that lighting the candles in a moment provides a visible space for a moment for those treasured memories that mean so much.
The hope that the Christian faith holds out goes much further than our imaginations can contain. The second reading, from St Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth (1 Corinthians 15:1, 3-4, 35-38, 42, 57-58), uses the image of a seed. The seed that is buried carries the genetic blue print for the plant that will follow, but what grows is way beyond what you would imagine looking at that seed. There is a clear link, but the glory of the flower, or wheat in his example, is so much more colourful and flamboyant than we would guess.
A question I am sometimes asked is ‘will we be together again’. I understand the deep desire for this, but I think what is in store is even better than this. Think of what it means to be reunited and multiply that by a factor of 15 million! That is what is in store for us all. We call this the resurrection and our minds hit overload when we try to think of it because we have only a limited compartment in our brains to put it in. All we know is that what we had was pretty good and we hope to get it back because there is a hole where it once was that nothing else seems able to fill. Think of the seed, though. It doesn’t become the seed again, it becomes whatever plant it grows into, but it still has a link with what it once was. So what is important from now will be carried into the new life and the intimacy and the love is God given and God-shaped, so I can’t imagine that not being given its own space.
Ultimately we live for God and all that we are and do is held within the love of God. This gives us a tremendous confidence that the pain is worth it because the joy is worth it. It’s worth having your heart broken because the flowering that awaits is so much more glorious and part of that glory is reflected in the brilliant bits now.
The Christian faith calls us to be thankful in all things because this is God’s world and we are made by and for God. All of us are therefore united and reunited in that love and the bonds are eternal.
© Ian Black 2006