All Things Seen and Unseen

But what is a neighbour? It’s one of those funny words that mark the difference between England and America. For a start, one of us spells it wrong! But the contrast goes deeper: I remember wondering when I came here what neighbourhoods where. In England we just have districts or places but Americans have neighbourhoods. What are they? Places where neighbours dwell. Interesting! … Another American concept is neighbourliness—to be neighbourly. It’s a word I’d only heard on “The Waltons” until coming to the states—even coming to Berkeley.
Remembering the Waltons begins to put it in perspective for me. Neighbourliness and nostalgia go hand in hand. And what a nostalgic moment we live in. If you disbelieve me check the cinema listings—this morning half the big page ads were for remakes or sequels. Nostalgia for childhood: Dr. Doolittle is back and Zorro is carving his initials again. Even Lethal Weapon, now hitting it’s third sequel, is nostalgic for good old-fashioned buddy-hood and family values—amid the car chases and explosions. And, of course, there’s nostalgia for nostalgia as Gone with the Wind is restored to big-screen glory and makes a bid to restore its southern honour in the wake of Titanic’s new box-office record.
And, more seriously, if you want a meditation on neighbourliness and nostalgia you could do very much worse than Peter Weir’s disturbing film The Truman Show. Do you laugh or do you cry? It’s hard to know but harder to be unmoved.
These days neighbourliness is something more to be remembered than experienced. Soft-focus days of simple goodness, when people greeted each other on the street, sat down as a family for Sunday dinner, felt no fear in leaving their doors unlocked, or borrowing a cup of sugar from next door. When young people had respect. When simpler things were cherished. When people were happy even though poor and dark streets were safe to walk.
When? When was this? Before. Before what? Before distrust. Before drugs. Before gangs and cynicism and betrayal. Before the family collapsed. Before the city crumbled. Before the neighbourhood disappeared. Before people stopped being neighbourly. Before neighbours became strangers.
Even the most jaded should long for what has been lost. For the security, for the surety, for the trust, for the peace.
Who do we blame for their passing? I blame the teachers, the priests, the ones who never speak up any more about real values, who never lay down the law, or hold up a standard of right and wrong. No, I blame the parents, who don’t seem to care, who haven’t instilled any discipline, who’ve let their children do just anything. Heck, I blame the neighbours themselves. Look who they are! All the good ones have left and gone and the in-comers are loud and violent. They don’t know how to be civil. Say anything to them and they’d bite your head off. They’re not like us. Lazy they are. They don’t know our ways. They’re probably not capable of learning, being who they are, you know. Have you smelt the food they eat? What we need is …
Well, what do we need? How do we bring back the neighbour? Where is the law and order to bring back the favour of God, Adonai’s delight and the prosperity of our ancestors? Where do we have to go to find it? WE are ready. We’ll do it—even if it seems a harsh and heavy burden—because by God we need something.
But, says Moses, the law you seek—the pattern, the order—isn’t mysterious and remote. It isn’t up in the sky so that you need someone t fetch it. It isn’t across the sea so that someone must carry it to you. No it is already very near to you—it is already on your lips and in your heart. All you have to do … is do it.
But what makes a neighbourhood? Law, values, and nostalgia don’t. The carriers of the law see the problem but live elsewhere. It is the foreigner with his stinking food who sees and draws near, binds the wound as best he can, lifts up the broken in body to care for them and comes back to keep on caring. Stays until the healing is complete.
But why? Why is the enemy the friend? Why do the friends walk on by? We are back to that word again—compassion. That untranslatable word with a meaning somewhere between pity and anger with it’s literal root in spleen. The evil Samaritan is moved to compassion—literally something convulses his bowels, turns his stomach over—and he is stopped in his tracks. Luke uses the word only three times: when Jesus raises to life the widow of Nain’s dead son; when the prodigal Father rushes out to meet his returning son; and here, where the wrong person is moved to do the right thing. Elsewhere in the gospels this stomach-turning anger/pity/compassion always promises a cure, a healing, a settling of demons, and extraordinary act of loving care, an act worthy of God.
The neighbour question—of neighbourhood and neighbourliness—ceases to be about them—the neighbour and their problems—and becomes about me. Am I a neighbour? Am I one wounded by another’s pain, angry at another’s loss, touched by another’s need? Are my innards turned upside down? Is the Law on my lips, and in my heart, and in my guts? Am I as disturbed as God is? Not to punish the bad neighbour but to lay down my life for him.
No one I know says it better than the lesbian poet Adrienne Rich:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
So much has been destroyed.
I have to cast my lot with those
Who age after age, perversely,
With no extraordinary power
Re-constitute the world.

I have a burning question this morning … what happened to those twelve baskets of leftovers? What did the disciples do with all that half chewed bread and fish? Haven’t you ever wondered? The gospel writers are so delighted with the excess but they never spare a word about where it went. Did the Twelve carry the basketsful home to save for tomorrow’s gathering or did they hand out doggy bags for the departing crowd? Perhaps after the miracle that had just happened these scraps were treated like holy relics to be hurried home and stored in little gold boxes ready for when the next fever might hit and a miracle be needed. Or maybe everyone was so full they lost all interest in food and the leftovers were left to rot like waste. Maybe? And now I think about it I wonder where they got the baskets from? You see once you start asking these questions it gets hard to stop and even finds a fascination all of its own. It’s called theology and some of us do it for a living.
But it has its traps and one of them is the shift of focus that is embodied in this great mediaeval feast of Corpus Christi. For nine, ten, centuries after the first last supper if you asked the ordinary person in the pew where the body of Christ was—after they stopped looking at you strangely—they’d tell you here—in the gathered church praying together, breaking bread together, doing good together. A few hundred years later the same poll would have gotten a different answer—the long-suffering amateur theologian would use a different gesture—not sweeping out a wide arc but pointing directly at the tabernacle: there’s the body of Christ—in that box. Somehow Jesus has been trapped in a box—oh a gold box, nicely padded, but under lock and key. How do we let him out again?
We have a lot to celebrate in this feast but we have to know what are we celebrating: an event, not a thing; something that goes on happening, not something over and done with; an awful and glorious waste.
Look how Paul remembers that event: not as the first Eucharist, not as the first consecration, but as the night when Jesus was betrayed. On that night when he was handed over by one of his own, he first hands over himself to his friends, his own—including the betrayer. He hands himself over in broken bread and shared cup. “This is my body which is for you.” Eat it and remember me. This cup makes a new promise sealed with my blood. Drink it and remember me. What a waste! You can imagine his friends thinking, “this is not a good bargain: bread and wine instead of flesh and blood.” What could have possessed Jesus to waste his life like this—handing it over for nothing instead of prudently backing off to fight another day. He could have gone back into hiding and let the fuss die down but, no, he had to go and hand himself over even as he is handed over by his betrayer. What a waste!
It’s the waste we remember: every time you eat this bread and drink this cup you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.
That’s why the gospel’s twelve baskets of wasted food is an important detail: night is falling and people are hungry and the disciples are worried and Jesus is challenging. He asks them the question he keeps on asking us: what have you got to offer? What will you waste?
Though the disciples say they have next to nothing, they hand over what little they have, protesting all the time the waste of throwing so little at so many mouths. But Jesus blesses their pittance of bread and fish and hands it over to God, and God hands it over in abundance to the hungry crowd. The miracle isn’t in the eating but in the handing over; isn’t in the receiving but in the giving.
The crowd was hungry but now they’re satisfied: more, they’re full, stuffed, couldn’t eat another thing. They thought they had nothing but it turns out they had enough and even more than enough, even too much. Here’s how it is in the body of Christ: we have to run the risk of wasting what little we have, handing it over, so there’ll be enough to satisfy the deepest need, enough to waste.
So … where’s the body of Christ this morning? Is Jesus here or in a box? I think that all depends on what we do together. Shortly we will break bread together but if the focus is on what we receive the box will stay firmly locked. What opens the door is what we offer; what we are willing to hand over today; what we are ready to waste. Because the hunger is still there and Jesus is still asking us the question: “why don’t you give them something to eat yourselves?”

Why on earth do we celebrate this awkward feast right here, right now, when we are still reeling from Pentecost, still wondering how to put our feet down into ordinary time and get on with the brisk business of living? Why distract our attention from the here and now with this feast of the where and nowhere?
I for one never remember it’s coming. All the focus has been on Easter and Pentecost and every year I’m surprised and say to myself “Oh yes, Trinity!”
But there is a reason it’s here and a good one at that. Our faith in the Trinity is not a faith in a theorem of mathematics, not a problem in logic, not even a puzzle in theology. Instead it’s a shorthand for all that has gone on before: for Advent’s waiting; for the Christmas joy of Incarnation; for Lent’s remembrance of bruised innocence; for the Holy-Week horror of loss; the surprise of Easter; and the Church’s reckless gift of Pentecost fire.
When we testify to Trinity we sum up the triple testimony of our lives, and the lives of our forefather and foremothers: the testimony of the living world to its creator; the testimony of Jesus to his God; and the testimony of the Christian community to the Spirit of Jesus still with us.
These are the roots of trinity in us. The sense we have that this world is no accident; that despite it’s sorrows and ugliness it is a place of life and for life with a creative heart at its centre and a care ready to be made visible through our own.
The experience of Jesus which we remember every day. God’s way to be human, revealing the lines of God face, and a love that would hold nothing back in its daring generosity and its challenge to our notions of goodness and beauty.
Then the experience of the church from its earliest days that Jesus, once dead, is now beyond death, and with us always in the Spirit. God still with us, still delighting in life, still finding beauty in love, surprise in creativity.
If the Doctrine of the Trinity says anything it says this: God has risked even giving up God’s very self to be God for us. The song we’ll sing in a little while says it accurately: “you have shaken with our laughter; you have trembled with our tears.”
So no shamrock or triangle opens the heart of the Trinity to us … just the experience of love. If you know what it is to have loved someone enough to have shaken with their laughter and trembled with their tears then you can begin to understand God’s Trinity.
We’ve all been raised to believe that God loves us but somehow we tend to believe that all the risk and all the feeling are on our side … that God is so big and self-sufficient that nothing we do can really make a difference to God—really hurt or really delight. But today’s feast says the opposite and invites us into its mystery. Have you ever loved someone so much that you feel you’ve lost your self to them? That all your future depends on them? That your heart wakes or breaks with theirs? If you’ve known that pain, that daring, that delight then know now that God looks upon you with just that kind of love.

Is school over yet? I ask because I want to start with a quiz, a tough one: what phrase appears on every American coin but on no American bank note? … It’s OK you’re allowed to cheat … … …
“E pluribus unum.” Any of you know what that means? … It’s Latin: “Out of many, one.” It’s an idea so close to the American heart that it’s inscribed there on every quarter, every dime. … In honour of that sentiment I decided to bring along this morning something I was given recently as a gift. … You like it? I’m not sure how it will play back in England!
Well here we are, as the day of Pentecost comes round, gathered in one place. We are English and American; Vietnamese and Filipino; Irish and German and Italian; Chinese and African; we are black and white and pink and who knows how many shades of brown; we are tall and short; we are gay and straight; we are woman and man; we are young and old. As on that first Pentecost all humanity is here—it wouldn’t surprise me too much if there weren’t even a few Medes and Elamites here among us.
So here we are, brought together by one Spirit into one Body. Baptized into one Community. All of us drunk on the one Spirit. “E pluribus … unum.” Doesn’t Pentecost sound so American? All our differences dissolved in a melting pot of freedom—blind to colour and race and religion—where what separates us is forgotten and unity prevails. E Pluribus Unum. Out of many, one!
I think that’s so close to being true that we might easily miss how close it is to being completely false.
A story … Once upon a time the people of the whole world spoke a single language and used the same words. But as they saw themselves spreading out over the face of the earth they began to worry that if this carried on they would soon become scattered and, being separated from one another by distance, they would cease to be one people. So they decided to build a great city where they could all gather and be one and, at the heart of that great city, a great monument to their unity, a hard work of hope and courage, a feat of technology to testify to the power of people working together: the Tower of Babel. You know the story. You know how God sabotages their efforts by the simple move of multiplying their languages. Instead of one tongue they find they have many. And since they fear they’ll no longer be able to understand one another they scatter and divide. The tower is never finished: the monument to their unity falls to pieces. Out of one, many. Ex Uno Plura. The Babel Event.
When one person talks while another listens you have a conversation (or half of one, at least). When two people talk at once you have babble. If we all started right now to say the Our Father in our own languages that’s what we’d have—babble, noise, confusion. It would even be hard to get the words right in our own tongue with all the competition going on. So what’s the alternative? That we undo Babel and all stick to one language? Well sometimes we have to do just that. But there’s a better way.
(Choir sings in three languages at once)
What is babble when spoken, can be harmony when sung. And harmony can only happen if the voices are different. No single voice—alone, unaided, can never manage harmony.
The Pentecost Event with its rushing spirit blows down the doors to intoxicate the gathered disciples and undo Babel. But not by making many into one. Instead, the whole bunch of them are all chattering away in different languages and yet every one hears and everyone understands the message. Pentecost undoes Babel not by dissolving human differences but by making something beautiful out of them. Babel drove the people of the earth far from each other in fear and loathing but Pentecost brings back the scattered into one community burning with the fire of many cultures. Pentecost doesn’t just reverse Babel and give us back one tongue and one ear. Instead the Spirit goes further. Here we are with all our differences, all our languages, and yet still we can worship God together.
The one God has made us full of difference so that in our care for God and God’s world we might make something beautiful together which we could never make alone.
And when our differences get too much for us, as they must always do, the remedy, the Gospel says, is not to diminish the difference but to forgive one another; neither to assimilate the other nor to punish her but to do her justice.
This morning Pentecost is with us as we share Eucharist. Eucharist isn’t possible without Pentecost. The one bread gets taken, blessed, and broken up into many little pieces so that we many different people might gather around one table and be life for each other. This morning eleven young people are asking for a place at the table. They bring their differences too to our feast so that we all might be richer, and the noise we make together more beautiful. The test of our Spirit, sisters and brothers, is how well we make room for them and how well we make room for all the others who want to join our feast.

How many times this week have I heard the groan of guilt and the in-drawn breath of panic as someone else has realised that Mother’s Day was coming? And the groans got louder and the panic sharper as the week wore on. I hope all you mothers out there are satisfied with all the guilt and distress you cause! Not least to a preacher.
“I, John, saw a new heavens and a new earth … a new Jerusalem, holy city, coming down out of heaven from God … and the One who sat upon the throne said to me, “See, I make all things new!” This is supposed to be encouraging: a new world where every tear will be wiped away; a world without death and mourning, without pain and panic. But I for one am ambiguous about the new. The world seems intent on making itself new every day and of that newness, some is glorious, some is terrible, and some is poised precariously between the two so that only time will tell. Chocolate, for example, may be on the way out. It seems that old plantations are struggling with disease and new places to grow the food of the gods are running out. Mothers, this could be the last year you get a box of chocolates: in future you’ll have to make do with diamonds or furs, or even lettuce.
“For forty seconds it outshone the universe.” So said the report on a new discovery in the heavens—a burst of gamma rays so powerful that it briefly took over the sky. That’s the kind of newness to wonder at and keep at arms length. Nice to watch from a distance but hell to have in your back yard.
Closer to home new hope flares and falters for peace in Israel, for peace in Ireland. No one thinks it’s possible. Everyone hopes it may be. Few are willing to bet on the outcome.
“See I make all things new.” Yes, but does God make all things good? We have an appetite for novelty, an expectation of trading in the old for the new, a firm belief that the next thing along will be the best thing, at least until it becomes just one more old thing. But we’re also unsure of the new, a little threatened by it, a bit in awe. So, why doesn’t God make it all simple for us? Why isn’t the new always good? Why doesn’t God do a good job and stamp out the bad stuff before it can do any harm? Or God could at least give us a clue how to tell which is which. And right here we are at the heart of the Easter mystery: why does God’s own path to the new life of Easter lead through the tomb of death?
“See I make all things new!” I think the only people with a chance of grasping an answer to any of this are those who have given birth. You have something awesome in common with God who declares himself to be a mother to the world. God who brings newness to birth. God who speaks in joy to all she’s made saying, “You are good!” Go who takes the enormous risk of creation. Risk, because children don’t always turn out the way you expect or the way you hope. They might give you joy but not without grief. You love the kids but you may not like them: at least when they give you no sleep, when they ruin your furniture or strain your marriage, or when they crash your car, or they never call. Yet liking or not there is love. Love that aches to mend what is maybe unmendable; that longs to put right what seems to be going wrong. Love that has learned the hard way but has to hold back and let them make the same mistakes all over again.
This is the kind of love that we are commanded to in the gospel, God’s kind of love. We are commanded to be mothers to each other. We are told that it is the only sign we can give that we follow Jesus on his way. What kind of new community would that bring to birth if it were to happen among us? We can’t know until we try it.
That puts an enormous burden on those of you who have given birth. You have to teach the rest of us what it is like. You have to teach us how to live with the new things we make. You have to teach us how to be like God. … And like kids everywhere we probably won’t want to learn.
Happy Mother’s Day!

This week I experienced a deep personal trauma—I turned forty. Now for half of you this evening that’s all in the past and no big deal and for the other half it’s still far enough away to forget. But forty crept up on me unawares and bit. I hadn’t been expecting it—hey, what’s another birthday … I’ve got to the age where I’ve stopped counting. But I should have seen the attack coming when I started to get calls from well-wishers hoping the shock of ageing wouldn’t be too great. “No big deal,” I said.
But then the day came and I had promised myself a day off from writing my dissertation so I lounged about and tried to enjoy the sun and the breeze and the time to myself. But as the morning wore on I found myself getting more and more morose—sadness like a comfortable blanket wrapped me and with it self-doubt and loneliness. Forty! Remember how old forty once looked to the teenager with eyes only for the endless possibilities of life? Forty! With life half over and the possibilities all petered out. Forty! And still in school! Forty! And still struggling to write papers!
“I, John, saw before me a huge crowd …” Tradition has it that the same John wrote the book of revelation as wrote the gospel of that name. John the subtle, the sensitive. John, for whom community and companionship meant so much. John, of all the gospel writers the one at home in the city. John the beloved. John the preacher of love.
Now, the tradition has it that for punishment this John was exiled, cut off from his community and those he loves, and sent to Patmos, no more than a bleak and nondescript lump of rock in the Mediterranean with only sheep and their herders for company. But it is here that John is granted visions of heaven. Alone, he sees a huge crowd in heaven. From his monotonous exile, he sees people of every nation and race, people and tongue. Defeated by inglorious exile, he sees the throng of martyrs who have washed their robes in the blood of the lamb. Hungry and thirsty and beaten by the burnished sun, he sees a place of fullness, and cool with springs of life-giving water where God will wipe away every tear.
This is John’s vision. An answer to his longing, a gift in his distress. It is indeed revelation, a lifting of the veil. Because, of course, the heaven that John sees in visions isn’t just the reward awaiting him after death, it is, in faith, the life he is living if he could but see it, if the veil that clouds his vision could just be lifted. Just so the John of the gospel writes about eternal life but in his own Greek tongue those aren’t the words at all. The words he writes are “the life of the next age.” When John’s Jesus says, “I give them eternal life,” he is not talking about a promise of what will be but promising a transformation of what is. Right now, by Jesus’ gift, we can have eternal life, the life of the next age, the life of heaven.
So exiled from civilisation, John still lives by the vision of the heavenly city. In desolate silence, John still worships in the heavenly liturgy of praise. Never again to see those he loves, John still feels their presence around the throne of God.
So what is your vision of heaven? And what does it speak to in your own life? What are you longing for that Christ longs to grant?
Hitting forty—having been hit by forty—I see that heaven must be a place where all the lost time is somehow made good, the missed opportunities somehow ripened to fruition, and the aborted possibilities somehow brought to term.
Where all of that—the essence of forty—is somehow in God’s hands and healed and made whole. And if the life of the next age holds that promise then maybe so does my own when I lift the veil. Maybe school will end. Maybe a dissertation will be written. Maybe it’ll even make a difference in the balance of things. Maybe … if I lift the veil.

Poor Thomas. Thomas the Twin. Doubting Thomas. It seems we never remember poor Thomas except for what he isn’t—he isn’t his brother and he isn’t faithful, he doesn’t believe.
But Thomas is—in his own right—the first and greatest of believers. And what he comes to believe is still astonishing.
The disciples are huddled in fear of the authorities, locked up and safely behind bars when Jesus is suddenly among them. His first word, “Shalom.” “Peace be with you.” He shows them his hands and his side. And that vision is enough to get them going. “Shalom,” he says again. The absent Thomas returns and finds the group all a-flutter. And this is where we jump to conclusions at Thomas’ expense. Thomas is not willing to trust their testimony so we label him Doubter. But what do they testify? “We have seen the Lord.” Yet for Thomas seeing is not believing. Or rather believing is too important to be left to sight: Thomas wants to touch. Wants the confirmation of the flesh. Doesn’t just want to see the truth but wants to entrust himself to it. And truth not just about the reality of this apparition. Thomas knows, I believe, just what an outrageous claim the others are making without their knowing it. Not that Jesus, once dead, is alive but that Jesus, alive, still bears the wounds of his death. The others don’t see deeply enough—the holes just serve to convince them of the truthfulness of their eyes. They don’t go far enough … but Thomas, who once offered to walk with Jesus all the way to his death, does—he grasps something more.
A week later, as John tells it, nothing has changed. For all they’ve seen the living Jesus the disciples are still behind locked doors. Still Jesus comes with Shalom on his lips. He comes to Thomas: “bring your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side.” And Thomas touches his friend, not to confirm his reality but to know him through his wounds. And where the others had got all excited Thomas becomes solemn. He sees with his fingers what the others could not see with their eyes and he testifies to what he has discovered: “My Lord and my God!” Not just his risen Lord that he can feel beneath his fingertips but his God. This is God and God has wounds.
It seems that you can have the Holy Spirit breathed upon you, even by Jesus himself, and still not grasp who Jesus is. Seeing is not believing. Seeing is something you can do from a distance, above all from an emotional distance. You can see—and maybe know—but still not feel and still not entrust yourself. You can see pain but not feel it. You can know another’s wounds but not take the risk to enter them.
God’s wounds are our place of entry into God. Maybe they are all we have in common with God. John tells us that he writes all this down for our sake, so that we might go beyond seeing to touch the reality of God.
Look around you this morning and what do you see. An Easter people, rich in the Risen Lord, alive in his life. Look around you this morning and what touches you. An Easter people still wounded like their Risen Lord. Only through our own wounds are we able to touch the reality of one another. Only through our own wounds are we able to be touched by the reality of God.
The mystery here is beyond me. The marks of evil, of dying, of violence are things we hate. We hate them for what they do to us and to those we love. For how they mar the beauty born there, and ruin the wholeness of life. We pray to be healed, to be made whole, to find freedom. But in our one glimpse of a human being fully healed from death, completely whole, and absolutely free—in Jesus Risen—we find the marks remain.
If Thomas is right, the very things we spend our lives trying to escape turn out to be what we have in common with Jesus, with God.
If Thomas is right, Jesus—Risen, Alive, Wounded—is here today offering in his hands and his side a way into God, a way into each other.
If Thomas is right then peace and joy have come to us today.

I live in Berkeley, just north of the Cal campus, just across from a fraternity house, the band fraternity in fact. And whatever the reputation that such places might have this house is a decent one, pretty quiet, pretty considerate. And as part of that consideration there was a knock at the door last Wednesday evening and two student-types standing there wanting to let us know that they would be having a party on Friday and they promised it wouldn’t go on too long and if we wanted to we could come along. A party on Good Friday? Blank looks. OK Well thanks for telling us.
So on Good Friday evening there was a party. Nothing extravagant or unusual. Just a party. Here we were, in our house, back from churches and prisons and services and processions – a little tired, a little emotional, pondering once again what it means to walk alongside Jesus on his unpopular way. And across the way the guys were whooping it up.
And that’s probably how it should be. Probably how it was that first passion weekend. As Jesus was nailed up for his troubles most of his followers were hiding while the rest of Jerusalem went on its busy way preparing for Passover. What percentage of the population even noticed? 10? 5? Jesus death was a non-event. The parties continued, considerately I’m sure, and the slaughtered lamb was eaten, the bread broken and maybe one too many cups of wine poured.
Saturday must have dawned with yawning hangovers for the many and yawning emptiness for the few huddled away for whom this one grisly death did matter.
And now it’s Sunday, the third day. The headaches are gone. The relatives are going and Passover is about to be forgotten until next year. But for a few nothing will be the same ever again.
Maybe forty years later when the Roman army sacked Jerusalem and fought their way into the bitterly protected Temple to the Holy of Holies. They were astonished at what they found. Past the gold and the finery, past the candle sticks and the veils, past the blood of lambs and defending Jews, they came to a small empty room full of nothing but the absent presence of God. The heart of the earth, the Holy of Holies, the sanctum sanctorum, was empty. Expecting treasure, expecting ornament, expecting glory they found instead an emptiness, a bare, vacant space. Only such an emptiness can hold the God of Israel.
It is fitting then that we are confronted this Easter, every Easter, with the truth that confronted Mary Magdalene that first witness, that first Easter. An empty tomb. A small space full of nothing. Where Jesus should be, where a corpse should be, only absence.
In weeks to come we are going to hear all the stories of meetings with the once-again-living Jesus but the first fact, the first awkward Easter fact is the empty tomb. It confronts us just like it confronted those first friends of Jesus with a puzzle and a challenge. Where we expected only death and decay, ruin and rot, we do not find them but we do not find life either … we are faced with a hole in our understanding. As the angels told us last night: “He is not here.” He is no longer dead but he is not here.
Each of us has to fill that hole. Together we have to fill that hole. Because Jesus did not come back to life to teach some more, or heal some more, or work some more miracles. He disappeared. He didn’t turn up to thumb his nose at Pilate or Caiaphas. He didn’t force out the Romans or depose the priests or shatter the temple. He is not dead but is not here. He is not here. The parties go on to this day. To most of the world Jesus does not matter. To most of this city he doesn’t matter.
But to us he matters. You and I are a people bound together by nothing, nothing but the empty air of an empty tomb. He is not dead but he is not here – but we are. And though he doesn’t matter to our friends and our neighbours, we must matter. He has left us this charge and challenge. We must matter. We must be his presence. We must be the living empty heart of our city, our nation, our earth.

This is our prayer today: Let us see. Let us not be blind. Dear God remove our blindness! It’s the prayer we will pray for our catechumens on their journey out of darkness to the light of Easter. But it had better be our prayer today too. For we are blind. We are blind because we can see and because seeing is such second nature to us that we think see clearly and without effort. Seeing is so easy to us that we forget we have eyes that have to work at vision and we forget that every vision is a work of imagination. William Blake condemned his contemporaries for “seeing not with, but through the eye.” As if our sight were a window out onto the world rather than a portrait painted with nuance and interpretation. We forget the brush strokes. We forget the sign.
At the beginning of today’s story blindness is a metaphor for sin but by the story’s end blindness has become innocence. To not see at all would save us. The only sin is to see but not see the sign—not see the significance of what we see. We do not see the works of God. It is not our habit. We do not see into the causes of things but content ourselves with glamour.
Glamour is an interesting word. Today we celebrate it. It is the heart of Oscar night. But once the word meant a magic spell, a spell cast to hide one thing and show another—a deception, an illusion, a false identity.
This is what we pray to see through today. To see with new eyes what we have done and what God would have us do.
I woke this morning with the blind man. I was going to ask him what it was like to see but before I could get the words out he asked me a question: what is it like to be blind? I ignored him and poured my coffee. But about half way through my bran flakes he spoke again. “What do you see?” he asked me as I read the newspaper. So I gave in and tried to see the world his way. What would he see in the paper, with his fresh vision and innocent ignorance? Not words certainly—all that would be beyond him. What would he make of the pictures? So we looked together.
“Who are all these people?” he asked. They’re models mainly. People payed to look beautiful. He could see their beauty but wanted to know why they were so thin. So thin, so young, and so … moody. “Well, I suppose we like them that way.” “But they don’t look like anyone I’ve met—do you know anyone like that?” “Well not really.” “So where are the pictures of all the real people—like the ones at Church?” “Well you see we don’t put them in the ads because the ads are supposed to make us want to buy things and ordinary people don’t sell.” “They don’t sell?” “No, the idea is that we want to look like the pretty young things or at least we want some of their glamour to rub off on us.” “Does it work?” “Well no … but we still like it.” “You like what? Longing to be someone you can’t be? Yearning to have what you will never have? What?” “I don’t know.”
An Embarrassed Silence. Which I eventually broke. “Look here’s some ordinary people. It’s not all ads you know. This is a newspaper.” Faces of the hungry and old. People being arrested and the ones arresting them. Angry mouths of accusation. Smooth smiles of politicians. Quiet eyes of defeat. Guns and stones and batons. Skies and art and growing things. My blind friend was silent: watching, recognising. Until I turned the page to a large photo of children playing, dancing in a ring of held hands on bare earth against a backdrop of smoking chimneys. “What’s this?” he asked, “is it ugly or beautiful? I can’t tell.” Neither could I. It was both and neither. I read the print. “It’s a picture from a town in Mexico—Juarez—that’s a US factory making copper.” “Who are the children?” “They’re just children—the story says they are playing in a place with unsafe levels of heavy metals like copper … they’re playing on poisoned ground.” “Why? And why is a US factory in Mexico?” “Well it says it’s cheaper to smelt copper there than here because you can pay people less and you don’t have to worry about the pollution you make and that it gives jobs to the local people—mainly women—so everyone benefits.” “You mean except the children with the copper poisoning.” “Well…”
“I came into this world to divide it,” says Jesus, “to make the blind see and the seeing blind.” We see by dividing, discriminating dark from light, foreground from background, colour from colour. We see by dividing, discriminating rich from poor, hurt from healthy, just from unjust.
It is a dangerous prayer we pray today. A dangerous way we walk with Cecilia and Derek. We ask to see and we ask to become responsible for what we see. We ask for the end of our innocence and the beginning of faith.

A terrifying darkness with smoke and fire and animals torn into pieces. A mountaintop brilliance with burning figures out of legend and a voice booming from a darkening cloud.
What do these two moments, one from the Hebrew scriptures and the other from the Christian, have in common. One thing is terror. Abram is terrified. The disciples—Peter, John, James—are terrified. None of them knows what’s hit them. Or maybe they do know and that’s why they are in terror. Suddenly, in the middle of their lives, when they least expect it, they find themselves having a close encounter with something way beyond them, something uncontrollable, something that might do anything to them. Suddenly they know power, raw power, and they know glory, dazzling glory—and it takes their wits away. Wouldn’t it do the same to you? Who in their right mind would want to see the face of God unveiled?
What else do the two stories told this morning have in common? Sleep. Deep sleep. Abram has been taken on a journey. Abram has exhausted himself slaughtering and sawing up all these animals and now he is asleep in the dark. Peter and John and James have been taken on a journey. They have exhausted themselves climbing a mountain and now they are asleep.
At least we have that in common with our heroes today. We might not have seen terrifying visions of God but we do know what it is to be asleep, to be exhausted and to fall asleep. Maybe we are even better at sleeping than they are because they wake up in the middle of disorienting terror to a world transfigured beyond recognition, a world gone wild. Wouldn’t it have been better to stay asleep? To linger in the shadow kingdom of dreams where all the wildness disappear without trace with daylight? What would they have lost if they hadn’t been awake to be terrified?
Abram wakes to see a pillar of smoke and a pillar of fire, angels of God’s presence, moving between the scattered carcasses of Abram’s sacrifice. In Abram’s day this is how contracts were made. Both parties walked between the split bodies of heifer and goat and ram as if to say “let this be what happens to me if I am not faithful, if I do not keep my word.” But here, as Abram watches in terror, God alone walks the contract into being. Abram has to promise nothing. He has no oath to swear on pain of dismemberment. He only has to witness the oath God swears. “Look to heaven, Abram,” God says, “count the stars. So shall your descendants be.” And God seals the covenant by offering to be torn apart like dead meat if his word should be broken.
On the mountain Peter and co wake to the terror of glory all around them, to the sight of their friend Jesus burning with fire, speaking with long dead prophets, and to a voice calling to them out of a cloud of smoke. “This is my Son, my chosen one. Listen to him.” The same voice which had spoken to Jesus at his baptism: “You are my son, my beloved. My favour rests on you.”
If Abram had slept on he would have missed the promise of God. He would have missed seeing God put God’s very life on the line for the sake of the chosen people. If the disciples had slept on they would have missed the promise of God. They would have missed seeing God claim Jesus as his own beloved child.
If they had slept on they would have missed the terror but they would have also missed the promise.
Who knows what promises we have missed because we have been asleep. We may have missed the terror but at what price in glory? If Lent is about anything it is about waking up. That’s all the fasting and penance and alms-giving are for—like pinching yourself to make yourself wake up. Not because we don’t need sleep but because we need God more. God has a promise for each of us this Lent, a touch of glory. Will we be awake to hear it?