Easter Sermon: 'Woman, Why are you Weeping?'

One of the infuriating things about Jesus was that he had an annoying habit of speaking in questions. He rarely gave a straight answer when anyone questioned him. Instead he asked a question back. Or remained silent. Or did something weird like draw in the sand with his finger, while someone’s life hung in the balance. Or said nothing at all, as when he was questioned before Herod and Pilate on Good Friday. Or he told odd stories, that raised more questions than they answered.

It’s no wonder the disciples so often didn’t get it. At our service here on Maundy Thursday, as we thought about the first Last Supper, we looked at what Jesus asked the disciples then – ‘do you understand what I have done for you?’ And no, they didn’t. Not then. It was just too much to take in, and until the resurrection, just too unbelievable.

Sometimes reading the gospels we might think ‘Oh come ON, Peter! Come ON disciples! How can you possibly not get it when you’ve got Jesus there in front of you? How on earth are we meant to manage?’

But on that first Easter morning, even the least charitable of us might reasonably expect Mary and the other disciples to need some sort of explanation of what’s going on. 

But no. Even the angels, Gods messengers, often the ones who spell God’s messages out, here in John’s gospel join Jesus in speaking in questions.

And not even sensible questions.

‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ ask the angels.

And ‘Woman, why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?’ Jesus asks.

Isn’t it obvious why Mary is weeping, and who she is looking for? Isn’t it weird that Jesus doesn’t just come right out and comfort her, tell her, explain what has happened? ‘Mary! No need to worry. Here I am! This is what I was trying to get at the other night. I had to go through death so that I could conquer its power for ever, for everyone else. But God has raised me, as I always knew and trusted that he would. So everyone can now live for ever with God in heaven – there is no more condemnation for sin, no more need for trying to appease God, and you can now know how much God loves you! Now, go, tell everyone the good news!’

But no. First the angels, then Jesus, start by asking a question – ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’

We don’t know, of course, what tone of voice Jesus asked this question in, how we should read it.

Was it perhaps sympathetic? ‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ 

The nice thing about imagining that, is how it seems to symbolise Jesus coming alongside us in our sufferings and grief. We know he understands what human sadness and desolation are like – he has gone through them himself, not just in his own suffering, but in for example his grief at the death of his friend Lazarus. If he said it like that, maybe this simply means that God, in Jesus, comes alongside us and meets us in our own pain, empathising with it, sympathising with us, before attempting any theologising comfort. God, like a good friend, simply sitting down next to us and putting a metaphorical arm around us when we are sad. And even though he has the best news in the world – the news that does, in this case at least, totally remove the cause for the sadness – he doesn’t rush to share it, but takes the time to take her grief seriously.

Or maybe it was said with affectionate exasperation? ‘Woman! Why (on earth) are you weeping? Here I am standing in front of you!’ 

Sometimes I feel that is the tone of voice that God uses with me when I’m praying: ‘Oh for goodness sake, Miranda! I do love you, but per-lease, you can be slow to catch on sometimes!’

Or perhaps the emphasis is on the ‘why?’. It seems obvious to us, that Mary is weeping because she is distraught at the death of Jesus, and now feels totally lost and helpless because his body is gone and so she can’t even do the simple but important things for his body that she came for. As if you had gone to the cemetery to lay flowers, and simply couldn’t find the grave, and stood weeping with frustration and rage and grief and confusion.

But I wonder… do you remember the last time Jesus spoke to some women about weeping?

In Luke’s account of the crucifixion, he includes the detail that among the crowd following Jesus on the road to the place of crucifixion were many women:

‘women who were beating their breasts and wailing for him. [And] Jesus turned to them and said, ‘Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children. For the days are surely coming when they will say, “Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never nursed.” ³Then they will begin to say to the mountains, “Fall on us”; and to the hills, “Cover us.” ³For if they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?’

So I just wonder, if perhaps Jesus wasn’t just asking a rhetorical question when he asked Mary ‘why’ she was weeping? Was he genuinely asking – why are you crying? Because I said the other day, don’t weep for me – weep for yourselves, for the future, because it is going to get pretty bleak. Which is this? 

As we look around the world and hear some of the horrific stories of persecution coming from Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, people being crucified now, or beheaded, whole families and villages and church communities fleeing for their lives and now living -  if they managed to escape - in refugee camps for the foreseeable future – Jesus’ question seems pretty relevant. As relevant as it would have been to the early Christians for whom the gospels were first written down, in the midst of persecutions and uncertainty.

We can all too easily slip into reading the Easter story, and talking about it, as if the ending is so obvious it is banal. Jesus dies, God raises him from the dead, nobody has to worry about anything any more. Sin sorted, world put to rights, Kingdom ushered in, job done.

But that is to ignore the two millennia of women who have been weeping ever since, and who are still weeping now around the world. Weeping over children dying in infancy. Weeping because they are unable to feed their families. Weeping with sheer, mind-numbing exhaustion and hopelessness at the end of a 16 or 18 hour working day, at the end of which they are as poor, as enslaved, as indebted as they were at the beginning. Weeping over war, over injustice, over death, persecution, weeping with fear, weeping with shame, weeping with loneliness.

Jesus, and the angels, both ask – ‘woman, why are you weeping?’ And I thank God for them taking her – our – all humanity’s - grief seriously, respecting it, recognising it. Not rushing to answer it, or tell her why she is wrong to feel it. God doesn’t just know our sorrows, he notices them. God doesn’t just tell us its all OK, but comes alongside us in our grief and asks us to tell him about it.

Only then does Jesus say something that isn’t a question – but it isn’t an answer either. it’s not even an explanation. It is simply her name. ‘Mary’. And at that, she recognises him, and we imagine, from his next words – ‘don’t hold onto me!’ that she reaches out and hugs him in joy, in recognition, in relief.

And then he sends her out to proclaim the good news that she has seen him, alive, to the rest of their friends. 

(Reference to our new banner of Mary Magdalene, Apostle to the Apostles)

The pattern of Jesus’ meeting with Mary on that first Easter morning is the pattern that I recognise from my own experiences of encountering God, and I wonder if it is one you recognise too?

God meets us when and where we least expect it, in ways we often don’t recognise at first. He is more interested in asking us about ourselves than telling us about himself.  He takes our feelings, positive or negative, seriously. He doesn’t tend to explain. He asks more questions than he answers. And far sooner than we feel ready, he asks us to go and tell other people – tell them things we are hardly sure of ourselves, announce things we feel very unprepared for proclaiming, proclaim things that we really hope we aren’t asked questions about because we don’t feel we know any more than the little we have been told to share.

As the people of Mary Magdalene’s church, let’s hear for ourselves this morning the words that Jesus spoke to her. 

Why are you weeping? What are you sorrows? God hears, and listens, and takes your worries and your pain seriously.

Who are you looking for? Do you want to find Jesus here today? Do you want to meet him in prayer, in bread and wine, in your neighbour? It might seem obvious, but maybe Jesus wants us to articulate it, to name him to ourselves, to be explicit that we are here to find Jesus.

And then he speaks your name. And says:

Now go. Go to my friends, to my brothers and sisters, and tell them that you have seen the Lord.

Schools Easter Service: Frozen

Here's an Easter Service I've just put together with Liz Hollis (a Durham student with me for a few days) for the various schools services we will be having in church this week.

Feel free to use/adapt  if it is helpful!

Frozen: Love Conquers Fear and Death

Opening Song (school bringing)

Show film clip (the bit where Ana stumbles across the ice, nearly frozen, but then swerves away from Christoff to save Elsa)

Get several children to act out the scene:

a.       Hans (with sword)

b.      Christoff (with reindeer soft toy)

c.       Ana

d.      Elsa

e.      Storm! 6+ with strips of blue voile/white flags to wave.

(Storm perform; then Christoff running in slow motion up the aisle from the back; Ana running in slow motion from the altar; hans about to kill Elsa in the middle of the dais.

Ana sees them, diverts from running to Christoof and flings up her arm to stop Hans’ sword.

Storm dies down. Elsa flings arms round Ana.)

Freeze!

Ask the children: Who is showing love? Ask character by character if necessary.

Ask How each character is showing it/what are they doing to show love?

Draw out: Hans just concerned for himself;

                Christoff – running into storm to save Ana, not thinking about his own safety.

                Elsa – forgets her own fears (hence the storm dies down - the snow/ice is an external manifestation of Elsa's fear) when she’s thinking about her grief for Ana/realises how much Ana loves her/realises how much she loves Ana. Ie, isn’t thinking about herself.

                Ana – sacrifices her own chance to live (eg chooses not to run to Christoff) to save Elsa. (Key insight here is that the 'act of true love' that saves Ana is her OWN act of self-sacrifice - not Elsa's hug. She starts to thaw/come back to life almost as soon as she freezes, because her own choice to save Rlsa rather than herself has that redemptive dynamic)

Ask: How is Ana like Jesus here?

Draw out – self sacrifice; death and resurrection.

Bible verse – John 15:13 – ‘No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends’.

So what? God loves us so much that he was prepared to become human for us and die for us.

-          God’s love is stronger than death and bigger than our fears.

-          Frozen is just a lovely story that helps us feel what this is like, but although the story of Jesus is written in a book and films have been made about it, it isn’t just fiction, its something that really happened. Jesus really did die to save us and that love was so strong that it broke through death itself. This happening in real life was something that was so amazing that people are still telling each other about it 2000 years later.

Prayer: either school do, or:

-thank you God for loving us so much;

-thank you for Jesus showing us that your love is stronger than death and all our fears

- help us to love each other as you loved us

- pray for people living in fear, that your love will surround and save them

- pray for the things we are afraid of, that you will keep us safe.

Final song.

World Book Day 2016: A Proposal

World Book Day: a day parents (and perhaps especially mums, on whom the job of childcare still falls disproportionately) dread and support in equal measure.


Support, because we love books and want our children to love books. Dread, because so often World Book Day seems to actually be World Costume Day. Its bad enough getting three children into school uniform, breakfasted, teeth cleaned and out of the house in time for school: having to also get them special costumes is often a step too far.

And that's just from my rather privileged middle-class book-loving household perspective: I can only imagine what its like trying to live up to the pressure if you are barely literate yourself, or have no spare money or a dressing up box lying around to source a costume from.

Surely, World Book Day should be primarily about sharing the joy of reading, not the joy of dressing up?

So my proposal for World Book Day 2016 is simple. Let all schools simply open up the doors of their library (or organise a trip to a local library - while we still can). Children can bring in their own book, of course, but not all are fortunate enough to have them, or access to a good range of them.

Let them each choose a book (or books). No telling them what age range they should be picking from, no telling them a comic book or graphic novel doesn't 'count' - let them enjoy free range reading. Let them pick several, start several, abandon them if they don't enjoy one and try another instead.

And then just let them read ALL DAY. Sitting at their desks, lounging in the library, sprawled on the floor. Encourage them to read a whole book, in one go. A short one if necessary. With support if needed. Or part of a longer one - if a child wants to start The Lord of the Rings for goodness sake don't tell them they need to choose a book they can finish in a day!

A whole day, in school, just lounging around reading. Who's in?

(Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustained_silent_reading shows children in a school in Laos on the first day of a Sustained Silent Reading programme)

'Man Up'

I went to see the musical 'The Book of Mormon' recently. It was brilliant -  I laughed virtually the whole time, until my belly hurt. At the same time as being laugh-out-loud funny, it was remarkably theologically astute and thought-provoking.

And there were several points where, as well as snorting with laughter, I was also wincing. The FGM subplot was one. The 'man up' song was another.

The song comes at the turning point in the plot - Elder Cunningham (the wet you'll-never-amount-to-anything one: 'I'm a follower!') has been deserted  by his golden boy mission companion Elder Price ('We'll do it together - but mainly me') and has to decide whether to give up his mission, or to attempt to make a difference on his own.

'What did Jesus do?' He asks himself. 'Did he give up? No - he manned up, grew a pair, and took the cross on the chin!'

The very, very funny song that followed had my sides hurting, but also made me think: 'this is what we are up against'. Because the musical doesn't really take the piss out of Mormonism per se - it holds up a mirror to, among other things, all religion; evangelistic techniques (even theories of mission); Western attitudes to Africa; Biblical exegesis and much more. It is brilliant, as I said. (How many musicals have you mentally referencing the 5 Marks of Mission and Vincent Donovan?).

The 'Man up' song was a piercing expose of a certain type of hearty Christian chauvinism - in which the answer to Christian feelings of weakness is to 'man up' and 'grow a pair' - because that is, allegedly, what Jesus did.

Where does this leave women? No wonder sexism is so engrained in the churches.

In real Mormonism, all men can be priests - and a woman has recently been excommunicated for suggesting that women might be too. But this isn't just about Mormonism - in the Roman Catholic church, too, public discussion of women's ordination is an excommunicable offence. We have only just agreed that women can be bishops in the Church of England - and even then at the price of accepting that those who don't agree with that will be officially protected from us and deliberately promoted as a 'sign of good faith'. No wonder, if the basic theology of 'man up and grow a pair' is as common, and as fundamental, as it seems to be in our society.

This obsession with testicles is fascinating. I've noticed it recently in the Apprentice - male contestants are constantly telling us they've 'got balls', which they seem to be mainly 'putting on the line'. Those who complain are told to 'grow a pair'. Nobody seems to notice that this is a metaphor that literally and deliberately excludes the women candidates. I actually shouted 'oh, shut up about your testicles!' at the TV one week. (The next week, to my joy, my 13 year old son shouted it first).

In classical culture, the balls - and the semen they contained - were not just metaphorically but also literally believed to be the seat of virility. Eunuchs had their balls cut off, of course, often as a result of losing in a war (presumably, this is what might happen to those balls 'on the line'?). But what uncastrated males did with their balls - or what they contained - was also important. One of the major arguments for celibacy was based on the belief that ejaculation - emitting your semen - literally lessening your manhood. Retaining all that precious virility-juice meant that your manliness would all stay with you.

We don't believe that now - if anything, ejaculation (preferably into a handy female, willing or unwilling, conscious or comatose) seems to be the current standard by which 'virility' is proven. Perhaps to prove that a pair have indeed been grown.

But we still seem to be obsessed with testicles as a symbol of manliness.

So what do women in the church do?

There seem to be two alternatives. One possibility is the historical solution most identified now with Roman Catholicism - men 'man up' and try to imitate Jesus, women 'woman up' and try to imitate Mary. (Interesting, though, isn't it, that 'woman up' isn't a thing.) Womanly religion becomes about being willingly receptive - literally and metaphorically - to the seed (hence no contraception, and no women teaching, are linked theologically). Women are allowed to be strong, so long as that strength is shown in patiently enduring suffering. But any form of initiative, leadership or authority is 'unnatural', because it is not 'womanly'. We don't have a pair (breasts don't seem to count in this taxonomy), and shouldn't try to grow them.

The second possibility is that we challenge this whole 'man up' paradigm. We point out it is based on faulty, medieval biology - which believed that the womb was simply a ploughed field in which the seed was planted, and knew nothing of the ovum and women's 50/50 participation in the act of conception and the child's genetic inheritance. We point out that a pair of breasts was needed for the incarnation to work (otherwise the infant Jesus wouldn't have lasted long) - whereas, at least on an orthodox understanding of the virgin birth, a pair of testicles wasn't. We can note that Jesus didn't, really, 'man up': rather he 'womaned up' on the understanding of the time, as he became passively receptive to his fate (some commentators suggest that disappointment at his lack of manning up is what led Judas to betray him). We could remind ourselves, indeed, that the male disciples waited fearfully in a locked room, while the women braved arrest and execution by going to his tomb, which they knew to be under armed guard.

We might even point out - not least to contestants on the Apprentice - that testicles are remarkably weak, vulnerable things. By contrast the breasts, ovaries and uterus are remarkably strong, resilient organs.

Oh, but if we say these things we are feminists out of control.

Which rather begs the question, Out of whose control? Sounds like a good thing to me.

Discipleship

This has suddenly become a hotly contested word in the world of the Church of England! It is the subject of a big new Report to General Synod, and an article by Angela Tilby in this week's Church Times argues it isn't a word we should be using.

This wasn't originally written with that debate in mind: it is what I wrote back in January for our February church magazine, as Discipleship is our PCC priority this year!

I wonder what the word 'discipleship' means to you?

'Discipleship' might make you think of Jesus's first disciples. People like Andrew the fisherman, or Matthew the tax collector, who dropped everything when Jesus called them to follow him. They left families, careers and everything else behind, to wander around Galilee following wherever Jesus took them. Does discipleship have a meaning like this for you - making it perhaps not entirely a pleasant idea? You may remember songs and stories about the calling of the first disciples: perhaps -

In simple faith, like them who heard
Beside the Syrian Sea
The faithful calling of the Lord
Let us, like them, without a word,
Rise up and follow thee.

Or you might think of the story of Mary and Martha. Martha, who is busy making the tea and cleaning the kitchen, gets annoyed with her sister Mary who is instead sitting at Jesus's feet and learning from him. The original meaning of the word disciple is something like learner - that's why Jesus's first disciples sometimes called him 'Teacher'. A disciple is a learner - but this isn't learning from books, it is learning by spending a lot of time with your teacher and trying to be as much like them as possible.

Or maybe the image that comes to mind is something like Leonardo Da Vinci's famous painting of the Last Supper? A group scene, with 12 disciples (the number 12 representing the 12 historic tribes of Israel, and so expressing the ideal that all people would recognise and follow Jesus). They didn't always get on or agree, they sometimes even quarrelled over who was the greatest, and more than one of them let Jesus down at critical points in his story - but for better or worse they were the group, called together by Jesus, to be the very beginnings of the church.

Discipleship is one of Bishop Paul's priorities for our diocese this year, and is Belmont PCC's single-word priority for 2015, so it is worth asking ourselves what it really means. Then we can all work together on how to do it - and do it better!

It certainly seems to me that it includes something of all those three elements: being called to make God a priority in our lives - learning by spending time with Jesus - and being the church together with all the other people who have been called in this place.

What could you do this year to help you be a better disciple of Jesus? Which of those three areas might be your focus?

Bishop Libby: Feeling Like A Whole Church

I'm blogging unfashionably late on Bishop Libby's consecration. It's not news anymore, and for that I am thankful - that it has become so normal, so quickly, to have a woman among our bishops shows how right and overdue this was.

It has taken me a couple of days to sort through my feelings. Some of them have taken me surprise.

It was - astounding to be there, in the minster, as Libby was consecrated. I felt nervous, as if something was bound to go wrong, to stop it happening. It didn't feel as if this day could really have come. There was the inevitable objection, of course. But when it came, the pathetic lone voice against the echoing joy of the affirmation of the 2000 strong congregation served only to emphasise just how right and welcome this was.

What took me by surprise was my emotion at the moment when +Libby was consecrated. Tears came to me, so that I could only nod and smile, not speak, when an older, male priest next to me turned and said to me, as the bishops hands left her head, 'At last, we're part of a whole church'.

Why was it so emotional? Partly, the satisfaction of something achieved, a task laid down. Partly, the enormity of watching history in the making. But mostly, I think, an overwhelming feeling that somehow my own ordination was changed in that moment. Now it was complete - I was finally ordained in the same sense as men have always been. It felt that something we had hardly noticed was missing had been restored, to me and to all women, in that moment of grace.

Others clearly felt the same. Many women have said how profoundly they felt that moment. And not just women - many men, like the man next to me, have said similar things. Our ordination feels complete, whole, healed.

Taking communion immediately after the consecration felt amazing. I was so conscious of this being the first time we had eaten and drunk Christ's meal together as this new, healed church. That was the first communion of the rest of our lives.

But the greatest surprise was how I felt about our opponents. They may tell me I'm completely wrong about what follows - so I stand open to being corrected here - but I wonder if I perhaps empathise rather more, now, with those who feel that their ordination is somewhat diminished or diluted by the addition of women to the mix?

Having felt, in that moment, this new sense of completion, I wonder if they have been feeling the reverse, all this time? As if having women priests, and now a woman bishop, lessens the validity of their ordination compared to that that men have always had in the past? Is that the emotional reality that all this talk of 'impaired communion' is trying to express?

In the interests of honesty, I have to say that this new sense of empathy doesn't mean my heart is bleeding for them! I am trying very hard to resist the temptation to say - and feel - that it's their turn to feel like that. I'm only succeeding about half the time.

But I am wondering how - if there's any truth in this empathy - we can stop this feeling like a zero-sum game. I wonder if that's what the Archbishop of York is trying to do, in giving into the demands of Forward in Faith to hold off from laying hands on Philip North at his consecration next week? Is he hoping to let people who currently feel like losers feel that they've won something?

Nice idea, but this isn't about winning and losing. It's about feelings. And just as my mum always used to tell me 'two wrongs don't make a right', I'm sure that two hurt feelings don't make for a whole church.

Indeed, I fear that decision may in fact play into such rhetoric of 'winners and losers' and actually entrench the feelings of hurt and diminishment that it was perhaps intended to alleviate. It will sadly also mean that diminishment being enacted, as one consecration with over 100 joyful co-consecrators is contrasted with another, rather sad and lonely one.

I don't know how we go about healing hurt feelings, but my instinct - perhaps my instinct as a mum - tells me that such a 'there, there, have some sweets'  response is almost certainly inadequate. Prayer, I guess, and more prayer. And I can't help feeling that the answer to feelings of impairment of communion is not less communion, but more of it.