Posts tagged Magazine Article

“Christ is Risen.”

We met on a grey, cold evening to light our fire.   The flames soon got going, and began to scatter the darkness of the night sky.   We blessed the fire, and then our paschal candle was lit from its flames.    Carrying the candle high, we then entered a darkened Church and proclaimed at the top of our voices:  Christ is Risen!

The Church was soon lit up as light was passed from light, candle to candle, all taken from the great paschal candle.     We saw before our eyes a visual demonstration of how Easter works.   Easter spreads.  It burns up the night, and just a tiny Easter flame gets rid of a whole lot of darkness.

That’s how we celebrated our first part of Easter in S. David’s and S. Timothy’s, and for us, that celebration just keeps on going.  Easter is a fifty day season which lasts right up to Pentecost.  We are now in Eastertide, which takes up a seventh of the Church’s year.

We need such a long time to keep celebrating it, because our eyes and hearts have a very un-Easter default setting.   A lot of the time, our horizons are stuck sometime between Good Friday to Holy Saturday, and that’s very understandable.  It’s not as if these things aren’t real; it’s not as if spectacularly bad things don’t often happen to very good people.

The Christian knows this.  She knows that the darkness in this world is indeed very great.  It’s just that she refuses to live by it, be defined by it or be ruled by it.

The Christian knows the dangerous, subversive truth that darkness, sadness, addiction, separation, pain –even death itself, doesn’t get to have the last word.    Jesus has risen, Easter has landed, and so the last word is always going to be spoken by Love.   The personal reality of Jesus’ risen presence in our lives convicts us of this living truth.

With a mischievous sense of joy, a Christian is therefore someone who goes around lighting fires.   Our faith commands it.     With faith in the Risen one, we light fires of hope and love in dark places, spreading the truth that the message of Easter means the victory of life for all of God’s children.

We are children of the resurrection.   That means more than believing that Jesus rose from the dead.  It means trusting in our daily lives that this is true, and allowing that truth to burn our fears, our anguish, our sorrows.

May the Light of the Risen One keep burning in you.

Fr. Jesse

Xristos Voskrese!

The Communist speaker paused for breath, before delivering his final conclusion.  “Citizens!  Hear me!  God is make believe, the Church is a lie, and  Jesus was just a man, who died 2000 years ago”. 

A very old and frail Russian priest then raised his hand, and asked if he could say just two words. “Well” the speaker thought, “what harm can this old fool do with two words?” 

So the elderly priest struggled to the stage, to speak his two words.  He looked up over the crowd and, with a mischievous smile, shouted:  “Xristos Voskrese!” (Christ is Risen!)  Back came the roar of the crowd “Vaistinu Voskrese!”  (He is risen indeed!).

With those two little words, the Russian people had been declaring their Easter faith in the risen Jesus.   Clever words were no match for that deep trust and that life-giving faith.

Unlike those Russians under communism, we haven’t been persecuted for our faith.   If you’ve seen any of the old films about the Church, you’d have seen Christians being thrown to the Lions by the Roman Governors and Emperors.  In the early days of the Church Christians worshipped secretly in the catacombs -  the graves and tombs of the ancient cities.  They would hide out there, and meet there to avoid arrest and death.

 Can you imagine that?  Can you imagine people hating us for being Christians? 

What made those early Christians, and those Russian Chistians put up with all of that? 

There’s only one thing I know that makes people that brave, and that’s Love.  You’ll do anything for someone who Loves you.  You’ll bear anything for the one who loves you through and through. 

In the risen Jesus, those Christians met someone who Loved them with a power stronger than death.  They met someone who said, “See the nail marks in my hands and my side and my feet.  I died, and I rise again to live with you”. 

Our fellow Christians simply could not give up on Jesus, the One who Loved this much.

The biggest obstacle in our Christians lives is not persecution, it’s doubt, it’s a lack of faith.  We don’t really believe that the gospel, the good news of Jesus, is for us.  We find it almost impossible to believe that we are personally included in the saving power of Jesus’ death and resurrection.   We don’t really have faith that we could be loved that much. 

The hardest part of the Christian faith is therefore the easiest part.  It’s believing that you are loved.  The Risen Christ says to us: “how can you doubt me, look at my hands and my feet and my side, it was for you.”  In this season of Easter, God wants you to know that the good news, the gospel, is for us, for you personally, for all.     What the Risen Christ says to the disciples, he says to each one of us.  Doubt no longer, believe!

Xpistos Voskrese!  Vaistinu Voskrese!

Fr. Jesse

The Victorians got some things wrong but some things right. When they built public buildings and works they built them well and they built them beautifully. Consider that the London sewage works were constructed beautifully and, aside from those working down there, nobody would ever really get to see them. Consider that they believed in creating and maintaining beautiful buildings not for themselves but as a legacy for other people to enjoy throughout the years. These would have come at a price, and generous benefactors and community members would contribute their own money for this purpose. So what has this got to do with the parish?

Well, we have two wonderful buildings that are beautiful in their own way. They provide the means for people to gather together; for worship, for celebration, for youth clubs, for community groups, for fun and for remembrance. The churches of St Timothy’s and St David’s are both its people and its buildings.

Just like those beautiful works that not everyone gets to see, attached to our church we have those activities, ‘goings on’ and ‘works’ that we don’t all get to see, but are linked to, because we are the people who make up this parish.

 I was struck by Peter Rosser’s gentle plea about church finances. If we want to continue to ‘do’ and to ‘have’ these beautiful works we need to pay for them. To be generous ourselves. This is not to suggest that we aren’t already generous, but perhaps we could each consider the financial sacrifice we make towards all this.

It is not about the actual amount we each give – it is about the proportion of our money that we can give. To ‘tithe’ is to give 10% of your money to support the Christian church. This can take many forms including supporting individuals, donating to charities and in our monthly/weekly parish donations.

Perhaps we need to stop and take a moment to really reflect on this. Maybe you’ll feel you have got it right. Maybe you’ll see you’ve got the balance wrong and realise you sacrifice too much at the expense of other important things. But maybe you’ll realise that you can and should give more. For if the sacrifices don’t come from us, then it will show itself in the many forms of ‘works’ that make up the church in Caerau with Ely. This is about the beautiful legacy we are making and will leave for generations to come. So let’s make sure we have got it right.

Sophie Hallett