Easter 2
By Mark Oakley, Sunday 30th March, 2008
Those of you who know your Church year will realise that today, the Sunday after Easter day, is called Low Sunday. But today also has other names: in some places it is known as Thomas Sunday, in others White Sunday or Dominica in albis depositis, that is, the day in which those who had been baptised on Easter eve stopped wearing their white gowns that they had worn at their baptism, and, the one other name for today is Quasimodo Sunday. Now, as a visual aid for the sermon I did look for a hunchbacked bell-ringer but they are not easy to come by in Copenhagen at this time of year. If you remember your Hunchback of Notre Dame, it was on the Sunday after Easter that the boy was left abandoned on the steps of the cathedral and the first words sung in the service on this day used to be Quasi modo geniti infantes, like new born babes long for spiritual milk, and so he was named Quasimodo. Its amazing the things you learn when you go to church!
Now, two years ago I told you about the medieval tradition in some parts of Europe in this week of Easter of what they called risus paschalis when the preacher would encourage the congregation to celebrate the Lord’s resurrection by prolonged laughter and if this was difficult to get going, as I suspect it was, he would tell stories and jokes to help it along. And it appears that these jokes were not sophisticated either – they often had obscene elements. It must have been a bit like Carry On Vicar. It was thought that laughter was the truest response to Christ´s resurrection. Laughter was a promise of redemption, faith was the intuition that the promise was being kept. Laughter leveled, drew people together, revealed our foibles and limits, kept pomposity in check, hinted at something transcendent. It was about the work of resurrection. I hope that there is a court jester employed at the Lambeth Conference, to keep them in check by bashing them on the head with a balloon from time to time. Laughter helps us become the children that Jesus wanted us to become so we might begin to understand him.
At a party once, it is said, Mick Jagger told George Melly: “No George, these aren’t wrinkles on my face – they are laughter lines”. Melly’s answer was: “Nothing’s that funny”. For all the reasons I have given as to why it is good to laugh, and Freud gave a few more as he believed that a good joke helped avoid repression and opened up a person by fighting inhibition, it is easy to see why laughter and resurrection held hands in many pulpits. Otherness breaks into the reality we know. Christ’s resurrection, teaches one carol, is a dancing day, it is a running away from the tomb day, it is a having a picnic with friends on the beach day, it is a sharing peace with one another day, it is an unexpected meeting in a garden with one you thought lost day, it is a laughing day. As today´s hymn says: Hail Easter bright! Ye heavens, laugh and sing! Unfortunately the church hasn’t always been secure enough to laugh. People then see its wrinkles rather than the lines of joy that mark it for ever. I admit, clergy don’t always help. We get used to looking glum in services, po faced, and it spreads. One clergyman in the London diocese was supposed to have the motto – “start each each day with a smile – get it over with”. But when on our best behaviour we are not at our best. And we are not being more serious by not laughing – quite the opposite – truth needs a joker to prize it out: just as the world needs the Christ to show us our soul. Behind our locked doors we need a Christ who intrudes on our fear and speaks peace.
In the resurrection appearances Jesus does not appear in great glory and hype, like Liberace coming up through the floor. He appears to his disciples in the places he was first with them – the seashore, a garden, an upper room, breaking bread – and says in effect it was here we were first together, it was here you denied and left me, but it is here that I am with you again. It is ok, shalom, peace, you can rest and live in my faithfulness, you can have a future in my fidelity towards you. Let´s start again where we began. Believing that you are loveable enough for someone to say such things to you is not always easy. No wonder Thomas doubted. To believe in God we can do, to believe that God believes in us can be hard, but when discovered there is resurrection and our lost familiar places are transformed by his presence. Perfect love casts out fear. It makes us playfully peaceful instead. The words of Jesus are often translated Peace be with you. The Greek says, peace is yours.
Last Sunday I preached about a charity called Music in Hospitals, that enables musicians to play and sing music in hospices and hospitals, reaching parts that medicine doesn´t quite reach. I said that the phrase Music in Hospitals was for me a good description of the resurrection, the playing of the healing melody of a faithful and eternal love to our injured and bruised selves. Those of us who looked at poetry in the Advent Group read one evening a poem by Elizabeth Jennings called Night Sister. It was written after one of the poet´s stays in a psychiatric ward. Jennings was a devout Christian and in this poem which I end with she reflects on a night sister she had observed and known on the ward, but the imagery she uses is in part drawn from the story of Jesus visiting his frightened followers in their locked room. The night sister is Christ-like:
How is it possible not to grow hard,
To build a shell around yourself when you
Have to watch so much pain, and hear it too?
Many you see are puzzled, wounded; few
Are cheerful long. How can you not be scarred?
To view a birth or death seems natural,
But these locked doors, these sudden shouts and tears
Graze all the peaceful skies. A world of fears
Like the ghost-haunting of the owl appears.
And yet you love that stillness and that call.
You have a memory for everyone;
None is anonymous and so you cure
What few with such compassion could endure.
I never met a calling quite so pure.
My fears are silenced by the things you´ve done.
We have grown cynical and often miss
The perfect thing. Embarrassment also
Convinces us we cannot dare to show
Our sickness. But you listen and we know
That you can meet us in our own distress.
