In his Easter Sermon the Most Rev David Chillingworth, Bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld and\u00a0Dunblane, and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church says:<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2018I have seen the Lord\u2019 – That is Mary\u2019s straightforward and startling personal testimony. She has come to the tomb of Jesus with Simon Peter and with the disciple whom Jesus loved. They have come as people through ages have done \u2013 to come to terms with the loss of somebody deeply loved by caring for their body after their death. But as she weeps in the gloom of the early dawn she has an experience which changes everything. She sees that the tomb is empty. She meets the person whom at first she thinks is the gardener \u2013 but in that transformative meeting he realises that she is in the presence of her Lord. And so she says simply \u2018I have seen the Lord.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is the simplest and the best statement of the Easter Gospel. Not \u2018His body is gone and they say he is risen\u2019. But simply and personally, \u2018I have seen the Lord.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cOur tendency is to approach the Easter Gospel first as if it is about the promise of life after death. And of course it is. I used to feel myself struggling with it at the funeral in church \u2013 the crowded church and coffin of somebody whom I had known and loved over many years. The funeral is about coming to terms with loss and comforting those who are bereaved. But it is also about daring even in the midst of that loss to proclaim resurrection hope. And I can think of myself doing that as all clergy do literally hundreds of times while the voice inside me says, \u2018Do you really believe this \u2013 is this true for you\u2019 And in the end for me it was resolved not by the elegant words of the theologians but by the simple faith of people whom I loved and respected.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut the more immediate Easter Gospel is the promise that the life-giving love of God will always move the stones away from the places of death. And death doesn\u2019t just mean death in the funeral sense \u2013 it means all the dead places which feed corruption, self-interest, deception, duplicity, racism, sexism, suspicion, cynicism, marginalisation, despair, fear and then some more. It is all of those and more which close down hope in life, which tell us that what we most fear will probably happen, that the rich and powerful will always look after themselves at the expense of the rest of us and in particular at the expense of the poor and powerless.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen the stale air of decay meets God\u2019s breath that creates new life and the possibility of hope and peace, death truly is no more.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are living in strange and difficult times. Predictable patterns are dissolving \u2013 assumed consensus is no more. There is in the air a despair about the ability of conventional politics to find answers to some of the big challenges of our age. Migrants and refugees seek hope \u2013 terrorist violence in Nice, Berlin, London and Stockholm brings death and suffering into the midst of ordinary lives on ordinary days \u2013 the agony of Syria continues<\/p>\n
\u201cYet the Easter Gospel faces all that despair and insists that the ways of love will win over the ways of hate. \u2018I have seen the Lord\u2019 confirms that the truth of kindness can be heard over what is callous and dismissive and vindictive. It is a new way of being \u2013 a way of being which is shaped by resurrection, which embodies everything which is life-giving, which is so demonstrative of mercy and so exemplary of the truth of Easter that others too will look into the places of death and find them empty.<\/p>\n
\u201c \u2018I have seen the Lord\u2019 A personal testimony of conviction \u2013 not a worked out statement \u2013 but a telling of it as it is.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In his Easter Sermon the Most Rev David Chillingworth, Bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld and\u00a0Dunblane, and Primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church says: \u201c\u2018I have seen the Lord\u2019 – That is Mary\u2019s straightforward and startling personal testimony. She has come to the tomb of Jesus with Simon Peter and with the disciple whom Jesus loved. […]","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3787,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70740\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}