One of our members died this week He had left London a couple of weeks ago to return to his home in Brazil, and while there, he had a stroke, and died. We got the news by an email late one evening. By the time we heard about his death, the funeral had already happened.
We are sad about his death, though not surprised, as he had been very ill. We recognise and understand the normal reactions to death – we deal with them regularly in a community.
But there is an oddity here, and it is to do with distance. Because he had gone home, and because the funeral had already happened and none of us were able to be there, we have not had our normal processes to acknowledge and make sense of the experience of losing somebody who is part of us.
And it has made me think about Easter – not just about the promise it offers us as we face the brute fact of physical death, but the way in which we encounter it.
We know about our friend’s death only through reports – and indeed, only through one report, which feels rather indirect because it is by email from somebody we don’t really know, and we can’t encounter the reality of the death in any normal way. For those of us who hear the stories of Jesus’ resurrection, there is something similar happens. We don’t see the event – we don’t see the body moving, the tomb being empty, even the encounters with the disciples. We have report. Somebody has told us. And not particularly directly, but through some written stories. It is not a direct experience, but a reported conviction of which we must then make some sense, and work out how we are going to live with the impact of these reports.
Because our friend had already left London, we were not seeing him regularly – and so his death does not change materially our day to day work. But, given that the reports are true, the world is a materially different place. It’s just that, for us here, it doesn’t yet feel it. We only have the reports, we have no direct encounter or experience.
And that is how we encounter resurrection if we encounter it all. We hear the stories. It doesn’t make the world look immediately different. But if it is true, then the world is not the same place – there is something changed.
We could not get to our friend’s funeral. But we will be holding a memorial. There are various reasons for this; it is right that those of us here who loved him have a place to say thank you for him, and to acknowledge his life as a gift from God. Memorials are important places to share stories and re-energise memories.
But in this instance it is also important for we need the ritual, the ceremony to allow us to experience his death and the difference it makes in our lives and in the world.
When we meet for worship as a Christian community, we are doing something similar in terms of resurrection. We need the ritual and ceremony of meeting, of hearing the story, of trying it on and seeing what a difference it makes to the way we know and live in the world, of making it real not just as a story but as something we experience for resurrection to have the impact it can have in our world.
It does raise for us, as those who lead worship, some intriguing question s and demands to do with what we think we are about.