Grace to you
Today we will begin worship with the joyful announcement: Christ is risen! And the instant response: Christ is risen indeed!
Yes indeed, Christ is risen and roaming, seeking the lost and searching for the lonely, convicting the stubborn and humbling the proud, liberating the oppressed and embracing the marginalised, touching the outcast and healing the broken, en-couraging the fearful and even giving birth to people again and again … and again.
Yes Jesus is risen indeed and he is still coming out of the tomb to call us by name to new life.
In a sermon two weeks ago I read from St Augustine’s Confessions – here are his words. I invite you to read them in the light of Resurrection. In the light of Jesus seeking Augustine out from the inside and releasing (resurrecting) Augustine to fall in love – better late than never. Augustine’s freshly “fallen-in-love-life” is a beautiful sign of Jesus’ living and loving presence in the world.
Where did I find you in order to make your acquaintance in the first place? You could not have been in my memory before I learned to know you. Where then could I have found you in order to learn of you, if not in yourself, far above me? “Place” has here no meaning: further away from you or toward you we may travel, but place there is none. O Truth, you hold sovereign sway over all who turn to you for counsel, and to all of them you respond at the same time, however diverse their pleas.
Clear is your response, but not all hear it clearly. They all appeal to you about what they want, but do not always hear what they want to hear. Your best servant is the one who is less intent on hearing from you what accords with his own will, and more on embracing with his will what he has heard from you.
Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! Lo, you were within, but I outside, seeking there for you, and upon the shapely things you have made I rushed headlong – I, misshapen. You were with me, but I was not with you. They held me back far from you, those things which would have no being, were they not in you. You called, shouted, broke through my deafness; you flared, blazed, banished my blindness; you lavished your fragrance, I gasped; and now I pant for you; I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst; you touched me, and I burned for your peace. When at last I cling to you with my whole being there will be no more anguish or labour for me, and my life will be alive indeed, alive because filled with you.
Grace, Alan
