If we kill the truth-tellers
their truth will be resurrected ten-fold
in the generations to come.
Long live the Truth, long live.
Friends,
“Easter is serious. Easter is a demand as well as
a promise. Easter demands not sympathy for the crucified Lord but loyalty to the risen one; it
demands an end to all our complicity in crucifixion.”
– William Sloane Coffin
Easter is serious because to trust in its truth is to affirm that the way of Jesus really is the way of Life. It is to affirm Jesus’ teaching and lived example which pretty much goes against almost all the accepted wisdom of the world.
Like:
Welcome-in strangers. Hang-out with outcasts. Tell the truth regardless. Better to help someone lying in a ditch on a dangerous road than make it in time for church. Don’t hit back. You don’t own what you have. Give and give again without counting the cost. Worry not about tomorrow—not even today. Pray all night. Fall in love with the people who hate you. Fear no-one. Forgive people who are wrong—even if they are really, really wrong. Forgive again. Serve all people—especially the “least”. Make friends with the poor.
This is serious stuff. Easter is serious stuff.
Joyfully disturbed by resurrection,
Alan
—
On this day of Resurrection I invite you to slowly wander through this poem by the Brazilian liberation theologian, Rubem Alves.
What is hope?
It is a presentiment that imagination is more real
and reality less real
than it looks.
It is a hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts
that oppress and repress
is not the last word.
It is a suspicion that reality is more complex
than realism wants us to believe
and that the frontiers of the possible are not determined
by the limits of the actual
and that in a miraculous and unexpected way
life is preparing the creative events
which will open the way to freedom and resurrection . . .
The two, suffering and hope, live from each other.
Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair,
hope without suffering creates illusions, naiveté,
and drunkenness . . .
Let us plant dates
even though those who plant them will never eat them.
We must live by the love of what we will never see.
This is the secret discipline.
It is a refusal to let the creative act be dissolved
in immediate sense experience
and a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren.
Such disciplined love is what has given
prophets, revolutionaries and saints
the courage to die for the future they envisaged.
They make their own bodies the seed of their
highest hope.
– Rubem Alves, Brazil
We raise this banner on Good Friday to highlight the crucifying consequences of State capture. The people involved in State capture not only have dirty hands. They have blood on their hands. They are guilty of theft and the deaths that ensue from their theft. State capture makes a handful of people obscenely rich at the cost of making millions of people excruciatingly poorer. Among these are the vulnerable poor who die from all manner of lack. There are many ways to kill someone. Stealing money that was intended to provide life-giving services is one way. It is often a tortuously ‘slow’ death and those responsible are seldom caught, let alone convicted, for it is difficult to find their fingerprints at the scene, but we want them to know that like Pilate of old, no amount of hand washing will remove the blood stains from their hands. As the prophet Jeremiah says: “The acted shamefully, yet were not ashamed, they did not know how to blush…Therefore they shall fall.” [Jeremiah 6:15].
See 
praying at the Jerusalem’s Western wall.
And then finally some protest theatre against State Capture way back on 12 May 2013 wonderfully coinciding with Ascension Day. I officiated at a wedding. The couple have been in love for a long time and finally decided to come out in the open and get married.