Living in Resurrection

Please note:

This script cannot exactly reflect the transmission, as it was prepared before the service was broadcast. It may include editorial notes prepared by the producer, and minor spelling and other errors that were corrected before the radio broadcast.

It may contain gaps to be filled in at the time so that prayers may reflect the needs of the world, and changes may also be made at the last minute for timing reasons, or to reflect current events.

Opening anno

BBC Radio 4. And now for this week’s Sunday Worship we go live to Tabernacl Baptist Church in the heart of Cardiff City Centre where the Minister, the Rev’d Denzil John and the preacher the Rev’d Roy Jenkins reflect on the theme of “Living in the Resurrection”. The service begins with the hymn “Good Christians All, rejoice and sing”.

ITEM 1 HYMN 1 CHOIR/ORGAN

Good Christians all, rejoice and sing! Tune: Vulpius.

ITEM 2 INTRO ROY JENKINS

Good morning and welcome to Cardiff. Easter might seem a very long time ago: the greatest of festivals marks the events which split history in two And two Sundays on… the world looks very much the same. From Port Talbot to Panama, the news can still depress us. Our own problems haven’t gone away. Life isn’t any simpler.

But resurrection isn’t simply a date in a calendar, a doctrine to be affirmed. Christians believe it’s a reality to be lived. To be lived therefore through all the joys and sorrows of human experience, through whatever mess and confusion and anxiety any day might throw at us.

And it’s a cause for celebration which the whole universe shares, one which is meant never to end. In the words of the Orthodox Easter liturgy.

ITEM 3 READING

It is fitting that the heavens should rejoice and that the earth should be glad, and that the whole world, both visible and invisible, should keep the feast. For Christ is risen, the everlasting joy. Now all things are filled with light, heaven and earth and all places under the earth. All creation celebrates the resurrection of Christ.

ITEM 4 LINK ROY

This morning we try to explore just a little of what living the resurrection might mean; and the minister of this church, the Rev Denzil John, takes up the theme after our next hymn.: Christ is alive, let Christians sing.

ITEM 5 HYMN 2 CHOIR/ORGAN

Christ is alive! Let Christians sing Tune: Truro

ITEM 6 PRAYER DENZIL

Risen Lord Jesus, source of life and conqueror of death, we bless you for the love which took you to the cross for the world and for its renewing. We rejoice in the power of weakness by which you save us, and in the mighty power by which you were raised. Grant us grace to pursue your way and to share your life. And in the words you taught us we say:

DENZIL + CHOIR

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory. For ever and ever. Amen.

ITEM 7 LINK DENZIL

For the apostle Paul, the resurrection of Jesus Christ was central. Without it, he tells his readers, we have nothing to preach and you have nothing to believe: ‘If our hope in Christ is good for this life only and no more, then we deserve more pity than anyone else in all the world.’ We read the opening of the fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the Christians in Corinth, in which he sets out his conviction.

ITEM 8 SUNG ACCLAMATION: CHOIR/ORGAN

Diolch y Ti

ITEM 9 READING I Cor.15: 3-8 15-19

I passed on to you what I received, which is of the greatest importance: that Christ died for our sins, as written in the scriptures; that he was buried and that he was raised to life three days later, as written in the scriptures; that he appeared to Peter and then to all twelve apostles.

Then he appeared to more than five hundred of his followers at once, most of whom are still alive, although some have died. Then he appeared to James, and afterwards to all the apostles.

Last of all he appeared also to me.

But if it is true that the dead are not raised to life, then he did not raise Christ. For if the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is a delusion and you are still lost in your sins. It would also mean that the believers in Christ who have died are lost. If our hope in Christ is good for this life only and no more, then we deserve more pity than anyone else in all the world.

ITEM 10 SUNG ACCLAMATION CHOIR/ORGAN

Diolch y Ti

ITEM 11 LINK DENZIL

‘Diolch i Ti yr hollalluog Duw’ : ‘Thanks be to you, Almighty God, for the holy gospel’

That gospel is built around the fact that Jesus left his grave, and that over a period many of his followers saw him: he spoke to them, shared meals, invited at least one to touch him.

That’s not how we encounter the risen Christ today. Yes, there might be moments when we feel our spirits lifted…and we might choose to believe that it’s his presence giving us strength to carry on. But we can’t prove that.

We might still be left with a thousand questions, about faith, about the world as it is, about what’s happening in our own lives - all kinds of doubts and uncertainties which aren’t simply banished by some overwhelming spiritual experience. God seems far away, unreachable. We might feel like the man in the R.S.Thomas poem, alone in church, and wondering whether God is hiding there, ‘testing his faith on emptiness, nailing his questions one by one to an untenanted cross.’

It’s a powerful image; uncertainties can remain even as we kneel before an untenanted cross and an empty tomb. Like it or not, there’s no avoiding the need to trust. We’re invited to take the risk, to reach out to the one who offers life and masters death: Dyma gariad fel y moroedd, William Rees’s hymn, written in Welsh, is now sung around the world as Here is love vast as the ocean, loving kindness as the flood.

ITEM 12 HYMN 3 CHOIR/ORGAN

Here is love/ Dyma gariad

ITEM 13 SERMON 1 ROY

This month sees the 30th anniversary of the nuclear explosion at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine. Three weeks after that disaster, amid great uncertainty, I was in the Soviet Union for the first time. It was a visit which gave me a fresh perspective on resurrection.

We were a party of British and Irish Christians meeting members of Soviet churches, and it was Easter, so we spent quite a lot of time in services.

The music was glorious: deep, rich tones which filled great cathedrals, grand liturgy and classical arias and the simple piety of What a Friend we have in Jesus, magnificent sound which simultaneously chilled the spine and warmed the heart.

But it was one proclamation which will stay with me forever. Whether we were with Orthodox or Baptist or Catholic, the service would be punctuated with the shout, ‘Kristos voskrese’ - Christ is risen; and back from the congregation would come with great passion, ‘Ystynno voskrese’ - ‘He is risen indeed.’

It came from elderly women who stood for three hours at a time, lighting their candles, kissing the ikons, crossing themselves with dexterity - who could tell what they’d lost, what suffering they’d seen? It came from younger people making a conscious decision to live as nonconformists in a state which taught atheism as a creed; risking discrimination in work, education, housing. They would have known that few churches were open, and hundreds of their fellow-believers languished in prison or labour camp for acting out the teaching of their faith.

Christ is risen, they asserted - it was the reality which had sustained them.

We moved on to a mandatory visit to a cathedral converted into a state museum - a museum of atheism. Gloomy and dust-strewn, it was designed to show the folly of religion of all kinds. We remained polite, but unimpressed.

Twenty years later I was back in that same building. It was bustling, with long queues for candles, and services taking place in the side chapels. Outside, over the huge colonnades facing Nevsky Prospekt, the main street in the centre of St.Petersburg, was a familiar message in lettering maybe ten feet high, Kristos voskrese - ystunno voskrese. The Christ who walked out of a grave certainly won’t be contained in a museum.

Which doesn’t mean that all is straightforward for all religious believers in Russia and other republics of the former Soviet Union. New freedoms present new challenges, alongside variations on the old ones. How do you use what influence you have? To what extent do you trim your principles to avoid confrontation with those who have real power? How do you treat your own dissenters, and those most likely to be marginalised?

We might ask such questions no less sharply in our own country. Our answers might reveal how much we line up with the Christ of cross and resurrection….about whom, whatever the pressures, the celebration continues.

ITEM 14 SONG CHOIR/ORGAN

Arr: Bob Chilcott My life flows on in endless song

ITEM 15 SERMON 2 ROY

How can I keep from singing, indeed, and living the resurrection implies thankfulness, joy, even through great suffering. I’ll never forget the elderly couple I used to visit regularly. He’d had a stroke in his early sixties. She insisted on caring for him at home, and for twenty years, in failing health herself, she struggled to see to his needs. He could speak very little, but often when we took communion together and remembered the presence of the crucified and risen Christ, he would beam cherubically, and whisper ‘God is good, God is good.’

They lived out the advice Paul offers his readers at the end of his long discussion of resurrection. In the light of all this, he urges, ‘Stand firm and steady.’ It sounds a counsel of perfection when we know we can be weak, vacillating, swayed by self-interest and the loudest and most recent opinion we’ve heard.

But this invitation has nothing to do with confident self-sufficiency. It takes for granted our dependence. Through his own weakness and suffering Christ opens up new beginnings, in apparently impossible situations. He offers courage to stand firm, however hesitant our grasp on his way, however subtle the pressures to give up, to conform, to sell out, to lie low.

But then the apostle offers what sounds suspiciously like an activists’ charter. ‘Keep busy always in your work for the Lord’/ Work without limit. There is indeed no end to the work we might do, and we might admire people with the dedication to pour themselves out for others: to build unlikely friendships, campaign for justice, support victims, share their faith, speak truth to power.

Unlike most of us, they often seem not to require much sleep.

There’s no virtue, however, in self-imposed martyrdom (especially when other people - often those nearest - have to pick up part of the bill).

John Henry Newman’s words offer a sense of proportion. ‘To take up the cross of Christ is no great action done once for all; it consists in the continual practice of small duties which are distasteful to us’. At the most basic of levels, this might be about continuing to work on tasks which are necessary but boring, turning up, clearing up, speaking up; it’s about relating to difficult people without bitterness or superiority It’s about learning to forgive as God has forgiven us. Keeping busy at that doesn’t imply wearing ourselves ragged, just sticking at it.

But it helps if we try to keep it in perspective, and Paul suggests how: ‘ Nothing you do in the Lord’s service is ever wasted’/in vain.

Of course we can waste time, energy, resources. We can fool ourselves that our great venture is what heaven wants and the world needs, when the reality might be that it’s all about us. We can get it very wrong. Yet the God who knows our hearts can work even through our weakness and failings, to fashion something good. Love is never wasted. And what’s prompted by love is never too small, too insignificant to matter.

One of the most humbling features of the migration now changing the face of Europe has been the response of some very poor people. When desperate men, women and children have landed after perilous sea crossings, villagers have shared what they have: they’ve cooked, welcomed, tried to make sure the exhausted, often traumatised, newcomers are cared for. Alongside understandable wariness, and some resistance, many have simply done what they could.

I’m glad that a striking symbol of their response is now in the British Museum. It’s a cross made on the Sicilian island of Lampadusa. The carpenter Francesco Tuccio met Eritrean migrants in church weeping for those they’d lost on their terrible crossing: 366 died when their boat sank. Frustrated that he couldn’t offer more practical help, Francesco collected driftwood from the wreckage of other boats, and from it he carved small crosses to offer every migrant a symbol of their rescue and of hope. He also hewed a rough cross to stand above the altar from timber which smelt, he said, ‘of salt, sea and suffering.’ As word spread and commissions came in, his simple gesture which began as a reaching out in compassion, has told the message powerfully around the world.

Living the resurrection involves creating what we can with the resources we’ve been given, and not worrying too much at the outcome. Doing what’s right is never wasted.

St John used his enforced exile on the Greek island of Patmos to write the Book of Revelation. That offers us the vision of a new heaven and a new earth, with God at the centre: ‘and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.’ It will happen, we’re assured - and until it does, it’s the vision to draw us on, working against all that represents death, and giving ourselves for all that builds up life. Living the resurrection, that is.

ITEM 16 LINK DENZIL

We come now with our prayers for the world and for ourselves, beginning with a hymn which invites us to focus on those suffering for their faith: Pray for the Church afflicted and oppressed.

ITEM 17 HYMN 4 CHOIR/ORGAN

Pray for the Church afflicted and oppressed Tune: Song 1 Orlando Gibbons

ITEM 18 PRAYERS

Lord Jesus, we pray for all who suffer because they take your way of love: surrendering themselves to care for people in need, enduring hardship to stand for justice and truth. Strengthen their faith, calm their hearts, renew their hope. And grant us grace to learn from them and to love like them.

Lord, have mercy

SUNG RESPONSE: CHOIR Kyrie eleison

READER

Risen Lord, we remember all who take perilous journeys to escape war, repression and poverty. We pray for those who offer support and welcome, for all who seek to keep peace or to make peace; and for all whose decisions mean life or death for others. Grant them wisdom to know what is right, and courage to do it.

Lord, have mercy

SUNG RESPONSE CHOIR Kyrie eleison

READER

Living Lord, open the eyes of all who cannot recognise you alongside them: those weighed down by their own cares, and the troubles of the world; those who have been hurt many times, and are fearful of fresh disappointment; those who cannot grasp that you go on loving them whatever they have been or done or said. Give them grace to trust.

Lord, have mercy

SUNG RESPONSE CHOIR Kyrie eleison

READER

Lord of life and conqueror of death, we pray for all whose earthly end is near, and for loved ones who watch and feel helpless. Ease their pain, relieve their anxiety, banish their fear. As you hold them in your loving embrace, enable them to know that you are indeed the Resurrection and the Life.

Lord, have mercy

SUNG RESPONSE CHOIR Kyrie eleison

ITEM 19 LINK DENZIL

‘No work for him is vain, no faith in him mistaken’ - our closing hymn: This joyful Eastertide, what need is there for grieving?’

ITEM 20 HYMN 5 CHOIR/ORGAN

This joyful Eastertide Tune: Vruechten

ITEM 21 BLESSING ROY

BLESSING 1

Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honour and power and might be to our God for ever and ever.

BLESSING 2

As we go forth in your name, Lord

grant that we may live faithfully, joyfully and courageously.

Through us, may your light shine and your love be made visible.

Send us out in the power of your Spirit, that by our living the world may discover your gift of life in all its fullness.

BLESSING 3

Gras ein Harglwydd Iesu Grist, a chariad Duw, a chymdeithas yr Ysbryd Glan a fyddo gyd ni oll.

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all now and forever. Amen.

ITEM 22 ORGAN PLAYOUT JANICE BALL

Closing Anno from R4

Today’s Sunday Worship came live from Tabernacl Baptist Church, Cardiff and was led by the Minister, the Rev’d Denzil John. The preacher was the Rev’d Roy Jenkins. The Cardiff Ardwyn Singers were directed by David Michael Leggett and the accompanist was Janice Ball. The producer was Karen Walker.

Next week Students and staff of St Catharine’s College Cambridge andProfessor of theology Catherine Pickstock reflect on ‘Hallowed be thy name’ from the Lord’s Prayer.