Sermon for Easter Day

Sunday 8th April 2007

Preached by Rev Paul Hewitt

I get emails from all sorts of different quarters, some make you cry, some make you laugh and some simply astound you.

Last month I received the ‘Hubble telescope’s top ten greatest space photographs’, which had been originally printed in the Daily Mail. In colour, they are spectacular. The top one is of the Sombrero Galaxy. It is 28 million light years from Earth and it was voted best picture taken by the Hubble telescope. Underneath the photo it says, ‘The dimensions of the galaxy, officially called M104, are as spectacular as its appearance. It has 800 billion suns and is 50,000 light years across.’

How can you ever get your head around that? Space and time is so vast that it is beyond comprehension; certainly for ordinary mortals. How can anything be 28 million light years from earth, and more extraordinary, how were they able to take a photograph of it?

We say that time is just the earth, spinning on its axis while orbiting our sun. It takes roughly 24 hours to turn and 365 days to orbit the sun. Is it just that simple? If the orbit changed by a fraction and we ended up slightly nearer the sun, we would all burn up. If it were slightly further away, we would all freeze to death. It is a finely balanced working and we can only marvel at it.

The timing seems to be exact and the balance of life seems so precarious.

I put the word “Timing” into Google the other day and I went for the safe option of a definition: the act of measuring the elapsed time of something or someone, and it went on about engine timing, comic timing, phonology, filmmaking, even Stock market timing. Timing is crucial to life and our very existence.

And in all these thoughts of space and time, your mind could get so addled that I felt like the computer in ‘The Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy’ which had fed into it the question, What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything. And it spluttered and choked and eventually it came out with an answer...42!

To come back to earth for a while, who would have thought ten years ago that our political timing would have Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams, sitting down in the same room, at the same table?

Why things happen when they do baffles us continuously. The thing about timing is that you don’t often appreciate it at the time!

I could tell you a joke which I daren’t have used during Holy Week, or even, perhaps ten years ago. The timing would have been terrible and highly inappropriate. I heard of a Church of Ireland Church which had a ‘Songs of Praise’ on Good Friday night. Today, yes, last week, no. If we cannot live through the agony and dereliction of the cross, then we cannot truly realise what Easter Day is all about. Timing is everything.

Do you want to hear the joke? (It has nothing to do with the sermon as such, but it just illustrates how I couldn’t have told it before a glorious and happy Easter Day)

An Irish daughter had not been home for nearly six years. Upon her sudden return, her father cussed her, “Where have you been all this time. Why couldn’t you have written? Your mother and I have been sick with worry about you”.

“I’m so sorry, Dad”, she cried, “but, daddy, I became a prostitute...”

“Ya what? I want you out of here, ya shameless harlot. You’re a disgrace to this family!”

“OK, dad, as you wish. But I just came back to give mum this luxurious fur coat, the title deed to a ten bedroom mansion plus a savings certificate for 2 million euro. For m’ little brother, this gold Rolex and for you, daddy, this Mercedes limited edition convertible that’s parked outside, plus a membership to the country club and an invitation for ya all to spend New Year’s Eve on board my new yacht in the Riviera.”

He looked at his daughter and said, “What was it you said you’d become?

And the girl, crying again, said, “A prostitute, daddy”

“Oh! For goodness sake! Ya scared me half to death, girl. Come and give your ol’ man a hug. I thought ya said ya’d become a Protestant!”

You see what I mean about timing?

We cannot get our heads round such vastness. How could we ever comprehend the vastness of space and time and meaning if it wasn’t grounded in reality; in what we could call the real world?

Romans Chapter 5 verse 6 says this, “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly”. At just the right time – I don’t know what that means; we never appreciate timing at the time, but this mystery of space and time and meaning is grounded in the reality of the cross at Calvary. You’re not asked to understand it; you’re asked to surrender to it.

In Graham Kendrick’s wonderful hymn, ‘The Servant King’, there is a verse that has a most inspired line;

‘Come see his hands and his feet,

the scars that speak of sacrifice,

hands that flung stars into space

to cruel nails surrendered.

This is our God, the Servant King,

he calls us now to follow him,

to bring our lives as a daily offering

of worship to the Servant King.’