Sermon Archive
Ee, she were bonnie
Sermon preached by John Armes at Holy Communion on 23 March 2008, Easter Day
An old Lancashire lady died and her family pondered long and hard about what to put on her tombstone. She hadn’t been greatly loved nor had she made much of a mark in life. The only thing her family could think of was that she did, occasionally, go to church. Someone had a brainwave. ‘How about “She were thine.”’ ‘Aye,’ said everyone else, ‘That’ll do!’ So, the stonemason was instructed and a week later he proudly displayed his handiwork. The family were dismayed to find that instead of saying “She were thine.” the stone read, “She were thin.” ‘Hey up, lad,’ they said, ‘the ‘e’s missing.’ So the stonemason promised to sort it out. A week later the family assembled again. The ‘e’ was there, all right. This time it read, “Ee, she were thin.”
I was reminded of this story recently when we learned that buried in our graveyard is none other Lesley Baillie, of whom Robert Burns’s wrote his poem Bonnie Lesley.
Thou art a queen, fair Lesley,
Thy subjects we, before thee:
Thou art divine, fair Lesley,
The hearts o' men adore thee.
Mind you, her grave took some finding because her name was spelt Leslie rather than Lesley. Perhaps they worried less about spelling in those days.
I wonder what Lesley herself made of Burns’s poem. For in many ways it tells us more about Robert Burns than it does about Lesley Baillie. Yet, this is all that’s left to us of the lady – and Lesley’s grave will be visited now, not because of who she was but because of who wrote a poem purporting to describe her. Yet, when she died, as her family sat around, as families do, sharing memories of their loved one, I hazard a guess that they had more to say than, ‘Ee she were bonnie!’…
I suppose what I’m getting at is that we only ever remember bits and pieces of a person’s life – for we never experience the totality. Indeed, the verdict of posterity on a person’s life is often eccentric, sometimes unkind and certainly selective: she were thin, she were bonnie. Since we can’t even remember everything that’s happened to us in our own lives we have to resign ourselves to the likelihood that 200 years from now no one will remember anything.
So there’s something reassuring about the thought that God (who’s closer to us than we are to ourselves) might remember everything; that we live in the memory of God. That God alone has the capacity to piece us together, to re-member us, every piece intact and in the right place – literally, that is, to re-assemble all our members and to invigorate them with life. It’s a bit like Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones when the bones are fitted together, given flesh and life breathed into them.
Perhaps this partly explains why, after the resurrection, Jesus’ disciples seem to find it hard to recognize him. Peter may claim (in our first reading) that ‘we are witnesses to all that Jesus did both in Judea and in Jerusalem’, yet Mary mistook Jesus for the gardener, and on more than one occasion the disciples think they’ve met a stranger – not least on a walk to Emmaus when, in spite of a long conversation with him, they only realize it’s Jesus when he breaks bread.
It’s as if the disciples, having watched Jesus die, carrying all their false expectations, all their dubious ambitions, all their bewilderments and prejudices, are simply unable to recognize the Jesus who rises – re-membered by God, not remembered by the disciples. As if his resurrection catches them by surprise before once again they attempt to wrap him in all their layers of false meaning, so that suddenly they see him as they have never seen him before. ‘Do not hold onto me, Mary.’ Don’t hold onto what you thought I was, see me instead now through new eyes.
We too have our illusions and delusions – ways we believe we’ve got Jesus sorted, so that he doesn’t disturb us too much, doesn’t unsettle our habits of mind, our way of life – so that we’re comfortable with him, safe, secure. He was wise, heroic, inspiring and, sadly, dead. Easter, however, is that moment when someone taps us on the shoulder and says, ‘why do you seek the living amongst the dead? He’s not there, not in the tomb, turn around and see him.’
Easter is when we’re asked to turn away from the familiar and predictable and to face the dangerous possibility that God’s love will surprise us – that we haven’t after all got God worked out, that Jesus may come to us too as a stranger. And it is dangerous, not just for the disruption it brings to individual lives, but for the threat it carries for the world. For what if God’s love really is stronger and wider and more generous and more forgiving than all our human shaped religions can conceive? What if God works through, becomes present to us through people who are not only strangers to us but strangers to faith? Dangerous enough to nail a man to a cross – alone against the assembled might of official disapproval. Dangerous enough to change the world.
Our mural this Easter raises the issue of Tibet. It takes that iconic image of Tiananmen Square from the uprising of 1989 of one person standing alone against four tanks, and replaces him with a figure in saffron robes. It’s headed Easter 2008. Someone overheard a mother talking to her little son about the picture. ‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with Easter, she said. Replied her son, ‘Perhaps it’s saying something different about Easter.’
Sensible lad. What it’s trying to say is that the determination of the mighty to grind down and destroy the weak, makes those weak and power-less people incredibly power-ful. The first Easter pitted one man against the world. At Easter 2008 a similarly unequal struggle is going on in Tibet. Dare we find in that something of the same Easter hope that suffering though never avoided may ultimately be transformed?
Easter reminds us that it is God not us who re-members Jesus. And whenever God re-members him he comes to us initially as a stranger in unexpected places. For us, the one reliable place where God re-members Jesus is in the breaking of bread – not in creed or sermon but in that simple meal of bread and wine. In the communion we shall share this morning God re-members Jesus in us – this is my body, you are my body. In the communion God also re-members us, re-makes us, piece by piece, fragment by fragment, in the image of Christ.
So, Easter is a great remembering. It presents to us the dangerous strangeness of God; it assures us that just as God remembers Jesus, gives Jesus life in new and constantly surprising ways, so God also gives life to us, by remembering, remaking Christ in us.
Ee we may be thin, ee we may be bonnie, but it is in God we are made and in Christ we are remade… and, therefore, we have hope.