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Lent 5. Passiontide - 2020This week we enter into the season called Passiontide in the Church’s calendar. Passiontide is the most solemn season in the church’s year, as our focus shifts to the events leading up to Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion, often called the Passion. The consensus among biblical scholars is that the narratives depicting Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples, his betrayal, trial and subsequent execution are the earliest parts of Jesus’ story to have been written down. The Latin root of the word Passio means suffering. So they are often called ‘Passion Narratives’, because they record the extent of God’s own passionate love for us and all the suffering he is willing to go through on our behalf. So, although we are still in Lent. Indeed, today is also the 5th Sunday of Lent, today our gaze begins to have a second focus as well. We remain in the struggles of the dessert whilst now also looking towards the struggles of the cross. Quite what Easter will feel like this year once we get there, is anyone’s guess. But there is a very wise old theological saying: you cannot get to resurrection, without first walking Calvary. In other words, in order to get to the glorious bit, we have to first work our way through the suffering and pain. This year, that old adage may feel too close for comfort for many of us. It has certainly been one of the strangest fortnights that many of us can remember and it looks as though that’s going to continue for a good time longer. We are all having to come to terms with new ways of living, relating and even how we do church, as we all take the necessary actions to protect ourselves and others from the Coronavirus. Most of us are now faced with prolonged periods of isolation for one reason or another. Isolation is certainly not easy, and the temptation can be to look for distractions to get through the time. We may feel the urge to fill the time doing lots of stuff to help the time pass. I would warn against this. This time of isolation could, and maybe should, be used to slow down. It is an opportunity to reflect on one’s life and reprioritize a little. But we must also be mindful of our physical and mental health. Having a routine in place can really help. Getting up at a regular time each day and having a few things planned at consistent times during each day gives the day structure. This is one of the reasons why, in the Benefice, we are offering prayer at regular times of the day for others to join in through live-streaming online. These are often a part of our structured day as a Benefice, but by live-streaming them, we hope they may be useful to lots of others too. Such committed structure to one’s day is important, because isolation can feel a little like a desert and that can become magnified if we don’t have routine. The dessert can be a very dangerous place to be if we don’t have the right kind of provisions to see us through. We need water, maybe some multipurpose tools, some shelter and we need to be able to cope spiritually and mentally manage the extremes of climate and landscape that we will encounter there. It is no surprise then, that in the Bible the dessert is repeatedly the place where people struggle and can find themselves getting into trouble. According to the biblical narrative, human life is formed of Clay (representing physical matter) and water. Water is necessary, because without it, the clay could not metaphorically speaking be moulded and would shatter as God’s hands tried to shape it. The scientific view would loosely agree with this, because water makes up the vast majority of our bodies and without it we could not live. The dessert is so often seen as a place of confusion and danger in the Bible, precisely because it is arid and lacks water, the essential ingredient to life.The other thing necessary for life, is God’s breath. God breaths into us at the beginning of creation to create life. That means that at the centre of our being there is God, constantly breathing new life into us. Our isolation then is a kind of dessert for us, but it can also be a place of discovery. It is a place where we can become more aware of God’s breath within us. The God who is at the centre of our souls. Nonetheless, if we are not careful, and we don’t take the right resources with us into our dessert of isolation, then we will struggle to find the necessary water of life that we need to get us through healthily. Basic physical supplies are important, but just as important are those things that will keep us both spiritually and mentally healthy. We must make sure that our routines keep our minds nourished and our souls fed. In the next few days, most of you should recieve a ‘Spiritual Survival Pack’ from the benefice. These contain a whole host of materials designed to help during our time in the dessert. If you don’t happen to receive one, and would like one, then just let me know together with your address and I’ll pop one on the post to you. As I have already mentioned, we are also steaming all of our services over the internet for the foreseeable future. This will be especially important as we move into Holy Week together. It is our hope that these things will go some way towards helping as we continue our journey together into the dessert and towards the cross.Today’s Gospel reading, the raising of Lazarus, was all about finding life in arid places. Many scholars believe it a kind of precursor to Jesus’ resurrection – a preparing of the people for the main event yet to come. But more simply, the raising of Lazarus shows us that Jesus gives life, even where life has otherwise been lost and all hope is gone. He is the water, as it were, without which we would simply shrivel in the sun and dry up.When Jesus enters the dessert and is tempted, he is able to resist the Devil and all his devious dominions precisely because he possesses the very water which the deadly dessert wastes where the devil resides cannot dry out. No matter how the Devil tries to manipulate and trick Jesus, his faith and confidence in God the Father remain paramount. It is this Christ, the wellspring of the water of life, that we must continue to drink from, even when we find ourselves deep in arid and isolated wastelands. In today’s Gospel, Lazarus found himself in the most arid and lonely place imaginable, death. A place, by its very definition, void of the moisture needed for life. Jesus, the wellspring of eternal life, brings both Lazarus and us back to a place of living water, a place where even the dead are raised. Amen ................
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