I was in a small, roughly-built church, some eighteen months ago, in a back street in Lumumbashi in the Congo with Bishop Isingoma of Katanga. The ridges, the pot-holes and the mud of the lanes between the little houses down which we’d come had taxed both his all-terrain vehicle and his management of it; and when we got out and the people gathered round, the priest and many of the other adults looked ill and worn down, and most of the children had clearly not met Europeans before – they wanted to touch us but they weren’t sure that it was safe! Inside the church there were benches on the earth floor, a simple altar, and a lectern and a pulpit with the outlines of breeze-blocks showing through the white paint; and to give rhythm to the singing there was a big hollow log resting on an old lorry-wheel which gave out a rich deep sound when someone hit it. On the East wall there was painted a Cross with a Bible on it; and across its top, in French, Jesus’ final triumphant word from the Cross in St. John’s Gospel:

“Tout est accompli - It’s done, complete” (19:30)

No wonder that it is in places, all over the world, like Lumumbashi that churches of all sorts are vibrant and growing; because it was in the kind of situation in which people there live today that Jesus lived and died and was raised to life, and Christian Faith was born and first spread like wild-fire. 

But most of us in Western Europe, most of the time, do not live in fear of soldiers and bandits and police; we do not hear the first words of our Reading from Isaiah like clean water in a desert, like an arm round your shoulder if you’re living with Aids in Rwanda or seeking asylum in Southampton: 

“Do not fear, says the Lord, for I have redeemed you; when you pass through the waters, I will be with you...when you walk through fire you will not be burned..” (43:1-2)

So in this country we can miss the directed immediacy that made and makes the Resurrection of Jesus GOOD NEWS. What is “accomplished, completed, perfected” in Jesus’ Cross and Resurrection is God’s age-long purpose to rescue humankind and all creation from our appallingly destructive cruelty and carelessness and disobedience and from the effects that these have – that we have. And when have people had more opportunity to comprehend the enormity of the effects of our sinfulness, institutional and trans-generational as well as individual, than we who live at the start of this century in the Western, G8 world?

For Christian Faith, the Resurrection of Jesus establishes the New World that human beings everywhere so desperately long for and weep for - forgiveness and the conquest of death, the New Life of freedom and peace, justice, compassion and decency. Like Pilate’s words above his head on the Cross, Jesus’ Resurrection placards that in spite of all continuing appearances “the earth is the Lord’s”: the Governor, the President, the Prime Minister, the one who really counts, is Jesus Christ not whoever exercises and abuses power where you live with your family. God’s Son, having suffered all that you suffer and more, is beside you, within you and among you to see you through whatever you face – and he asks three things in return: that you trust that he has made you one of his partners in his establishing his reign, the New World, everywhere; that you expect to see signs of its reality; and that you seek his help every day to pattern your behaviour on that of your Master.

Twenty-three years or so after Jesus’ Resurrection, Paul’s Christians at Corinth were already thinking that all this was too earthy, that it upset things too much and asked too much of them, that it was too dangerous. In case we’re a bit like them – and we are, with most of our fellow-Christians and in Burundi or Bethlehem as well as here! - we have had read to us that astonishing piece that those Corinthians had read to them. “Now I want to make sure that you have in mind”, it began, “the Gospel that I proclaimed to you, that you received, on which you have taken your stand and through which you are being saved”. (1Cor.15:1-2)

And then Paul quotes, for them and so for us, what is the oldest Christian creed and may be the oldest snippet of Christian composition that we have; it could go right back to Ananias and the frightened, brave little church in Damascus only a very few years after the Resurrection with whom Paul himself first learned Christian Faith. Characteristically, it tells of the Risen Christ’s “being seen” first of all by the Peter who in Jesus’ moment of acute danger had denied knowing him. And then Paul adds his own testimony, for those Corinthians and for us, like Peter’s an astounding story of a person’s being turned around and changed and made who he becomes in his Lord’s service – like so many others all down the centuries and today: “..I persecuted the church of God; but by God’s grace I am what I am, and his grace towards me has not been in vain...it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.”

After that the last line of what was read rings as a probing, enlivening, word to us all: “This is what we proclaim” – present tense, asking of all of us who preach and teach in the church “Is this what you proclaim?”; “and this is what you once committed yourselves to believing”. That presses upon each of us and on every Christian the question “Will I now, this morning and this year and always, have the Risen Christ as my and the world’s Lord? Will you believe that he’ll change you, will you allow and ask him to change you, so that you grow into his character, live his life and represent his Lord-ship at every point in your working, public life and in your political judgements as well as in your personal life and relationships, relying on his presence among us (“when you pass through the waters, I will be with you”)?

Lastly and crucially, to believe in the Resurrection means believing that our Lord has a future for the church in this country that depends on you and me being faithful and imaginative and brave by his inspiration. The Resurrection of Jesus means that he is Lord of this country too. He calls us again, and as perhaps most English Christians have not done for some centuries, to believe in the Lordship of Christ, not in that of those who most influence our culture and our politics, and so influence the minds and hearts of us Christians as well as of others; and our Lord promises to be with us and among us if we will pray for, look for, plan for quite fresh kinds of growth of the Gospel’s influence, and of the Church, in this country.

“Now I want to make sure that you have in mind the Gospel that I proclaimed to you, that you received, on which you have taken your stand and through which you are being saved.......”

Amen.