Through the door

Some of you will be aware that I have recently celebrated, which is not really the right word, but it will have to do, I have recently celebrated my sixtieth birthday. Yes, you’re surprised: you thought that event was quite some time in the past already, obvious not long after the mice got to the portrait in the attic. Certainly, certain parts of my body- principally the eyes and ears- have already shot straight past the start of old age into the twilight years where time is counted not in days and weeks but medical tests and hospital appointments. But still, in common with pretty much everyone who has reached three score birthdays it seems, odd, surreal to be the same age as old people. Suddenly, I’m living for real the last part of In Search of Lost Time where Proust returns after the war to the salons of his youth, only to find that nobody told him tonight is a fancy dress party and everybody has decided to come as old people. I understand, now, what he was on about. The day after my birthday I came back home after morning prayer to see the heart-sinking deep-breath-time sight of an old tramp ringing on the Rectory doorbell; said vagrant turned out to be my three-years older brother come to wish me a belated many happy returns. He’s a long way from being a tramp by the way but age seems to make even the most expensive clothes look like dish rags. Anyway, there was my really-quite-old-now older brother and pretentious as I am I immediately thought ‘this is just like Marcel’s modernist masterpiece… though without the literary brilliance and set in Beddington instead of Paris and minus the elegant veneer of the French language. But you can’t have everything in life. Just the depressing things.

On top of the sense of unreality I believe affects most who can claim their Senior’s Oyster Card, I’m also surprised to have reached this age. That is the silver lining in my particular geriatric cloud. For most of my twenties and thirties I seriously didn’t expect to reach forty. This was not me considering the historical fact that most humans who have ever lived haven’t lived to two score years: even I’m aware, we’re not living in the Middle Ages. (I’m certainly not now). Nor was my low life self-expectancy expectation a nod to my naturally gloomy disposition; instead, it was testament to the reality that time on earth for gay men in the 1980s and 90s was often short. Many of my friends, contemporaries and acquaintances were long gone before their life began, if it is the case, as the cliché goes, that life begins at forty. So, I didn’t expect to get this far but I have: that’s the up side- fifty per cent extra than expected, so far. The down side is there’s probably no more than twenty per cent max of my time on this planet left— and even then that percentage assumes I’d be outliving my father and his father before him, neither of whom notched up two score years and ten. My grandfather didn’t even get his pension, though as I’m reliant on the Church of England to support me in my dotage, I probably won’t either. Anyway, 80% has gone and I can definitely now make out the buffers at the end of the track. To save you the bother later, let me stress I am aware that many here are looking at ratios more extreme than 80/20— I can hear you bristling— but still. There are some things that the arrival of free off-peak travel on TFL and ‘no need to pay now’ NHS prescriptions can’t smooth over.  And for card carrying Christian sexagenarians there is a burden on our bending backs our non-believing brethren don’t share: the resurrection. Because we can’t just passively accept the joy of the resurrection: we are compelled to respond.

Yes, it’s not just the elders— Christians of all ages have to respond to the resurrection, but, well you know what old people are like. And to be fair, we can easily ignore something which has a bearing on us when it seems to be a long way off; less so when it’s getting up close and personal.

As we celebrate the Ascension today we’re at the dog end of Easter season— not long now and we’ll be starting the long countdown to the 53rd Sunday after Trinity. Almost at the end of Easter and we’ve had six whole weeks of relentless Resurrection rejoicing. Fair dos:  the resurrection is both the central Christian belief— no Easter, no Christians— and an immensely attractive doctrine to boot— a sure and certain hope of happiness beyond our understanding. 

But— ain’t there always— but there is a sting in the tail of all this jubilation, the component we would rather ignore, which is, there is no resurrection without there first being death:  as St Paul cheerily quipped: “What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.”

So the new life of resurrection means first the death of life corruptible, and for those of us this side of the trumpet sounding it is almost impossible to see past the pains to the exultation beyond. Our minds can assent; still our hearts quail.

As Christians we believe that death is an ending but not the end; there is a life after this one, a hereafter ever after, on and on into eternity, resurrection life, life everlasting. Dying he has destroyed our deaths; rising he has restored our lives; death is swallowed up in victory, where O death is your sting? Which surely means— I know I’m being optimistic here, but hope springs eternal— surely it means that followers of Jesus will see life and its finitude in a different way to those who don’t believe. We might even behave differently. It won’t be any easier for us, but our faith must make some difference.

Of course we will cave to the same pressures, have the same yearnings, desire the same things as those who do not believe: Christians are not immune to suffering or careless of their lives or unafraid of death. Life is a gift of God, a precious, exquisitely beautiful gift not easily relinquished. A few saints go gentle into the good night; a handful of holy ones care not if they live or die; for one or two the borders  of earth and heaven have blurred long before they must cross over. But the overwhelming majority of humanity, whatever their faith, want to avoid paying Charon’s coin as long as they can.  

Nevertheless, for all that we share in common with the rest of our siblings, there must be something extra for Christians. Our lives are not guaranteed to be easier or harder than those without our faith; the certainty of death is not guaranteed to be more or less easy to bear; but there is something more that informs the Christian approach to life and to death.  

Good Friday, Easter, Ascension: death, resurrection and beyond; they cannot be removed from our faith without removing our faith. No resurrection, no Christianity. Resurrection is our faith: the seismic change of resurrection is the force which quickens our faith: without it all Christianity grinds to a halt. Resurrection— and its Ascension destination— is the sign and seal of God’s extraordinary concern for humanity and his inextricable, ineradicable, infinite love for us.

Like all our siblings, we are bereft when someone we love dies. But we also have the hope that they live on, not in the fading shadows of Hades but in a life infinitely more than we can imagine.

Like all our siblings we want to keep on living, just a bit longer, and a bit more and then a bit more after that and push death that little bit further away; we are afraid of dying. But we also have the hope that what lies beyond death’s door is the place where Jesus will take us, to be with him when we must cross that threshold.

Like all our siblings, we love living; life is ups, downs and coasting; trials and disappointments; pain and suffering; but however intense the struggles, life is sweet and we wish for a long life. But Christians measure life not only in length but also in depth, and it is the resurrection, infusing life backwards as well as forwards, that incorporates us into the life of God, that gives our lives— and the lives of all God’s children— their value, the value given in God’s infinite love.

I suppose we might know all this, believe all this and still be indistinguishable from our non-churched neighbours. But it’s unlikely. Because to know Jesus is to change everything, to live the resurrection life is to see everything anew, to know that the earthquake of Easter is a tangible reality, a lived and living truth not an aspiration.

Fear doesn’t disappear. All the commons of every life, good, bad and indifferent are still ours as much as anybody else’s. 

But we have something more. Our faith gives the ability to see the glow from our place in the gutter— while everyone else keeps their heads down, we look up; our hope grants us the knowledge that there is a depth to life that cannot be plumbed, and our love, the gift and the very essence of God, gives us the purpose of our lives past, present and beyond our horizons. 

He is risen indeed. And we are risen.