Happy to See Me Dead?: (Sixth Sunday of Easter: 25th May 2025)

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Acts 16. 9-15; John 14. 23-29

“I do not give to you as the world gives.”

Will you be happy when I die?

Often when I take a funeral, people tell me they want it to be a celebration. But I always reply that I hope that people won’t be too happy at my funeral.

The summer I finished university, twenty-five years ago, I went on a post-graduation trip to Turkey and Georgia – Georgia the country in the Caucasus, not the American state. One of my abiding memories of that trip is being invited to a wake, which in Georgia involves a full day of banqueting—and drinking. As the coffin was carried off from the house, Chopin’s Funeral March was played on old record player as a black and white portrait photograph of the deceased in younger days, resplendent in his Red Army dress uniform, was processed in front of the coffin. Most incredibly, professional mourners, all of them older women dressed in black, wailed at the top of their voices and pulled clumps of hair from their heads.

I don’t think I want people to go that far at my funeral, but I hope they’ll be at least a little bit sad that I’m gone.

According to this morning’s Gospel reading, that might make me a bad Christian. The reading comes from a speech Jesus made to his closest followers on the night before He died, and He uses a strange phrase “If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father”.

At first, it seems odd that we have spent so many of these Sundays in Eastertide, the Church’s season of Resurrection, with Gospel readings from what is often called “the Farewell Discourse”, St John’s record of a series of long speeches Jesus gave to his disciples at the Last Supper.

But the more one thinks about it, the more one realises that Eastertide is the perfect season to look back on the suffering and bewilderment of Christ’s final hours. For now we have a new perspective,the knowledge that no matter how dark things seem, Christ emerges triumphant in the end. More than that, we know that this victory won’t result in the life of material comfort and worldly power the apostles imagined for themselves, but in a much stranger and more glorious kingdom. This kingdom has lasted longer than any political state in history and spread to every corner of the Earth, yet is present wherever two or three are gathered together in Christ’s name, and present most powerfully among the weak and despised and persecuted.

These weak and vulnerable outposts of the Kingdom of Heaven are intimations of what we can look forward to with hopeful confidence. Christ’s death was good news not only because He was returning to His Father, but because He was opening the way for us to follow Him there. It isn’t always easy for us to believe even now, and it must have all seemed utterly bewildering on that night in Jerusalem. Indeed, Jesus explains to His apostles that He is revealing all this to them before it occurs, so that when it does happen, they can believe what common sense would say is impossible.

“I do not give to you as the world gives.” Christ’s gift to us was His death, a death that opened the way to eternal life for us.

Everywhere, God in Christ overturns our standards of how the world works and how it should work.

Indeed, all things in this universe must die. Everywhere we look death is the gateway to new life. The chemical elements that make up our bodies and the world around us can only exist because the violent end of long-dead stars spread them throughout the universe billions of years before the world existed. It is only through our deaths that there can be space for new babies to be born.

It seems obvious that we live at a time of great political and cultural transition, perhaps in the dying years of an era. Throughout history, these have always been frightening and disturbed moments. The world is a worrying place at the moment, with our screens full of the suffering of innocents, most especially the very young, the very old, and the disabled, at a time of too many long hot wars and brief outbreaks of violence in sensitive places where things might escalate dangerously.

Yet, Christ told His followers as He faced His own death, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” Now we have a new perspective,the knowledge that no matter how dark things seem, Christ emerges triumphant in the end. Christianity emerged in a world as troubled as this, among people who lived lives more vulnerable to misfortunes of heath and livelihood and facing much crueller and more arbitrary state power than even the very poorest in our society today. The gift of faith that Christ gave you was made for circumstances even more frightening than your own.

And the kingdom He established was also much broader than His followers imagined, or than we often live up to today.

There is much discussion among scholars about Lydia, the dealer in purple cloth who is the star of today’s reading from Acts. Some think she must have been well-off, as purple was the most expensive dye, while others say cloth-dealers in the Roman Empire were always considered lower class. Whatever the truth of all that, we notice that Lydia and her friends weren’t worshipping in a nice building in town, but outside the city gate in the open air, on the banks of the river.

Lydia and the group of women she leads worship the same God as the Jews, something which seems to be outside respectable Graeco-Roman society. At the same time, Paul would have offended sensible Jewish convention by treating this gentile woman as a legitimate leader of a God-fearing community, and welcoming her into as an equal in faith. These events took place perhaps a year after the Council of Jerusalem when Paul had rowed with other apostles, who eventually agreed with him that Gentiles could be full members of the Church without being circumcised as Jews. Already Paul, who is unfairly seen as a bigot and a chauvinist, is pushing the boundaries of inclusion out further.

When Christ spoke to them at the Last Supper, the apostles still thought they were going to be senior officials an Jewish state on Earth so fair and just that it would lead the world. Instead they got this strange kingdom not of this world which brought them suffering on earth and where foreign women were equals. This kingdom still endures. You and I are citizens of it just Lydia and Paul and the apostles still are, in heaven as much as they were on earth.

You are already part of the greatest story ever told. So do not let your hearts be troubled. God’s plans for us are bigger than you can possibly imagine. Your life here is just the platform from which God will raise you to a fullness of existence that is beyond our mortal capacity to truly understand. That is the new perspective we have on the troubles of our lives, and the troubles of the world,the knowledge that no matter how dark things seem, Christ emerges triumphant in the end and if we trust in His promises, we will triumph with Him.

So, while I hope you’ll be at least a little bit sad when I die, also be happy that Christ has opened the way for me to go with Him to the Father.

Not that I’m planning on going anywhere just yet!

Now thanks be to God the Father, who has given us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.