We wait at the tomb. As Gregory of Nyssa pointed out centuries ago, Jesus lies in the tomb, in order to bring to life all who lie in tombs. We pause this Holy Saturday night, on the very threshold of resurrection. The Latin word for threshold is limen, from which we derive the word liminal, to describe all those spaces and times that are ‘in between’ - the ‘not quite yet’ spaces; the crossing points from one state of being to another.
Tonight is a liminal time and this is a liminal space that we have created, in order to draw near to Christ. For it is easier to draw near to Christ in a liminal time and place than in any other. Between light and dark, there is the twilight of dawn or dusk, exactly the kind of light in which the women went to the tomb on the first Easter Day. Between grief and happiness there is a space that belongs to the shy gift of joy, whose nature partakes of both. Between life and death, death and life, there is the waiting time; the time when nothing appears to be happening, but actually everything is happening. This is the chrysalis time, when the caterpillar dissolves and the butterfly emerges. The work is done inside, unseen and unknown...
Tonight is a liminal time and this is a liminal space that we have created, in order to draw near to Christ. For it is easier to draw near to Christ in a liminal time and place than in any other. Between light and dark, there is the twilight of dawn or dusk, exactly the kind of light in which the women went to the tomb on the first Easter Day. Between grief and happiness there is a space that belongs to the shy gift of joy, whose nature partakes of both. Between life and death, death and life, there is the waiting time; the time when nothing appears to be happening, but actually everything is happening. This is the chrysalis time, when the caterpillar dissolves and the butterfly emerges. The work is done inside, unseen and unknown...
We are not always aware of liminal times and places. Especially in our over busy culture we tend to rush from one thing to the next, heedless of the crossing points. We are a little better at marking the big crossing points, such as from engagement to marriage, or even from putting in the last assignment to graduation. Yet there are so many crossing points in the most ordinary day; we cross from sleeping to waking and back again; we cross from fasting to eating; we cross from work to recreation; we cross from one space and community to another, even within our own homes. Some of these crossing points we mark with prayer, like grace at meal times, or perhaps by changing our clothes or our shoes. Yet we are too rarely mindful of what we are doing and of the possibility of divine encounter in those everyday transitions. If you want to try this out for yourself, try simply remembering to say a brief prayer of thanks or recognition each time you pass through a doorway. You will soon find that we pass across many thresholds in a day and it is very hard to remain attentive to their nuances and possibilities. Yet in this there is constant opportunity for encounter with the divine. And of course there are many liminal places. A beach is perhaps the most obvious example - the crossing place between land and sea, and this is possibly why some of the most sacred places on earth are small islands- large enough to inhabit but with disproportionately large amounts of liminal shoreline.
I wonder what thresholds you have knowingly or heedlessly crossed since last Holy Saturday; since the last time you deliberately put yourself on the threshold of life and death and chose to sit there without flinching for a while. For each of us in a year there will have been partings and greetings; friends made and lost; opportunities grasped and let go. There will have been times of waiting, for birth, for death, for some things to let loose their hold and for others to spring up. In our time of silence in a little while you may like to ponder some of these and reflect upon the hand of God in them. Where in your life have thresholds been crossed that led to resurrection? For be sure that the times, places and persons surrounding resurrection are all liminal, at once alerting us to the potent presence of the divine and at the same time if we are not careful scaring us back into the security of dogmatic assertions. But resurrection is not about certainty. It can only be known by experience.
The body of Jesus would have been laid on a narrow stone shelf. It would have been not unlike being laid flat on one of our pews. The body would have been wrapped in linen cloths, tenderly wound around and left until the flesh rotted away and only the bones remained to be taken away for burial. This is where Jesus spent Holy Saturday, in a dark tomb, doing apparently nothing. Resting as God did on the seventh day of the first Creation. His friends went home to rest too for it was the Sabbath day.
There were no witnesses to what actually happened in the dark of that tomb. No one heard or saw anything. The so called witnesses to the resurrection, witnessed only absence - the body gone; or Presence, a risen figure different enough that they failed to recognise him a first. The resurrection itself, the moment of change and transformation, was seen by no one. No bells and whistles. Sometime in the quiet of the sabbath night a change occurred, so momentous that we still wait to receive something of its echo over two thousand years later. It cannot be proved scientifically or even theologically, for like all things experienced in the liminal space - the space of dream and vision and transformation, it tends to ambiguity, openness and indeterminacy.
For us here tonight this is a time to draw near and to wait, in the knowledge that in the silence and the darkness, new life is rising. For some of us it may be new life in a relationship or vocation. For others it may be in a letting go and an allowing, making the space where God can act as only God can. For all of us, who have responded to the prompting of the Spirit and come here to watch and wait tonight, there is the promised new Life of deepened relationship with the dying and rising Christ. So even as Christ descended to the furthest depths of Hades to release those in captivity there, so may we know ourselves released this night from all that binds us, that we may welcome the new light with joy unquenchable.
So for a time now let us wait and let us allow God to work within us, raising up within us the gift of new life. Amen.
Penny Jones, for Sanctus, Holy Saturday, 31 March 2018
I wonder what thresholds you have knowingly or heedlessly crossed since last Holy Saturday; since the last time you deliberately put yourself on the threshold of life and death and chose to sit there without flinching for a while. For each of us in a year there will have been partings and greetings; friends made and lost; opportunities grasped and let go. There will have been times of waiting, for birth, for death, for some things to let loose their hold and for others to spring up. In our time of silence in a little while you may like to ponder some of these and reflect upon the hand of God in them. Where in your life have thresholds been crossed that led to resurrection? For be sure that the times, places and persons surrounding resurrection are all liminal, at once alerting us to the potent presence of the divine and at the same time if we are not careful scaring us back into the security of dogmatic assertions. But resurrection is not about certainty. It can only be known by experience.
The body of Jesus would have been laid on a narrow stone shelf. It would have been not unlike being laid flat on one of our pews. The body would have been wrapped in linen cloths, tenderly wound around and left until the flesh rotted away and only the bones remained to be taken away for burial. This is where Jesus spent Holy Saturday, in a dark tomb, doing apparently nothing. Resting as God did on the seventh day of the first Creation. His friends went home to rest too for it was the Sabbath day.
There were no witnesses to what actually happened in the dark of that tomb. No one heard or saw anything. The so called witnesses to the resurrection, witnessed only absence - the body gone; or Presence, a risen figure different enough that they failed to recognise him a first. The resurrection itself, the moment of change and transformation, was seen by no one. No bells and whistles. Sometime in the quiet of the sabbath night a change occurred, so momentous that we still wait to receive something of its echo over two thousand years later. It cannot be proved scientifically or even theologically, for like all things experienced in the liminal space - the space of dream and vision and transformation, it tends to ambiguity, openness and indeterminacy.
For us here tonight this is a time to draw near and to wait, in the knowledge that in the silence and the darkness, new life is rising. For some of us it may be new life in a relationship or vocation. For others it may be in a letting go and an allowing, making the space where God can act as only God can. For all of us, who have responded to the prompting of the Spirit and come here to watch and wait tonight, there is the promised new Life of deepened relationship with the dying and rising Christ. So even as Christ descended to the furthest depths of Hades to release those in captivity there, so may we know ourselves released this night from all that binds us, that we may welcome the new light with joy unquenchable.
So for a time now let us wait and let us allow God to work within us, raising up within us the gift of new life. Amen.
Penny Jones, for Sanctus, Holy Saturday, 31 March 2018
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