In so much as you do it to the least of these...

Holy Week and Easter was a draining, busy, emotional time for me this year. Circumstances meant I clocked up twelve services in the week, including five on Easter Sunday. But the marathon was as well as tiring, very uplifting.

I missed my Lenten pilgrimage to Holy Island very much this year. I couldn't go for a variety of reasons. I find it a "thin" place and I manage there to sort my life out a bit, it is just God, his wondrous creation, fellow companions on the journey resting there, and me. Oh well, next year. I've been thinking about those pilgrims walking there over Easter, carrying the cross across the sands at low tide. What difference does belief, a crucified God, a God of hope make in a messy, broken world? Why follow at all?

Easter this year for me has been and continues to be about an incarnational God meeting people right where they are. The Church can only be credible if she understands and cares every day about people right where they are.

Several points on my Holy Week journey brought this home as I meditated with others about the nature of God in Christ we follow and learn about in this season:

• The little girl after an assembly about sadness wanting to talk to me about Grandad being poorly with a heart attack. The vicar for her might understand how she was sad.
• The spirituality group in Rye we've started doing a deep theological study on Psalm 22 feeling freed with the thought that it is okay to question God and shout at God, as God was there himself on the cross. 
• The power of foot washing, enactment of the Last Supper and stripping of the altar on Maundy Thursday and doing this treated as an equal partner in an Anglican church, on the night Christ prayed we might all be one. It felt like we were. 
• Being cold and suffering walking behind a cross on Good Friday, in the middle of a busy High Street. 
• The joy of little children searching for chocolate eggs on Easter morning, and a church sharing communion round a breakfast table were very powerful occasions. 

A God who throughout gives me just a little bit of hope in some of my own personal darkness at the moment. The message of Easter is that the darkness can be transformed from within, not some magic trick or nice words underplaying the pain of the darkness or pretending it isn't there "you'll soon get over it" but walking with us in that horrible place.

It is very easy for us to live Easter one week a year, but I think we have to live it every day, if we really believe the message of God is possible transformation of the awful. This week I have listened to stories about the "bedroom tax" locally, where housing associations are knocking walls down to turn two bedroom flats into one bedroom ones to help people; I have listened to stories about people crying out in desperation financially needing help with being able to exist, let alone live; I have listened to stories of people once in a good job, or a stable relationship, suddenly finding themselves in a very different place, unable to cope, needing not just a companion on the journey but a companion who will stay with them on the journey and make a difference. I watched people this afternoon queuing in the council offices here in Hastings, a queue of frustration and despair. I overheard a man in the bank drawing out some money who said that money will keep a roof over his head for a month "and that has to be something, doesn't it?"

My stories from Holy Week remind me of the need to listen to people, the need to remember God suffers with us, to do some dirty theology, some foot washing, some self-sacrifice, to be out where people are, and to be open that God might surprise us through the pain.

Perhaps these words sum up these random thoughts:
I want to quote from John Bell "Jesus Wants To Save Christians" - he talks about Holy Week and Jesus descending into the world and this descending, being with, being the task of any genuine Christian community:
"He comes into Jerusalem on a donkey, not a horse, with children, not soldiers, weeping, humble. And he dies, naked, bleeding, thirsty, alone. Maybe that's what he means when he says "do this in remembrance of me" - the "do this" part is our lives. Opening ourselves up to the mystery of resurrection, open for the liberation of others, allowing our bodies to be broken and our blood to be poured, discovering our Eucharist. Listening. And going. Because when we do this in remembrance of him, the world will never be the same, we will never be the same."

I always think I cannot do very much, the problems are too big. But I guess I keep going thinking that if my life can help one person somewhere, God is at work through me. My prayer is that someone also might be that person for me when I need it!