Soon enough a man drove up behind her and got out of his car to look at the dead bunny. ‘Oh dear!’ He said and rushed back to his car, grabbed a tin of spray and sprayed it on the bunny.
The bunny popped up
‘How did that work? – What happened?’ Asked the vicar. The man picked up the spray can and pointed to the writing on the side ‘resurrects all types of hair – restoring wave and bounce’.
If it were only that easy. A quick spray and back to life.
But do we really want bunnies
Here in Australia, rabbits are a pest. They destroy the landscape by digging
In the northern hemisphere, rabbits are a great symbol for Easter. There, Easter arrives accompanying Spring. The Christian story of new
Of
In the year
And yet, the story is not quite the same. In fact, the Christian faith proclaims something quite new. Unlike other religious systems where the Divine resides in the sphere of the transcendent, in Jesus, God becomes human, immanent and present. This is the unique gift of the Christian faith. This is a shift of cosmic proportion. God does not remain separate from humanity. God becomes human and experiences human living, human loving and human suffering. Here in the small details of life, God is with us.
Does the power of this statements resonate
Celtic spirituality declares that heaven and earth are just three feet apart, but in the ‘thin places’, that distance is even smaller. These ‘thin places’ exist where the veil separating heaven and earth is pulled back, revealing the glory of God. Sitting there, you reach out your hand and expect to feel God, it’s that palpable. These are not simply places where God’s presence is felt, but
On Easter Sunday morning, we read from Mark’s gospel and hear about women coming to the tomb and walking into a very thin place. Reality is unmasked, the
Eric Weiner in an article about thin places says that ‘If God is everywhere and “everywhen,” as the Australian aboriginals put it so wonderfully, then why are some places thin and others not? Why isn’t the whole world thin? Maybe it is, but we are too thick to recognize it. Maybe thin places offer glimpses not of heaven but of
The women are quite rightly filled with terror, they have stumbled into the ‘eveywhen’ of God’s presence and their mouths are caked with silence. But they are not silent for long. Their encounter at the tomb begins the revolution calling together a community of people whose very lives point to the nearness of God through their commitment to God’s redemptive work of justice, peace, compassion
By living according to the rules of this new kingdom, Christ’s community reveals the glory of the living God right here, right now. Mark’s gospel demands a redefinition of our view of power, the role of government and geopolitical conflicts, class struggle, family dynamics, economic principals
The veil between heaven and earth is torn asunder when wealth is redistributed through tithing, when third world debts are cancelled with the celebration of Jubilee, when broken hearts are healed, when liberty is proclaimed to the captives, when evangelism spreads through love and not coercion, when governments exalt the good and punish evil, when the old
At Easter time in Christian circles, we hear lots of talk about what Jesus has done for us on the cross. To be honest, I find this a confusing statement. What has Jesus done for us? The answer is often something like: ‘Jesus has taken upon himself the sins of the world’. But what does this mean? Well, I think the answer is not so much in Jesus death and resurrection, but in Jesus life.
In Jesus, God is Present, not absent and only attainable by performing ritual sacrifices, but present and living amongst and within us. Jesus is the cosmic Christ, the Sophia wisdom present with God in creation bringing all things into being. This is the energy that enters human history and is living with us, in us and through us. This is the energy that saves us.
His death is no surprise, down through the ages people like Jesus get killed or locked up for stirring up trouble. Down through history, the radical reformers are silenced and often put to death by the authorities. There is nothing particularly new in that. We should not be surprised that Jesus ended up crucified.
God did not need his son to die in order to love the world. God loved the world and became human to help humanity learn how to live in God’s love.
The curtain in the temple separating the ark of the holy covenant from the people is torn in two, the barriers in
This is different. This is a different message from that which was the dominant view of religion in Jesus day, where God was considered separate and people had to sacrifice animals to atone from sins and be
This is different from the
So, if the Easter bunny gets run over by a vicar on her way to lead worship on Easter morning, should we reach for the quick fix resurrection
Perhaps we could look to the Australian landscape for an Easter symbol.
In
We are now entering a time of long nights when Wombats come out to graze and bask when there is
The wombat is a gentle symbol for this season when we recall the promise of new life emerging from the underground tomb. Like Jesus, the Easter Wombat rises from the darkness and the thin place of the everywhere and everywhen of God’s presence is revealed.