There are times when our focus on God is distorted by our human overlay. In other words, we mould the message to suit what we are feeling. A recent sermon (Transfiguration Sunday) gave me the stimulus to share this experience which I have never shared before.
It was 1982. I was 22, my mother was 53 and had been diagnosed with what would turn out to be her final foray into the world of cancer and her eventual death the following summer, 6 weeks after her 54th birthday. That is a picture many people can relate to because it is all too tragically familiar. Indeed, we have been there again with my youngest sister; same picture, just a longer fight and younger by a year or so. Why share this sadness? Because what comes next is far from sad.
As a 22-year-old I was already a lay preacher. I thought I knew what I believed and one night in my distress I was agonising over the threatened cloud on my horizon. That I night I dreamt of a great thanksgiving service, all focused on mother. In my humanity I interpreted that as a sign of recovery to come. Now, fast forward from October 1982 to July 18th 1983, and sitting in the front row in Hacheston Church. As I listened to the account of my mother’s short life and large faith, conscious of a packed church, there was a great clang in my head; the penny dropped.
My dream was meant to soften the coming blow and assure me of recovery. It was my human condition that bent the perspective and insisted on recovery on earth, in the flesh. That day and throughout the years that have followed I have been blessed with a sense of perspective over death that helps avoid crushing grief. I have no doubt about recovery for people of faith.
Many people have similar experiences and reassuring moments with God. I still grieve over death and in the short term. I can be absurdly emotional in the privacy of home and family but that is all about ‘me now’, losing focus on God’s eternity for a moment until I refocus and remember the dream.
As we walk with Jesus towards calvary, remember the Easter sunrise far beyond Calvary’s mid-day blackout and earthquake. Our lives are full of moments of blackout when it seems as though the ground is moving beneath us and we cannot stand alone; those are the times God lifts us to stand sure and look again to the sunrise – ‘life in all its fulness’.
A prayer
Loving, consoling and comforting God, sometimes our worlds feel so fragile. We confess our moments of weakness and fragility of faith. Those are our vulnerable moments; through the work of your Spirit, we pray that you might make them our moments of strength as we learn to trust you and see beyond our self-limiting present into your eternal presence. We pray for the sake of Jesus who made his journey, steadfastly towards Jerusalem, to introduce us to resurrection sunrise.
Amen.