A letter from the Vicarage – Rev’d Andy Stand

Hi Everyone,

How are we all doing? I hope and pray that you are all keeping well and enjoying the Easter season.

Those of you who know me, or who attend church at all during the Easter season will know, how much I enjoy proclaiming those words: “Alleluia! Christ is risen”. It is one of the privileges afforded me at the Sunrise service each year to be the first person that season to proclaim, the Christian faith and joy, that Christ is Risen! Alleluia!

Of course, at the time of writing, we haven’t got there yet. We are still journeying through Lent, and (possibly) still observing those disciplines we felt called to follow through that season of preparation for the proclamation of those words.

I wonder how has your Lent been? Did you manage to avoid the temptation to give in on the disciplines you set yourselves at the beginning of the season? Or did your resolve crumble and turn to dust, almost as soon as the Ashen cross had been cleaned from your forehead?

And what now?

Will you try to continue any Lenten disciplines into the Easter season; make them a regular feature of everyday life, or are you more than happy to let them go for another year, as you truly embrace the joys and indulgences of the Easter season?

Personally, I have tried, to watch what I have allowed myself to eat, and particularly the stuff I regularly snack upon; and I have tried to read couple of books that at the beginning of the season seemed worth reading for my own development, and possibly too, as a betterment for my personal journey with God.

I confess that I got further with the one book than the other, and so will need to continue through the Easter season to try and carve out space to finish reading that one, and make some progress with the second.

The book I have made some progress with is called The Seventh Story by Brian McClaren and Gareth Higgins, and is subtitled Us, Them and the End of Violence. In it they posit that there are six default oppositional stories, synthesised as a means of keeping “our” stuff for ourselves, while preventing “them” from gaining more.

The stories are characterised as the Domination, the Revolution, the Purification, the Victimisation, the Isolation and Accumulation stories. In some respects these stories are responses to the stories that precede them: Domination and Oppression lead to Revolution; Purification blames and scapegoats and possibly eradicates a minority community; Victimisation demands vengeance; and so-on and so-forth.

In each of the stories there is an element of “us” and “them”.

In the seventh story, they state, that “human beings are not the protagonists. Love is.” If we were to truly love our neighbours, rather than see them, as “them” in competition with “us”, then we would be able to live without the violence that so mars our world at the moment.

This seventh story, of course, is encapsulated in the Easter story, which we celebrate during Holy Week and the Easter season. It is encapsulated in the stories of the early church in the book of Acts and in the definitions of Love that the apostle John writes of; both of which we hear in our bible readings, Sunday by Sunday though this season.

How might we live resurrection lives of love and community; forsaking the violence in our own hearts and minds? Setting aside our own needs to dominate and accumulate, in order to live in community and communion with our neighbours?

May God bless us all as we live Easter lives.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen!

Every blessing, Andy.