Easter and the Tango Dancers of Kyiv
Easter Day, 11.00am Sung Eucharist
Last night I got to explode a giant tube of confetti in the Cathedral, while bells and other noise making implements resounded. It came towards the end of a wonderful Easter Vigil, with multiple baptisms and confirmations, as we celebrated Christ’s resurrection. In his sermon Bishop Jonathan had spoken about Christian discipleship as involving listening out for the music of God’s kingdom, and in that raucous and celebratory moment, the melody of the kingdom was certainly heard. But our Bishop’s image made me think also of rather different circumstances in which we might hear that music. Some video footage, for example, of a young man called Alex playing one of those outside pianos you see in public places such as railway stations. But Alex was in Kyiv, and as he played, the air raid sirens started. But rather than run for shelter, he stayed at the keyboard, playing with even greater intensity.
There are other videos like this, one showing a group of Ukrainian soldiers playing instruments and dancing during a break from the grimness. The small crowd love it – an interval of joy in the midst of so much destruction. And then there are the Kviv tango dancers, continuing to meet in the botanic gardens and dance to a Latin beat.
These, it strikes me, are all powerful examples of the music of the Kingdom, and indeed the music of the resurrection, for here violence and death are not allowed to have the last word. They are poignant signs of how even in the darkest times, there are always moments that point us beyond the immediate to a different future. Gestures of hope and life, lighting a fire that cannot be extinguished.
I say this all too aware that we live in era when the videos and stories I’ve mentioned will be dismissed by some as ‘fake news’ and staged propaganda. Many people today are deeply convinced that the real truth about what is going on in the world is being covered up, and that everything we are told by media or government is deception and lies. So if I say to you this morning, ‘Christ is risen!’ the response might be not ‘He is risen indeed! but rather, ‘Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you? Now, what’s the real agenda?’
It's a modern version of an age old issue: who to believe and trust? In today’s gospel reading, the apostles do not believe the women who tell them about the empty tomb, for this seems to them ‘an idle tale.’ The society in which we live is not exempt from the implicit sexism operating here, but adds to that a widespread mistrust of those in power. And because the Church, not least the Church of England, has often stood close to political power, it cannot expect to be exempt from the general suspicion. While we are not in the same league as Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox Church, so closely aligned with President Putin that he is prepared to justify violence and death in search of a horribly misguided vision of a ‘Holy Russia’, the history of the Western Church has its low points too, and its witness to peace and justice and reconciliation has been all too uneven and imperfect.
So let me be as clear as I can: I may be a Dean preaching from an exalted position in a Cathedral, during a service presided over by a Bishop, but nonetheless the Church does not exist to tell you what to believe through a duly constituted hierarchy. The point and purpose of the Church is rather to enable people in this every century to encounter Jesus Christ as a living contemporary. The sacrament of Holy Communion is not a memorial to a dead leader, controlled and guarded by his successors, by an event where we are invited to meet the living Christ as surely as his disciples did on the first Easter Day. And the Bible is not the authorised code of a private society, but human words suffused with the energy of the divine, through which we hear the call of God to us today.
The sceptic may well remain unconvinced, so let me say a little more about how the text of the New Testament actually works. First, it was written by people, who in writing what they did, were making themselves less powerful in worldly terms, not more. Their immediate society was dominated by traditional Jewish religion, and Roman society and law. So the writers of the New Testament letters and gospels were going out into dangerous territory, away from religious and political safety, publicly identifying themselves with the marginalised followers of a figure who had been executed as a criminal.
And second, these writers were struggling to find a language for an experience and reality that was too big and overwhelming to be easily put into words. The stories of the resurrection in particular look like accounts in which people are struggling to find the right language for what has been experienced. In the passage we heard from Luke’s Gospel, the women are first ‘perplexed’, then ‘terrified’. Then, inexplicably, there are ‘two men in dazzling clothes’ telling them that Jesus is risen. When the pass this on to the disciples, they aren’t believed, but at least Peter runs to the tomb, where, we hear, he is ‘amazed’. In other stories, the disciples meet Jesus but don’t recognise him at first, but then there are moments of recognition: when bread is broken, or wounds displayed.
So what we see in the New Testament books is not a tightly controlled agenda speaking for a powerful elite, but rather the product of communities living at great risk because they feel compelled to do so by the mysterious, powerful, overwhelming presence of Jesus Christ, crucified yet risen. They are convinced that living in the company of Jesus is the best way to become fully and effectively human, in which they might begin to live together without greed, fear and suspicion. They believe they now have the gift and the task of showing God’s world what justice and mutual service and thanksgiving might look like in a dangerous world. They accept the risks because they have been entrusted with a promise, in which the future of reign of God is breaking into the darkness of contemporary reality.
Just as there are moments of recognition in the gospels, when the disciples realise what is going on, and that they are in the presence of the risen Christ, so there are moments in today’s world when we see that violence and hatred will not prevail. When Alex plays his piano as the air raid sirens ring out, and the soldiers sing and the tango dancers strut their stuff even in war zone, and the music of the kingdom is heard. Primo Levi, an Italian chemist who survived the Holocaust, wrote a whole book about such experiences, when people show their humanity through the most appalling conditions. He called it Moments of Reprieve. Our Holy Week preacher, Tim Schofield, has used the more theological term Signs of Glory to express something similar. One of his most powerful examples, indeed, drew on the experience of Jewish women in Auschwitz.
Canon Tim referenced the contemporary Jewish theologian Melissa Raphael, who tells how in the concentration camps, the faces of women were routinely desecrated and defiled by being smeared with excrement and dirt. And amidst this degradation the women cared for each other by gently washing each other’s faces using only what they had, usually dirty cloths and saliva. And as women cleansed one another’s faces, Raphael writes, something of the glory of God was revealed.
The implications of this powerfully connect with the horror of the war in Ukraine, and in particular with violence against women and civilians. Even in such circumstances, there are still examples of kindness, creativity, self-sacrifice and generosity. Even here, as I said at this sermon’s beginning, there are moments that point us beyond the immediate to a different future. Gestures of hope and life, lighting a fire that cannot be extinguished. Resurrection images, in which the face of God is seen in and through the faces of others, and the music of the kingdom rings out. This is not fake news, but the truest news of all, rooted in the promise of God, and what we have seen in the death and resurrection of Christ.
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has spoken to parliaments and governments all around the world. But he also delivered a powerful pre-taped message to the American Grammy Awards. ‘Our musicians wear body armour instead of tuxedos, he told the assembled pop stars. ‘They sing to the wounded in hospitals, even to those who can’t hear them. But the music will break through.’ He urged musicians to ‘fill the silence [left by bombing] with your music’.
So yes, on this Easter Day, let us affirm and celebrate that even in the darkest times, God’s music breaks through. And as we celebrate the presence of the risen Christ, let us pray that keeping his company will inspire us and enable to see God’s face in every person on our planet, that those ‘Moments of Reprieve’ may multiply and grow, until God’s glory shines through every aspect of our lives and our world.
‘Christ is risen. He is risen indeed! Alleluia!’