Our most recent minister Rev Stephen Haward retired in July 2023

EASTER MESSAGE
After the author and illustrator Shirley Hughes died a few weeks ago, one of her most fondly recalled books was Alfie Gets in First, in which a small child solves a big problem. 

Some people always like to get in first. Who has not opened their mouth to give the only quiz answer they are really confident they know, only for some loudmouth to shout out the answer? 

In her autobiography Hovel on the Hills Elizabeth West said that however early she started doing her washing, her nearest neighbour on the other side of a Welsh valley would always have a line of clean white laundry flapping in the wind long before she herself was finished. Some people always like to be first.

In a delightful poem, George Herbert takes us across the threshold of his seventeenth century home at Easter.   The clean floors are strewn with fresh flowers.  Branches are cut to decorate the house.  In a deeply satisfying way, tokens of nature are called to be flags and signals of his Easter hope, rather as another great poet Walt Whitman was later to speak of the grass itself being ‘the handkerchief of the Lord’. 

But some people always like to get in first.  For all his joyful preparations, making everything just so for Easter morning, Herbert says that he is in a sense too late.   For Christ has done an Alfie.  He has got in first. 

‘I got me flowers to strew Thy way,
 I got me boughs off many a tree;
 But Thou wast up by break of day.
 And brought’st Thy sweets along with Thee.’


In the Bible accounts of the resurrection, Christ’s grieving female friends come to the tomb ‘very early’, but they are not quite early enough.  ‘He has risen’, they are told, ‘He is not here’ (Mark 16:6).  Jesus is one step ahead of them.  He has brought his ‘sweets’ of life and joy; and their aromatic spices are no longer needed.

We have come along a rough path to Easter this year, have we not, and some have had it a great deal rougher still.  With war haunting Europe once more – and seemingly endless difficulties confronting so many people – it would be easy to despair. 

But Herbert was right.  We can come to Easter beautifully and harmoniously prepared, or we can come hopelessly and messily unready, and the result will the same.  We will find that Jesus has beaten us to it.  Like that early-rising Welsh housewife he is up already and the washing clean of the world is already begun. 

So our task is not to make Easter happen, but to rejoice in what God has already done – and become part of it.

I pray that God will ‘get in first’ and gift each one of you with joy and hope this Easter,
Stephen

Archive of Words from the Minister