Christ preaching before a crowd. Woodcut. (image credit: Wellcome Library, London)
I don’t know Rev’d Vicci but I can say she plays the piano well , reads well and sings like an angel. Today my partner and I went to a Good Friday service of hymns/songs and readings and it was super.
We normally go to the Wesleyan Chapel on the border of the City/Hackney but I am being confined to the country (Eton/Windsor) till I have full use of my bowels restored to me.
If you are from the area and can come to a service on Easter Sunday, please call me (Henry the Pension Plowman) on 07785 377769 or mail henry@agewage.com.
Windsor Methodist Church stands at the crossroads of Alma Road and Clarence Road, Windsor, SL4 3HH.
The feisty blog of Rev’d Vicci can be read below
Thoughts for Easter by Rev’d Vicci
Friends
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
He is risen indeed! Alleluia
Easter morning has arrived and once again, there are the usual complaints from non-Christians about eggs being nothing to do with Christianity, the resurrection of Jesus or anything else remotely “Easter” like. They will tell us that we Christians appropriated an ancient pagan festival, that the Easter bunny should be a hare and that there is no correlation at all between the egg and the empty grave. We hear the same dialectic each year at Easter and at Christmas, and doubtless we would at Pentecost, if only those clever marketers at John Lewis et al had found a way to commodify it.
The imagery of Easter is two-fold – the cross and the empty tomb; the chicks, eggs and bunnies. For us, the cross and the empty tomb are self-explanatory, but it is unhelpful to ignore the other imagery as being nothing to do with us, or to let our non-believing friends tell us this is so. Firstly, the earth and all that is created was created by and belongs to God. Crafted by his hands, marked with his fingerprints, it is a nonsense to say that anything he has created belongs exclusively to another tradition. The preponderance of chocolate reminds us that we have been fasting in one way or another. The sweet things remind us that the days of fasting are over.
The chocolate eggs we give each other are empty – an image of the empty tomb. However, other eggs are full, full of the potential for life. At this time of year as lambs, chicks, bunnies and many other animals are born, we are reminded of the new life that Jesus promises and demonstrated through his death and resurrection.
Life that we are promised in a two-fold way: that our lives are renewed when we form them with Jesus at the centre, and that our deaths are merely a swinging door through which we pass to that great country where there is no more sighing, no more pain, no more suffering. Easter is a promise for eternity, but it is also a commitment to life in all its fullness here and now. Let us live these Easter weeks in renewed relationship with him who lived and died for us.
God bless, Vicci