The Very Reverend Michael J. Pitts
March 2006

Dear Friends,

The special liturgies of Holy Week and Easter present us with the heart and core of the Christian story.

In the years of his ministry, Jesus has taught people about the coming reign of God. He has brought healing to the sick in body, mind and spirit. He has challenged people to new ways of thinking about themselves, their society and its politics, about their religion and their God. He has created community for the marginalised and rejected, and suggested that this is the true community of God. In doing all this, he has provoked the enmity of those who thought they were at the centre of religion and society. Now he is on his way to Jerusalem, the seat of social and religious power. As he enters the city with his unlikely group of disciples around him, the great unwashed, the poor, the oppressed, the crowd cry out:

 
"Ho-sanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!
Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!"
Mark 11:9b, 10

This is the ultimate challenge to the authorities. Jesus and the crowd truly represent God, not they. The authorities react in the way religious and political authorities usually do. They remove the problem. Today, at least in our so-called civilized world, we do that by character assassination and other gentle means. In other times and places physical assassination has been more common. As Jesus is secretly arrested, even his disciples desert him, and he goes to the cruel cross alone.

Yet on that first Easter Day, women, those most marginalized of all humanity, go to the tomb and discover that God can never be defeated. So begins the story of the church, those who find in Jesus and his story new life and new hope, wholeness and joy in living and serving others.

Unfortunately it took only a few generations before the revolutionary story of Jesus became subverted to serve the needs of the power brokers of a patriarchal society and before the church of the poor and marginalized became the seat of imperial, political and commercial power. That subversion has lasted fourteen centuries.

It is my belief that in our own day we are catching a glimpse of a possibility that the now fractured churches can leave all that behind and find their true vocation anew in the story we tell and celebrate at this time. But to do so, I believe we need to take the story seriously. There is no resurrection without a death. New life is born only from the decay and the demise of the old. So if our experience, verified by statistical research, tells us that the church is in decline and decay, if the message we have preached in recent years is clearly meaningless and irrelevant in today's world, let's rejoice that at last, we may soon catch a glimpse of resurrection. Not that we will see it without a great deal more pain and affliction, and if we were to attempt to bypass the pain of death we may never see new life. But let us start to see dreams and visions of what churches and religious communities might be in the future. Let us try to rediscover our counter-cultural role in society. Let us find in the Easter story of resurrection our new life and new hope, our new humanity of wholeness and service.

Yours sincerely,

Michael J. Pitts,
Dean and Rector