Never alone - thoughts for Easter

40 years ago this year Felicity organised an event here in Cheltenham for young people, a couple of years later she and I were part of the group that organised the very first CF Youth Conference here at Highbury.

It’s great to welcome CF Youth to this Easter event this year again at Highbury, as you this afternoon will be making plans for something new and exciting in the future.

Through the week the church has been open and we have been invited to follow in the footsteps of Jesus as his journey took him to Jerusalem, to the cross and to resurrection.

When I have been in the church I have been playing one piece of music that I chose to play specifically for this Easter. It was Mahler’s 5th Symphony. I chose it for a very specific reason.

Many of the older people who have been at Highbury for a long time will remember an earlier youth organisation in our Congregational churches. It was called the Livingstone Fellowship. Diana and Dick were among those who were very involved. Dick’s brother, John married another of those who was very involved, Elizabeth Harding. Interesting isn’t it what involvement in church youth organisations can do for you – Felicity and I are still going strong 40 years on!

Elizabeth Harding’s nephew Daniel has in recent years become one of the country’s leading conductors.

On 11th March he was scheduled to conduct Mahler’s 5th Symphony. The orchestra he was to conduct was the Philharmonic Orchestra of Japan. The concert was in Tokyo.

Should they or shouldn’t they carry on? They felt it best – because it was good in those circumstances to get together, to be a support to each other. It was a remarkable evening. Mahler’s 5th Symphony had an appropriateness to it for two themes run right through the Symphony – Death and Resurrection.

We’ve been telling the story of Christ’s journey to Jerusalem, a journey that took him through death, a cruel, painful death, to resurrection. The Way he took, opened up a way that his followers have taken ever since, a way of love for God, of love for one another, that does not enable us to avoid the awful things that life and this world, nature itself, sometimes hurls at us. But it does offer us a Way through the pain of death to a resurrection victory we too may share.

In a strange way this weekend walking in the footsteps of Jesus, listening to that music perhaps prompts us to realise something very special about being people who follow the way Jesus has opened up for us.

We need never feel alone. There are always people there for us. Some things change, new, exciting challenges come along, and the presence of God’s love is always with us, come what may. Through death to resurrection the way Jesus invites us to follow is a way trodden by so many down through the years, and a way that draws us into the eternal love of God.