Yeah, but no, but yeah, but… Vicky Pollard does Easter

Sermon for Easter Day – Sunday 20 April 2025 – All Saints, Kesgrave

Text:  But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared.  (Luke 24v1)

God give you peace my sisters and brothers.

On the wall of the staff room of St Martin’s High School in Johannesburg there was a poster near where the English teachers used to sit, and I suspect it is because of this poster that they sat there’ It read:

Grammar Lesson

• Don’t use no double negatives
• About them sentence fragments
• Try not to ever split infinitives
• Verbs has to agree with their subjects
• Between you and I, case is important
• Correct spelling is essentail
• When dangling, watch your participles
• Use your apostrophe’s correctly
• Avoid clichés like the plague
• Don’t use commas, that aren’t necessary
• Proofread you writing

Feel free to add your own grammatical errors from your school days.

But what I really want to know is can you begin a sentence with a conjunction?  Like… but?

I was taught to avoid both ‘but’ as well as ‘and’ at the beginning of sentences.  All this has done is to leave me with a writing style that is littered with the word ‘however’ instead.   However, today’s grammar gurus say it is perfectly ok to begin a sentence with ‘but’ so long as it makes sense.

Some would even say, especially for some of our more famous exports, that it is impossible to begin a sentence without ‘but’ being its first word…..!

Where does God stand on this thorny issue?  Well I think we may find God is an adolescent.  Just look at the first verses of Genesis.  For seven whole days there is an endless series of And God Said’s.  And it was So’s.  And God saw that it was Good’s. 

Then there is today’s Gospel reading…

This is not the Gospel according to Luke, this is the Gospel according to Vicky Pollard with her endless nagging chorus of  ‘Yeah, but no, but yeah, but…’  Apparently the Garden Tomb is not in Jerusalem but somewhere on the set of Little Britain.

That’s the problem with God, like Vicky Pollard God keeps on ‘butting in’ on our lives.  

When things are going well and there’s a little extra cash in the bank God ‘buts in’ and shows us someone in need.  

When we’ve got comfortable in our ways and turn bad habits of grudge holding, unforgiving-ness, and gossip into personal characteristics God ‘buts in’ and puts us in a place where we need forgiveness and understanding.  

When things fall apart in our home and family life and those once close to us become estranged God ‘buts in’ and commands us to be the ones to take the first step in putting things right, even if it involves the swallowing of pride.  

And when the world seems to be going to hell in a handcart, tearing itself apart with the lust for power, the hunger for war, and the destruction of the environment God ‘buts in’ and shows us a cross on a faraway green hill…

But…

God ‘buts in’ yet again and empties the tombs we have made of our lives of all of their pain and sorrow and offers us life everlasting in its place.

Sometimes I get fed up with God and all this ‘butting in’ that describes the Creator’s relationship with the creation.  Some days, like Greta Garbo, I want to be left alone.  Left alone to my own devices, my own desires, my own just deserts and my own lonely dying.

But God won’t let me do that.  God won’t let any of us do that.  God loves us too much to not ‘but in’.  

Throughout the history of God’s love story with us there are moments where God ‘buts in’ and calls us back home.  Today is the greatest of those moments.  God refuses to leave us alone.  The cross alone is proof enough of God’s great love for us but add to it the resurrection and we have proof not only of God’s love but of God’s intention to never ever leave us alone.  The resurrection, and the fifty-day foretold gift of the Holy Spirit, is God’s declaration that there will never be an end to God ‘butting in’ on our lives.

You see we do not worship a God who did something great once and then left us alone to make up our minds as to whether we follow a set of commands or not.  We worship a God whose love, as the old hymn reminds us, ‘Will not let us go’.  Our God is a God who constantly ‘buts in’ from the time when the world was first made, through the history of God’s journey with the children of Israel, to the first Easter when the world was remade.  And so on down until God touches our lives, meets you and I, today on this Easter Day.

On occasion, in fact nearly all of the time, God ‘butting in’ on life can be a darn nuisance!  But without God ‘butting in’ our world would be poorer, our common life would be harsher, and we would be living lives without hope – which is a sentence of death.

So, bring it on God!  ‘Yeah, but no, but yeah, but’ away!  Disturb our plans, disrupt our selfishness.  Remind us that we can afford to love others because you love us.  Challenge us to be people who ‘but in’ on the lives of others that they too may know the same love that burns within us.  Please Lord, never ever stop being a nuisance.  For without the resurrection, without your disturbing of ‘business as usual’ normality reigns and we are lost eternally.

[This blog ‘Yeah, but no, but yeah, but… Vicky Pollard does Easter’ is copyright © Andrew Dotchin 2025 and may be reproduced without charge on condition that the source is acknowledged.]

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