In 2004 tydens ‘n opstandingsdiens het Aartsbiskop Rowan Williams ‘n preek gelewer wat as oordenking wil ek graag ‘n gedeelte vir ons voorlees. Mag ons oor die woorde reflekteer en ons inspireer tot ‘n nuwe Hoop, ‘n nuwe Lewe en ‘n lewe in die Lig:
The goodness of the resurrection news is most evident for those who have lost people they love to any sort of incomprehensible evil – the tragedies of dementia, the apparent meaninglessness of accident, the horrors of violence or injustice. Think back for a moment to the days when death squads operated in countries like Argentina or El Salvador: the Christians there developed a very dramatic way of celebrating their faith, their hope and their resistance. At the liturgy, someone would read out the names of those killed or ‘disappeared’, and for each name someone would call out from the congregation, Present, ‘Here’.
“When the assembly is gathered before God, the lost are indeed present; when we pray during the eucharist ‘with angels and archangels and the whole company of heaven’, we say present for all those the world (including us) would forget and God remembers. With angels and archangels; with the butchered Rwandans of ten years ago and the butchered or brutalized Ugandan children of last week or yesterday; with the young woman dead on a mattress in King’s Cross after an overdose and the childless widower with Alzheimer’s; with the thief crucified alongside Jesus and all the thousands of other anonymous thieves crucified in Judaea by an efficient imperial administration; with the whole company of heaven, those whom God receives in his mercy. And with Christ our Lord, the firstborn from the dead, by whose death our sinful forgetfulness and lukewarm love can be forgiven and kindled to life, who leaves no human soul in anonymity and oblivion, but gives to all the dignity of a name and a presence. He is risen; he is not here; he is present everywhere and to all. He is risen: present.”