Today's reading focuses on resurrection from the dead, and uses the example of a Celtic saint praying for a young man to be restored to life from death, something that evidently happened after a couple of hours.

From time to time, I hear of people rising form the death in African and Asian countries, usally not accompanied my medical verification.  Occasionally, I hear of someone who has been medically certified as dead waking up in a mortuary or funeral director's premises, though usually they die (again) soon afterwards. Earlier this year I heard of a church in the UK praying for a much loved member to be raised from death - and their struggle when the answer was self evidently 'no'. And all that before we start contemplating CPR, it's efficacy and justification. It feels as if we are in danger of opening an enormous can of worms.

So I go back to a sermon I preached about three years ago (it has to have been that long, because it was when we were still in our own premises) and the fact that resurrection is a translation of anastasis, 'getting up'.  I spoke of 'little resurrections' and used the chorus of the Chumba Wumba song 'Tub Thumping' as a sort of antiphon: 'I get knocked down but I get up again, ain't nothing gonna keep me done." Or, in the words of another song, 'pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again'.

Whether any of this connects with what I was meant to be pondering, who knows, but here is the prayer from the book:

Risen Christ, living within me, may I know the power of your life moving through me.  May the resurrection power, which raised you from the dead, raise me from the death which can so often overtake my soul.  Not only this, but may I know that power living. Amen.