Sermon, Trinity 2 2012

Ezekiel 17:22-24

2 Corinthians 5:6-10

Mark 4:26-34

I don’t know if you watch Gardener’s World. On Friday Monty Don was talking about potting up seedlings, which reminded me that was a job that I needed to do. His yarrow seedlings were just right – the roots had reached the bottom of the plug, but no more. Alas, his basil seedlings had become plug bound – he had left it a little late, and too much root had grown. He said you have to wait until the seedlings are just ready to pot up, and then waste no time – get on with it!

I imagine, however, that if we watched Gardener’s World and Monty told us that this was the week for sowing dandelions in our lawn, or nettles in our lettuce bed, we might wonder if he’d caught a touch of the sun. Except there hasn’t been any sun…

It would be a strange thing to tell us to plant weeds in our carefully cultivated gardens or window boxes. But that is the story that Jesus tells us today. Someone sows a mustard seed. And you have to ask why. The mustard plants that grow in the Holy Land are invasive weeds. True, their seeds are used for flavouring, but you don’t need much, and there’s always some growing out by the roadside, disregarded most of the time. But you want to keep it out of your garden or your field, because it would quickly take over. It’s not something that anyone would grow on purpose.

And yet, in the parable, someone sows a mustard seed. Stranger still, it grows into the biggest shrub of all and all the birds of the air shelter under its branches. Well, mustard isn’t that big, really. It’s a thin straggly plant about six feet high, and wouldn’t provide much shade for anything.

So we enter the mysterious parallel universe of the parables. Much of the teaching of Jesus in the first three gospels takes the form of parables, and they are more than just metaphorical stories. They describe reality differently from what we are used to. They challenge our perception and our priorities. They invite us to enter a deepened awareness, a new consciousness, of something that Jesus is holding out to us but that we can’t grasp in terms of life as we know it. The parables are windows into a new and different reality.

What reality is that? It is the reality that led the first Christians to record these teachings of Jesus in the first place. The reality of the risen Lord, the living presence in their midst. The reality of the life that had burst victorious from the tomb, from the place of apparent final defeat. The reality of their own lives being transformed by the deathless, utterly loving life of God.

It is that reality which undergirds the whole gospel. The resurrection, the life of God breaking in to the world in the place of rejection and defeat, is the key to understanding everything in the gospels and indeed everything in the Bible.

Which is I think why a number of the parables are about sowing seed, with its resonances of death, burial and resurrection. Jesus himself makes this link in John’s Gospel, where speaking about his death he says, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” St Paul in 1 Corinthians uses the same imagery to speak of the resurrection, “What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.”

So it’s significant that in this parable of the mustard seed it is a weed that is sown. The disregarded, roadside plant that you wouldn’t want in your garden becomes an image of Jesus who was despised and rejected. The rubbish seed that no-one wants is thrown into the ground. And, miraculously, it rises, and becomes a great tree, giving shelter to all creatures. Just as Jesus, raised from the dead, becomes the one in whom all will find their true life and true home.

The resurrection reveals the Kingdom of God and opens the Kingdom to all believers. “What can we say the Kingdom of God is like?” asks Jesus.  The Kingdom is God’s rule, God’s justice, God’s life, enacted in the world. The Kingdom is everything as God intends it to be. In the Kingdom all that has been wrong is put right, and there is no death, because it is the world fully alive in God and there is no death in God.

In his teaching Jesus talks about the Kingdom both as something that is to come, and as something already present, for those who have eyes to see. In the Jewish tradition of the temple the Kingdom was the hidden reality at the heart of creation, always present but concealed, waiting to be manifested like a seed hidden in the earth, biding its time.

In Jesus God’s kingdom has become real in the world. In his human life God’s rule, God’s life, entered the world. In his resurrection the Kingdom has triumphed in the place of rejection and defeat. The discarded seed has become the Kingdom of God. The stone which the builders rejected has become the corner stone. As St Paul says in Romans, Colossians and Ephesians, this is the mystery which was hidden for past ages and has now been revealed in Jesus.

That reality has always been present, whether people have been waking or sleeping, aware or unaware. But now Jesus has risen, the green blade has burst from the earth, and the harvest has come. The Kingdom is revealed, and all people may enter in.

And the harvest of God’s Kingdom always begins on the edges, at the margins, in the place of rejection and defeat. Because that is where the Kingdom has entered the world in Jesus.

In our own lives, where is God at work? Where is God’s Kingdom becoming real, for us? Is it when we are comfortable, at ease, unchallenged, satisfied with ourselves, when we think our life is what we make it? I don’t think so. Is it not rather in the times of loss and sorrow, the times of emptiness and failure and disorientation, the times when we know we come with empty hands to receive our true life from God?

So too with those we welcome and serve in the Church. It is no accident that the attention of the Church – if it is being true to its calling – is so often on the margins of society, the rejected, the excluded, the misfits. This is not just because we feel sorry for people. It is because that actually is the priority of God’s Kingdom. It is where God is bringing about his rule and his new life. And if the rich and the comfortable and the at-ease get into the Kingdom it will be hanging on to the ragged coat tails of the poor, the despised, and the rejected of the earth.

So when we pray, as Jesus taught us, “Thy Kingdom come”, we are praying for that reality of God’s rule and God’s life to take root and fill the land. We are praying for it to become real in our own lives, and in those around us, so that the world can be transformed by the risen Christ. And we are praying for a new awareness, to be enlightened so we can see God’s Kingdom, the mystery hidden through past ages and now revealed in Jesus Christ. 

Sermon, Trinity Sunday 2012

Isaiah 6:1-8           

Romans 8:12-17           

John 3:1-17

Yesterday was a joyful day in the lives of two members of the congregation I serve at St Pancras Old Church. And it was a day of great joy for me as well, as I had the privilege of presiding at their marriage and celebrating their wedding Mass.

The marriage rite concluded, as it does, with the exchange of rings. And the words that are used at that moment are:

I give you this ring as a sign of our marriage. With my body I honour you, all that I am I give to you, and all that I have I share with you, within the love of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Some astounding things happen in church. Sinners become saints, bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ. And those words that people say to each other at their marriage are also astounding.

At a marriage we name the mystery we celebrate today, God in three Persons, the Holy Trinity, incomprehensible, beyond all names and forms; and we locate our pledge of human love within that mystery.

Is this just mystification, spoiling a happy human occasion with obscure theological jargon? I don’t think so. Because the Trinity is about love. It is about the revelation that God is love, and that God calls human beings to enter in and share in that love.

Most people believe in God, of course, apart from a few eccentrics. That belief is expressed in many religions, but mostly in our own so-called secular culture by vague inklings and longings. “I think there is something more than this”; “I believe in someone watching over me”.

But we as Christians find that we have to believe in God, and that we have to talk about God as Trinity, because we are in a living relationship with Jesus of Nazareth. And it is that relationship that enables us to say that God is love, love come to us, love embracing us and enfolding us and carrying us home.

Because we are in that relationship with the risen Lord we are able to say something about God, and in essence it is this: God is whoever it is who loved Jesus and raised him from the dead. And all the formulations of doctrine through church history, the Trinity and the Incarnation, flow from that. God is whoever it is who loved Jesus and raised him from the dead.

The background to the God of Jesus, of course, is Israel. The God of Israel was not like the gods of the other nations that could be described, understood, depicted as statues. In the holy of holies in the Temple at Jerusalem there was no image of God, just empty space, a door into abyssal silence and infinite depth, the void beyond all things from which all things have their being.

And yet that depth, that incomprehensible mystery, called to Israel. That experience of God calling took many forms. It could be the rage against injustice and exploitation that rose unbidden in the heart of the Prophet Amos. It could be the “the sound of utter silence”, at which Elijah covered his face and was afraid. Or it could be a terrifying theophany, such as the vision in Isaiah today.

And then Jesus came among us, a human being who called God “Father” and said that the Father loved him. A human being who, moreover, said that he was the Father’s message of love, in person, sent into the world, as he says this morning in today’s Gospel.

Now for a human being to say that God the Creator loves him is to say something which seems to be impossible. Love, real love, can only happen between equals, in freedom, in a relationship of mutual self-giving.

We use the word “love” quite loosely of course. We might say that we love our cat, or the view from Fiesole at sunset, or a nice bottle of claret. But we are not in a relationship of mutual self-giving with those things. Even a cat cannot give back to us as we give to her, in equality and freedom.

Love, in the proper sense, is only possible between equals. So when Jesus the man says that God the Creator is his Father, and loves him, he is saying something astounding. He is saying that he and the Father are equals. He is saying that they give themselves to each other in mutual surrender and freedom. Jesus the human being is saying that he and the Father are both God.

So Jesus, the human being, is God come among us. And the reason why he has come among us is so that all human beings can come to call God “Father”. So that all human beings can enter into the love that the Father shares with the Son. So that human beings, in Jesus, can be partakers of the divine nature. And to enable this to happen he has sent his Spirit into the hearts of believers. Now this Spirit is sent from the heart of God, and therefore is also God, because everything in God is God, pure and simple.

Now as the church grew and spread, people thought and debated about what exactly this all meant, and how best to express it.

Some Christians argued that Jesus was not really God, only similar to God. But the problem is that this makes Jesus’ mission impossible. If he is not truly God, then the Father cannot love him – or us. He can be kind, merciful, compassionate, yes, but not loving, because he can only love his equal, in freedom and mutual self giving.

Some other Christians argued that Jesus wasn’t really human, just God in the appearance of a human, a vision or illusion. But if Jesus isn’t human, then we humans can’t be joined with him in the relationship of love he shares with his Father.

All of which led over the course of time to the Church saying that there is one God in three persons, and that the Son truly became human and is “of one substance with the Father”, as we say in the creed. And so the Church arrived at the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.

Language of course can be tricky, and words change their meaning. When the theologians centuries ago said “three persons” they didn’t mean what today we might mean, three individuals or three people. They meant that there are three relations in God, so that the heart of Divine life, the inside of God as it were, is infinite mutual self-giving love. God is not literally a father, or a son, or a breath of wind. These are metaphors which connect with things we do understand, and point to relations in God which are real and true, but surpass our understanding.

And in case you’re wondering if the language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is all a bit masculine for a metaphor, you might like to consider that the word “Trinity”, in Greek and in Latin, is feminine.

But whether the metaphor is masculine or feminine, the message, the good news, remains the same. God is whoever it is who loved Jesus and raised him from the dead. This same God has created us to enter into the relationship of self-giving love that we call the Trinity, and in union with Jesus, who is fully human and fully divine, has made that possible.

Love is the reason for our creation, and the goal of our existence. When that love came among us, and was rejected by being nailed to a cross, God refused to take that rejection as our final answer, and raised Jesus from the dead.

We are joined with the risen Jesus in faith. In our baptism we partake of his nature and are born again as children of God. In the Eucharist and through the scriptures he feeds us with his divine life.

The love of God which surpasses all human knowledge draws us, in Jesus, into God’s very life. The risen life of Jesus opens the life and love of God to all people. In Jesus we have received the Spirit of adoption by which we, too, call God “Father”.

And it is that Spirit, in the risen Jesus, who enables us to believe and confess and love one God, Father Son and Holy Spirit.

Sermon Easter 2 2012

Acts 4:32-35

1 John 5:1-6

John 20:19-31

North Korea, that eccentric and isolated state, caused alarm again last week by its plans to send up a rocket to put a satellite into orbit. Those plans were regarded by many as a cover for testing an intercontinental missile. Missiles are scary things, particularly when the people building them have atom bombs and are fixated by an ideology that most of the world regards as deranged.

In the event, however, the North Korean test failed, so perhaps its neighbours are now a little less agitated than they were.

This may seem a curious introduction to today’s Gospel, but there is a connection. The word “missile” is part of a family of words which share the same root. Others include mission, Mass, and missal, and all derive from the Latin for “to send”.

Sending is mission. And today the risen Lord appears to the disciples in the upper room, and sends them. But unlike the sending of a missile with its threat of hostility and violence, this is a mission of peace.

“Peace be with you. As the Father sent me, so I am sending you.”

As we have been seeing during Easter week, in John’s Gospel the resurrection is really the beginning of the story of the disciples. Mary Magdalene, Peter, John and today Thomas are brought into a new relationship when they meet the risen Lord. The meeting completes their journey into faith, liberating them from the various ways in which they have been in captivity to sin and death.

Meeting with the risen Lord enables them to believe and so enter into the life which Jesus shares with the Father in the Holy Spirit. The resurrection means coming to live in God in whom there is no death.

Today Jesus spells out more of what that means. The life of God is not something static and self-contained, but is super-abundant, inexhaustible, continually pouring itself out in the work of creation. God’s utterly vivacious loving alive-ness bursts out in all directions.

Jesus has been sent into the world, the Son of the Father, the eternal Word, to complete the work of creation, to bring all to perfection and to enable the creation to share the life of God. And the risen Lord has opened the way to the Father, so that we can enter in and live with his life. That means we also share in the movement of that life into creation. The resurrection draws us into the sending of the Son and enables us to become its continuation in the world. Those who believe in Jesus become part of God’s movement into creation to redeem creation.

That is what the church’s mission is. It arises from the heart of God and pours itself out into the world. It is a Divine movement that we receive and participate in. We are sent. The mission of the church is not something we devise ourselves. Just as Baptism and the Eucharist are things we receive and participate in, because they are part of that same sending, part of that same movement of God into the world. Baptism and Eucharist constitute the Body of Christ, his presence and his mission in the world. This is why one of the words for the Eucharist is the Mass, the “sending”. This derives from the dismissal at the end, “ite missa est”, go, you are sent, go in the peace of Christ. The Mass reconstitutes us as the sending, the mission, of God, bearing his peace into the world.

The mission that Christ gives us is peace, forgiveness, and witness to the risen Lord. Its purpose is to bring people into that relationship of faith in which we can say “my Lord and my God”, in which we receive and participate in the very life of God.

All churches are now supposed to have mission statements, a description of the work that we believe God is calling us to do in our particular context. That’s an important thing. For too long the idea of mission was synonymous with foreign mission, that is sending people to far flung corners of the world to preach the gospel to those who had never heard it. That is an important aspect of mission. But we must not forget that the church is God’s mission in the world, everywhere. Home and abroad. We are sent as the Church, here. We have a mission, here.

But mission statements must be how we interpret and live the mission we have received, not something we construct ourselves. Peace, forgiveness, witness to the risen Lord, and bringing people to faith, are the core. Without those elements whatever we do is simply not the mission of the Church. Social activism by itself, however good, is not what Christ was sent to do and not what we are sent to do.

There is a social gospel, but only because there is a gospel. Care for the marginalised and needy necessarily follows from the fact that there is Good News. The truth that God in Jesus has freed us from the old order of sin and death spills over into every aspect of life that is still under the sway of sin and death. The Gospel, necessarily, is about liberation for all. But it begins with the Good News of Jesus.

Sometimes I think we as the church need to recover confidence in the mission we have received, the movement of God into creation in which we are caught up. Occasionally, exceptionally, I come across churches or clergy who seem to be very busy doing all kinds of good things in the community, but who seem to lack confidence in the basic beliefs that ought to be motivating all this activism.

St Francis is supposed to have said, “preach the gospel and, if necessary, use words”. There is a place for that but it is perhaps a little over quoted. It can be too ready an excuse for those who are embarrassed about making up-front claims for faith. Faith does actually need words. Now we are not all speech makers, we are not all teachers, not all apologists for Christian doctrine. But as the first letter of St Peter says, “always be prepared to give an account of the hope that is within you, but do it with gentleness and respect.”

In one way or another, the answer to the question, “why do we care?”, comes back to the hope that is within us because Christ is risen.

We have met the risen Lord and been called by him, sent by him. He has drawn us into God’s mission, which is his own mission, to bring peace and forgiveness to the world. We are sent as witnesses of his risen life, to bring the world into the relationship into which he has drawn us, the relationship of love, peace, and forgiveness. The relationship in which we share the very life of God.

Because Christ is risen, because he has called us, he has sent us to bring all the world into the embrace of that relationship with him in which we say “my Lord and my God”.