Sermon at Parish Mass, Trinity Sunday 2015

The Mystery of Life, Image and Gift of the Holy Trinity

Isaiah 6.1-8

Romans 8.12-17

John 3.1-17

“How can these things be?” asks Nicodemus. This is a very intimate scene from John’s Gospel. Nicodemus, a leader of the people, a teacher of Israel, comes to Jesus – but secretly, by night. He knows the law and the prophets, but he is seeking something more. He does not know yet what he is seeking, but he senses that Jesus is the key to finding it.

And Jesus speaks to him of the life of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the mystery of the Holy Trinity that we celebrate today. The Father so loved the world that he sent the Son into the world, so that the world might be saved, and come to share in the life of the Spirit. But Father, Son and Spirit are all one God.

Jesus speaks to Nicodemus and to us from the heart of that mystery, the heart of God. When we say that God is a mystery, we don’t mean that God is a puzzle to be solved or a question that demands an answer. We mean that God is beyond anything that we can understand or know. This is the God uniquely revealed in the history of the Jewish people. The nations around them had gods in plenty, but all of them could be described and understood. You could make images of them, you knew what they were for – the weather, harvest, war, and so on. But not Israel’s God. No image can be made of Israel’s God, not even any mental image or concept. This is the one who, when asked for a name, said “I will be what I will be”.

We can never understand, define or pin down God. “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” But what we cannot know with our minds we can know by love. Because God, the unfathomable and unknowable, speaks to us in Jesus. And, in Jesus, God summons us into the life of the Spirit. We human beings, created from nothing by God’s generosity alone, are called to share in the divine and uncreated life of God, who is love.

In this intimate scene, when Jesus and Nicodemus are talking together by night, Jesus chooses to reveal the most intimate secret: God is love, God is relationship, and Jesus has come so that we can share in that relationship of God who is love.

The life of the body, born from the flesh, born from below, as Jesus puts it, is given to us so that we can come to be born from the Spirit, from above. The purpose of our creation is to attain to union with God the creator.

The Book of Genesis says that humanity is created in the image and likeness of God. That means many things. It means that we are created for relationship, for communion, because God is relationship and communion. It means that alone of all the animals we have reason and will. It means that we are called to a moral, good and holy life, because these qualities reflect the nature of God.

But God is unknowable, a mystery that surpasses our comprehension. And human life also is a mystery, and so reflects God’s image. We do not call ourselves into being. We cannot determine our personalities or our destinies. So much of what it is to be human rises from unknown depths that we do not know or control. There is no such thing as the self-made man or woman.

We are created in the image of God who is mystery, and our life also is a mystery, a gift to be received rather than an identity to be constructed. Therefore the whole of life needs to be valued as reflecting God’s image, especially those parts of life that are dark, mysterious and hidden. The whole arc of life from beginning to end is a gift bearing God’s image.

In the darkness of the womb we have no idea when or how the human person begins. We emerge from a mystery we cannot know or determine. And the image of God is marked on all human beings, at every stage of life. Whether in the fullness of strength and vigour and human achievement, or in the life of the severely disabled, the terminally ill, and in those suffering from illnesses of slow decline that progressively veil the personality. God who is light but hides himself in darkness has set his image on us all.

Human life is the mysterious gift of God the Holy Trinity. We are created from nothing, given the life of the body so that we might seek the life of the Spirit, which is union with God. Therefore we need to have the profoundest reverence for the whole of human life from beginning to end, for all of it is imprinted with God’s image.

So the revelation of God the Holy Trinity, the intimate conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus by night, is not some abstract academic discussion. The concept of human rights begins here: the absolute value of every human person, slave or emperor, man, woman or child, because all alike are called to the life of grace and to union with God. This is something the first Christians were clear about from the beginning. But it is fragile and easily lost, as the rise of tyrannical regimes shows us from time to time. We need to be alert to anything that might undermine it in our society.

Again, assisted dying has been in the news once again this week, and the campaign for it is not going to go away. If we just go by what we can see then the beginnings and endings of life, when life is dark and veiled, can easily seem to be of lesser value. But if we are created in the image of God then darkness, mystery and hiddenness are part of that image, to be held and valued along with the rest.

Or again, in our Western Society we can seem so much obsessed by the rational and the conscious that we are in danger of forgetting the mysterious depths within and the realm of the Spirit, which is just as much a part of what it is to be human. “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

The opposite of this, the suggestion that life is something we do own and control, is really a kind of idolatry, because it replaces the image of God who is mystery with something that we wish to pin down and determine ourselves.

We live in a society that asks in so many ways, like Nicodemus, “how can these things be?” How can human life be of infinite value? How can the life of the body open us to the life of the Spirit? These are questions that are seeking the insight of faith to which the Church bears witness – even if, like Nicodemus, people do not yet know what they are seeking. And the Church, like Jesus, is in the world not to condemn the world but so that the world might be saved. The witness of the Church to the dignity of human life must reflect the compassion, mercy and love of God in whose image that life is created.

The thing that human beings most need to know is that we are created by God who loves us so much that he sent his Son so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. That is good news, and we need to sound like people who have good news to tell. Every human being is made for eternal life, and eternal life is the relationship of love in which God lives, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, as is was in the beginning, is now, and shall be for ever. Amen.

Sermon at Parish Mass, Pentecost 2015

Acts 2:1-21

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. 2And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. 3Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

5 Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. 6And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. 7Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? 8And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? 9Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, 10Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, 11Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.’

Romans 8:22-27

and those who are in the flesh cannot please God. 9 But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit,* since the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. 10But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit* is life because of righteousness. 11If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ* from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through* his Spirit that dwells in you.

12 So then, brothers and sisters,* we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh— 13for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. 14For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. 15For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba!* Father!’ 16it is that very Spirit bearing witness* with our spirit that we are children of God, 17and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

John 15.26-27; 16.4b-15

‘If you love me, you will keep* my commandments. 16And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate,* to be with you for ever. 23Jesus answered him, ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. 24Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; and the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me.

25 ‘I have said these things to you while I am still with you. 26But the Advocate,* the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.

The day of Pentecost - what a launch party ! What a beginning for the Jesus movement expanding into the world! And all without a PR company or an advertising campaign, or any presence on social media. Only God could do something like that.

And what a transformation! The disciples were in the same upper room in which Jesus had celebrated the last supper just before his death. That was a private, safe room where the Master and his disciples could gather undisturbed by the police who were hunting for him. The same room where the disciples had met after the death of Jesus with the doors locked because they were afraid. And they’re the same disciples.

Yet today the Holy Spirit blasts into that room in wind and fire. The disciples begin to praise God in every language under heaven, proclaiming his mighty works. Thousands see and believe. Suddenly everything is public and out in the open. The little secret church in that closed room has been launched into the world. And the Church has never gone back into that little room, and the world has never been the same again.

The Spirit gives the church everything the church needs to carry on the mission of Jesus in the world. What is that mission? It is the mission to bring the world into the embrace of God’s love. It is the mission to reach out to a humanity thathas been estranged from that love.

Jesus describes the Spirit as the Advocate, the one who comes alongside and defends us. This is an image from the courtroom, but it shows us that the Holy Spirit is God on our side,  taking our part, replacing the spirit of the world, Satan the accuser who divides and casts out. God’s Spirit comes to us to assure us that we are loved, that we are embraced by God who is love. The life of the Spirit, which is unity and inclusion and drawing all together in love, is given to us in place of the spirit which has been running the world up to now, the spirit of accusation and violence and casting out.

The Orthodox icon for the feast of Pentecost tries to convey something of this change. It’s a marvel of inverted perspective. The upper room has become an open space with no walls or horizon, it just goes on without limit into golden light. The disciples and Mary are sitting in arc which is part of an expanding circle like ripples on a pond. This is the new life in the Holy Spirit, ever enlarging. Down below, in a small cramped dark space, is a little figure representing the world, run according to the old way of accusation and violence. The world is robed like a king, but he looks on without comprehension. He doesn’t see the glorious new universe, the Kingdom of God in the Holy Spirit, which is unfolding in front of him.

This is the change, the new life, that the Spirit brings. And what were the disciples doing when the Holy Spirit descended on them? They were praying, and had been for nine days. Preparing themselves for this great gift. The Spirit is not an invader taking over, but a guest transforming us with our consent. So we have to be willing and prepared.

Prayer prepares us to receive and nurture the gift of the Holy Spirit in our hearts. But that is no great challenge. Prayer is very simple. It is simply attention to God in our hearts. In these days when life is so complicated and so full and busy we need this simplicity more than ever. All the different methods of prayer are intended to lead us towards this goal: wakeful attention to God in the heart. So do whatever helps you most. That may be set forms of prayer, the daily office of psalms and readings, the Rosary, the Jesus prayer, meditative reading of scripture, silent meditation.

We also need to nurture the Spirit by constant conversion of life, repentance, turning around to follow the will of God, and by faithful and frequent participation in the Eucharist, for that is our spiritual nourishment as much as ordinary food is nourishment for our bodies.

The Spirit within us is the first fruits of redemption and the promise of its completion. Which, says St Paul, is the redemption of our bodies. Our bodies are temples of the Spirit now, and are to be fully glorified in our own resurrection.

This is why we worship with our bodies as well as our minds. We physically come to church and gather together. You can’t have a church without that! There is no such thing as a “virtual church” - the church absolutely needs bodies! It is a physical gathering. With our bodies we make the sign of the cross, we bow and bend the knee, we raise our hands in prayer, we see the lights and the images and vestments, we sing with our lungs, we breathe the incense.

Most fundamentally of all, our bodies are washed with water in baptism, our mouths receive the Holy Eucharist in which Jesus feeds us with himself. Our bodies are absolutely central to the way in which we are being saved and made holy. This is why the Church from the beginning has treated the bodies of Christians with honour in life and death, and venerated the tombs and relics of the saints. Bodies in which the Holy Spirit dwells are made holy.

Christianity does not believe that we are spirits trapped in matter but bodies and souls made spiritually alive by the Spirit of God. The Ascension, in which bodily human nature is taken into God, is the other side of the same coin. At Pentecost we see the fruits of the Lord’s Ascension coming back to us, the Spirit given to us to transform us into God. And while we wait for the fulness of our redemption the Spirit prays within us and supports us in our weakness.

The Holy Spirit comes to us to assure us that we are loved. And the Spirit dwells in us so that we might love God and one another with the same love with which he loves us. The Church is not to remain in a little safe upper room.  God sends us, who have been caught by his love, to widen the circle of that love, to embrace the whole world.

And the Holy Spirit gives us too the gifts that are needed to continue this mission. Gifts of ministry and discipleship and administration. Gifts of wisdom, understanding, patience, love. Some gifts are more obvious, some are quieter and more hidden. But every one of us has different gifts and we all need each other. The gifts the Holy Spirit distributes are to work together to build up the Church and to extend God’s Kingdom. And all of these are nurtured and grown by prayer, by the Eucharist, and by the path of conversion of life.

So let us today give thanks for the gifts God has given us, and pray that we may use those gifts, together, to build up one another and to carry on the mission that God has given to us.

The whole world is invited to enter the new universe that began in the upper room, the new way of life filled with light and love, the Kingdom of God in the Holy Spirit. And God has given us the Spirit of his love that we may bring others into that love too.

Sermon at Parish Mass Easter 7 2015

Acts 1.15-17,21-26

1 John 5.9-13

John 17.6-19

Today’s readings are perhaps not the easiest in the Easter season. The Gospel in particular may seem very abstract and philosophical. Nothing happens in the passage we heard just now, there is no action or dialogue, and indeed Jesus is not even teaching anything to his disciples. Instead he is praying to the Father for his disciples and we are listening in on his prayer. But it is this prayer that the Church wants us to pay attention to, on this Sunday before Pentecost.

What is it then that Jesus prays for, on behalf of his disciples, and how does it connect with our lives? What difference does it make?

Firstly, he asks that they may be protected in his name, so that they may be one, as Jesus and the Father are one. And secondly he asks that they may be sanctified in the truth.

So what does this mean for the disciples of Jesus? What does it mean, in fact, for us, because we are disciples of Jesus too?

Truth is a big word here. “Sanctify them in the truth”, Jesus prays. When Jesus was on trial before Pontius Pilate he said that he had come into the world to bear witness to the truth. And Pilate had replied, “what is truth?”. He got no answer. Because the truth, in John’s Gospel, is not a set of ideas or facts that we have to agree to. The truth is a person. “I am the way, the truth and the life”, says Jesus, “no-one comes to the Father except through me”. The truth was standing in front of Pontius Pilate, but he could not see it.

Jesus is the truth, not as a set of ideas or facts but as God’s living expression of himself. Jesus is the Word, the truth, of the Father. “Sanctify them in the truth”, says Jesus, “your word is truth”.

To be sanctified is to be made holy, dedicated and set apart. It is to belong to God. What we hold sacred is what matters to us most. So if the truth is a person, to be sanctified in the truth is to be in a relationship with that person in which we belong to God, a relationship that matters more than anything else.

In other words Jesus in his prayer is asking that his disciples may be drawn into the relationship that he has with the Father, the life of God the Holy Trinity. God is the Father of Jesus, and if we are in Jesus, “sanctified in the truth”, then God is our Father too, and he sends his Spirit into our hearts.

To be sanctified in the truth, then, is to be in the relationship with Jesus by which we can call God our Father. And to be sanctified in that relationship, dedicated and set apart, means that this is the highest purpose and centre and goal of our lives.

So this prayer of Jesus, which may have seemed to be very abstract and disconnected from real life, in fact is about life where it is most personal, most real. It is about our dwelling in the relationship with Jesus in which we call God Father. That is the most important thing there is, because it is what we were created for.

In fact to be sanctified in the truth can be very real and concrete indeed. To give an example: I was in Jerusalem just over a week ago on pilgrimage, and like many pilgrims we followed the way of the Cross, the Via Dolorosa, through the walled city. The end of the Via Dolorosa is historical – Calvary and the empty tomb are located beyond reasonable dispute in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. But it’s by no means clear where Pilate’s judgement hall was, and the way of the cross winds through streets that are mediaeval, not first century. For part of the way it goes through the souk, squeezed between shops selling spices and souvenirs or hung with carpets and feather dusters.

So, following this route, I was beginning to feel that it was all rather disconnected and abstract. What did this really have to do with the Way of the Cross? And then we turned a corner – the ninth station was in front of us, Jesus falls for the third time. The ninth station is in a narrow street outside the headquarters of the Coptic Church. And strung across the street was a banner showing the thirty Coptic martyrs killed in Libya by ISIS just a couple of months ago. Then the tenth station was by the Ethiopian church, and there was a banner showing the Ethiopian Christians killed in Libya even more recently.

And suddenly the Way of the Cross was very real indeed, and completely up to date. Here were pictures of people who were alive a few weeks ago. But their relationship with God in Jesus, the relationship in which they called God Father, was more important to them than their lives. These were truly people who were sanctified in the truth.

Elsewhere in the Holy Land we encountered Christian communities who were absolutely committed to staying where they were, even in increasingly difficult circumstances, committed to peace and dialogue and reconciliation, determined to stay and make a difference. We don’t hear much about them in the news here, but the Christians in the Holy Land make a huge difference to the lives of all communities there by running schools, hospitals and orphanages, by being committed to the poor and excluded and taking risks for peace. To be committed in that way, also, is to be sanctified in the truth. It is to see that being able to call God Father is the most important thing there is, for us and for others, the one thing above all that changes how we live in the world and how we value our fellow human beings.

Radical commitment to the poor and excluded is nearer to our experience than the risk of martyrdom – though let us remember that the word “martyr” just means “witness”, and we are all witnesses to Jesus Christ. It is certainly part of the way in which we are committed to being the church in this place, making a real difference with the people among whom we are set, amid the many needs of our society, which I suspect are going to get more acute over the next five years.

Jesus the risen Lord calls us into relationship with him, the relationship in which we, with him, can call God our Father. And Jesus sends us, as he was sent, to draw others into that relationship of love. He sanctifies us in the truth, so that our relationship with him is the most important thing there is, the one thing that make life totally different for us and for all those whom Jesus is calling, through us, into that same relationship with him.

Sermon at Parish Mass Easter 5 2015

Acts 8.26-40

1 John 4.7-21

John 15.1-8

Well the election campaign is in its last frenzied week, relieved a little by the joyful news of the birth of a new princess. But I expect the headlines will soon be back to the various promises and claims of the various political parties.

One of the factors that is very much present in our political dialogue at the moment, it seems to me, is a sense of belonging. Where do you belong? Who do you belong with? Scotland, England, the EU, the poor, working families, the well off, and so on. Which group do you identify with? Where do you feel you are connected, plugged in? And of course the extremes in politics are trying to use our desire for a sense of belonging to play on people’s fears, and trying to use our nastier side that wants to cast out and exclude those we think are different to us.

Belonging. Abiding, as the Bible puts it. Where you abide is where you are real, where you are deeply rooted and connected. Where you abide is where your life is.

And the Bible uses various images for that. The vine is one of them.

In the Old Testament the vine is a metaphor for the people of Israel, planted in the land of Israel. It is an image of belonging. We meet it for example in Psalm 80:

You brought a vine out of Egypt;

   you drove out the nations and planted it.

You cleared the ground for it;

   it took deep root and filled the land.

The mountains were covered with its shade,

   the mighty cedars with its branches;

it sent out its branches to the sea,

   and its shoots to the River.

Last week we heard another image of the people, another aspect of belonging. The image was that of sheep, belonging to the good shepherd. That too was a well known Old Testament image for the people of God, and the good shepherd was God himself, or the kings who ruled in his name.

But as we heard last week Jesus took that image of the Good Shepherd and gave it a new meaning.  Jesus is the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep, instead of the other way round, which we would normally expect.

And Jesus does the same this week. He takes that Old Testament image of the vine, very familiar to the Jewish people, and gives it a new and unexpected meaning.

The vine is an image of the people. So we would perhaps expect Jesus to say to the disciples, the people he has gathered to himself, “you are the true vine”. But he does not. Instead, he says, “I am the vine”. And you the disciples are in the vine, the people, if you abide in me. This is new. This is revolutionary. To belong to the people of God means abiding in Jesus. It doesn’t mean belonging to some specific race or location or political system. It means that anyone Jesus chooses is planted in him, like a vine, rooted in the spiritual ground that is God. Anyone at all, drawn together in him, regardless of whether those people would naturally group together or not. In Jesus all our divisions are overcome. All our sense of insiders and outsiders, who belongs and who doesn’t, is left behind, because Jesus establishes a new reality in himself, which all are called to enter.

Jesus is offering a completely new idea of what it means to be the people of God, and it is centred and rooted in himself. The people of God is not any particular human group agreeing among itself to belong together. It is not a human initiative at all. Instead, it is God’s initiative, in Jesus. And if we are to belong to the people of God, we must belong in Jesus.

And as Jesus makes clear, and as the first letter of John repeats many times, love and faith are the key to abiding in Jesus. Love for God and for one another, as we heard last week, that is the commandment of Jesus – that we believe in him and love one another. St John reiterates that this week:

God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

In this belonging together we do not choose one another. Rather we are all chosen and called by Jesus. Therefore we have to accept one another as his gift, in all our diversity. And not just this little congregation but disciples all round the world in every time and place and culture. People with whom we might think we have nothing in common – except that Jesus has chosen us.

The church, the people of God, is the new way of being human. In the choice of Jesus for us all our old human categories of insiders and outsiders are overturned. All are called to enter this new reality. We can reject no-one, nor may anyone reject us.

This may seem to stand at a bit of a distance from our oppositional politics and the trading of promises and accusations that we get in election week. But those who have faith are called to be salt of the earth and the leaven in the lump. Those who foundationally are present and abiding in Jesus are called to be a persistent patient presence in wider society, the community of the Church transforming the communities in which we are set.

So we have to engage with the society around us, however imperfect the system is. We have to live Jesus’ command to believe in him, and to love one another, in a way that makes a difference. We have to live in a way that shows that everyone matters, that no-one can be rejected. And part of the practical way we make a difference is by engaging in the political system we are part of, and by taking part in the democratic process.

So I would urge you to vote, even though no candidate or party is perfect. Vote because we believe in love for one another. We take part in our society as it is, because we believe in the new reality, the new way of being human, which Jesus taught in his ministry and instituted in his church, the reality of abiding in love that he calls us and all human beings to enter.