Sermon at Parish Mass, St Mary's Somers Town, Trinity 11 2012

Proverbs 9:1-6

Ephesians 5:15-20

John 6:51-58

“This may be a wicked age, but your lives should redeem it.”

The Letter to the Ephesians over the last few weeks has been painting a picture of contrasts: the new life of believers in Christ contrasted with the old life of sin and corruption. In the past they were dead in their sins but now have been saved and raised to new life in Christ. Therefore, believers must leave aside their old way of living: lies, anger, theft, evil talk, immorality. These things no longer have any place in the life of those who are in Christ.

Throughout Ephesians, Paul also contrasts the present age and the age to come.  These are not simply periods of history, like the space age or the iron age, but represent two very contrasting ways of living and being, two opposed value systems, two different and incompatible imaginations. 

This present age is what we might call the age of sin, governed by envy, rivalry, violence and death. The age to come is the age of God’s Kingdom. It is the age when God’s rule will be manifested in the world. It is the age in which love, justice and peace will be all in all. It is the age which the Bible compares to a great feast, of super-abundant, never-failing rich food and fine wine. 

These two ages are not however consecutive periods of history. The age to come, the age of God’s rule, is not something that will come about only after this present age of sin and death is over. The Biblical picture is much richer than that. The age to come in fact is a reality which is already present. In Ephesians 3 Paul says this is a mystery “hidden from ages in God” and now brought to light in Christ. 

The age to come entered the world in Jesus, because Jesus is God’s kingdom, God’s rule, in person. The preaching of Jesus was not abstract teaching, but what he was himself enacting: forgiveness, healing, the restoration of human society through the renunciation of envy and greed. These things characterise the age to come. The Kingdom of God, said Jesus, is among you - already. Let those who have eyes to see, see. 

And of course this present age would have none of it and put him to death. But Jesus was raised from the dead because God’s Kingdom is triumphant and is the final word on human sin. 

Christ has conquered, and the age to come is already present for those who are in Christ. Christ is risen, and those who are in Christ are raised with him into his Kingdom. In Christ we share in the life of the resurrection, which is the life of God in whom there is no death.

So we could call this present age the age of death, because death is what defines its imagination. Resources are limited, life is short, so grasp what you can while you can, before you die. And this leads us only into envy and rivalry and violence. The age of death ends in death.

And we could call the age to come the age of the resurrection. It is the age of limitless life, which we do not have to grasp at because it is a gift from the never failing generosity of God our loving Father. It is life entirely without death, without rivalry, without violence, because it is the life that God lives. The age of the resurrection has no end.

But the heart of Paul’s message in Ephesians is that if we are reborn in Christ we are already beginning to live in the age of the resurrection, even in the midst of this passing age of death. 

That contrast requires, as Paul says, the radical reordering of our lives. It requires, in fact, repentance, turning around. We are to redeem the age by living according to the age to come whilst still in this passing age.

This is nothing less than a collision of worlds. As Paul repeatedly says, it requires lifelong discipline. Christ has freed us from this passing age of death, but it still retains a powerful allure. The world is very attached to the imagination of death, as we see only too well every time we turn on the news. 

Nevertheless, to redeem the age is to transform the world. It is to make the age of the resurrection more concrete, more visible, in the midst of the age of death. The gospel message is not escape from this evil world to a heaven somewhere else, after we die. The gospel message is transformation of this world, the redeeming of the age. We are to live our lives according to the resurrection here and now.

This is where any true theology of liberation begins: Christ is risen, bringing the age of the resurrection to light in the midst of the age of death. We should not be surprised if the gospel often speaks most powerfully to those who are the victims of the age of death, the oppressed and downtrodden of the earth. After all, Christ’s resurrection is foreshadowed in the Exodus, the liberation of slaves from Egypt. And whether in the favelas of Brazil, or in South Africa under Apartheid, or in the slums here in the time of Father Jellicoe, Christian lives lived according to the Gospel redeem the age. 

Christian life is of course life lived in the Church. St Paul is absolutely clear that if we are in Christ then we are one body, one new humanity, in Christ. That being one body in Christ is expressed and made real though the sacramental life that Christ has given us. We are made one body through Baptism and the Eucharist. Through those sacraments we receive the life of the age to come. As Jesus says in today’s gospel, “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me, and I live in him. As I, who am sent by the living Father, myself draw life from the Father, so whoever eats me will draw life from me.”

And of course to many of those who listened this was incomprehensible and offensive language. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” The words of Jesus provoke a violent reaction. But this too is about the collision of worlds. It is about the age of death failing to understand the age of resurrection. Because if your imagination is bounded by death, then talk about eating flesh and drinking blood can only sound like cannibalism. Someone can only give his flesh to eat if he’s dead. And that does not lead to more life but less. 

But if you are in Christ, and beginning to live in the age of the resurrection, then indeed the flesh and blood of Christ are the source of limitless life, the life he draws from the living Father, and which he pours out to us continually without being diminished. In the Eucharist we are fed with the boundless, limitless life of the resurrection. 

And when and where do we celebrate the Eucharist? Not in heaven, but on earth. In the midst of this passing age, the age of death, we feed on the flesh and blood of Christ, the life of the age to come. The Eucharist is the sacrament of the Church, and the Church is the sacrament of the transformation of the world, the new humanity, living from the deathless life of God.

Our participation in the Eucharist calls us to live with the same openness and generosity that God shows to us. We are to be open to the life of God, which is limitless, and to leave aside our old life of sin, which ends only in death. And the generosity of God is infectious. By being forgiven, we become forgiving. By being liberated, we become liberators, co-workers with Christ in his transformation of the world. 

This is why the gospel of the resurrection is, necessarily, a social gospel, a gospel of liberation. If we live according to the resurrection then we must oppose injustice, oppression and violence in the world around us. Anything which destroys or diminishes humanity does not belong in the age to come, and we are already beginning to live in that age even in the midst of this present age.

“This may be a wicked age”, says Paul, “but your lives should redeem it.”

Sermon at Parish Mass and Baptism Trinity 7 2012

Jeremiah 23:1-6

Ephesians 2:13-18

Mark 6:30-34

“He had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd.”

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m very much a town person, unfamiliar with the ways of the countryside, although of course acknowledging like all of us our dependence on farming and agriculture. 

But the image of sheep is a very familiar one to all of us in the Bible. It is an image of the people of God, and in the Old Testament that meant the people of Israel. Sheep go around in flocks, they are not isolated individuals, so this tells us that the people of God belong together. Unity is part of what it means to belong to God as his people.

But sheep also need quite a bit of looking after. They need a shepherd to keep them together and stop them from wandering off. And they also need to be protected from predators and thieves. Sheep are not terribly resourceful. They are dependent, and need to be able to trust their shepherd. They need a good shepherd.

In the Old Testament, the metaphor of a shepherd is used of God himself: God watches over and looks after his people. But the Kings and rulers of Israel were regarded as holding their authority from God, and so they also were described as shepherds of the people. They ruled on behalf of God, and had the duty to guide the people in the right ways, to keep them together, and to protect them from aggressors. 

But sadly, and often, the people of Israel didn’t have good shepherds. As in this morning’s reading from Jeremiah. The prophet is speaking just before the people of Judah were invaded by Babylon and carried off into exile. The kings of Judah have behaved stupidly and selfishly, they have not listened to the prophets, they have not seen the threat coming and have not responded appropriately. So the people are doomed. They are going to be scattered and driven away like a flock of sheep without a shepherd.

But, Jeremiah says, there is still hope. God has not forgotten his people. In the future he will give his people shepherds who will look after them, and more than that, a mysterious figure, “the Righteous Branch of David”, the Messiah, God’s anointed ruler. And the scattered people of God will once again be gathered together and live in safety.

So when in the Gospels we have references to sheep and shepherds all of that is in the background. Jesus sees the people and has compassion for them because they were like sheep without a shepherd. This is the scattered people of God, at the mercy of predators, not knowing what way to turn, and they are waiting for what Jeremiah promised: the Good Shepherd, the Righteous Branch of David, who will restore God’s people. 

And the gospel writer is saying that the Good Shepherd has now come. In Jesus, God is bringing his people back together in unity and guiding and protecting them. Which is why the first thing that Jesus does is to start teaching them. As in the Old Testament, the sheep have wandered off because they haven’t been taught the ways of the Lord, the paths of righteousness and peace. And it is Jesus who announces the Good News of God, to draw his people back together into God’s Kingdom.

The image of Jesus as shepherd runs through the gospel reading this morning. We can see it when the apostles gather round Jesus to tell him about all they’ve been doing. And when he wants them to come away and rest a while we’re reminded of Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd... fresh and green are the pastures where he gives me repose, near restful waters he leads me to revive my drooping spirit”.

Jesus is not like the kings of ancient Israel, who ruled on behalf of God, but mostly not very well. Jesus is enacting Psalm 23 in which the Lord is my shepherd. He is fulfilling Jeremiah who promised that the future shepherd of God’s people will be “The Lord our Righteousness”. So Jesus is not a substitute shepherd, he is the Lord himself restoring his people.

Sheep are pretty helpless, really. So in Jesus, God is taking the initiative to gather his sheep back to himself, to guide them gently into pastures where they can rest, to guide them under God’s rule, into God’s kingdom.

And the sheep that Jesus has come to gather are not only the ancient people of Israel. As our reading from the letter to the Ephesians tells us, in Jesus God has drawn into one both Jew and Gentile. Jesus has broken down all the divisions which keep human beings apart, making one new humanity and creating peace. God’s choice of the people of Israel has never been taken away, his promises to Israel have never been cancelled. But, through Jesus, that choice and those promises have been extended to all people. 

This morning we celebrate the sacrament of Baptism, welcoming William as the latest member of God’s people in his church. Baptism is the sign of dying and rising with Christ. It is the sign by which we become part of the one new humanity which Jesus has created, overcoming all divisions.

And it is Jesus himself who does this. It is Jesus who works through the sacraments of his Church. We cannot make ourselves members of God’s people; Jesus the Good Shepherd seeks us out and joins us to his flock. Which is why we baptise children, who aren’t yet old enough to understand, because for all of us what matters is that God has chosen us and made us part of his redeemed people.

Most of us, probably, don’t remember our baptism. But we do know that we are baptised. We know that Christ has claimed us for his own. And he never takes back his choice.

We do not make ourselves members of the people of God. It doesn’t depend on us. And our faith, our relationship with Christ, is not an individual thing or a private hobby. We are members of a people. We, like sheep, are gathered together in unity by Christ our Good Shepherd. 

And the promise of God, for us, as well as for William, is that he will guide and protect us and bring us into his Kingdom. That Kingdom is righteousness and peace for all people, in which all divisions and injustice have been overcome. It is the new humanity, made one in the body of Christ. Through Baptism and the Eucharist that new humanity becomes real in us, in our lives, and in the world. This is what Christ does for us, for William, and for all his people. And in Christ we have a sure and certain hope.

This is why we study his teachings, not just as individuals but when we come together to celebrate the Eucharist. Christ teaches us as a people, guiding us through the scriptures into the ways of God’s kingdom of justice and peace. Jesus is the good shepherd who teaches his people the good news of God. And because there is one flock of Christ, one new humanity, we need also to reflect on the insights of our brothers and sisters elsewhere in the world. For example, Christians praying alongside other faith communities in India, or struggling against injustice in the Philippines, have their own insights to share into how Christ is leading all his people.

And we make those teachings real in our lives, and carry them into the world, spreading the good news of God’s kingdom. Now we don’t follow the teachings of Christ to try and earn God’s favour. We are not trying to make the grade as the people of God. God in Jesus has already chosen us and made us part of his people. That is his free act of grace, and he will not take back his choice. So we can truly say, with William and all God’s people, that the Lord is our shepherd, and that he guides us along the right pathways for his name’s sake.

Sermon at Evensong, St Pancras New Church, Trinity 6 2012

Job 4:1;  5:6-end

Romans 15:14-29

All the ladies fell for Rudolph Valentino,
he had a beano back in those balmy days.
He knew every time you meet an icy creature,
you got to teach her hot-blooded latin ways.
But even Rudy would have felt the strain,
of making smooth advances in the rain.

Oh, this year I’m off to sunny Spain, eviva España,
I’m taking the Costa Brava plane, eviva España.
If you’d like to chat a matador, in some cool cabaña,
and meet señoritas by the score, España por favor.

Back in 1974, when that song was on Top of the Pops, package holidays and Franco’s impending demise had opened up the Spanish Costas to millions of Britons for the first time. And most of them, unused to the sunshine, came back boiled red like lobsters. 

For many of us I expect the idea of a holiday in Spain might be quite attractive at the moment. Certainly when I was writing this sermon, looking out of my window at the pouring rain, it did cross my mind.

But that’s not St Paul’s idea. When he says towards the end of his letter to the Romans that he’s off to Spain, he’s not thinking of a holiday. In fact his route takes him from Macedonia to Jerusalem and then to Spain via Rome - the whole length of the Mediterranean. A long and hazardous journey with many dangers and uncertain prospects at the end. And this was by no means unusual. In 2 Corinthians Paul gives us a brief account of his travels as follows:

Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked.

Now that’s not the kind of recommendation you’re likely to read in a Thomas Cook brochure. So you have to ask, why did Paul bother? What drove him to undertake all these lengthy and hazardous journeys to out of the way places like Spain?

And the answer is what he has been telling us throughout his letter to the Romans. The answer is the good news of God in Jesus Christ. And that good news was the reversal of everything that Paul had thought about God. 

That Good News, as Paul tells it in Romans, is that our justification, our new life in Christ, is God’s gift. It is not something we construct for ourselves, not something we earn. And Paul came to that good news through his conversion, that is, by the discovery that he was wrong.

Paul, of course, had been a violent fundamentalist, who really hated the annoying new sect called the Christians, and pursued them from city to city, trying to kill or imprison as many as possible. 

Until he met Jesus. Jesus, who had been killed by religious zealots just like Paul, met him on the road to Damascus, and turned his life around. When Paul met the risen Christ his old self collapsed. Paul had been living inside a myth that he was perfect, but when he met the one he was persecuting he found instead that he was loved. All of him. His sins, his flaws, his failures. The dark depths that he hardly even guessed at. Everything about him was known, and forgiven, and embraced in a love so strong that it had raised Jesus from the dead. And this love came to him as a completely unearned, unmerited free gift.

Throughout Paul’s life, up to his conversion, he had been trying to justify himself. He was trapped inside the idea that his life was something he put together himself, that his self was his own construction. That his worth, his fundamental true and eternal value, lay in his own achievements. 

And the whole of the letter to the Romans, in one way or another, is telling us how that is completely wrong. Paul is telling us how his entire world view, his entire conception of himself, collapsed and was overturned when he met Jesus. 

So, for Paul, new life in Christ means a completely new beginning. It means both discovering that you have got it all wrong, and discovering that God has been waiting for you all along in the place of your wrongness, just waiting for you to let go. Waiting for you to let go of the false self you thought you could construct so you can receive the free gift of your true self, the Self which is hidden in Christ in God. The Self whose existence is founded not on anything we have done but in the truth that we are loved. 

The risen Christ who met Paul on the road to Damascus shattered his illusions and broke through the shell of his ego. It was really a death; the death of what Paul calls the “old Adam”, our fallen human nature turned in on itself and its illusions. And it was a rebirth, birth into the new life of the Resurrection, the deathless and utterly loving life of God.  So complete was this transformation that Paul could afterwards say, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”. 

And it was Christ living in Paul who drove him on, carrying him through trials and dangers and persecutions for the rest of his life. Paul was so captivated by Christ that he could not but proclaim the good news of God in as many places as possible. The good news that we are loved. Anyway. In spite of everything in our nature that wants to fight against being loved. In spite of everything in us that wants to reject God’s gift of life. In spite of our deep-seated desire to construct our own death-dealing ego-centred imitation life instead. 

Paul of course eventually had his head cut off by the Emperor Nero, a man who was the very embodiment of death-dealing ego-centred imitation life. But Nero did not understand, and could not touch, the true secret of Paul’s life, which was hidden with Christ in God. Because of Christ, crucified and risen, Paul’s death became a sharing in Christ’s triumph. It became his personal final victory over sin and death and all the illusory world of the false self.

And Paul’s gospel, the good news of God in Jesus, still shouts and sings from the pages of his letters, and in the life of the Church which he spread and planted in so many places, through so many dangers.

And the good news of God in Jesus is our good news, too. The good news that we are loved. Anyway. Loved even in the midst of our wrongness. Loved even in the midst of all the ways we try to resist being loved. Loved where we are, in the place where God is waiting for us. Loved, in fact, in ways we could not have discovered so gloriously had we not been so wrong. Loved, and loved, and loved, until we can finally let go of our death-dealing ego-centred false self. Loved until we can receive God’s abundant free gift which is both God’s own life and our deepest and truest Self, Christ living in us. 

This is the mystery that captivated Paul, and in which we too are caught up. His gospel is our gospel. Good news in this place, and in every place. The good news of God in Christ Jesus, to whom be glory, honour and praise, now and for ever.

Sermon at Parish Mass Trinity 4 2012

Wisdom 1:13-15; 2:23-24

2 Corinthians 8:7, 9, 13-15

Mark 5:21-43

Don’t do that. Don’t touch that. It’s dirty. I wonder how old we were when we first heard those words, or something like them. As children we quickly learn that things called “dirty” are forbidden, taboo. And most of the time of course we hope that grown-ups are trying to teach children sensible habits of hygiene. 

But “dirty” is a powerful word. It can come to be associated with other forbidden things that have nothing to do with physical cleanliness. In particular sex and foreignness. That behaviour is dirty. Those people are dirty. Subconsciously “dirty” becomes attached to anything and anyone we don’t like. It draws a boundary to separate us from people we imagine are different from us. And deep down it perhaps names parts of ourselves that we deny, because to acknowledge them would make us the same as those other people we don’t want to be like.

That visceral sense of someone being “dirty” is probably the nearest that most of us can get to something that lies behind today’s gospel story. It is set in a world governed by ritual law defining what is clean and unclean. In that world those who are unclean are excluded from society.

And uncleanness was contagious, transmitted by touch. You only had to touch someone or something who was unclean and you became unclean yourself. This is why people who were unclean were segregated.

So when Jesus asked “who touched me?” he was asking a question fraught with anxiety. Particularly in a crowd, with people you don’t know. Might some unclean person have found their way in?

And in this case, that is exactly what has happened. The woman who is suffering from haemorrhages had a menstrual disorder causing excessive bleeding. This was a disaster for her, not only because it made her ill through blood loss, but because it made her permanently unclean. She was a permanent outcast from society because of her bleeding.

So for her to force her way into a crowd was a scandalous offence. For her to touch a rabbi, a holy man, was even more shocking. And she knows the magnitude of what she has done because in fear and trembling she falls down before Jesus and confesses all.

You can imagine the revulsion of the crowd. This dirty woman has pushed her way among them, rubbing against them, and has touched the rabbi. And what does Jesus say to her?

“Daughter.” Daughter. He addresses her as someone who belongs, who is part of his family. His first word to her says “there is no barrier separating you and me”. He welcomes her back into the society that had shut her out.

But more than that she is healed of her disease. Power flows from Jesus, reversing the contagion of uncleanness. Jesus seems instead to have a contagion of life and healing which is more powerful than that of dirtiness and exclusion. 

And although it is the power of Jesus which has healed her, it is the woman herself who has taken the initiative. Her faith has led her to push her way through the crowd, to break the religious taboo, to touch Jesus. But it is Jesus who says she is healed and made whole.

All this takes place while Jesus is on his way to the house of Jairus, the leader of the synagogue. He is an important person, very much part of the community; yet he too has fallen at Jesus’ feet to ask for the healing of his daughter. But, while they are on the way, his daughter has died. And the people say, “don’t bother the rabbi any more”. Why would they say this? Perhaps their faith isn’t enough to imagine that Jesus could raise the dead. But perhaps also because the girl is now a dead body, and corpses were also ritually unclean. You wouldn’t ask a revered rabbi to enter a house where there was a dead body. The daughter of Jairus is now the other side of a ritual boundary of exclusion. 

But this does not matter to Jesus. He goes in and touches the dead girl, taking her by the hand. And once again the contagion of uncleanness is reversed: instead of Jesus being contaminated by the corpse, life and healing flow from him. The girl is raised to life.

We’re told that she is twelve years old. That was the age at which girls were deemed to be legally adults. The law of Moses, including all the ritual purity rules, applied from that age. It’s surely significant that it was just as this girl became subject to the purity laws, that she died. Just as the woman with the haemorrhage had been suffering the social death of an outcast for twelve years, because of the purity laws. 

The symbolism here is that these rules of inclusion and exclusion bring death. They stop people living and flourishing in the community of God’s people. And Jesus overcomes all that. Jesus crosses the boundaries that he shouldn’t cross, he touches and is touched by the excluded people. And they are made clean and whole and restored to society. 

Jesus overcomes the contagion of uncleanness with his own, more powerful, contagion of life and love. He draws people to him, cutting across the boundaries which were supposed to keep them away.

We need to ask where those boundaries are in our own day. Where are the barriers in our society that keep people from flourishing? We live in a prosperous city, by world standards, but there are many people on the margins. People like Joanne, a homeless woman I know who often sits on the streets around Euston. As the Olympics approach, her experience is that she and other homeless people are increasingly being stopped by police, arrested, moved on, driven out of the centre of the city. For some it seems that “cleaning up the streets” means more than scrubbing off graffiti and weeding the flower beds. 

This matters, because the Gospel is about the Kingdom of God in which all human beings are called to dwell together. It matters because Jesus still today crosses the boundaries that are meant to keep people out.

We value this church building as a place of welcome, and many people indeed find it to be so, a place of prayer and sanctuary as well as a meeting space which is used by the wider community. But most of the people who live in the area are not with us for Mass today. Of course we don’t want to force people in against their will. But we do need to make sure that there are no invisible barriers keeping out people who want to come in.

What we do in church is culturally quite strange for most people today. Making responses, singing hymns, bowing and genuflecting, do not come naturally. And add to that all the subliminal expectations about how people are supposed to dress or behave when they come to church. We think these things are traditional but actually most of them are quite recent. I fear that many people don’t come because they simply assume that they wouldn’t belong. 

But the mission of Jesus is to draw everyone into God’s kingdom, and the church is the bearer of that mission. There is nobody who is “dirty”, unclean, outside, nobody who doesn’t belong. So we do need to take a critical look at what we do, both as a community in this city and as the community of the Church. We do need to ask whether what is comfortable for us is not a barrier for others.

We who were once far off have been welcomed by Jesus into the new life of his kingdom. And we cannot but welcome others, too.

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”.