Sermon at Parish Mass, Easter 7 2014

The Ascension of Christ - Andrea Mantegna

Acts 1:6-14

1 Peter 4.12-14; 5.6-11

John 17:1-11

One of my cousins posted a picture of a bird on Facebook, with the caption: “If human beings could fly, we’d class it as exercise and not do it”.

But of course, human beings can and do fly. We can go to the airport and, without thinking much about it, get in a plane and zoom several miles up in the air and hundreds or thousands of miles around the earth until we land in, say, Benidorm. Then there is space flight. If you go out tonight just before midnight and look to the southwest, you may see what looks like a white star rise up and drift slowly from one side of the sky to the other. That star is actually the International Space Station, an orbiting laboratory full of scientists and astronauts doing frightfully clever things. A little dot in the sky, hundreds of miles above the earth, with people on it.

This is part of the world we live in. And that gives us a problem. Not in floating round the earth, or in getting to Benidorm, but in reading the Bible. Because the Bible writers never dreamed of anything like it. For them human beings were entirely earth bound. But for us human flight is just part of the world we live in. We see the world differently.

So, when we read of Jesus being lifted up, vanishing in a cloud, his disciples gazing into heaven, we might wonder, where is he, then? Living in the modern world as we do we might imagine that Jesus is up in orbit somewhere, or floating in space between Jupiter and Mars.

But this is completely not what Luke is telling us. Heaven, in the Bible, is not a place or a direction. It is not above the atmosphere somewhere. Nor is it (notwithstanding the song) a place on earth. In the Bible, Heaven is a different dimension, a different way of being. It is the state of being that God inhabits, free from change, decay, chance, transience, all those things that we know in this dimension that we call the world.

In the Ascension Jesus has left this dimension, and entered that one. He has passed into the shining cloud which, as so often in the Bible, represents the fullness of God’s presence.

Jesus has come from the Father and returns to the Father. But he does not return as he came. He is both God and man. He takes with him the humanity that he joined to himself when he became flesh and dwelt among us. He lived and suffered and died as one of us. In the resurrection Jesus, as one of us, stepped out of time into God’s eternity. And in the Ascension Jesus, one of us, is taken entirely into the life of God.

So, in a way, this is a disappearance. Jesus has left this world. But through the Ascension he has become present in a new way. Being entirely with God he is longer confined by time and space. All times and places are now open to his presence.

Through the Holy Spirit he is present in the hearts of all who believe in him. He lives in his Church, which is his body now, his visible presence in the world. He suffers still in the poor and oppressed and the outcast of the earth, and calls us to seek him among them and to hear his judgement on the injustice of the world. He speaks in the scriptures, read in the community of faith. He is the Word of creation sustaining the cosmos, all things having their being through him.

Because Jesus is entirely present with God, he is also able to be present for us. He speaks about this in today’s Gospel reading as he prays: “Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had in your presence before the world existed”. But he also says that he has been glorified in his disciples. Jesus, because he dwells entirely in God, dwells also in those who believe in him.

So Jesus has left the world and gone into heaven, and his disciples remain in the world. But those who believe in Jesus begin to know the life of heaven even now. Jesus, ascended to the Father, is present in our hearts, raising us where he has gone.

If we are disciples of Jesus we live in two worlds at once. Yes, we are still physically in this world of change and decay. But we also begin to live in God’s eternity. “This is eternal life”, says Jesus, “to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent”.

Heaven is not just something that happens after this life, or a destination we have yet to reach. Heaven is knowing God, and his life coming alive in us. This present world will change and decay and pass away, but what is truly real will then remain: God, and his life in us. And when everything has passed into God, then Christ will be all in all, filling all things, which is what we mean when we say that he will come again.

In Jesus the two worlds of creation and eternity meet. In him, human nature, an actual body, material and created, has passed into God, the uncreated, the eternal. And he has gone not alone but to be the pioneer, the head of the whole of creation made new in God.

Jesus, ascended into heaven, constantly prays for his church, and sends the Holy Spirit to change us into his image. And through the church he draws the whole creation into the life of God.

Partly this is expressed through our work for the marginalised and those in need, and through our stewardship of God’s creation. But above all it is something expressed and made real through our worship. Worship is fundamentally what the church is for. And worship is about creation entering into the life of God.

The one great act of worship that Jesus gave to his church, and told us to carry on until the end of time, is the Eucharist, the Mass. And that is entirely fitting. The Eucharist is creation entering the life of God. Bread and wine, the perishable products of this perishable earth, are offered at the altar and become the glorified and incorruptible Body and Blood of Christ.

His disciples who gather for the Eucharist become what they receive: the body of Christ, the people who are now his visible presence in the world. Through the Church, the Eucharist renews the world. Every celebration of Mass enacts God’s new creation, and lifts up this world into heaven. “Lift up your hearts!” “We lift them to the Lord!”

So we are not to stand gazing into the sky, like those disciples in Acts, and wondering where Jesus is now. He is in God. And he is also in us. He is with us. He is drawing creation into the life of God through his church. We lift up our hands and our hearts to heaven, which is God and his life appearing in us. And with bread and wine we lift up the whole world, groaning in the birth pangs of the new creation, so that Christ may be all in all.

Sermon Easter 5 2014

Subterranean altar over the tomb of a martyr,

Ss Apostoli, Rome

Acts 7:55-end

1 Peter 2:2-10

John 14:1-14

I can still remember being on holiday in Rome, even though it was over a week and a half ago – you may know how quickly the effect of being on holiday fades! Rome is a very good place to be in if you’re a fan of old churches, as there are about 400 churches in Rome and most of them are very ancient indeed.

Many of the oldest ones were built just after Christianity was legalised in about the 310 – before that, Christian services were forbidden and had to be held in secret. And many of those very old churches have a feature in common: underneath the altar, there is a grave containing the body of a martyr. Many Christians had been put to death for their faith in Rome in the years of persecution, and their graves were remembered and visited. Once Christianity was legalised the new churches were built on those sites with the altar placed directly over the body.

Building the church in this way made a connection between the death of Christ, which was represented on the altar in the celebration of Mass, and the death of the martyr, whose body was beneath it.

But there was nothing gloomy or morbid about this. Christianity is not a cult of death. For the early Christians the tombs of martyrs were entirely a celebration of life. Inscriptions on them spoke of peace and triumph. Paintings and sculptures showed the martyr, not suffering, but dressed in stately robes and holding the palm branch of victory. What mattered about the martyrs was not so much that they had died, but that they had become images of Christ in the pattern of their life and death.

The martyrs were people for whom the ultimate reality in life was the love of God that had found and saved them in Jesus. Jesus Christ risen from the dead was so important to them that they would choose even to be killed rather than deny Jesus. The word martyr means “witness”. A martyr is someone who witnesses to the transforming love of God in Jesus in the whole way that they live and die.

We seem this same connection made in the reading from Acts this morning. Stephen is the first martyr, but that doesn’t mean that we should focus on the method of his death. The most important thing about Stephen, the thing that makes him a martyr, is that he saw “the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God”.

Stephen is remembered as the first witness for Christ because he saw that the ultimate reality behind the universe is Jesus, the risen Lord, in the place where God is. And for him, that reality changed everything. It changed how he lived and how he died. It made him, in fact, like Jesus.

Stephen’s story is told in Acts in a way that mirrors the story of Jesus. It is as though the author, Luke, is saying to us, “look at Stephen, because he shows us Jesus”.

So, Acts says, “Stephen, full of grace and power, did great wonders and signs among the people”. Just as Jesus is described in the Gospels. Stephen, like Jesus, is arrested and brought before the religious Council; like Jesus, he is accused of blasphemy by false witnesses. At the conclusion of his trial he cries out “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!”. Just as Jesus, at the end of his trial, said “from now on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God”. Like Jesus, Stephen is taken outside the city to be killed, and like Jesus he prays for his murderers to be forgiven.

As Jesus says in today’s Gospel reading, “the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do”. Stephen does this. In his life, in his death, in his forgiveness for his murderers, Stephen does the works that Jesus does.

Stephen’s killers think that death is the ultimate reality behind the universe, and they enact that understanding in Stephen’s murder. Just as the Roman empire was to do for the first generations of Christians in Rome and elsewhere. But Stephen knew better, because he saw Jesus, the man who had died, raised in the place where God is. And if the risen Lord is the ultimate reality behind the universe, then death is not. We can live a life freed from the fear of death, for ourselves and for others. Such a life knows that nothing is impossible to God, so is capable of embracing everything in love, even murderers in the act of murdering.

Who is among those murderers? Saul. Later called Paul, after his eyes also were opened and he saw the risen Lord in heaven. Jesus who met him on the road to Damascus and called out, “Saul, why are you persecuting me?” And that same Jesus picked Saul up and turned him around and sent him to carry the good news of that vision to the nations. St Paul was later to write, in the letter to the Romans, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds”. That is, know that your whole life is different, because the ultimate reality behind the universe is not death, but Jesus, who died, raised to the place where God is.

This is what is meant in today’s reading from 1 Peter, which quotes Psalm 118:

The stone that the builders rejected has become the very head of the corner.

The rejected stone turns out to be the one essential stone that holds the structure together. That is, incidentally, the most frequently quoted verse of the Old Testament in the New Testament. The world lives and acts as though death is the most important thing there is. But the risen Lord standing at the right hand of God overturns all that. He becomes the corner stone for building a whole new way of living. A life free from the fear of death. A life that can live from God’s deathless love and never failing generosity, at every moment, even to the end of our earthly lives.

Those who live like that become images of Christ. Just as Stephen did. Just as the martyrs of Rome did. Just as followers of Jesus do in every time and place. Just as you and I can, if we will let our lives be transformed by vision of the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. Because that is the ultimate truth behind the universe. That is the stone that the builders rejected, which has become the corner stone for building a wholly new life. Life that does not end in death but in God’s eternal life. So we too can be witnesses for Christ, we too can do the works that he does.

Sermon Easter 4 2014

Image: vatican.va

Acts 2.42-47

1 Peter 2.19-25

John 10.1-10

Last week I was in Rome, admiring the many treasures of Christian art from across the ages.  The earliest images of Christ that we have are found in the catacombs, underground cemeteries outside the city walls dating from the first to the fourth centuries. There are no images of Christ on the cross from those early times. Sometimes Jesus is shown in glory, or teaching his disciples. But often he appears as the Good Shepherd: a youth carrying a sheep securely over his shoulders. It is an appealing image, not great art but fresh and hopeful, full of the vitality of a new faith that offered to all the hope of eternal life beyond death.

The use of this image in the catacombs is not a surprise, because the image of sheep and shepherd often appears in the Bible as well, and would have been familiar to the first Christians. In the Old Testament sheep are used as an image of Israel, the people of God. Sheep go around in a flock, not as isolated individuals, so this tells us that the people of God belong together.

But sheep also need quite a bit of looking after. They are not very clever creatures, apt to wander off into danger, falling down holes or into ditches or the jaws of wolves. So they need a shepherd to keep them together, to protect them and keep them from wandering off. Sheep are very dependent, and need to be able to trust their shepherd. They need a good shepherd.

In the Old Testament God himself is described as the shepherd of his people. That is a very comforting and reassuring, not only that God is described as our shepherd, but also that we are described as sheep. Admittedly it’s not very flattering. Sheep, as I’ve said, are a bit daft, and need a lot of looking after. So, too, do the people of God. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, says Isaiah. We are inclined to wander off and get ourselves into trouble and difficulty. But God knows this and understands it. When a sheep falls into a ditch, does the good shepherd blame the sheep, or get angry with it? No. The good shepherd just goes to the sheep, and carefully drags it out of the hole, and brings it back to the flock. And then patiently does the same again, and again, as the sheep, being still daft, keeps wandering off.

Or if a sheep goes astray into the den of wolves, does the good shepherd say, well, that’s your fault, you’ll just have to take the consequences of your actions – that’ll teach you! No. The good shepherd goes in and drives the wolves off and rescues the sheep.

And this is the story of Israel, a people who often wandered off after other gods, or forgot the covenant, or acted unjustly, getting themselves into messes, exiles and disasters over and again. And again and again their experience was that God came to meet them and save them in the mess they had made.

So, if the image of the people of God as sheep is not very flattering, it is at least comforting and encouraging. God is the good shepherd. He knows what we are like, and he doesn’t want to blame us or punish us, but to save us.

Now, in the Old Testament the kings and rulers of Israel were also described as shepherds of the people. Their authority was from God, but it was authority to serve and protect his people, not to exploit them. Kings and rulers needed to be good shepherds too. But sadly, according to the prophets, often they were not. They exploited and abused their authority, using it for their own ends. And so prophets like Jeremiah promised that one day God would send someone who would be, at last, a true and good shepherd for his people.

These Old Testament images are very much in the background when Jesus speaks in the gospel today about sheep and shepherds. Jesus calls himself the good shepherd, which is to say that he is in the place of God, come to rescue his people and take them to peaceful pastures. And unlike the Kings of Israel of old, he is the good shepherd, not a thief or a bandit. Jesus will be what the Kings of Israel had failed to be: one who acts like God for them.

In Jesus, that Old Testament promise is fulfilled. In Jesus, God has come to his people to save them and gather them in. And not only to save them, but also that they might have life, and have it abundantly.

“I am the gate for the sheep”, says Jesus today. That’s a curious expression. He is not just the shepherd, but also the gate. This means that Jesus is the way in to safety, to pasture, to abundant life. But it may have a more specific meaning, too. Jesus gives this teaching in or near the Temple in Jerusalem. And one of the gates in the Temple was called the Sheep Gate. It’s mentioned a few chapters earlier in John chapter 5: “Now in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate there is a pool”.

So when Jesus says “I am the gate for the sheep”, an equally valid translation could be “I am the Sheep Gate”. This is quite likely, as John has already drawn this gate to our attention. But the Sheep Gate, if you were a sheep, was a bit grim. Because it was the gate through which sheep were brought to be sacrificed in the Temple. It was a one way gate, leading to death.

But Jesus says that the sheep who enter through him, “will come in and go out and find pasture”. They will have life abundantly. The old Sheep Gate, the gate of sacrifice, is a bit like the “thief [who] comes only to steal and kill and destroy”. Jesus as the Sheep Gate overturns all that. He is the way in to life without limit, the life that God lives.

Jesus shows us what God is like. God, in Jesus, does not require death and destruction. God is not a thief or a bandit. God in Jesus has not come to kill and destroy, but to give life, and give it in abundance.

And, to show that, Jesus himself has gone in through the gate of sacrifice. Through his death on the cross, his life freely given, he has transformed sacrifice into love. Jesus is the way, not to death, but to life without limit. God, in Jesus, is the good shepherd, who has come to save his sheep, not to punish them.

St Peter in our second reading today says, “you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls”. In Jesus all those Old Testament promises are fulfilled. God has come to save his people, not just Israel but all people who turn to him in faith. He is the good shepherd: loving, patient, going to any length to seek out and save his silly wandering sheep.

That image of scripture is one we can rest in, in great confidence and trust. God understands that we are like sheep: we need saving, and he is our saviour. This is what God is like - he is not a thief or a bandit. He is the Good Shepherd. And we are the sheep who are being held securely, no matter how far or how often we have wandered, carried safely on his shoulders into the pasture, which is his life that he wants to share with us, life in all its abundance. 

Sermon Easter 2 2014

Acts 4:32-35

1 John 5:1-6

John 20:19-31

At the end of Mass today, I shall sing the words “Go in the peace of Christ, alleluia, alleluia”. This part of the Mass is called the ‘dismissal’, and in the Latin original it is “Ite missa est”, which seems to be a very matter of fact announcement: literally, “go, it is the dismissal” or, “it is the sending”. Latin was a language of empire building rather than speculation and philosophy, so it tends to stick to the matter of fact. Go, it is the dismissal.

Now that word dismissal, in Latin missa, is what gives us the word “Mass”.  And that is the word that most commonly came to be applied to the Eucharist, in the Western Church. So the Mass, what we are doing in church today, is named after its conclusion: the dismissal, the sending out.

Another word that comes from missa is “mission”. Mission is sending. And today the risen Lord appears to the disciples in the upper room, and sends them.

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

Three things to note about this sending.

Firstly, it is a mission of peace; specifically, the peace that Jesus gives to his disciples in that locked room where they are huddled in fear. They are to go out bearing that peace. The peace that opens up the closed-in places of fear so that the Lord can come in. The peace that opens up closed-in hearts to his presence.

Secondly, it is addressed to people who have been through a time of great darkness and doubt but have now met the risen Lord. Meeting the risen Lord has changed them; their lives have been turned around.

Thirdly, Jesus sends the disciples as he has been sent by the Father. It is that relationship he shares with the Father that they are to bear into the world.

The disciples can do this because they have met the risen Lord. That encounter draws them into the new life of faith. They come 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 tells them, and us, 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 from the Father 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 God’s 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 comes from meeting the risen Lord, because it is his mission, his sending into the world from the Father.

The mission of Jesus, which is our mission, arises from the heart of God and pours itself out into the world. It is God’s movement that we receive and participate in. We are sent. We don’t send ourselves. This is an important distinction. The mission of the church is not something we devise ourselves. The church didn’t sit down after Jesus had departed into heaven and say to themselves, well then, what are we going to do now? No, mission is God’s movement, carrying the good news of the resurrection into all creation. Our task is not to devise that, but to take part in it.

In the same way, the Church did not devise the sacraments. They are given to us by Jesus, and in them we meet him in his risen power. The sacraments are things we receive and take part in, because they are part of that same sending, part of that same movement of God into the world. So it is by baptism that we are made members of Christ, sharing in his risen life; it is by the Eucharist that we become his body. In the Mass Jesus is re-membered, that is, the opposite of being dismembered; his body is formed under the signs of bread and wine and in the people who are fed by them. And it is from the Mass that we are sent on our mission which is God’s mission given to us by Jesus.

We are sent out at the end of every Mass to our daily lives, to live out our mission, the mission we have received from Jesus. But today as we are sent out we will go first to the church hall, for our annual meeting. That’s entirely appropriate. Our annual meeting is about the nuts and bolts of God’s mission, what we need to plan to do, who can share the many tasks that face us, how we will fund them, and so on.

One of the big things we will discuss will be our Mission Action Plan. That is, what form the mission of God will take in our local community for the next few years. How we are to make known the good news and live the resurrection life in this particular place and time with its particular needs.

The way we will discuss this, after being sent out from Mass, mirrors our mission itself. At the core of our mission is the Eucharist, the summit and source of the church’s life. And that mission flows out into the world in peace, forgiveness, witness to the risen Lord, and bringing people to faith.

And, of course, also in care for the marginalised and those in need. And that love and care is unconditional, because it is an expression of God’s love which is unconditional. But this is always going to be rooted in our resurrection faith and life, in meeting the Lord in the Eucharist and being sent out by him to live with his life in the world.

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, and he has come to us to draw us into relationship with him and to send us into the world.

So I hope we won’t see today’s annual meeting as a bit of boring bureaucracy that we just have to get through. I hope we will see it instead as the continuation of what we begin gathered at the altar. Here, we meet Jesus, risen from the dead. From here, he sends us out to continue his mission in the world.

So we will go in the peace of Christ, joyfully bearing his mission, ready for the tasks it entails. 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”.