Category: sermons

Ascension

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‘Why do you stand there looking up to heaven?’
It’s no wonder the disciples were caught staring up at the place where their friend and teacher and Lord had bid them farewell, but the angels are right to point the disciples back to the world – we are not to be so heavenly that we are of no earthly use.

It seems to me that the ascension is, above all, a feast of the body of Christ. It’s the day when we remember the departure back to heaven of Jesus’ earthly, incarnate form, the day when his presence stopped being particular (tied to a specific time and place and material form) and started to be universal – present to all times and places ‘even to the ending of the age’ (Mt 28.20).

But the ascension is but one moment of this process of the particular becoming universal.  At the Last supper Jesus explained his own body in terms of bread and wine, which he then broke, poured out, and distributed.  On the cross the  his actual body was broken and his blood flowed.  At the resurrection his body was both physically real (which he proved by eating and drinking) yet also able to go unrecognised and walk through locked doors (a step up, perhaps, from walking on water?).  Now, at his ascension, that physical body disappears, and in its place we find a group of bewildered disciples left with the task of carrying on Jesus’ work.

By the time St Paul started writing his letters to the early church, he had started calling the christian community ‘The Body of Christ’ – something which we still do, and to which we continue to aspire.  There was one final thing that needed to happen before those early Christians could assume the role as Christ’s new body on earth: that body had to receive the Holy Spirit, the breath of life, which we can read about in the story of Pentecost (Acts 2) or indeed in the quieter version in John’s gospel where the risen Christ breathes his Spirit on his friends in the upper room.

So during the course of this process, the Body of Christ which begun as the incarnate Son of God, born as a baby in Bethlehem, growing up as a carpenter’s son in Nazareth, being baptised and undertaking a three-year ministry of preaching, healing and teaching, and culminating the cross and resurrection – that Body of Christ is transformed into the Church – established by Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit to continue his work in co-operation with God.  Thus, Jesus’ particular body (limited to one time and one place, two thousand years ago) becomes universal, filling the whole world, and for all time.

We talk about the universal church, but really is that what we mean?  In the end, to be true to the Christ whose body we try to be, we come full circle: in the Church, the body of Christ becomes not, after all, merely ‘general’ or ‘universal’ but particular again, incarnate in the individuals and christian communities in which the Holy Spirit dwells.  If we are, in Teresa of Avila’s words, “Christ’s hands with which he blesses people now” then our action in the world is particular, in the places where we find ourselves.  The church may fill the world, but if it is truly to be the Body of Christ, then it cannot be ‘general’ but must always be active in the places where it finds itself.  If we are the Body of Christ then we must be incarnate, too – through the ascension we will always have a heavenly life, but here and now our calling is to continue, in his name, the work that Christ began.

 

John 14.1-14 – ‘…so that where I am, there you may be also…’

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What makes you feel that heaven isn’t so far away? A beautiful piece of music or art?  Looking out at the ocean, or a spectacular sunset?  Spending time in prayer?  Holy Places, such as churches or pilgrimage sites, are often described as ‘thin places’ – where earth and heaven seem to be closer, and whatever it is that separates this world from heaven is worn thin, perhaps by centuries of prayer.  Some people seem to find glimpses of heaven everywhere.  Stephen Cottrell, Bishop of Chelmsford, wrote of his sense of overwhelming awe when he went out of his front drive two days after the pavement had been re-surfaced and saw that already a tiny plant had started to germinate and grow in the tarmac – this testimony to the miracle of life had him wanting to get down on his knees, right there and then.

Perhaps you have had such moments yourself – moments of profound awareness of the sacred in ordinary things, or of the miracles that we walk past every day without blinking, or of the way that the extraordinary things of this earth point beyond themselves to a heaven which is beyond our imagining, yet suddenly feels near enough to reach out and touch.

In John’s gospel heaven is never far away.  Jesus’ divinity shines through in all his words and actions, and here, in this central part of the gospel, we find John putting into words the mystery of how Jesus not only demonstrates the proximity of heaven, but also how in his own person he enables complete continuity between earth and heaven.  As Jesus goes on painstakingly and loving to explain (again!) that God is his Father and our Father, this becomes clear to us, if not to his disciples at that point. ‘The Father and I are one,’ he says, and this means that heaven is not only near (in place or time), it is right there, right then, in their very midst.

No wonder these words are so often chosen as the bible reading for funerals. They are full of the hope in the promise that ‘where I am there you may also be.’  If we have enjoyed the companionship of Jesus in our earthly life, then we will continue to do so after our death.

Jesus speaks all these words as one who is cherishing this last bit of quality time,  before his death, with the friends who have shared his earthly ministry. They have witnessed his miracles, heard his teaching, been challenged in their understanding of who he is and who God is, seen things they would never have dared to dream of.  They have been closer to him than family, sharing his joys and sorrows, challenges and times of reflection, humour and anger.

The Jesus in these chapters of John’s gospel speaks of one who knows that this is the last night that he’ll be with them in quite this way.  He knows that he’s going to die, and soon.  He knows that his friend Judas has already set in motion the chain of events that will lead to the cross. He speaks as one who has only a limited time left to try to give his friends everything they will need to make sense of what’s about to happen. Thus, this whole section of John’s gospel is a heady combination of theological depth and pastoral concern: almost everything in these chapters is both profound and absolutely practical.  It is exactly what the disciples need to hear, and yet by definition they could only realise that with the hindsight of the cross and the resurrection.

So he comforts them with hope, and in the promise of the ‘many dwelling places’ set aside for them he once again shows the abundant generosity of God that had already been revealed at the wedding of Cana and at the feeding of the five thousand (both earlier in St John’s gospel, and both foretastes of the life of heaven).

The really striking thing about this part of John’s gospel is that Jesus is both promising heaven, and at the same time, coaching his friends on how to survive and flourish in the mean time, and how to grow a church after his death that will one day fill the world. He shows them the nearness of heaven, and then prepares them for another 2000 years of this world – and counting! He prepares them for his departure, while reassuring them that he will, in every way that matters, always be with them.  And somehow we must hold these things together.

I am reminded of the axiom that states: care for the world as if you’re going to be judged for it today, and as if you have to make it last another billion years.   We hold together the ‘now and not yet’ all the time. We live with the temporary nature of earthly life – the blessings of this life and the promise of eternal life is a tension that we live with constantly.  And it’s a good job that we do.

Christian Aid Week has just ended, and its strapline used to be, ‘we believe in life before death’ – in other words, it is not good enough to lament at the suffering of our fellow human beings, but console ourselves that they are beloved of God and will get their reward in heaven. To rely on the hope that God will sort it all out at the end of time or when we each die is to miss the point (and I always have this same argument when my persistent Mormon visitors come to the door) – our hope for the renewal of the earth and the coming of the kingdom are not unrelated to our calling to be stewards of the earth here and now.

When we pray, ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ this is not just some future hope about what God may do, it is our own pledge about what we ourselves are going to do. Readying ourselves for the life of the kingdom of heaven means working for the establishment that kingdom on earth.  We cannot wait for God to do those things for which he has given us the means ourselves – God is already at work, in the ordinary stuff of this world, and longs for us to join him, here and now.

And this is what makes sense of that tension in John’s gospel. Jesus has to show his friends that he is going ahead of them to prepare their place in heaven, while at the same time giving them the tools they will need to start building the kingdom on earth.  He begins, of course, in the next chapter, by the commission to share the love with one another that they have already known in their  relationship with him. ‘Love one another as I have loved you.’

This is the defining characteristic of the kingdom of heaven, but it is also the defining characteristic of an earthly life that is working towards the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. In continuing the work of Christ we continue his ministry of creating continuity between earth and heaven, and we will find that those moments when heaven and earth feel very close are not limited to ‘holy’ places but happen everywhere where we practice the Love that is God’s greatest command and greatest gift.

 

 

 

Easter Sunday morning thoughts

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My churches aren’t in the habit of having Easter vigil services, so the 8am on Easter morning is the first time in the Benefice that we light a paschal candle and roll away the stone from the Easter garden’s tomb.

On Easter Eve this year I was at home, and browsing twitter – I wasn’t sure how to feel about the numerous tweets from people returning from evening services proclaiming ‘Christ is risen!’ and ‘Alleluia’ – it almost felt like ‘spoilers’ for the liturgy in which I’d be taking part in the morning.

I told the 8am congregation this – we’d said the Easter Anthems, we’d lit our paschal candle, and in the sermon I reflected that as a vicar I ‘do’ Easter many times on Easter day.  No one service can be argued to be the moment of resurrection – the 8am doesn’t have priority as the real Easter because it’s earlier, and nor does the 10.30am because there are more people there.

In the end I found the fact of multiple Easters more helpful and more theologically profound than confusing, because it’s a model that’s truer to the Biblical accounts that we read in the gospels.  On the very first Easter, there must have been a ‘real’ moment of resurrection – the moment when Jesus stopped being dead and started being alive again.  But nobody witnessed it.  I love the fact that in a church with no Easter vigil, we sleep through the resurrection, just as the first disciples did, and then each of us comes, one by one or two by two, or in larger groups, and has our own ‘moment’ of realisation of the new life of Christ.

For Mary in John 20, the moment of resurrection is not when Jesus comes to life, it’s when he cuts through her grief and speaks her name. For the disciples in the upper room, it’s not when Jesus comes to life, it’s when he walks through the locked door of their fear and breathes his peace on them. For Thomas, it’s a week later, when Jesus touches away his doubt and by his wounds he gains his faith.  For the disciples at Emmaus it’s the moment when Jesus breaks the bread, and for Peter it’s the offer (in John 21) of a threefold commitment to balance his threefold denial.

None of these resurrection stories take place at the very moment of the resurrection, they are all afterwards, by varying degrees – perhaps only by minutes in Mary’s case, but for the others it’s hours, maybe days before the resurrection becomes real for them.

And this is still happening now.  The resurrection was a historical moment, but the very fact that it went unwitnessed at the very moment it took place means that each encounter with the risen Christ today is just as potent as the encounters that the disciples experienced. We did not miss out for the fact that we are living almost 2000 years after the event, for it is fresh every Easter, every Sunday, potentially every moment of every day. For every moment could be the moment when we will find that Christ has spoken into our grief, or walked through the locked door of our fear, or touched our doubt into faith…..

So, happy Easter!  Not just today, but tomorrow, and the next day – whenever something enables you to grasp the new life that God offers us in the risen Christ.

 

The woman at the well (John 4.5-42)

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I cannot help but see the woman at the well as a bucket – much like the one she had brought with her to draw water the day she met Jesus.

If she is a bucket, then she is an old and leaky one, full of cracks and holes, barely fit for purpose.  At least, that’s how she’d come to see herself, reminded every day by the stares and hostility of her neighbours at her less-than-perfect lifestyle.  And an empty bucket, too.  Worn down, dried up, and fed up, with nothing to offer.  That’s how they see her, so perhaps that’s how she has begun to see herself.

Jesus changes all that.  He has no bucket at all with which to draw from the well, yet speaks of living water that can overflow from him to her and from her and bring her life.

Even she would not have dared hope that that living water would have worked such wonders in her so quickly.  Indeed, the conversation alone with Jesus has filled her so full of life and hope that, leaving her bucket by the well, she returns to her city and shares what she has experienced with others.

Jesus chose well. He chose a vessel that was broken and cracked, and filled it with life-giving grace and love, knowing that it would leak and spill, and that everywhere it leaked there would be new life and hope, springing and welling up to eternity. For the best witness to grace is not the perfect life but the redeemed life. The leaky broken bucket scatters its water further and more generously than the sealed, watertight bottle.

God has always chosen leaky buckets. When he chose his people, the descendants of Abraham, he chose them not because they were perfect, but because in their weakness his strength would shine through.  The Bible reads like a catalogue of God choosing and working with the outcast, the very young and the very old, the unlikely, the poor, the foreigner….

Jesus poured the water of life into the leaky bucket of a Samaritan woman with a questionable past and an even more questionable present.  And through her that water of life brought life to a whole city.

Jesus still has no bucket of his own.  But he asks us to use ours.  We may have the shiniest, most perfect watering can or drinking bottle, or we may, like the Samaritan woman, be full of holes and cracks. A cracked pot will generously spill its precious contents in unexpected and wonderful places, and a small vessel will overflow sooner than a big one….  We come in all shapes and sizes, there is no one perfect pot into which God can pour his love, for with an infinite amount of love being poured, we will all overflow.

May we rejoice in our leaky buckets and our small vessels, but most of all rejoice in the water of life that Jesus will pour into us, so that when we overflow, everyone around us may receive new life.

 

 

 

Lent 1: Matthew 4.1-11

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There was once a short-lived reality TV show called ‘SAS: are you tough enough?’ in which ordinary people undertook SAS style training and were, one by one, eliminated from the programme.  I remember watching one episode, and reflecting on the title that no, I really really wasn’t.

There’s a strand of the Lenten tradition that teeters on the brink of being all about whether we are tough enough.  Fasting, strict disciplines, and onerous rules for Lent can, if we’re not careful, become a matter of will power.

But that’s precisely the opposite of what Lent is really about.  The Eucharistic Prayer for Lent speaks of how we are to “learn to be God’s people once again” – in other words, we are on a quest not for self-improvement, but for a deeper rootedness in our identity as people of God.

If we give things up for Lent, we do so so that our usual props  – the things we think we are relying on but are really just cosmetic, with no real strength – fall away, and we are left with only the real, structural, load-bearing columns that really are keeping the building standing.  Sometimes it takes some time in the wilderness to find out what those columns are.

In Jesus’ time in the wilderness we see a process of stripping away.  Jesus fasts, giving up the comfortable feeling of having enough. And he heads out alone, giving up the tangible signs of support from his family and friends.  And he goes away from the towns, away from the trappings of human civilisation, and from the sacred places of his Jewish practice.   And there, he faces temptations to make himself comfortable, to take the easy route to power, and to test the love God his Father.

So what is it that enables him to survive this brutal wilderness experience?  Is it simply that Jesus was “tough enough” when we are not?  Undoubtedly Jesus was strong spiritually, mentally and emotionally, as well as physically, but if we make him out to have some sort of souped-up will power, then we deny his full humanity, and ignore all the evidence from the rest of the gospels that he was “tested as we are”.

When I read this passage it seems to me that we see Jesus finding, in his battle with Satan, that even without many of the things that he had relied on, there were certain things that were deeper sources of strength and courage in the face of adversity. He turns to scripture, refuting each of Satan’s advances with his own, deeper understanding of the Bible’s witness to the eternal and irrepressible love of God for his people.  And, I suspect, he also went into the wilderness with the words of God his Father ringing in his ears at the day of his baptism: “You are my son, I love you, and I am pleased with you.”

It is a fundamental need of each human being that they know they are loved unconditionally.  This applied to Jesus just as it does to all of us.  It is the foundation of our psyche, the ground of all our loving, the sound basis for our risk-taking, our growth and development, and the central core of our ability to love God and love our neighbour as we love ourselves.

Jesus shows us that it is not, and never was, about being tough.  It is about being human. And to be human is to be loved for ever by a God who reveals that love through scripture, and through his calling us by name at our baptism, and through his presence with us in every one of our life’s wilderness challenges.