In the community of the Good Shepherd

Acts 2:42-47 They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

1 Peter 2:19-25 You have come back to the shepherd and guardian of your souls

John 10.1-10 I am the gate of the sheepfold

 

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The tasks of a parish priest - the role I have - can be distilled into three things:

 

1.       Celebrate the sacraments

2.      Preach the word of God

3.      Lead God’s Holy People, the Church

 

Now of course like in any role those three basics lead to a whole range of tasks and things to be done, and it’s not a role exercised in isolation but in partnership with others, flowing from the Bishop’s ministry, with fellow priests and working with and for the baptised people of God.

 

This task is set out in the Ordinal, the rite for ordaining priests, which says:

 

Priests are ordained to lead God’s people in the offering of praise and the proclamation of the gospel. They share with the Bishop in the oversight of the Church, delighting in its beauty and rejoicing in its well-being. They are to set the example of the Good Shepherd always before them as the pattern of their calling. With the Bishop and their fellow priests, they are to sustain the community of the faithful by the ministry of word and sacrament, that we all may grow into the fullness of Christ and be a living sacrifice acceptable to God.

 

That charge to the priest flows out of what our readings contain today which, at their heart, concern the nature of the Church.

 

As the Bishop reminds the new priest and people at an Ordination, ‘[Priests] are to set the example of the Good Shepherd always before them as the pattern of their calling’.

 

Today, the fourth Sunday of Easter, is traditionally known as ‘Good Shepherd’ Sunday, when we hear in the Gospel Jesus setting out one of the key images of his ministry, that of the Good Shepherd, which draws on the images of the Lord our shepherd of the twenty third psalm.

 

The Good Shepherd knows his sheep, leads them to good pasture, protects them from ravening wolves - even laying down his life for them - shelters them in the sheepfold and, when necessary, says ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to where they want to go. After all, like sheep we go astray, such is our human condition, but as St Peter reminds us in the second lesson, ‘For you were going astray like sheep, but now you have returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.’ (1 Peter 2.25)

 

The pastoral staff, or crozier, of the Bishop, modelled on the shepherd’s crook, is a symbol of all that: a staff to beat off attackers; a staff to guide and point the way; and staff to be a marker of the boundaries.

 

Underlying this image of the Good Shepherd – the example the bishop or priest must set before himself - is that Christ came that all people may have life, and have it abundantly.

 

Life in all its abundance – life in Christ - is the priority and the touchstone: anything that detracts from that, the priest should not do.

 

So, the example of the Good Shepherd takes us back to those three tasks I have set out:

 

1.       Celebrate the sacraments

2.      Preach the word of God

3.      Lead God’s Holy People, the Church

 

Celebrating the sacraments and preaching the word of God are about feeding God’s people.

 

The sacraments feed us, replenish us, with the gifts of grace that they mediate, that they channel to us. This is most obvious in the Eucharist in which, echoing the psalm, ‘a table is set’ before us. (Psalm 23.5).

 

The priest has the ‘duty and joy’ of setting that grace before the Church.

 

The preaching of the word of God guides and leads us, as another psalm says, ‘your word is a lantern to my feet and a light upon my path’ (Psalm 119.105).

 

The third task, to ‘lead God’s Holy People, the Church’.

 

As it happens I have spent a time in prayer and reflection recently reflecting on the nature of the Church both globally, nationally and in our parish.

 

Globally the Church is growing, getting younger, is vibrant and passionate.

 

That is not how many of us might describe the Church of England, or much of the Church in this nation, where it feels depleted, getting tired and jaded and getting older.

 

And what of locally, this Church? Who are we? What is our vision, what is our mission, who are we called to become in the here and now? They are big questions that we should always pay attention to.

 

I find myself going back to a beautiful vision for this church expressed when many of us came together in June 2019, before Covid struck, to consider these questions, and it holds good today.

 

We said that we want to be ‘a church that is welcoming and open, where people find life, joy and belonging in Christ’.

 

We said our mission is ‘to be the Parish Church at the heart of Croydon, faithfully offering worship to God, intelligently growing in Christian faith and, looking beyond ourselves, compassionately serving our locality and human need as Christ serves us’.

 

That is good stuff!

 

There are echoes of our first reading, which describes the quality of life of the first Christians. Take another look at that passage.

 

It’s a growing church, rooted in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, with the breaking of bread and prayer at its heart

 

It’s an organism not an institution; it’s a shared household not a club; it’s the Body of Christ.

 

It’s tempting to go down the route of strategies, mission action plans and such like, and believe me the wider church desperately hopes those things will make a difference. And certainly we need plans with clarity and strength of purpose.

 

But we’re not making widgets on a production line; we’re seeking to live the kingdom of God – together.

 

That’s why I love the vision expressed that we should be, ‘a church that is welcoming and open, where people find life, joy and belonging in Christ’, it’s about our culture not our outcomes.

 

In the Acts of the Apostles, the community of the Good Shepherd, is shaped by words like, devotion, awe, belief, praise, gladness, generosity, goodwill: they’re words of culture not production.

 

Let’s measure all we do in those terms. In every little thing we do in the church, whether we have a formal role, or not, in the life of the church we can test all we do by asking ourselves,  ‘in what I am doing now am I helping people find life, and joy, and helping them belong, in Christ?’

 

If that’s how we live our life as a church then we have the example of the Good Shepherd before us, so that all who come to this place may say, ‘Surely thy loving-kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life : and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever’.

 

 

 

 

Walking with the Crucified and Risen Lord.

Acts 2.14a, 36-41 The Lord added to their number those who were being saved

1 Peter 1.17-23 You have been born anew through the living and enduring word of God.

Luke 24.13-35 They recognised him in the breaking of bread

 

For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears and my feet from falling.

I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living. Alleluia. (Psalm 116)

 

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The resurrection of Jesus Christ brings life where there is death, light where there is darkness and hope where there is despair.

 

But never confuse this with frothy, naïve, optimism.

 

Jesus says in the gospels, ‘I came that you may have life and have it abundantly’ (John 10.10) and St Paul says that we should ‘take hold of the life that really is life’. (1 Timothy 6.19).

 

In other words, there’s more to life than going through the motions.

 

For the Christian though the starting point for finding life is to die; to die to self, to sin, to all the power games and manipulations that we get caught up in, to all the illusions we set up for ourselves or others draw us into.

 

That’s the implication of being baptised. Seeking life. Receiving life. Living life.

 

That is at the heart of the spiritual life.

 

The greatest exemplars of this, the saints, have rarely been the rich, the highly esteemed, the totally ‘sorted’.

 

Rather, to be a saint is to be on the path, on the way, moving from death, darkness and despair to life, light and hope in Christ.

 

The saint walks in ‘the way, the truth and the life’: always with Christ; always in the name of Christ; always through Christ.

 

Today’s gospel reading maps out this journey, this way to life and insight and encounter with the living God.

 

It all takes place on the Day of Resurrection itself.

 

Our two disciples were trudging along the road going over and over with each other what had been happening in the past few days.

 

As they told their, as yet unidentified, companion, they were discussing, “the things about Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and leaders handed him over to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel”.

 

It's a story of bewilderment and disappointment. And they were stuck in it. Even what the women had told them – that they had heard that Jesus was alive - hadn’t stirred these disciples from their self-consumed misery.

 

How often does life throw bewilderment and disappointment at us? At home or at work; when we look around us in the wider world and even around Croydon, perhaps especially around Croydon at the moment – bewilderment and disappointment.

 

Like the two disciples, bewilderment and disappointment may come in to us in our faith, our life of prayer or at church. Spiritual torpor, or acedie as the great spiritual writers from earliest times call it, is spiritual listlessness, bewilderment, disappointment.

 

‘We had hoped…’ we say with the two bewildered, disappointed disciples.

 

But that’s where something arresting and decisive happens.

 

What did we say at the beginning? What is the message of Eastertide?

 

It is that the resurrection of Jesus Christ brings life where there is death, light where there is darkness and hope where there is despair.

 

And the Crucified and Risen Lord himself, in person, brings recognition and clarity to our bewilderment and disappointment.

 

The Crucified and Risen Lord does that for these two disciples, first by opening up the scriptures; showing that they should not be surprised that he, the Messiah, had to suffer these things and then enter into his glory.

 

By pointing to Moses and the Prophets he shows that God chooses to work in the mirk and mire of human existence, meeting us where we are, before taking us along the path to life, life in all its abundance, life that really is life.

 

And what a Bible Study session those two disciples got with the Word of God himself, the Word Made Flesh.

 

No wonder they themselves said, ‘‘Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’

 

Wow!

 

When did you last open your Bible and seriously read it knowing that your heart would burn with meeting the Crucified and Risen Lord in it?

 

When did you last hear a reading from the scriptures and sense you had met the Crucified and Risen Lord?

 

When did you last hammer my door down asking for more Bible study?

 

I wonder how many Christians sense, in the words of the Letter to the Hebrews, that ‘the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.’ (Hebrews 4.12)

 

Then the story moves on. It wasn’t just the scriptures that set their hearts racing as things fell into place and bewilderment turned to clarity.

 

They showed beautiful hospitality and invited him into their home. It was a deeper invitation into their hearts and lives, an invitation you can make today.

 

Then as we heard, ‘he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized Jesus’.

 

Do you see the pattern? The scriptures are opened and insight shared; bread is broken and Jesus Christ is made present in his Church.

 

This is what we do Sunday by Sunday, actually day by day, in this parish, this is the Eucharist: the word moves us to the sacrament, which itself moves us from bewilderment and disappointment to clarity and hope in the Crucified and Risen Lord.

 

This is what our Easter proclamation of life, hope and light is rooted in, deep roots.

 

Then, as we read, ‘he vanished from their sight’.

 

You’d forgive them for being bewildered and disappointed: he’d gone. Again.

 

This time they don’t brood between themselves, they don’t mope. They have met him in the sacrament; they will always meet him and feed on him in the breaking of bread where he is present.

 

They immediately got up – having already said how late it was - and returned to Jerusalem – where they had first met their bewilderment and disappointment - and they found other disciples who were saying, ‘The Lord has risen indeed, and he has appeared to Simon!’ Then they told what had happened on the road, and how Christ had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.’

 

There is the Emmaus Road journey. This is where the Christian Way takes us. This is where the Eucharist takes us: In the words of our psalm, ‘For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears and my feet from falling. I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.’

 

Are you ready to tell of what has happened to you, on the way, and to tell of Jesus Christ, the Crucified and Risen Lord?

He is not here; he is risen. Alleluia

Acts 10. 34,37-43 ‘We have eaten and drunk with him after his resurrection’

Colossians 3.1-4 Look for the things that are in heaven, where Christ is

John 20.1-18 He must rise from the dead

 

Alleluia. Christ is risen.

He is risen indeed. Alleluia.

 

‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb,

and we do not know where they have laid him’.

 

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Mary Magdalene is the first witness to the fact of the Empty Tomb on that first Easter morning.

 

She’s horrified by what she finds, so perfectly naturally, Mary runs from the empty tomb, in urgency and shock to tell Peter, the first among the apostles, what she has found.

 

Mary’s account, to Peter and the Beloved Disciple, of what she found at the tomb is clear, and yet, her conclusion is wrong.

 

Mary, perfectly reasonably and logically, assumes grave robbers, or political machinations have taken his body. The authorities - political or religious- would be prime suspects: “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”

 

In fact, as we now know, they haven’t done anything.

 

Mary ran to tell Peter, and he in turn runs back with the Beloved Disciple. What they find together doesn’t solve anything, but only confuses them all more.

 

The tomb is empty, the linen wrappings are there, one cloth rolled up by itself. This is not the modus operandi of hasty grave robbers; there is something purposeful and careful here, but Mary Magdalene, Peter and John cannot yet see it.

 

To help us understand this confusion the Evangelist helpfully notes that ‘as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead’ .

 

Baffled, Peter and John return home.

 

The Church’s proclamation of Easter can seem equally baffling to many in our culture today: ‘Okay, the tomb was empty but there must be a rational explanation; what’s your problem?’

 

But Mary Magdalene stays.

 

She can’t stay away from the tomb; she is drawn to the place where the body of her Lord lies after his death on the Cross.

 

Mary’s grief took her there at the first opportunity.

 

Jesus’ bruised, dead body was hurriedly placed in the tomb on the eve of the Sabbath; there had been no opportunity to wash and anoint his body, but Mary was back to do that.

 

She had come at dawn on the third day since his death, the first day of the new week, what we now call Sunday.

 

If nothing else, Mary Magdalene goes simply to be in proximity to the dead body of Jesus.

 

In a deeply loving, human way she wants to be still and to treasure someone just lost to her.

 

It’s Mary’s desire to stay at the tomb, empty though it is, that gives her the great moment of encountering the Risen Lord.

 

In the hurry, the leaping to wrong conclusions about Jesus body, in all the running about she, Peter and the Beloved Disciple, had missed something vital.

 

It is when she slows down, and is still, that the moment happens.

 

‘Woman, why are you weeping?’ Mary is asked that question twice: first by an angel then by the man she takes to be the gardener.

 

Why might she be weeping?

 

She’s sad, her Lord has died a most traumatic death.

 

She’s angry and confused, her Lord’s body has been snatched.

 

She’s bewildered and grieving; of course she’ll weep.

 

On another, deeper level, her tears are the tears of all humanity in our estrangement from God.

 

Mary Magdalene is in a garden – evident from the fact she mistook Jesus for the gardener – and that hints at two other gardens in scripture; in Genesis and in the Song of Songs.

 

In Genesis, the first woman, Eve, and the man, Adam, are estranged from God in the Garden of Eden; they’re are expelled from the garden after they snatch at equality with God. The garden which was a place of safety and oneness with God is lost to them through their action.

 

In the ravishing book Song of Songs, the lover seeks out the beloved, as she runs through the streets of the city and searches in the beautiful garden, through blurred, tear-filled eyes.

 

Mary’s tears are our tears when we are far from God; when we long for him but do not find him.

 

This second time at the tomb Mary models something important in the spiritual life.

 

You will not find the life-giving power of the Crucified and Risen Lord if you are running around, cooking up theories about God, or why you want to blame “them” for your lack of perception.

 

This second time at the tomb she doesn’t panic but rather she laments, she weeps and an angel gently asks her why she’s weeping.

 

In the Scriptures angels announce things: the word angelos means ‘messenger’.

 

This angel announces nothing, and prompted by the angel’s question Mary repeats her theory about grave robbers.

 

Then she turns around. She turns around from theories, suspicions, confusion and meets the Crucified and Risen One.

 

He asks the same question as the angel: ‘Woman why are you weeping? For whom are you looking?”

 

This is a beautiful moment, when Mary’s tears, your tears and mine, can be wiped away: in Christ’s death and resurrection we are once more united with God in the garden of his peace and life and presence.

 

Mary glimpses the vision described in Revelation:

 

Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

 

‘See, the home of God is among mortals.

He will dwell with them;

they will be his peoples,

and God himself will be with them;

he will wipe every tear from their eyes.

Death will be no more;

mourning and crying and pain will be no more,

for the first things have passed away.’ Revelation 21.1-4

 

When Jesus utters Mary’s name the theories are dispelled, resurrection is not an abstract thing, but rather it is known in the moment of encounter with the Crucified and Risen Lord.

 

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Why are you here today? For whom are you looking?

 

Be certain Christ is here today; he is looking for you and whispering your name.

 

Be still.

 

Open the ears of your heart.

 

No one carries Christ away from you; you now know where to find him.

 

His Body lies on the altar and he comes to us in the way he promised: ‘This is my Body; this is my Blood’.

 

Then, like Mary Magdalene, we can all announce ‘I have seen the Lord’ and tell all the things he says and does.