A sermon - May we dwell in Christ & he in us

A sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Easter: Readings Acts 17.22-31; 1 Peter 3.13-end; John 14.15-21

‘I will not leave you orphaned’ says the Lord.

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Today is the Sixth Sunday of Eastertide and we continue to proclaim: ‘Alleluia Christ is risen. He is risen indeed. Alleluia’.

The season of Eastertide is given to us to sustain our appreciation of the resurrection.

For Christians the resurrection is the epicentre and source of abundant life; the resurrection of Christ makes possible our conviction that death has no more power to come between human experience and the knowledge of God.

Eastertide is a week of weeks, seven days times seven – seven being the number of completion in the Bible - with a crowning day to make fifty. These fifty days of Eastertide hang on the twin poles of the Resurrection – Easter - and the Descent of the Holy Spirit – Pentecost.

That gives us fifty days of intentional reflection on what it means to be, in St Augustine’s phrase, ‘An Easter People with Alleluia as our song’; It also gives us fifty days to ponder what it means to say that we believe ‘in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life’ and contemplate how the Spirit forms, leads and guides us as the Church, the People of God.

And forty days into Eastertide comes the Feast of the Ascension of the Lord, which we observe this coming Thursday.

This is the time we recall Jesus’ bodily ascension into the heavens (Acts 1.1-11), when the followers of Jesus have to learn what it means to share his life when he is not physically present with us.

The joy of the resurrection meant that the disciples could still connect with Jesus present in their midst. The deprivation of his death, when they thought they had been abandoned and turned into spiritual orphans, was reversed in the resurrection when they continued to encounter Jesus, albeit in a new way.

Because of his ascension Jesus Christ is longer subject to place and time: that opens up access to God our Father, in Christ’s name, for people of all times and all places.

Jesus’ ascension is not going to be about deprivation but about discovering a deeper union with God, in Jesus’ Name, bound in by the Holy Spirit.

The Ascension gives us a vision of abundance in the church that flows out of the abundance of the Spirit and union with Christ, and not out of the narrow, human centred vision of scarcity that denies the life of God, and blasphemes against the Holy Spirit.

And this is what the gospel reading today prepares the disciples for, and trains us in too; preparing them for the rupture of their relationship with Jesus.

All through the gospel Jesus is quite clear that he will not be with them forever, that the time will come when, in his name, they will have to take responsibility for their discipleship, but they will be able to do so because the Holy Spirit will equip and lead them.

This is why the sacrament of the Eucharist matters so much to us.

Jesus is no longer present in human form, but in the sacraments the intensity of his presence is manifest in the things that we can grasp and touch and hold: bread and wine in the Eucharist, water in baptism, oil in anointing, another human body in marriage. The sacraments are the breaking through of the grace of God, in which we are reminded of the depth of the relationship we share with God in Christ. And the elements of the sacraments – bread, wine, water, oil, bodies – are given that capacity by the work of the Holy Spirit: ‘send down your Spirit upon the gifts to make them holy’.

So John’s gospel prepares us for the time when the Word made Flesh, who has chosen to dwell in our midst as one of us, is no longer with us. And the sacraments are given to us to connect us in the deepest possible way to God’s grace in the Holy Spirit.

This union with God is Christianity’s purpose, goal and end. Jesus’ discourses about being the Bread of Life (John 6) or about being the True Vine (John 15) or about his priesthood (John 16, 17) is all about abiding, dwelling, living, finding a home, in God. After all, God has found a dwelling place with us, in Christ: ‘and the Word was Made flesh and dwelt, lived, found a home, abided with us’ (John 1.14).

For God’s ancient, and first chosen, people the Jews, the relationship with God is established and maintained by living Torah, the way of faithfulness to the Covenant.

For Muslims, the relationship with God is established primarily in submission to God’s will.

For Christians the relationship with God is union and incorporation into the life of God: ‘Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them’ (John 6.56).

This is not a subjective feelings-based exercise – although it can feel wonderful to feel alive with God – it is an objective reality. Living the way of faith, hope and love in the Church, and feeding on Christ in word and sacrament, is our incorporation into the life of God.

That all begs the question of what we have been learning in this time of deprivation and being cut off during lockdown. What is it that has been most sustaining for us? What are we truly looking for in our hearts? What will a time of deprivation and disruption teach us about deeper union with Christ?

These are huge questions of course, so perhaps we might make this gospel passage into prayer:

Lord Jesus Christ,

you promise that if we love you

and keep your word

our heavenly Father come and abide with us.

Make your home with us

that we may truly be at home

in you and with you.

And may the Holy Spirit come down upon us

so that we are not left alone

but drawn into your nearer presence,

now and always.

Amen.

Mission un-boundaried - A Rogation sermon

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I want to begin, not with a Biblical text, but some words of the poet TS Eliot, ‘Take no thought of the harvest, but only of the proper sowing’. In other words, don’t be anxious about the results, but give your care and attention to the preparation.

This wisdom has a bearing on many aspects of life.

It has a bearing on those sitting public exams at the moment. The results will be what they will be, the real work is now, and what has been done before now, to prepare.

Likewise the farmer who only agonises about the amount of harvest in a few months’ time may neglect to prepare the land for the seed, forget to water it and to feed it. 

Today, the Sixth Sunday of Eastertide, is also known as Rogation Sunday. The word ‘rogation’ comes from the Latin, rogare, meaning ‘to ask’.

It is a time when we take care ‘of the proper sowing’

It is a time when we reflect upon what it is we ask of the Lord in our lives, for ourselves and our relationships, for our world and its peace and wellbeing.

Rogation is, as it were, the counterpart to the harvest. And so much more effort tends to go into the harvest thanksgiving than the asking for blessing and fruitfulness. It’s not that thankfulness is bad, quite the contrary, but Rogationtide reminds us also to make our requests and petitions known to God: ask and you shall receive.

There is an especially environmental dimension to Rogationtide too. It is when God’s blessing is invoked upon the crops and plants that are growing, asking that they may be fruitful. Rogationtide reminds us to tend and care for the earth not just extract as much out of it as we can and almost literally bleed it dry.

As a Minster church we need a posture of rogation as we consider what God is calling us to in this season of the life of our church. This will really be initiated in our church Vision Day on 15^th June, and please do make it a priority to be part of that day, from 1000-1400. And if you can be there, or if you cannot, please pray and ask that it may be fruitful, that our life may be fruitful.

It’s a pernicious tendency in the church to count numbers of attendees and measure the worth of life by attendance numbers. Perhaps we are too much of a harvest church and not enough of a rogation church.

If we actually asked God to bless us in the sowing and propagation of the word of God, we might find our harvest even more richly blessed. There is something organic about mission; it is not mechanistic.

This morning Bishop Jonathan set out his vision for the role of the Minster in the coming years. He was affirming of what we do now and challenged us to deepen our roots so that we may grow.

He gave us a potted history of what Minsters were in ages past and what this one might be today, noting how the parish system and boundaries had been fluid up until Elizabethan times. Curiously, even predating the Elizabethans, it was a Rogationtide custom for processions to go out and ask God’s blessing on the crops but it became the marking out of territory and boundaries, even prompting fisticuffs on the boundaries from time to time.

Mission today will not be served by territorialism. Bishop Jonathan recalled us to a bigger vision than that, and his words are worth looking up and will be made available this week.

As we approach Ascension Day on Thursday we are reminded that the life of God in Christ is not boundaried.

Christ’s resurrection was literally earth shaking event: the powers of the death and the tomb could not hold the Crucified and Risen One.

Our Incarnate Lord, who was restricted to physical location, be it in Galilee or Jerusalem - as we are, in Croydon or wherever - ascended into the heavens such that he is no longer held in by boundaries.

He makes his connection with us in the power of the Holy Spirit, for whose outpouring we await with eager longing at Pentecost, as did the Apostles and the Blessed Virgin Mary, in nine days of deep prayer (cf Acts of the Apostles 1.14). The Spirit makes Christ present at all times and in all places when we call upon him, most especially in intensity of the presence of the Sacraments.

So let us ask God that we may be open to his purposes for us, and that we may be fruitful in all that we think and speak and do, doing all in his name and to his glory.

'A new heart I will give you'

A sermon preached at Guildford Cathedral 13th May, 2018, on the launch of the Cathedral's new mission & vision statement & annual meeting.

Ezekiel 36.24-28; Acts 1.15-17, 21-26; John 17.6-19

‘And you shall be my people, and I will be your God.’ Alleluia.

(Ezekiel 36.28b)

+In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Last Thursday, on the feast of the Ascension of the Lord, we recalled that Jesus Christ ascended into the heavens promising to ‘send power from on high’ upon the embryonic church comprising his mother, Mary, some other women and the eleven disciples.

The Ascension is the hinge moment between the life of Christ incarnate, crucified and risen and the era of the sovereignty of Christ, our King, who reigns in the power of the Holy Spirit – the power from on high - who brings Christ’s presence to us now.

The Ascension begs the question of what life in the ‘power from on high’ – life in the Spirit - looks like without Jesus physically present with us, his disciples.

This era of ‘life in the Spirit’ is not over! We still live equipped by power from on high. What each church has to discover is what that looks like here and now today, and not just in Jerusalem half way through the first century AD.

This time, living in the life in the Spirit, was then and is now always a time of discernment and openness to God’s will; a time of seeking what it means to say personally and corporately, ‘thy will be done’. It throws us to our knees; it opens our hands and hearts in prayer!

This way of discernment asks how particular gifts are nurtured within the church and ministries fulfilled. We see this in our reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Following the death of Judas a new member of the Twelve is chosen, Matthias, whose feast is tomorrow as it happens. Discernment in action.

This way of discernment opens us up to the searching of the Holy Spirit and seeing God’s movement in our lives, in the Church, and in our world.

So, to what is God calling you and me? It’s a question Canon Paul posed from the pulpit a couple of weeks ago and that we’re all following up now: what is the call and claim of the Good Shepherd upon your life? This is the question of discernment, not just in tasks we might do at church but who we are and how we are as disciples of Jesus Christ.

This time of living in the power from on high is always a time of transformation and re-creation: God’s people constantly being transformed into being God’s people. As St Paul puts it, it’s about being, ‘transformed into the [image of the Lord] from one degree of glory to another’ (2 Corinthians 3.18a).

This transformation is initiated principally on the Day of Pentecost – the day that we will celebrate next Sunday. After all, as St Paul continues to say, ‘this [transformation] comes from the Lord, the Spirit’ (2 Corinthians 3.18b).

Life in the Spirit is a time of growth. The Acts of the Apostles tells us that the embryonic church of Mary and the Eleven grew: ‘and day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved’ (Acts 2.47b).

And the growth is seen too in the quality of life of the Church: ‘they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers’ (Acts 2.42).

Now is the time! Now is the time of discernment, of praying for the gifts of the Holy Spirit so that the Spirit’s fruit will be seen in the life of the Church.

Discernment. Prayer. Transformation. Growth.

These features of the early Church, along with worship, are in the Church’s DNA and we neglect them at our peril.

So, we have been responding to those features in our own context here in Guildford. Over the last few months we have pondered, in an enquiring and appreciative way, what characterises our life here and what we dream it might look like in the years to come.

The discernment has led us to speak of our aspiration, under God, that this Cathedral is a ‘warm-hearted community’. This draws directly from the language of the prophet Ezekiel - through whom God speaks in our first reading - ‘A new heart I will give you, and new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh’. (Ezekiel 36.26)

That heart, pumping God’s life around this cathedral and her congregations, is brought us by the Spirit, so that, in Jesus’ Name, we are open to God and open to all; so that we are open to growth and open to transformation.

It is down to each one of us to make that a reality.

And discerning, praying, transforming, growing is a programme for the Christian life and the life of every church community including this one.

This is the challenge: to embrace and adopt - in every aspect of our life as a Cathedral Church community - what it means and what it looks like to be a warm-hearted person and church, what it really means to be open to God and open to all, open to growth and open to transformation.

Life in the Spirit means knowing Jesus Christ. It is what we pray for and appeal to every time we break bread, as we do now: ‘grant that by the power of your Holy Spirit these gifts of bread and wine may be to us his body and his blood’ (Eucharistic Prayer A). Here is the beginning of the answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this sermon: what does life in the ‘power from on high’ – life in the Spirit - look like without Jesus physically present with us, his disciples?

It is seen in individual lives and in a community that knows Jesus Christ and makes Christ Jesus known to all. It is in knowing Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit that we share in the life of the Holy Trinity, that communion and fellowship of love.

That is the source of all Christian vision, life and hope. Let us embrace that here with ‘power from on high’.

‘A new heart I will give you,

and new spirit I will put within you;

and I will remove from your body the heart of stone

and give you a heart of flesh’.

(Ezekiel 36.26)

The Ascension of Jesus Christ: looking up, down, left and right

An Ascension Day sermon preached at Guildford Cathedral, 5th May 2016

Readings: Acts 1.1-11; Luke 24.44-53

‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’ (Acts 1.6)

+ In nomine Patris…

You need to wear your shades if you go into the Lady Chapel of Guildford Cathedral on a sunny day at this time of year. The steps take you up into the chapel and, for a moment, your sight line is directly up at the windows perched high up above.

The sun is quite dazzling. And one’s gaze cannot be held. And so one must look down again, back to the mundane, but also a place where manifestations of God’s glory are also to be found: the altar, the table of the Lord; the Blessed Sacrament, the presence of the Ascended Lord in bread and wine; and the people of God gathered for worship.

Ascension Day gives us a scene of people gazing up into the sky looking to the glory, exaltation and ascension of Jesus Christ. They know and are told that they cannot stand gazing up there for ever. They will have to look down again and out and about.

And, like them, we will look out for something that is coming: ‘Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your people, and kindle in them the fire of your love’. And in these days before Pentecost, nine days, hence the term ‘novena’, we are asked to pray especially in Jesus’ words, ‘thy Kingdom come’, the Kingdom that the Spirit shapes and leads us into. ‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’

This is what we look out for: the coming Kingdom of the Father, made known to us by Jesus Christ, into which the gift of the Holy Spirit will lead us.

You can sketch this movement of the head if you look up, then down, then left, then right. In doing so you are tracing the shape of the cross, and you are shaping yourself in the directions in which Christian disciples’ are called to look.

We look up, a motion expressive of our seeking out the Lord who has ascended from this earth, who reigns supreme over all things. From gazing up at the stars, to spotting Colonel Tim Peake’s space station, from rockets jetting up into space or a helium filled balloon, there is a deep human yearning is to gaze upwards and outwards. We want, we need to gaze so far beyond ourselves because in doing so we sense that we can reach out and touch the face of God.

But the Ascension of Jesus Christ tells us we cannot keep our heads tilted upwards forever. Only a spiritual cramp of the neck comes from that. The Ascension of Jesus Christ tells us we must look back down too. As the disciples were asked, rhetorically, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up into heaven?’ (Acts 1.11).

As we look back down we are not looking down on the world in a superior or supercilious way but, for a moment, we consider a heaven’s eye view of our world, a world that we are called to inhabit and love, as God does: as the creation account reminds us, ‘And God saw that it was good’ (Genesis 1.18b)

The prayer of Jesus to the Father, ‘Thy Kingdom come’ captures this vertical gaze, up and down, ‘on earth as it is in heaven’.

But our gaze is not just vertical it is horizontal too. As the Spirit swept over the waters in the beginning, so our gaze goes left and right: we look, with the eyes of Jesus Christ, at a world full of joy and lament; violence and healing; blessing and curse. We are called to walk as if on patrol, looking for the signs of the Kingdom, ‘thy Kingdom come’, looking left, looking right. As St Paul puts it, and I use the Authorised Version unashamedly, ‘See then that ye walk circumspectly, redeeming the time, not as fools but as wise, because the days are evil’ (Ephesians 5.15, 16). ‘Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’

Circumspection literally means looking all around. Up and down, left and right. And time is redeemed and changed as we look for the coming of the Kingdom, a kingdom already amongst us, yet to come, and of which we are citizens. As we pray with Jesus, ‘thy Kingdom come’ we pray ‘Come, Holy Spirit, make us citizens of the Kingdom, reveal to us the ways of the Kingdom, strengthen us to live the Kingdom’. We look around for a kingdom not of this world, but in this world. This means being fully engaged in society and politics, like voting, even when there seems little point.

Churches and Christians that only ever look up will miss what God is about on the earth. Churches and Christians that only ever look down will be bogged down in the things of earth and never notice the power from on high (Luke 24.49). Churches and Christians that only ever look side to side miss the vertical dimension of faith that is more than just about a kingdom being restored to Israel, more than social and political action. The Kingdom of God is richer than that.

This looking around in all directions connected with the coming Kingdom is reflected in a prayer we often use at the preparation of the altar at the Eucharist, drawing on a second century prayer:

As the grain once scattered in the fields

and the grapes once dispersed on the hillside

are now reunited on this table in bread and wine,

so, Lord, may your whole Church

soon be gathered together

from the corners of the earth

into your kingdom.

We are ready to be gathered in, but also to be sent out. As we go out having been fed at this table, may we be at the same time both lookouts for, and signs of, the Kingdom, looking up to heaven, looking down at the earth with a heaven’s eye view, left and right, in see a world where the exalted Christ is all in all (cf Ephesians 1.22,23): in other words, ‘Thy Kingdom come’. We wait in eager longing. ‘Come, Holy Spirit’.

© Andrew Bishop, 2016

Ascension: chronos and kairos kiss each other

One of the great insights of the early twentieth century was the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and their deep explorations into human personality and the world of what they named as the ‘psyche’. Their voluminous work is not something many of us have waded into, me least of all, so, like many people, I know their work in that sort of ‘pop psychology’ way.

One of the insights derived particularly from Jung was about human personality and the different types of person: this is used in the Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator: so we may tend to be either more introvert or extrovert, sensing or intuitive, thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving. For some people this is a deeply helpful tool of understanding for others, and for other people it is absolute rubbish!

 

Freud gives another polarity: retentive or expulsive personalities. Being Freud it relates to nappies and basic human actions, and there I will leave that aspect. Essentially a retentive personality is someone who is insistent upon the smallest detail of something, one who feels a need to be in control of all aspects of his or her surroundings, controlling, ordered. So what sort of personality wrote this phrase?

‘I decided after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you…’ (Luke 1.1)

It sounds a rather ordered personality, precise and careful. The author is, I’m sure you guessed, St Luke. Luke gives us a most orderly account and plenty of detail. It is Luke who gives us the celebration of the Ascension tonight, forty days after the Resurrection of Jesus; he’s that precise and, just to keep it all tidy, the Day of Pentecost falls a nice round fifty days after Easter. Luke inspires the putting of the Annunciation a neat nine months before the birth of Jesus at Christmas.

Our liturgical practice mirrors Luke’s neat and tidy scheme. Indeed priestly literature in the Bible demonstrates this tendency: the orderly seven days of creation forming the seven day week; the rubrics and liturgies of the Pentateuch. Priests, and Luke, enjoy chronos the ordering of time, from which we take the word chronological, measured time.

We have something of a contrast in the Biblical tradition of the prophets: they  tend to let it all hang out, talking in big brush strokes, setting hares running and not thinking through the consequences.

St John’s gospel curiously echoes aspects of that. Very untidily – but I would say that wouldn’t I, I’m a priest – there is no moment when Jesus’ risen body disappears from our sight, although he does tell Mary Magdalene, ‘Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and tell them “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God”’. (John 20.17). But if that’s the Ascension he comes back, whereas for Luke the Ascension is the tidying up of the earthly body of Jesus.

If we took the liturgical year from John it would look all very different. We might call it expulsive, but a better word would be kairos another Greek word that is about time, but more about time as a fulfilled moment. Time, as we will all have experienced, is something of quality of experience as much as measurement. How long has this sermon gone on? Dangerous question! If it’s boring you silly you might say 20 minutes at least, but if you’re interested and engaged you might say 2 minutes. Time flies by: well, chronos doesn’t; kairos does.

So what do all these threads say about the Ascension of Jesus? It is a fundamental and often overlooked festival, not just because it always falls on a Thursday, and not a Sunday, but because it is a major collision point where the retentive and expulsive tendencies of scripture and human preference run into one another, and where time and space is unbounded, and a new cosmology is shaped. The Ascension and its difficulties take us literally into places where our language and speaking cannot go, caught between the poles of Him being here or not.

In Luke’s account of the Ascension the disciples are busily asking Jesus the tidying up question, ‘’Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’ But that’s the last we hear of them: Jesus’ answer, and what they see, renders them silent, gawping up into the skies. From that moment Luke’s passion for things chronological fades and whilst the Day of Pentecost falls on the fiftieth day what it unleashes is a swirling maelstrom of confused language, visions, dreams and wonders, people are taken to places, figuratively and literally, where they never expected to go. The Risen and Ascended Jesus appears to Saul and dazzles him.

Jesus ascended into the heavens and inaugurates the age in which his Body, the Church, becomes the vessel which, at the very least, will bear his life and grace to the world, spilling out expulsively from Judea to the ends of the earth.

The Ascension of Jesus undoes our efforts at retention and the compulsion to tidy up and hold onto God; it also tells us that just as the climbing plant cannot climb without a trellis to support it: the risen life is to be lived in the real and actual world and it is not a pie in the sky. It is into the space that a new creative space is created and engaged with in the Eucharist, where we meet the Christ who commissions us. The Eucharist is the trellis that means earth meets heaven and heaven touches earth.

In the psalms we read,

Mercy and truth are met together: righteousness and peace have kissed each other.

Truth shall flourish out of the earth: and righteousness hath looked down from heaven. (Psalm 85: 10-11)

In the Ascension retention and expulsion are met together: chronos and kairos have kissed each other. And in the inadequate language given to us, God’s truth shall flourish out of the earth, and righteousness hath looked down from heaven.