Sunday 17th May 2009
Acts 19 vv 44 – end
1 John 5 vv 1 – 6
John 15 vv 9 - 17
Ends and Beginnings
The readings today, the last Sunday of Easter, sum up what Easter has been all about.
There is a spectrum of belief about what happened on Easter morning. The stories are full of variations and inconsistencies. We can accept the literalist version of events, that God intervened in natural law and brought a dead body back to life. Or we can see Easter as the point in our sacred story when God was redefined. St Paul led the way along this path. He interpreted Easter as the moment when God raised Jesus into himself. Whatever God is and whatever God means, from that point on we understand God as he is revealed in Jesus. Much later than Paul, the gospel writer has Thomas, the doubter, hail the resurrected Jesus as ‘my lord and my God’.
No matter what we believe about the Easter story, we know that it was the moment when everything changed.
According to Mark’s gospel, when Jesus was arrested, all his disciples forsook him and fled. After Easter, something brought the fearful and fleeing band of disciples back together. Something filled them with such courage that they never again wavered in their vision. Indeed, they were willing to die for it. It was an extraordinary power that changed cowards into heroes, that redirected the lives of a group of observing Jews into a mission team with the self imposed task of taking the Jesus story to the ends of the known world. It need not have been a supernatural power. But it affected individuals and groups and transformed them.
The transformation is documented in the Acts and the short passage we’ve just heard is a typical example. In the first part of the story, Peter had been staying in Jaffa when he had a vision of a huge blanket full of meat. He heard a voice suggesting he should eat some but he was horrified at the idea of eating meat which had not been prepared according to the strict Jewish purity law. The voice told him that what God was offering him should never be classed as unclean. So Peter ate some of the meat. Just then servants sent by a Roman Centurion, Cornelius, arrived and asked Peter to accompany them to their master’s house as he was seeking conversion. Peter knew that as a Jew he couldn’t visit the house of a pagan, but remembering his dream he went in and found Cornelius with a large company of his staff, family and friends all waiting to hear the Jesus story. Peter made his credal declaration: The truth I have now come to realise is that God does not have favourites but that anyone of any nationality who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to him. Cornelius and his entourage became the first Christian converts from paganism.
Peter’s vision of an inclusive church, John’s conviction that those with faith in Jesus can overcome the world, the gospel writer’s report of Jesus’s great commandment that we should love one another, these are all indicators of the way we must be changed. It’s odd to be told that change is not difficult. Sometimes it seems very difficult indeed. some of the things our fellow Christians say eg about women make it hard to persuade ourselves that we must be inclusive. How can we overcome the world when the world treats us with contempt or with apathetic indifference? And some people are not easy to love; we have to admit that at times we are not completely loveable ourselves.
We’re at the end of Christian Aid Week, that week when we grit our teeth and knock on strangers’ doors and ask them for money for people we’ll never meet. I think the gritting of teeth is an important part of change. Compassion, generosity aren’t always easy. We can acquire them as a habit. Sometimes we just have to get on with things, whether they lift our spirits or not. We can acquire the habit of lifting our spirits as well, without necessarily becoming relentlessly cheerful. CS Lewis in the Screwtape Letters warns Christians about their image as people who go about doing good. He says you can tell the people who are being done good to by their hunted look.
For some of the disciples, change happened very dramatically. Paul, eg, fell off his horse when he met the risen Jesus and was temporarily blinded. For others, the change was a more gradual process. The friends on the road to Emmaus needed to be persuaded that the stranger was Jesus; only after a six hour conversation and a meal did they recognise him. Mary Magdalen saw a gardener and eventually called out to him for help; it took a while before she cried out ‘Rabbi’. Sometimes we have to will ourselves to change, not wait for a Damascus moment.
We must accept ourselves, not cringe and creep in a state of perpetual guilt. Lord I am not worthy………..is not a healthy attitude for a Christian. We know we are worthy. We have been welcomed by God into his family, just as the prodigal son was welcomed back unconditionally by his loving father. But we must recognise that we have human frailties and we must try to transform our lives so that they are more like the life of Jesus. We must be more loving, more generous, more compassionate, more vigorous in our passion for justice, more honest, more brave, more sacrificial. We must cherish the divine element in ourselves and see it and bring it out in others. That is the Easter message.
We’re at the end of the Easter season, and we’re nearly at the end of our period of vacancy, mercifully briefer this time than the last one. We can use the arrival of our new vicar to take stock, to affirm our achievements.
We’ve looked after each other, we’ve looked after this building, we’ve carried forward our commitment to the parish and to the wider world, our Sunday school nurtures our children, there’ve been extremely successful social events, we’ve maintained the musical life of the church and have continued to offer prayer and praise Sunday by Sunday and during the week.
As well as taking stock we can look forward to moving on, to growth. Trevor is on the board of Inclusive Church, the organisation our PCC signed up to when it was set up in 2004. We have a chance here to become a model of inclusiveness. Ours is a very mixed parish, socially and ethnically, and that means that there’s a great diversity of income levels, educational attainment, cultures, attitudes and expectations. We’re part of a team ministry which has expanded that diversity even further to include people from different theological backgrounds from ourselves. But we can’t fit God into our doctrines or theologies. We can’t create a God in our own image and expect him to service our needs. We can’t behave as if we’re the chosen and all other people by definition are the unchosen. Jesus showed the way to leave behind that tribal, protected view of God bound by the rules and regulations that his people have erected around him.
The NOOMA group which John Watson set up was a success. It was open, social and welcoming and it allowed us to enquire of each other and to grow in understanding. The follow up groups were short-lived and not nearly as popular. I hope that Trevor will see the need for more exploration and nurture and suggest ways of answering that need.
We must recognize that for most people religion is not a search for truth, but a search for security. Security is not well served by opening up questions without suggesting answers. And a sermon in church doesn’t offer people time to process, or space to disagree. They can’t talk back and so they must absorb, resist or close their minds. Added to which in this church many of the adults leave with their children and go into the hall so they don’t even hear a sermon. I’d like our newsletter to include pieces that invite dialogue and that say, "Tell me what you think of these ideas." They needn’t necessarily be written by Trevor but they should be stimulating enough so that people will actually read them and they can be the means for opening up deep conversations and significant personal interaction.
We will all have our hopes and aspirations for this new beginning in our church life. Behind them will lie our urge to develop. Jesus said: You did not choose me; no, I chose you. And I commissioned you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last.