Trinity 7 sermon - 14th July 2013

Trinity 7 Year C

14th July 2013

 

Proper 10: Deuteronomy 30.9-14; Colossians 1.1-14; Luke 10.25-37

Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things: graft in our hearts the love of your name, increase in us true religion, nourish us with all goodness, and of your great mercy keep us in the same; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

 

+ May I speak in the name of God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  AMEN

An engineer, a physicist, and a lawyer were being interviewed for a position as chief executive officer of a large corporation. The engineer was interviewed first, and was asked a long list of questions, ending with "How much is two plus two?" The engineer excused himself, and made a series of measurements and calculations before returning to theboardroom and announcing, "Four." The physicist was next interviewed, and was asked the same questions. Before answering the last question, he excused himself, made for the library, and did a great deal of research. After a consultation with the greatest mathematical thinkers of the day, and after many calculations, he also announced "Four." The lawyer was interviewed last, and was asked the same questions. At the end of his interview, before answering the last question, he drew all the blinds in the room, looked outside the door to see if anyone was there, and asked "How much do you want it to be?"

 

A Lawyer stood up to test Jesus.‘Teacher’, he said, ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’

Now it is obvious that the person talking to Jesus in the Gospel is a lawyer, because I understand the first thing you learn is not to ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.  

In this case, the lawyer answered perfectly, and was told to ‘Go and do likewise’, not like the rich young man, who asked the same question and was sent on his way with quite a shock.

The challenge to the Rich young man was to see his money in a different way, and the challenge to the lawyer is to see justice in a different way from the norms of the day.

Jesus met them both on their own ground and challenged them.  This wasn’t some mystical hidden knowledge,

Deuteronomy “Surely this commandment I am commanding you today, is not too hard for you, nor too far away”.

That accessibility is extraordinarily comforting, and yet also challenging, because it removes any excuses, for him and for us, about not knowing how to express our love for God.

That brings us rather neatly to the second half of our Gospel reading, which in a few short verses seems to give us a story that jumps off the page, and is well known by all Christians.

This is probably because it speaks to us all wherever we are in the life, at all ages.  It represents the times when we should have done something, and didn’t, even though in the eyes of the world we had good reason, in the eyes of God, there was no such reason.  We have the ability to be the Good Samaritan, if only we learn to love properly.  

I can imagine throughout the world people imagine who the characters in the story are, and they feel the anxiety, the joy the relief and the warm feeling of humanity redeemed from the strangest of places.

A few years ago I started doing an annual Sunday service for children who, in one way or another, were victims of the Chernobyl nuclear accident.  Each year a group of a dozen or so would come over for a month to the parish with their leaders and stay with parishioners.  They visit everything worth seeing in South Wales, and attend church on the Sundays.  It was sad that each year we would hear that several of the children or leaders would have died, and we remembered them in our prayers.  

The day before my very first sermon for the children, I was told that the interpreter was a lovely person, but couldn’t really speak English very well.  She was excellent at Russian and the language of the Belarusian children however!  

I learned the Russian for ‘Hello’, ‘Bible’ and ‘Story’, dressed the children in shepherds robes from the nativity play and got one to pretend to assault the other.  When the other three saw this they smiled, and as I told the story in English the children knew how to act…two ignoring the child lying in the aisle (with Belarusian hand signals that made the interpreter blush, but made the congregation laugh), finally, with no prompting the last child picked up the other one, moved him to the choir stalls and acted out feeding and bandaging the injured traveler.  

Such is the power of this story that hides at the end of a conversation between Jesus and a lawyer, recorded for us by a gentile physician.

 

When the lawyer asks the question “well, who is my neighbour”, we can see that theLOVE OF GOD cannot be separated fromLOVE OF NEIGHBOUR.  We cannot love GOD, if we do not love our NEIGHBOUR.  And we will never grow up into the full stature of Christ unless we can properly grasp this.

The Colossians grasped this: their "faith in Christ Jesus and love . . . for all the saints" fell naturally into one sentence.

Commenting on the readings for today, a commentator in The Church Times notes;

Love takes shape in action. Once the Christians at Colossae "truly comprehended the grace of God", the gospel began to bear fruit among them.

Intelligent first century lawyers understood it, children from Chernobyl understood it, and the early Christian church in Colosae understood it, people all over the world know.  May we all, in our time, bear fruit that will last through our love for God and others.

Shall we finish with a prayer.

Let us pray

May you be strong with the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, whilst joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the Saints in Light.  AMEN

 

 

Trinity 8 Sermon 21st July at St Edeyrn's

Trinity 8

Pentecost 9

Year C

St Edeyrn’s 2013

 

+ May I speak in the name of God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  AMEN

 

Proper 11: Genesis 18.1-10a; Colossians 1.15-28; Luke 10.38-end

 

Mary and Martha

 

 

I don’t know if any of you have watched the comedy drama ‘Rev’ on the television recently… As the title suggests its about a Vicar working in the East End of London with a very small congregation – I was a bit suspicious about watching it, when someone religious turns up on telly they are usually strange or dangerous.  Dot Cotton in Eastenders seemed bad enough until the bloke who is a part time minister/part time serial killer turned up.

 

It was with a degree of trepidation that I turned the computer on and watched an episode of ‘Rev’.

 

In one episode the church Rev looks after allowed another church to use the building – it wasan ‘all singing all dancing’, service with video screens, rappers and a ‘TV personality’ running the show.  The Church was packed and lots of money was collected – lots of which was donated back to the usual church and its’ congregation.

 

In the original congregation there were all sorts of characters, and they didn’t all really fit into the ‘new’ service.  When one of the established congregation did something to upset one of the helpers in the new congregation the minister of the new congregation insisted that hebe excluded from the Church.

 

The Vicar refused and the Archdeacon agreed – they pointed out that nobody could be excluded from the Church… It is open to all – and that sometimes means people who are very different from those we would choose to spend time with.

 

At this stage I was waiting for the Vicar to turn out to have a dark sinister secret that no one knew about…but it didn’t happen….thankfully!

 

A friend of mine is the Vicar of Pimlico in Central London, and he tells me that before each new series of Rev, the writers and director meet the Deanery and ask about what’s happening in the parishes, also asking them about whether things seem realistic or not.

 

The episode about the new way of worship and the traditional way of worship is a good one, but it isn’t something that’s happened recently, there have always been differences about what we do, in faith, to worship.

 

In the Gospel the reported event in the lives of Mary and Martha is an important one, it shows us worship in different ways too!

 

We have the busy Martha, distracted by her many tasks, trying to make things perfect, and we have Mary, who would rather choose to sit at the feet of Jesus, just listening.

 

It isn’t as easy to split their tasks up by saying it’s all about faith and works, Mary havingfaith without works and Martha having work without faith, because that does a great disservice to the them as people.  

 

It’s not a case of two women getting it completely wrong in two different ways.  

 

I think it’s a lesson to us all, as are all the recorded events, parables and allegories in the Bible.  They are all there for a reason.  

 

This lesson, once again, has a wide-ranging and deep message.  The thing about Mary and Martha is that Martha was so busy ‘doing the right thing’ in the sight of God she forgot tocheck what ‘God’ actually wanted.  

 

God incarnate is sat on her sofa, and she still knew best – but it was hardly her fault.

 

But we can’t all be Marys either, sat at the feet of Christ, when the work needs to be done too!

 

Doing and being!  It takes all sorts of action and prayer to make a church!

 

St. Paul in the letter to the Colossians talks about his mission to ‘make Christ known’ he who is the ‘image of the invisible God’, so that we can all be ‘mature in Christ’.  

 

What a fantastic phrase and thought.  To be growing towards a maturity in Christ.  Taken together, we could say that the readings are inviting us to grow more mature in Christ bywaiting for him to speak to us, in whatever way we hear him.  In our prayers, or through our work!  It’s only then can we actually say we are doing the work of the Kingdom.

 

When we think back to the series Rev.

 

There was that apparently successful Church – lots of people came, most of them were young too.  

 

I’m sure they were learning about God, the stories of the Bible and even how we are expected to live.  But faced with a problem, faced with someone who didn’t actually want to do things their way, they couldn’t cope with it – the other person had to be wrong.

 

Lots of people believe that their way is the right way, and excluding others, questioning the motives and integrity of others – as the Archdeacon in the series pointed out, we can exclude nobody from our Churches however different they may be… And the fact is that it’s notour place to be judge.

 

The traditional church was an apparently unsuccessful Church, with money problems and a small congregation – but for all the faults associated with it, it was this Church, that best understood Jesus’ command to love their neighbour… they accepted everyone just as theyare.  

 

You can’t judge a church by numbers, lively songs, and the amount of people in the choir, the quality of the vestments, or even the quality of the clergy.  You can only judge a church by the way in which it considers, includes and involves those who would otherwise have little or no voice.

 

You can’t judge a church by its age, tradition, or many other things – looking at what’s happening now, and what a church has the capacity to do or pray for in the future is what counts.

When I was a curate in Risca, I was also chaplain to Cross Keys college, my fellow chaplain was a Baptist from America.  His previous post was to decide which chapels needed to close, and which needed to stay open – perhaps that’s why he needed to leave the states with such a controversial job.

 

I asked him about the decisions he made, and I said that it must be difficult, and a shame to close the small chapels that meant so much to people in the past.  

 

“That’s not how it’s done”, he said.  I asked about the process, how he choose, and he told me that he visited the people.  Listened to how they worked in the communities, and what they wanted for the future.

 

Big chapels with lots of members had closed, and small chapels with barely a dozen had stayed open.

 

I’m not a judge, he told me, I’m a fruit inspector.  

 

He then went on to tell me that any church needs to be a Mary church, grounded in prayer, and also a Martha church, focusing on action, one without the other rarely works, because one informs the other.

 

I pointed out that Jesus told Martha that she was worrying and fussing too much, and that the worshipful Mary had ‘chosen the right thing’.  He looked at me and told me that it was just about getting things in the right order…prayer comes before action.

 

I said (playing devil’s advocate) that it was a bit of a convenient explanation!  Shouldn’t we just all pray more and not worry about action.  He pointed out, correctly, that Jesus taught constantly about putting love into action.  You can’t get away from it in all the Gospels.

 

I was secretly pleased. To be honest, I love Martha, and I’m a bit of a Martha myself.

When things need fixing in any church, I believe that we should pray first, but then we should remember that there are very few things that can’t be sorted out with a nice piece of cake and a cup of tea.

 

I think that our churches should have a year of being Martha!  Welcoming, open, hospitable and kind, inviting others to share, listening to the stories of others, and telling them ours.

 

Finally, we go right back to the beginning.  If you have your reading sheets, please look at Genesis.  This is telling us of Abraham, the Father of Our Faith, the Faith of the Jews andthe Faith of the Children of Islam.

 

When visited by the Lord, who would tell him that his children would be as numerous as the stars in the sky, this is what happened;

 

The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them, and bowed down to the ground. He said, ‘My lord, if I find favour with you, do not pass by your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on – since you have come to your servant.’ So they said, ‘Do as you have said.’ And Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah, and said, ‘Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, knead it, and make cakes.’

 

All I can say to that is AMEN

Covenant Sunday Sermon - Unity!

In the Gospel reading, Jesus is probably returning to Capernaum after delivering the sermon on the mount, he is becoming better known and things are beginning to heat up.  People are taking sides, claims are being made, and some extraordinary things are happening.

Back in Capernaum, the place where he had healed people before, he is now approached for another sign, a miracle. 

The Centurion, a Roman Soldier in charge of 100 soldiers of an occupying force, was demonstrating faith, humility and hope, when he asked for his slave to be healed.  He was also demonstrating his willingness to take a risk for the slave he loved.

He sends some of the Jewish leaders to Jesus, to plead his cause.

We sometimes have a romantic view of the Romans as a sort of civilizing and cultural force, however this wasn’t what the people remembered them for when they left.  The first facts any schoolchild will give you is that the Romans gave us cement, bricks, sewers, straight roads, swimming baths and cats.

They don’t talk about the slavery, the bloody games and the oppression.  They don’t readily talk about the murders and ethnic cleansing.  They also don’t mention that there was a crucifixion because the cross was a Roman instrument of torture and execution.

I can’t ever remember preaching about, or even mentioning the fact that the Centurion was…well…a military leader from a brutal and unforgiving occupying force.  I can’t remember thinking how it was odd that he sent the Jewish leaders to Jesus.  I can’t remember thinking how this flash of Christ in the Gospels gives us a fantastically important vision of the kingdom of God, and the divine purpose.

In a week when we are walking the tightrope of unrest through the murder of Drummer Lee Rigby in London, and the subsequent rise in religious and racial hatred, it seems wholly appropriate that we have Christ looking at the faith, humility and hope of the Centurion, seeing his need, and not his class, race, colour or belief.

I’ve had a bit of a journey this week, I’ve managed to take a few days off to do some exciting things.

On Tuesday, I was lucky enough to see Rowan Williams talking at the Hay Festival, about religious icons.  At the end of the talk, someone asked him if he was happy to be ‘retired’.  He responded that it would be great to “catch up on his sleep”, and “to become a Christian again”.  People laughed and it was a lighthearted end to the talk.  This, of course, made the headlines, but behind this seemingly throwaway remark, there was a lot of truth.

The truth is that we need to see through the noise of everyday life, to see the the faith, humility and hope at the centre of the lives of other people, and to try and consider ourselves too.

Looking for the signs of God slowly working his purpose out. 

Christ saw these in the centurion, past the uniform, the slaves and the violence.  He saw the challenge of someone trying to find faith.

Finding faith

The Desert Fathers, and Mothers were hermits, ascetics, and monks who mainly lived in the desert of Egypt beginning around the third century AD.  The most famous, Anthony the Great moved to the desert in 270AD and by the time he died seventy years later, thousands of people had heard of the sayings of the Desert Fathers and moved to the desert.  Such was their influence on the growth and direction of Christianity.  It is fair to say that almost all monastic orders grew from the desert.

Abba Arsenius, a Desert Father prayed;

“O God, do not leave me.  I have done nothing good in your sight, but according to your goodness, let me now make a beginning of good”

Another, called Abbot Pastor prayed;

"If someone does evil to you, you should do good to him, so that by your good work you may drive out his malice."

This two thousand year old wisdom from the desert stands for itself, I think you’ll agree.

Faith, Humility and Hope

And today, Covenant Sunday we celebrate the different traditions in Christianity that make for a broad church.  We think of our prayer partners, and we think of the promises that were made years ago, that helped us to live together in unity, whilst celebrating our differences.

I have an admission to make, and it is this.

I find it difficult to come to terms with the fact that as soon as you accept that there are other people of faith, this then resolves not merely into an ecumenism, but an acceptance that ALL people who wait on God to reveal his purpose are ALL the same.  If faith to you means;

·     You believe in a GOD who is actively involved in the life of the world

·     You believe in a GOD who gives faith to counter our discouragement and doubt

·     You believe and trust in a GOD you can’t see

·     You believe in a GOD that gives strength for people to do what they could never do alone

Then your truth is my truth – and perhaps, just perhaps that truth will set us free.

When I thought of Christ seeing the faith, humility and hope in the centurion.  I thought of the people of the York Mosque, when faced last week with a potentially volatile demonstration by the English Defence League, the newspapers told us that they quickly defused the situation with tea, custard creams and a game of football.  Beautiful as it is to believe that, they didn’t diffuse the situation with biscuits, sport and a drink, they diffused it with faith, humility and hope.  The rest was a product of that.

And between the people with very different views, backgrounds, heritage and life experience, there was a shared faith, a faith in a God who brings his people to unity, and a God who shares our suffering.

It was a truly lovely thing in a truly tragic week.

The tragedy of a soldier who died on the streets of London, and the story of a soldier who called on Christ to save a loved one intermingle to remind us what a Desert Father knew all those years ago, that;

         “Good work drives out malice”

Jesus himself marveled at the humble faith that so clearly trusted in him and his authority over sickness and death. Here was a Roman soldier, who had faith in God that outstripped even the Jews.

Oh, the Jews had faith, but the centurion had great faith. It was great faith that wasn’t self-centered. It was great faith that humbly focused on God. It was the faith of a powerful man that trusted in God’s authority.

So, after a couple of days in London, I returned back home and promised to take the children to the MGM Studios where the Harry Potter films were largely shot.  I still hadn’t really managed to finish my sermon, and I was looking for  something to finish my sermon for today.  I wasn’t sure that I’d find anything in Watford. 

As I walked into the film set, there was a quote in five foot letters from J.K.Rowling.

“No story lives unless someone wants to listen. The stories we love best do live in us forever.”

That was it!  This is the end of the sermon!

Whether you’re a Roman centurion, a Desert Mother or Father, a person of faith seeking God’s purpose for you, your family and community, or whether you are a newly retired Archbishop, you need to take time to put words to the story of GOD in your life.  And that story will live in you forever, in the name of God; Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  AMEN

Pentecost! A good and fine day in the life of the Church

Today is a great and grand day in the church calendar; it is one of the splendid Christian feasts.  It is the day when we celebrate the power of the Holy Spirit present in the Church of Christ.

Last year, it fell on the fourth Sunday of the month, so (at 10.30) we had a Family Service, which involved making ‘flame’ hats to represent the Holy Spirit above the heads of the Disciples.  This year, the family Eucharist falls next week, on Trinity Sunday – I’m at a loss what to do for next week!  It could be fun!

Today is the start of that great season of Pentecost, where we can almost see the rest of the year stretching out before us.  Apart from Trinity Sunday, and some feasts of Saints, we are in the Pentecost Season until the 1^st Sunday of the Kingdom Season in November!

This rhythm of the seasons gives us a steady and solid beat with which to plan the year.  It allows us to prepare, plan and hopefully get things right for the festivals. 

We all love a bit of forethought and preparation – if clergy are able to sit back a few weeks before Easter or Christmas with all their liturgy, sermons and speeches prepared they are happy – there is an air of calm that descends when a sermon is completed – mostly because before sermon writing starts, most of us haven’t a clue what we are going to say.

This sense of all being good, and planning ministry is lovely! But it’s a million miles from what happened to the disciples that day. 

They were uncertain what was going to happen, their world turned upside-down.  A wind blew through the locked room, flames appeared and then they were literally speaking a whole new language, or languages.  The reading from Acts tells us;

And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.

Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans?

The next line of the reading after the Holy Spirit descending finds the Disciples outside in the streets, they were in the crowd, preaching, showing their faith, being ridiculed and berated – but they were there – DOING THE WORK OF THE CHURCH.

The reading doesn’t even tell us what they said after the Holy Spirit descended…

God had given them a gift too precious to waste.  They are up and out.

We then hear the sermon of Peter, who puts the whole thing in context, firstly by promising that they aren’t drunk!  And then he tells them what the Prophet Joel said concerning these things.  He tells them a horror story of the sun being turned to darkness and the moon to blood.  He tells them of the glory of the coming of The Lord to give salvation to all who call upon his name.

The Acts of the Apostles is an important book in the New Testament because it gives us snapshots of how the early church spread so far, so quickly across the world.

The visitors to Jerusalem took the faith back home with them, and soon there were Christians in Samaria, Ethiopia, Damascus, Sharon, Lydda, Joppa, Cyprus, Phoenicia and Antioch, and, with Paul’s conversion, Europe and parts of Asia.  The faith even came to Wales relatively early in its’ development.

And…just like at the beginning….the message was taken to people in their own language, speaking into their lives, about their worries, troubles, fears and their joys and happiness.  The stories have been transmitted in a thousand languages to millions of people, keeping up the tradition of that first Pentecost – the Birthday of the Church.

I’ve thought sometimes that calling Pentecost the Birthday of the Church is over sentimentalizing the whole event.  The terrifying event surely can’t really be similar to the church of today.

If it resembled the church of today, well, on the Day of Pentecost, there would be someone giving out a bulletin with events for the week, there would be tea and coffee after the service, and the children would have walked in just before the end.

But then again, perhaps it was just like the modern church!  The people who said;

·    “These people are drunk”, well they might have been the Pentecostals. 

·    The ones who disagreed and said “No, they can’t be” well, they must have been the Methodists. 

·    Then there were others who said “what does this all mean?” were the Baptists. 

·    The ones who insisted on making sure that the sermon was available in all languages so that no one was excluded were the United Reformed Church.

·    And then the one who categorized everybody into different nationalities, writing a list and making sure that each person could be categorized, so in the future when people would read what happened, they would understand a little of the history….yes, they were the Anglicans.

Right at the beginning of the church, we had all the usual characters.  Working Ecumenically together if you like.

It would take a few years for committees, organs, Sunday school and church wardens to arrive, but the main components of the modern church were there.

The beauty of Pentecost, is that we can see God tends to do things in a particular order.  The people of Jesus’ day hadn’t really understood what the prophets were telling them. 

That they were being blessed by God, in order to be a blessing to the whole world. 

No wonder Peter quoted the Prophets!

Pentecost expresses what God requires – that we, who are blessed, share in a world-wide mission, without fear, because God wishes to reconcile humanity.

The reading from the Acts of the Apostles about the birth of the Church, is a glorious connecting with God.  From their desolation and despair, their trust in the truth of God brought them to the will and purpose of God.  Wonderful Stuff!   For those gathered at Pentecost, it was a leap of faith, a jump into the unknown.  Would it be that we were as brave. 

GOod Friday 2013

After our Lenten preparation, we have entered into the reality of Holy Week, gone are the palm branches and the shouts of Hosanna, gone are the coats thrown in the dusty road to carpet the route of the king, and gone is the donkey.  Today is Good Friday.

Each year it gets harder for me to remember what life was like before my ordination.  However, I do know that I first felt the call to ordination around this time during Lent.

I remember that each year, I finished work on Maundy Thursday in the evening, and when most of my colleagues flew away for a few days, I would go to church.  In those days, we would be given no less than three holiday days, so I wouldn’t return to work until Wednesday.

I would live the Paschal Triduum, (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday) up until the first service of Easter, when the light of Christ was brought into the church on Saturday night, lit from a fire outside the church.  After the great celebration of Easter, I would have two days to reflect and relax, before returning to work.

There was the rather quirky “Easter Monday” with no religious significance, but it was another day off...the Tuesday was just an extra day.

It didn’t take me long to realise that we should have probably have finished work on the Wednesday of Holy Week, and gone back a day earlier, so that we could travel the last hours with Christ to the cross.

I was like a child in a sweetshop – the churches in which I grew up we didn’t really do Holy Week, just Easter Day, and for me, there was always something missing.

One of the standards from the pulpit, is when clergy say ‘There can be no Easter without Christmas, and no Christmas without Easter” merrily going on to unpack that in a thousand or so words.

But they should say the same sort of thing each Holy Week, when the device is much better used.  I’ll have a go…

There can be no Easter Day without Good Friday – no resurrection without crucifixion.  There can also be no proper understanding of Easter without an understanding of Good Friday.

Welcome to Good Friday…

We meet today to recall the important events in the life of Jesus and the history of the Hebrew slaves.  However merely remembering doesn’t do justice to the events of the betrayal and the arrest of Jesus.

Each Good Friday, we are being presented with the story of our salvation so that it might speak to us, in our own lives, in our own city, today.  We are being encouraged to look, once again about the great gift of faith we have.  We don’t do enough remembering, we rarely do enough thinking about faith…

Have a think about this…The EXODUS, remembered by the Jewish people at this time isn’t a faint memory of something that happened to distant relations, but an experience that is shared by each new generation, that shapes the community of faith and each and every family in Judaism.

It will be St. Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, who will remind us of this fact.  He writes to the early church because he thinks they have forgotten the link between the death of Christ and the Exodus.

If Paul were writing to the church today, he might well remind us of the connectedness of what we do in church, and how this should affect the lives of the people in the community around us.

The story of GOOD FRIDAY is not a simple tale about humility and service; it is the ultimate act of servanthood.

By virtue of his death, doing for us that which we couldn’t do for ourselves, Jesus of Nazareth radically challenges conventional, hierarchical ideas about leaders and followers. 

No other leader is worthy, never has been and never will be, and we will constantly strive to act as Jesus did. 

This constant striving is in the remembering, and like our Jewish brothers and sisters, this is an experience that should be shared by each new generation, it should shape our community of faith and each family in Christianity.

This is, of course, another example of Jesus bringing a new promise from God that sits perfectly with the promises given in the past.

The Good News of God in Jesus of Nazareth is not merely a theological exercise but it is an explanation, a demonstration, and an experience. At the Last Supper, Jesus shows the full extent of his love, and on the Cross…well….

Today, God is asking us if we can see the importance of sacrificial love in humility.  It is the only love that can save humanity from itself.

I can’t get a bit of scripture out of my mind, it’s like a pop song that is going around my head, and it’s difficult.  It jumps off the page.  Paul writes to the Romans;

“Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die.”

And today, the Son of God dies for the good, the bad, the righteous and the unrighteous alike.  He dies for you, he dies for me, and for all people, for all eternity…

How can I understand, comprehend or appreciate that?  Well I try to live up to the standard.  I pray every day and I stand behind the altar and remember what he said.

And so, we are left with the standard.  The standard Christ instituted on this day, and the standard that we should live out in our lives.

Let us, in humility, follow Jesus today and in our lives. 

Easter Day 2013

SERMON - Acts 10.34–43; John 20.1–18

Alleluia Christ is risen, he is risen indeed.  Alleluia

When a young minister was still single, he preached a sermon he entitled, "Rules for Raising Children." After he got married and had children of his own, he changed the title of the sermon to "Suggestions for Raising Children." When his children got to be teenagers, he stopped preaching on that subject altogether.

The Easter stories seem to be all about people making mistakes and not understanding what’s happening. 

·     Mary sees the funeral wrappings and thinks the body of Jesus has been stolen. 

·     Peter sees the wrappings and can’t understand what it’s all about.

 

·     The Disciples had no idea what Jesus wanted them to do

·     And angels then question Mary, and she still doesn’t comprehend, she thinks Jesus is the gardener. 

·     She reaches out to give him a cwtch, as we say in Wales, and he tells her not to.

I can’t remember reading more misunderstandings in a few short paragraphs.  It is as if everyone had no idea what was happening, and no one had taken time to sit and think about anything.

It’s clear that there has to be a point being made here.  The first Easter happened, the tomb was empty, space, time and world history had changed, but the people that witnessed it were the same, their minds and imaginations were the same also.  They weren’t given a cosmic understanding to comprehend the enormity of what was happening.  They seemed to just look on in bafflement.

They were trying to count the grains of sand on the beach really.  The explosive fact of the resurrection left them with a world of possibilities, and no real way of expressing that.

Reading the accounts of the Passion, from all the Gospels, and seeing the bafflement of the disciples, is a mark of the authenticity of the story for me.

A generation later when the stories were written down, if someone had been making it all up,

·     They wouldn’t have had the disciples in such bewilderment,

·     And no one would have bothered to make up the detail about how the folded grave clothes were in a place by themselves,

·     Another thing that jumps out to me is that it is hard to explain how, when the disciples saw Jesus, they didn’t recognise him, either here or on the road to Emmaus.

The first Christians weren’t prepared for what was happening, it was as if they were struggling to describe something they didn’t have the language for.

Ever since then, people have tried to explain the Easter message, with varying degrees of success.

Archbishop Barry is preaching this morning at the Holy Eucharist in Llandaff cathedral on the other side of this city, and he will liken Jesus to Fireman Sam, because they are both in the rescue business and they never let people down.

The Church in Wales Press Office tells me that he will say;

"Anyone in trouble, with no questions asked, so too God responds to everyone in need".

"As his name suggests, Sam is a fireman who rescues people from fires but he is into all kinds of rescue.

"So, whether people are stuck up a mountain, marooned at sea, have fallen off a cliff or their bus has got stuck in a bog, helped by Penny, Tom, Elvis, Station Officer Steel and Radar the dog, based at the fire service at Pontypandy, Fireman Sam comes to the rescue.

"If you wanted to sum up God's work, He is a God who is in the rescue business. That is the root meaning of the word 'salvation' - it means being saved from something or someone.”

We don’t need to be able to explain everything, we can just sit looking into the empty tomb, and be content that it happened. 

The first disciples learned something after the resurrection, and it is that the Easter message is about looking at the product of Easter morning and not fully understanding the details of the day.

Justin Welby, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, in his acceptance letter, wrote;

“The work of the Church of England is not done primarily on television or at Lambeth, but in over 16,000 churches, where hundreds of thousands of people get on with the job they have always done of loving neighbour, loving each other and giving more than 22 million hours of voluntary service outside the church a month.”

That is a product of Easter morning!

[He then goes on to call Parish Priests, the great unsung heroes of the church – so I think he’s great!]

The Christian church is still the largest provider of Health Care throughout the world, Christians have called for civil liberties, peace and justice for all people.  Christians founded the Red Cross, Save the Children, Action for Children and the Children’s Society.  They have called for change to legislation to protect people, to empower people and to support people. 

Baroness Warsi, coined the rather nice phrase;

People who "do God, do good"

She added to the figures quoted by Justin Welby, adding that as the economic downturn has taken hold, Christians have increased their giving by a third to social action projects, in money and also in time!

That is a product of Easter morning!

In another lovely report, we are told that  ‘Half of Anglican parishes run services such as food banks, homework clubs and even street patrols.’

This is the product of Easter morning!

I’m not suggesting that the history of the church is all light and joy, the darkness has slipped in and flourished in some places, but for me the proof of the Resurrection is the product of Easter morning, that continues to bring people together for;

·     Support

·     Social action, and

·     Spirituality

The leading Theologian N.T.Wright tells us that;

Easter is what it is because, together with Jesus’ crucifixion, it is the central event of world history, the moment towards which everything was rushing and from which everything emerges new.

The Gospel, says Paul in Colossians, has already been preached to every creature under heaven; which must mean that with the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth a shock wave has rattled through the world, so that despite appearances the world is in fact a different place, full of new possibilities, previously unimagined.

We should take these opportunities to build a new future as a product of Easter Morning.

I’m not sure whether Fireman Sam is really like Jesus, I would have thought he was more like Arnold Schwarzeneger, after all in the Terminator, he said I’ll be back.

And on that note,

Alleluia Christ is risen, He is risen indeed Alleluia!