Easter 7 Ascension

“Holy Father, protect them”

Rev. Margaret Raven

Readings:

Acts 1: 6-14: “You shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.”  

John 17:1-11: “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one as we are one.”

I don’t know about you, but I find it incredibly reassuring that right before going out of the door to go to the Garden of Gethsemane…tohis arrest and to his death by crucifixion…Jesus is thinking ahead to the short and long-term needs of the disciples…the massive challenges they will have to confront in the next hours, days and weeks….without him there beside them.

John’s gospel shows us Jesus identifying what is going to be necessary. 

Then Jesus asks God for just that - he prays for it, confidently… explaining the situation and the reason for his request: first,he tells God the disciples are now a Godly group: “..they have kept your word…..and know in truth that I came from you……I have been glorified in them”; second,Jesus identifies the disorientation, grief and leaderlessness the disciples will have to face alone, far from homein very high stress and always life-threatening situations ….” And now” he reminds God,  “I am no longer in the world but they are in the world, and I am coming to you.”; so, finally, he petitions God to allow the disciples the same open, mutual, loving relationship with Godself that he, Jesus, has learned to rely on during his mission on earth. He knows the disciples will need this so he specifically requests it from God on their behalf:

“Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me,so that they may be one as we are one.”

What a huge gift to give to the disciples!   These days we call it Assurance.  Blessed Assurance.

Jesus has anticipated normal human frailties.The intimate and united team of disciples he has trained up could easily collapse in shock and mistrust once they witness betrayal, arrest and realize they are now leaderless. It must not happen.Exposed to menace fromtemple police and Roman militarypersecution they might scatter, hidefor personal safety and never, ever meet up again. The Godly group needs assurance and protection in order to survive. There is going to be an extended leadership vacuum. There will always be opposition to the Gospel. Much reliance on prayer as a way of life is the only sure way to survive intact and move forward. After all, this Jesus Movement post-resurrection must consolidate itself, must thrive and must grow in order to continue the work begun by Jesus…..

Now you have all worked in charities, businesses, small and large organisations and volunteer groups. You and I, we are familiar with the power-struggles, the ideological battles,the strategy disagreements, the tempestuous resignations and threats to resign…along with the inevitable personality clashes which bedevil fledgling organisations and leaderless groups.Jesus anticipates that an enhanced, personal trust and prayer relationship with God is essential both to protect the disciples as individuals and as Godly group as well as to enable them to get beyond interpersonal disagreements in order to continue to function as an effective team with shared values, goals and beliefs. In fact he asks for them to be given the same prayer-relationship, trust-relationship and support- relationship with God that Jesus himself relied on during his earthly mission.

What an awesome gift!   To become somewhat like Jesus in their relationship with God?!  You know that gift is available to us too don’t you! “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one as we are one”.

It is no wonder then that as we move from the pre-resurrection and pre-ascension account given by the writers of John’s gospel to the post-resurrection and post-ascension account given by the writers of the Acts of the Apostles we find the early church is now calling the disciples “apostles”. A disciple is a trainee and a follower of a holy person. An apostle is a messenger of God, a leader, a preacher, teacher and evangelist – trusted and anointed by God as a pioneer leader in their own right. The disciples transformed into apostles are so important to early Christianity that they are all named  (quote Acts 1:13,14). The Godly group is not only identified but described as “constantly devoting themselves to prayer” just as Jesus had requested of God…not acting but praying, thinking, discussing, meditating, sharing, listening to each other carefully in those early days post –resurrection and post-ascension.

However, the narrative makes it clear there are limits on the role and function of the apostles - God is authority in history and in space-time….

So, the apostles are to have nothing to do with secular power-political groupings ……all the nationalist, revolutionary, apocalyptic and millenarian movements drawing on the rhetoric of kingdom of God, Israel, Jews or Israel as chosen people of God……”It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority” says Jesus just before the ascension. In other words: Forget about a date for the coming in of the kingdom of God. “Your task is to be my witnesses”. Do not use your power for other purposes.

The apostles are to witness to Jews and Gentiles. God is for all people. The gospel is for the whole world, for all nations and ethnic groups. The role and function of the apostles is to be witnesses for and of Jesus“in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” The Holy Spirit will come and give you power to fulfill this task says Jesus to the apostles…. and to us.

If we are willing to move out of our culture of self-protecting privacy into the greater intimacy of getting to know others on their terms….trusting them to the point where we are willingly sharing our story with others……  We can pray and ask for this.

Easter 6

Listening first

Paul preaching to the philosophers of Athens

Acts 17: 22-31 - In Him we live and move and have our being.

John 14:15-21 – The Spirit dwells in you and will be in you…

This is a great reading from Acts, because in it we find Paul at his absolute best, and being the very model of a great missionary. And the reason he’s a great missionary is because he’s listened, he’s observed. He’s noticed what’s sacred to the Athenians. He even knows their poetry – In him we live and move and have our being. He’s gone about the city and looked carefully at the things that really matter to them. So he finds the common ground from which he can begin to tell his story, having first listened to theirs.

Now this isn’t how the Church has always operated. One of our retired bishops tells the story of how he went out to Papua New Guinea as a very youthful missionary to assist a much older priest who’d been out there in the missions for years. He arrived to discover that this priest’s way of evangelising the locals was to erect a loudspeaker on top of the bamboo hut in which he lived and blast Choral Evensong from Kings College Cambridge right across the jungle - not exactly Paul’s approach of listening to the heartbeat of another culture.

Clearly you don’t need Anglican choral music to be Church, any more than Paul would say you needed circumcision to be a Christian. Wherever Paul saw an obstacle to the sharing of the Gospel, he overcame it – food laws, purity laws, people getting hung up on which apostle they followed. No, says Paul, I’ll be all things to all men so that by any means I may save some. If Paul needs to know the language of Greek philosophy, he will; he’ll get right alongside people so that he can read their own stories back to them, revealing the Jesus who’s already there.

There’s a wonderful book called “Chistianity Rediscovered” by a Roman Catholic priest, Vincent Donovan. Vincent worked for a number of years in a missionary school in Kenya, but he observed that while lots of people would become Christians in order to use the schools or the hospitals, Christianity as a living faith never really seemed to take root in their lives. Once people went back to their villages, they tended to go back to the indigenous religious practices they’d grown up with.

So Vincent asked his bishop for permission to stop teaching, and just go around the villages visiting the people, being with them, and above all listening to their stories. And the bishop allowed him to do this in a completely open-ended way for as long as it took, with no outcomes expected. He was just to be with the people. Like Paul, just to go about and observe and listen.

Now as an approach this was the absolute antithesis of what had gone before, because the European model of mission was to come into these places and into people’s lives, almost as if they were some kind of blank slate on which the Christian story could be written like there was never anything there before.

But what Vincent discovered was that in fact the Gospel was already there. For several years he just listened, and then gradually as he gained the people’s trust, he started to share the story of Jesus, woven in with stories they already had. They had salvation stories; they had their own sacramental meals, and once he knew about them Vincent was able to point to the Living Christ who was already there, right in the depths of their own traditions. For example, Vincent writes: “There was no need to explain to the Masai the symbolism of living, life-giving water. It was sacred to them long before I got there. Their word for God means rain – it being the most beautiful description of God they can think of”.

  

I want to say this morning that the same principles hold true for us in how we share our faith. In a culture where Christianity is often either scorned or dismissed, we need to face up to a real challenge. Namely, have we listened? Have we cared deeply enough about the stories people are telling through their music, their films, their novels, their work, and most of all their lives? - because beyond a doubt the sacred is already there. In God we all live and move and have our being.

You know, I often find on baptism visits with young families that there can be a bit of suspicion on the part of maybe one of the parents or even both of them if they’re maybe doing this to keep granny happy. But you get talking to them about their hopes for their new baby, you ask them about their hopes for this little sacred person, and before you know it you’re on holy ground.

And people who start off telling you that they’re spiritual but not religious, they end up saying: well if this is what it means, if resurrection means my baby is going to grow up knowing there’s new hope every morning, that he won’t have to carry yesterday’s failure into today, that failing an exam or being dumped in a relationship or making any kind of a mess of things isn’t the end – then you can sign me up. If Christianity values what I value then count me in.

Because our model here isn’t just Paul, but Jesus, who lived thirty years among us, who listened to our human story before ever he preached a word. Which is why people were amazed at his insight, his sensitivity – come and see someone who told me everything I ever did!

This is an evangelism any of us can do. Reverence what’s already sacred in other people’s lives. Do that, and there’s nowhere the Good News cannot reach. 

EASTER 5 2014

18^th May 2014

“The Father is in me”

Readings: 

1 Peter 2: 2-10 - out of darkness into his marvellous light

John 14: 1-14 - I am the Way...

I love Thomas, because he gets to be the fall guy, if you like, our fall guy, and he asks all the awkward questions we would maybe have asked if we’d been there, and maybe the questions we still ask now. So Thomas will be the one who says: Unless I see the prints of the nails I will not believe (subtext, what kind of credulous person do you think I am?) And now, Jesus utters these wonderful, moving, comforting words – I go to prepare a place for you and you know the place where I am going. Only up pops Thomas, and maybe coughs gently and says: actually Lord, no we don’t.

And as in that upper room where Thomas will get his answer, his evidence, and not just for him but for all of us who come after him with all our doubts, so now, Jesus’ answer isn’t just for him. It’s a bit of a Gospel set-up, because he’s asking the question that needs to be asked. And he gets an answer that Thomas and any of us, all of us, have to go on working with and living with for the rest of our lives: I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. If you know me you know the Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.

What a claim! But it’s almost so enormous that Philip doesn’t get it. So here he plays almost tag team partner with Thomas because now it’s his turn to ask something: Lord, show us the Father (clearly what Jesus has just said has sailed right over his head) and we will be satisfied. And you can almost sense the sigh in Jesus as he replies: Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and still you don’t know me?

I find this breathtaking. It’s almost as if God himself breathes these words through Jesus in this moment. The union of Father and Son couldn’t be any closer. Do you still not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. The world should stop in its tracks at such a claim. Creation should hold its breath, because this Jesus is either, like someone said of Lord Byron, mad, bad and dangerous to know, or he is who and what he says he is. But Jesus then goes on to make further stupendous claims. The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Here it is again: The Father is in me, the Father is in me... It’s a wonder the disciples remain on their feet.

Jesus says: These words, these works are the Father living in me. Believe because the Father is in me and I in him; or if that’s too difficult for you yet, believe because of the works – my works which are the Father’s works. Believe because of my words and my works. The words of love, the words of challenge, the words calling us into life, the words of promise; the works of healing, the works of mercy and forgiveness, the works of facing up to evil, unmasking it, calling it by its real name, letting it do its worst on the Cross, then conquering it once and for all – because, he says, I go to prepare a place for you, and I can be trusted and I know, because the Father is in me and I in the Father and I came from him and I will go back to him to be with him for ever and to pray for you.

It should take our breath away. But a bigger miracle even than that is on offer here. Because Jesus says the life of God is going to breathe in us and through us just as it did and does through him. We are a God-bearers. Yes, earthen vessels, clay pots, as Paul would say, to contain such a treasure, but that’s what’s on offer. You will do greater works than these because I am going to the Father, and I will send the Spirit to blow through your life whether you’re old or young, rich or poor, whoever, whatever you are. So get ready to be filled with the life of God.

Because God is at home in you. You can be at home in God. No special arrangements needed. No frantic tidying up in case he catches you out somehow. It should be like breathing out and breathing in. God is in you, by creation – Lord, before you formed me in the womb you knew me, says the psalmist. And he’s in us by baptism, marked as Christ’s own for ever: cleansed, refreshed, revived by living water.

This is why he is for us the cornerstone of our lives, chosen, precious. He knows the sufferings of your very flesh, the detail of every single thing that makes you unhappy or keeps you awake at night, takes it to the Cross, then transmutes it into risen life to show us the Way. That’s new life for all the children of God, new life beyond all that we suffer now. But not only that, new life even now, because he lives in us, constantly calling us into life – even on those days when you’d rather stick your head back under the covers. So this is a cornerstone not to reject, but to cling to. St Augustine says: Lord, you have made us for yourself and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you. If he is our Way, if he’s the Way we walk in, step by step – even when we fall and have to get up again – then our hope will be renewed time and again, day after day.

This is the God to whom we’re precious enough for him to make his home in the very deepest places of your heart. That’s what it means to be called out of darkness into his marvellous light. 

EASTER 4 - 11^th MAY 2014

“A DEE-DAH DAY”

Readings:

1 Peter 2: 19-25 – You were straying like sheep, but have now come back to the shepherd and guardian of your souls...

John 10: 1-10 - I have come so that you might have life

Jesus says, I have come so that you might have life, and have it abundantly. There’s a book I often go back to to re-connect with this invitation to life in its fullness. It’s called “The Life you’ve always wanted: spiritual disciplines for ordinary people” by an American pastor, John Ortberg. One of his chapters he entitles, “A Dee Dah Day: The Practice of Celebration”. And he starts off by telling us how his little girl who’s just a toddler has a habit of running round in circles singing: Dee Dah Day, Dee Dah day, Dee Dah Day. He writes: It’s a relatively simple dance expressing great joy. When she is too happy to hold it in any longer, when words are inadequate to give voice to her euphoria, she has to dance to release her joy. So she does the Dee Dah Day.

He goes on: “On one particular occasion I’d just got her out of the bath. Mallory had started her dance and I was getting irritated. “Mallory, hurry”, I prodded. So she did – she began running in circles faster and faster and chanting “dee dah day” more rapidly. “No Mallory, that’s not what I mean! Stop with the dee dah day stuff, and get over here so I can dry you off. Hurry!”

“Then she asked a profound question: ‘Why?’ I had no answer. I had nowhere to go, nothing to do, no meetings to attend. I was just so used to hurrying, so preoccupied with my own agenda, that here was life, here was joy, here was an invitation to the dance right in front of me – and I was missing it. So I got up, and Mallory and I did the Dee Dah Day dance together. She said I was pretty good at it, too, for a man my age”.

I have come so that you may have life and have it abundantly, says Jesus. C.S. Lewis says: “Joy is the serious business of heaven”. And the first question of the old catechism used to be: Why did God make you? To which the answer was. God made me to glorify him and to enjoy him for ever.

But our capacity for losing sight of this is almost wilful. Jesus weeps over the people of Jerusalem and us, because we’re like sheep without a shepherd, buried in our diaries and our obsessions, maybe feverishly pursuing things that won’t actually lead to our happiness no matter what the media might tell us. Regularly I’ve answered the phone to a disembodied voice telling me: Congratulations, you have been randomly selected to win a holiday in Florida. But I don’t want to go to Florida (they have alligators and hurricanes), in fact I don’t want most of the stuff that’s offered to me, and I need even less.

The old prayer book used to hit us with this every time we came to Church: We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, and there is no health in us. Which is all a bit grim, but it’s not that far from the mark. Peter, this morning: We were all going astray like sheep, but now we have come back to the shepherd and guardian of our souls.

And Jesus tells us what the mark of a true shepherding is. I always remember there was an episode of Father Ted in which Ted’s been accused of behaving like a fascist. “How dare they call me a fascist”, he protests. “Fascists are people who wear black all the time and tell other people what to do”. And William Blake sees false shepherds in the same way, not as joy-bearers and life-givers, but quite the reverse. He writes: “Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, and binding with briars my joys and desires”.

But Jesus says, don’t listen to people like that. Jesus says, listen to my voice and I will lead you to springs of living water, to new pastures, to the nourishment you really need. I am the gateway to the new life you want, I am the way.

All of which might sound great, but you may still be left with the question as to how do I hear the voice of the shepherd and follow him into that abundant life in the actual life I’m living now. Timothy Radcliffe explores this very helpfully when he says that what we see in Jesus is a man who took whatever life brought, whatever choices were in front of him, and somehow transformed the whole of it into a gift. “On his last night”, he writes, “Jesus had few options open to him, and none of them seemed good. There seemed to be no good choices to make. But he acted creatively. He grasped this betrayal and made of it a gift”. And he goes on: “Many of us find that we have few options. But with God’s grace invigorating our imagination, we can choose creatively, opening up possibilities of which we’d never dreamed. We can grasp our fate and make it a blessing”. This, he says, is how we can become free.

But when Jesus really wanted to make the point about how to be free we all know what he did. He would bring a little child right into the middle of all the big grown-up discussions and say: If you want the new life of the kingdom, if you want to know freedom, then you need to see as a child sees – which, is, believe it or not, how God sees.

G.K. Chesterton reflects on this child-like spirit in God when he reminds us how kids never tire of things they delight in: They’ll say, “do it again”, over a story or a game or whatever until you’re almost driven crazy. Maybe, he says, this what God is like. “It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.”

I am come so that you may have life, says Jesus. He comes to us now, today, so that no matter what else is happening to us, somehow, we can do a kind of dee dah day dance in our hearts, and connect with the joy of our Maker, and live. 

EASTER 3 ST ANNE'S

Sermon by Peter Davey

“Then their eyes were opened 

and they recognised him”

Readings: 1 Peter 1: 17-23 – Love one another from the heart…

Luke 24: 13-35 – They knew him in the breaking of the bread.

Have you ever wondered what it must be like to be blind? Guide-dog trainers occasionally have to put on blindfolds and go for a walk with a dog as their guide in order that they should experience what it is like for a totally blind person to put their trust in a guide-dog. There are restaurants in London and Paris where the dining-room is in complete darkness and you eat your entire meal in the pitch black. The waiters are blind so they are perfectly comfortable in that environment. Apparently when the diners attempt to pour their own wine it gets interesting!

Luke tells us in our gospel story this morning about two men on the road to Emmaus who were blind. Not in the sense that they needed a guide-dog, but they were unable to see Jesus who was walking and talking beside them. .They saw a man beside them but they did not see the the essential thing that the man was Jesus himself! Luke does not tell us exactly why they did not recognise him, but he was clearly with them for some considerable time explaining the scriptures to them, but still they were blind to who was with them on the road. We are told that when they reached Emmaus Jesus almost left them but luckily for them and for us, they invited him to stay with them in their house as it was getting late. It was only when they were having supper together and the stranger blest and broke the bread were their eyes opened and they recognised that it was Jesus. Why then and not before? Remember it is Luke who is telling us this story; Luke who is above all concerned with the compassion of Jesus. It is in that act of breaking the bread and sharing it with his friends , in that beautiful act of compassion and love, that they see their Lord! What they could not see with their eyes, they see with their heart.   Is this the clue then to what it means to open our eyes?

There is a beautiful little book that I discovered about ten years ago which I love. It is called, Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. It is read by all children in France  but loved by adults as well. The little prince meets a fox at one point in the book. And the fox tells the little prince that he has a secret to tell him. The fox says,

Here is my secret; a very simple secret. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye.

So the fox is telling the little prince that he must see with his heart in order to see what is essential. But what does it mean to see with the heart and not just the eye? It means to see as a child sees. It means to feel rather than to think; to trust rather than doubt; to be open rather than closed; to be generous rather than cautious; to be vulnerable rather than defensive. If you spend time with small children you will see how they demonstrate all these attributes. But how can we become like small children again? In the epistle this morning Peter reminds his flock that they have been born again, born again that they might love one another deeply. Only by being born again and becoming like small children again can we hope to see with our hearts and so have our eyes truly open so that we too can see Jesus.

But we are not on the road to Emmaus. Where do we look for Jesus in 21st century Dunbar? The answer is that wherever there is love and compassion in action, there we will see Jesus. In a smile; in a kind word; in an act of kindness; in a hug when someone is feeling down or sad. If we look carefully and with our hearts we will see such acts everywhere we go for Jesus is indeed everywhere if we only have eyes to see. And the beauty of it is that when we are born again we also find the risen Jesus performing these acts of compassion and love through us.  This is because in order to see love in others we must have the same love in our hearts. There is but one love and only love recognises love. It is a funny thing but the more acts of compassion we perform the more our eyes are opened to the love that is all around us.

Through the Dunbar Churches Together Youth project I am fortunate enough to be spending some time at the Dunbar Primary School doing some mentoring and conducting a programme called Seasons for Growth with some children who have experienced a loss in their family life. I am amazed how much I see Jesus in the children I spend time with. The children tell me that they enjoy their time with me, but it is nothing compared with the joy I get from being with them. I learn so much from the children  and the love that I see in them. Do you remember the story in the gospel of John of Jesus giving sight to the man who was born blind? The Jewish authorities question the man about who had healed him suggesting that Jesus was a sinner.

The man gave the most brilliant reply, he said, “Whether he is a sinner I know not. But the one thing I do know, whereas I was blind, now I see.” I, too, have met Jesus. But if someone were to ask me how I knew it was Jesus I would simply say, “I cannot say for sure who it was, but one thing I know, whereas once I was blind, and now I can see!”