The Parish Eucharist – Pentecost, 19th May 2013 (PDF, 0.2MB)

Weekly Newsletter – 19th May 2013 (PDF, 0.2MB)

But where to begin?  Well, we can only ever begin where we are – in the here and now: people gathered together.  But for what purpose?  There is, of course, the ubiquitous definition of church meetings, namely, a group of people waiting to go home.  Does that ring true?  Or what about the ditty that has gone through many iterations over the years:

Some go to church to take a walk,
some go there to laugh and talk,
some go there to meet a friend,
some go there their time to spend,
some go there to meet a lover,
some go there a fault to cover,
some go there for speculation,
some go there for observation,
some go there to doze and nod,
the wise go there to worship God.

And let’s throw in a little empirical research.  Many of you will remember the worship survey we carried out it in 2010.  One of the sections listed all the components of a service and asked worshippers to mark the ones they found helpful.   The only box ticked in one submission related to refreshments served afterwards.

In the light of all this, perhaps we should inquire into why we are here no further and simply accept that we are and make the best of it. Yet, according to Jesus’ high-priestly prayer we gather for community, communion and conversion:

JESUS PRAYED, ‘I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. (John 17.20-23)

We are here for community, communion and conversion.  I don’t know about you, but that leaves me with more questions than answers.  For a start, what kind of community are we talking about here?  And with whom are we supposed to be communing?  And are we really in the conversion business?

Let’s take these in turn, Jesus seems to be talking about a community of faith – faith related to and animated by Jesus himself.  Faith precipitated by and orientated around Jesus, that looks to him for its truth and meaning, that finds in him a way of life – eternal life, as John describes it elsewhere, by which is meant not endless life but life in its fullness – vital human being.

It is also a community that is called to live up to its name.  Repeatedly, Jesus prays that his followers will be ‘one,’ and in verse 23 we find a remarkable phrase that is difficult to translate, literally ‘that they may be fulfilled or completed in oneness.’  Now what on earth does that mean?

Is Jesus requiring consensus of belief or conformity of behaviour or loss of personal identity?  Is this a community defined by orthodoxy, orthopraxy or homogeneity?  Significantly, that’s not where Jesus locates the source of this community’s oneness.  Instead, he locates it in love – a quality of loving communion that he experienced personally and which, in turn, constitutes and characterizes Christian community.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to unpack the import of this insight.  In this prayer, Jesus seems to be offering us a very particular kind of ecclesiology or understanding of church – one that has little to do with denominations and organisational structures, little to do with doctrines and dogmas, little to do with priestly hierarchies and authorized liturgies (as necessary as some of these may be in their place).

Jesus prays for a community born out of love – that reality of love which shaped his own human being, animating his entire vocation and ministry – and which seeks to participate in that love as fully and authentically as he did.

In fact, we could sum it all up in a sentence: where the love Jesus embodied is present there is community, there is oneness, there is communion with the source of that love.

So simple and yet so utterly subversive.  To claim that there is a resource (call it what you will!) capable of embracing difference, enduring pain, overcoming fear; a resource capable of engendering compassion, practising forgiveness, pursuing justice, to yield a coherence of persons, organically and without enforcement, from the disordered and fractious fragments of our humanity.

Do you believe there is such a resource?  Do I?  One that is beyond us yet within us, one that transcends our own capacities and yet is realised through them, one that is outside of our control and yet can only be fulfilled through our cooperation?

Or do we believe that left to our own devices and drawing only on our reserves and potential we can build community across the prejudices, wounds and self-preoccupations that characterise any collection of persons, let alone on larger stages?

And if you incline towards the later, to belief in humanity’s ability to save itself with catalysis or precipitation, I encourage you to read Terry Eagleton’s satirical demolition (Reason, Faith and Revolution) of what he calls ‘liberal humanism’ as espoused by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, or Ditchkins as he refers to them.  Eagleton, a Marxist atheist, concludes in this vein:

The distinction between Ditchkins and those like myself comes down in the end to one between liberal humanism and tragic humanism. There are those like Ditchkins who hold that if we can only shake of a poisonous legacy of myth and superstition, we can be free. This in my own view is itself a myth, though a generous-spirited one. Tragic humanism shares liberal humanism’s vision of the free flourishing of humanity; but it holds that this is possible only by confronting the very worst. The only affirmation of humanity worth having in the end is one which, like the disillusioned post-Restoration Milton, seriously wonders whether humanity is worth saving in the first place … Tragic humanism, whether in its socialist, Christian, or psychoanalytic varieties, holds that only by a process of self-dispossession and radical remaking can humanity come into its own.

According to Eagleton, any future for humanity, and the planet for that matter, worth contemplating is grounded in a realistic assessment of our potential not only for progress, but also destruction, for both self-sacrifice and self-interest, for evil as well as for good.

Now I would agree with this analysis and such an acknowledgement accounts, at least in part, for my reason for being at this service, as indeed every service.  I am here because I have come to recognise in Jesus someone who also shared this assessment of the human condition and yet, through relating to a source of loving inspiration beyond him and yet realized through him, transcended it – enabling him to fashion a superfluous community of grace and forgiveness from persons who had little in common beyond the fact that they breathed the same air and were offspring of a mother’s womb; persons who in some cases disliked one another, were suspicious of one another, were different from one another, were jealous of one another, were out of sorts with one another.

Jesus called that source, God.  We will never quite know what experiences, insights and responses he associated with that word; but, thanks to the Gospel writers and other early Christian pioneers, sufficient clues have been preserved to point us in the right direction, to teach us the patterns and practices of love’s way, to orientate us towards its fulfilment and inspire us to pursue it for all that we’re worth.

And, yes, as many of us are discovering, it’s all very subtle, very unquantifiable – in certain respects, very unsatisfactory, but it is no less genuine for that – a surplus in our minds inviting us to reimagine the world and our role within it, a passion within our hearts enabling us to embrace those who are hurting or who have hurt us, a resolve within our wills to challenge injustice and fight poverty, an irrepressible hopefulness within our souls that refuses to be imprisoned within consensus or constrained by the intractable dilemmas of our time.

This is the lifeblood of faith Jesus makes visible and accessible.  And as we let it pulse through our veins, then webs of relatedness and communities of love will begin to emerge.  And as they do, perhaps others will look and wonder whether we have discovered something, someone, they need as much as we do – a way, a truth, a life – and seek to discover it for themselves:

I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. John 17.23)

May 2013 Mark’s Messenger (PDF, 1.0MB)

In the name of God,
to whom we owe our lives
with whom we live our lives
and through whom our lives are fulfilled.  Amen

Over the last few months I’ve been on a course at Whirlow Grange considering “The Art of Spiritual Accompaniment.”  It’s what used to be known as “Spiritual Direction.”  Many of us felt that this sounded rather too prescriptive so we looked at different ways of describing this relationship including accompanier, midwife and fireside companion.  These images gave us different insights into what we think the role is about and I came to the conclusion that we are helping someone to listen to the spirit of God who is at work within and around them, whether they name it that way or not.

I imagine that my reflections on this Ascension day have been informed by this practise of listening, reflecting and discerning.  I am deeply suspicious of anything which divides “heaven” from “earth” as if there is a realm where God is more real than in our daily experience.  Learning to listen to another human being talking about the things that matter to them is a deeply spiritual experience, even if they never mention God.

So I find the suggestion that the Ascension is a vertical event profoundly difficult.  Many paintings seem to have the Christ figure doing a little dance on a cloud… but I’m particularly drawn to Salvador Dali’s “Ascension of Christ” which appears to have Jesus being drawn into a cosmic MRI scanner…  But either way we’re still left staring at the soles of his feet…

I echo the angels in our reading from Acts who cry out, “Why do you stand looking up to heaven?”  It makes far more sense to me to think of God as “the ground of our being” than “up in heaven”.

There’s a song from the Iona Community which articulates this:

“The God of heaven is present on earth,
in word and silence and sharing,
in face of doubt,
in depth of faith
in signs of love and caring.”
(Heaven on Earth in Enemy of Apathy)

In Jesus’ humanity God’s divinity is grounded.  As we get to know more about what moved Jesus to anger, laughter, tears or action we see through him God’s priorities for our world – forgiveness and reconciliation, spiritual yearning and action for justice.

The role of the church, as with the spiritual companion is to help make visible the life of God, the work of the divine spark in us and around us – to discern that which is drawing us into life, that which is life-giving, from that which is leading us away from life.

Since traditional images of the Ascension are either ridiculous or deadening to me, I’ve had to struggle to consider whether I can find anything that does make sense of it.

I don’t know much about attachment theory, but the idea runs something like this…  When we form secure attachments, either as babies or even in the relationships we form in adult life, they help us to gain a stronger sense of our own identity.  This means that when we encounter separation, either from our earliest care-giver or from other people we love and trust, we are better able to manage the pain of loss.  We learn that we can love, lose and learn to love again, even though that can be painful.

In Jesus, it seems to me, we have someone who models secure attachment.  His relationship with God gave him a clear understanding of his own value and purpose in life.  He could form relationships with others without being limited by the fear that they might either betray him or get too close to him.

Jesus was a man who had such a charismatic influence on people that they were willing to give up their work and families in order to follow him.  He related to these men and women of faith as his friends.  They were hungry and he ate with them.  But more than that: he showed them how to identify good food and share it with others.

Jesus wasn’t making people dependant on him, he was teaching them about God’s life-giving kingdom, a kingdom that was open to everyone.  He wasn’t gathering around himself a bunch of groupies who’d do and say all the right things so that he felt good about himself.  As the church, as Christ’s followers today we need to find ways of learning self-discipline and self-worth not hero-worship.

If we accept the resurrection in any sense at all, that somehow Jesus was experienced as being alive to those who had once given up their livelihoods to follow him; then it seems to me that the ascension is a necessary act of closure.  He had to leave a particular time and space in order to be present in all time and space.

But he left behind a group of witnesses – experts of their own experience they knew that they had to share with others the energy and insights they had learned from him – even long after he had gone.

And surely this is still happening today…

We have experienced something or someone which has drawn us into this church, maybe it inspired us or set us thinking differently, filled us with questions, or possibly gave us some answers, but it gives us an experience of belonging which has life and vitality – and to which we freely give of our time and energy.

As we look at the lives of the earliest Christian communities we see people trying to discern together what is of God and what is not; what will lead them towards life in all its fullness and what deadens their faith.  Surely this is the art of spiritual companionship: listening, discerning and sharing what we’ve found to be true with others.

Being people who know ourselves to be loved, who recognise in Jesus someone whose relationship with God was utterly secure, means that we don’t have to cling to certainty or to each other; inspired by his vision for the world we can reach out to a society which is broken apart by attempts to find love in the wrong places, from the wrong people, in the wrong ways.

But maybe we need to look for love in the wrong places before we can discover that God is there too.

Eucharist – Feast of the Ascension, 9th May 2013 (PDF, 0.2MB)

In doing so, you may think that I’m simply playing with words, but my intention is much more serious for whilst the first question is concerned with what happened to Jesus in the past, the second is focused on what is happening to Jesus in the present.

Now, I think we can be pretty confident, and this may surprise some of you, that the whereabouts of Jesus’ body post-crucifixion was unknown to the first disciples – evidently, there was no place where they could go to gather around his mortal remains and mourn someone they loved and followed.  There was no shrine where they or anyone else for that matter could visit, although this would change with time and under different motivations.

But surely the Gospels contradict this conclusion, I hear you say.  Not really, because whilst all four evangelists record some of the women disciples making their way to a tomb after the crucifixion to anoint Jesus’ body, it is manifestly not there.  The empty tomb traditions, unknown it seems to Paul, simply affirm where Jesus isn’t.

Why the earliest disciples were ignorant of the whereabouts of Jesus’ body remains an open question and depends to a large extent on how we understand resurrection.

Perhaps it was unknown because Jesus had been bodily resurrected from the dead and where his corpse once was it was no longer.  Such is the affirmation of orthodox Christian belief although, unless you also believe in a heaven located somewhere within space-time where Jesus’ resurrected body could be accommodated, the question of its ultimate destination remains unresolved.

Liberal-minded Christians have tended to answer the question of whether or not they believe in the resurrection of Jesus in relation to this affirmation and, finding the prospect of a bodily resurrection problematic and incredible, plead agnosticism or reduce the phenomenon of Jesus’ post-crucifixion presence to a series of hallucinations experienced by distressed and impressionable followers.

Increasingly, I think this approach is misguided.  For one thing, it defines liberal Christianity in terms of a negative – what is not believed in and, whilst this might be a relief to thinking Christians struggling with traditional approaches to matters of faith, it’s not very attractive for anyone else.  After all, would you be interested in belonging to a community promoting scepticism and unbelief?  Why bother?  There’s plenty of that on offer pretty much everywhere you look.

But more importantly, it’s misguided because it fails to recognise the true nature of Jesus’ resurrection which is not a deductive process (‘he’s not in the tomb so he must be alive’) or a delusory one (‘some followers were misled by visions’), but a sustaining experiential reality – Jesus is experienced as a living presence by those who loved him and continued to love him, as well as, and this is crux, those who had never encountered him previously.

This, I think, is the testimony of John the evangelist in our Gospel reading this morning, although we need to attend carefully to his words:

JESUS ANSWERED … Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them … I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you.  (John 14.23-26)

Commentators tend to interpret these verses as anticipatory prediction, of Jesus informing his disciples of what will happen to them after his death, but I’m convinced they should be understood as retrospective testimony, disclosing how Jesus continued to be experienced as alive – as a presence within (‘we will make our home with them’) realised through a process of interpretative remembrance (‘the Holy Spirit will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you’).

In chapters 13 to 17, the Farewell Discourses as their known, the evangelist is seeding on the lips of Jesus the means by which he was experienced as alive within the Christian community to which John belonged towards the end of the first century.

And seminal here is a very particular quality of remembering through which the past becomes present not primarily for the purpose of personal reminiscence or historical interest, but in order to be re-embodied afresh as the teachings and practices of Jesus are rehearsed in another time and within a different set of circumstances.

John appears to be saying that, through this process of corporate remembering, Jesus emerges from the archives of history to become vitally present – relevant and real – claiming authority over persons from a very different culture and religious background to that of Galilee, inviting them to live their lives in the light of his, inspiring them to do the same.

But not in a wooden way – it’s not about imitation, simply counterfeiting Jesus (as difficult as that would be), but improvisation, embodying his faith with as much intelligence, imagination and commitment as he did.  And through doing so, as John intimates a little later, enabling innovations to abound – as Jesus’ undying creativity and access to wisdom and reserves of graciousness and forgiveness give expression to new possibilities:

I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.  When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. (John 16.12-13)

According to the Evangelist, this process of corporate remembering and improvisation of Jesus’ faith possesses a profoundly spiritual dimension through which he is experienced as a living companion, a Paraclete to use the Greek term, able to encourage, to guide and to challenge.

Here, I hope, is an appreciation of Jesus’ resurrection that we too are able to affirm and make our own.  One that is not focused on what happened to Jesus’ body in the past, but seeks to discover his presence in the here and now.  As such, believing in the resurrection is less about affirmation and more about invitation – invitation to participate, if you will, in a living experiment in which Jesus is remembered and his faith is improvised.

And what does this church community, as one hopes every congregation gathering in Jesus’ name, exist to do if not that?   For we are here not so much to affirm that Jesus was once in a tomb, but now is not (although, come to think of it, that is a wonderful metaphor for our true vocation); rather, we are here to demonstrate that Jesus transcends time and place to be a lively presence wherever his story is told and his call heeded.

In a sense, of course, this is bodily resurrection – Jesus living on the community of faith that embodies his risen life and presents him to the world.

So perhaps we’re not as liberal in our theology as we think – what an intriguing thought!