Sermon preached at St Alphege Church, 9.15am Eucharist
Sunday 23rd August 2009, Trinity 11, Proper 16, Year B
Readings: Joshua 24: 1-2a & 14-18 Ephesians 6: 10-20 John 6: 56-69
One of the great themes of John’s gospel is "Eternal Life". In John, chapter 10, Jesus says, “I have come that they might have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). And this great theme resonates throughout John’s gospel (indeed it resonates throughout the whole New Testament), but it is especially intense in the passage that we heard as our gospel reading today.
But before we look at the gospel let’s pause for a moment to reflect on what John means when he talks about eternal life. Certainly he is looking at life that goes far beyond the 70 or 80 years that we might hope for as an earthly life. He speaks of eternal life, the life that survives death, the life that endures for ever. And we are not talking here of a life of monotony, a dreary life, like a prison sentence to be endured. We are talking of the fullness of life in all it beauty and all its wholeness. Elsewhere in the gospel he describes it as the life that is the light of humanity (John 1: 4), the life which is like a rich harvest (c.f. John 4: 36), the life free from condemnation (John 5: 24), the life which never perishes (John 10: 28), the life that comes with the knowledge of God (John 17: 3). Perhaps by “knowledge of God”, we might understand, “full relationship with God”.
And today’s gospel reading is especially concerned with how we receive this eternal; life that Jesus wants to share with it. It is concerned with where it comes from and what we have to do to get it! And we need to be careful to understand what it means to receive this life. Eternal life is something that comes to us from God. It is something we share in when we abide in God and God in us. It is not something that we can ever own in our own right, independent of God, as though we held legal title to it. Rather it is something that God continually gives to us, continually tops us up with, like water being poured onto a garden every evening, throughout a long dry summer (not that we have had much experience of long dry summers recently!). We receive this life from God by grace, as God’s own free gift to us. When our relationship with God is strong we can gain a sense of assurance that God will pour out this life for us, but it always remains God’s to pour out.
So if that it means to receive eternal life, then how do we do it? What can we do to help to help the process, to receive this life that God wants to pour out to us. Well, in the short passage of scripture that we read for our gospel today Jesus gives us at least three direct descriptions of where this life comes from.
First of all Jesus says, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them. … The one who eats this bread will live forever.” Well there are many different interpretations of what Jesus means here, and probably, to a greater or lesser extent, many have truth within them. However, it seems to me very natural and obvious to think that Jesus is talking about the Eucharist at this point. Certainly it is true, coming to the Eucharist is a practical and very physical way of receiving the life of Christ within us. And it is important to come regularly. Just as a garden needs to be watered regularly if it is to grow and bear fruit, so we need to come regularly to the Eucharist to be refreshed in the eternal life, and to grow and bare spiritual fruit.
The second description of where eternal life comes from occurs when Jesus says, “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is useless.” This is a reminder that we all need to be born again in the Spirit. Just as, physically, we are born as babies and need to grow up into mature human beings, so, spiritually, we must be born of the spirit and grow up to be mature spiritual being, saints, ready to lay aside our earthly flesh and to live the life of heaven. We associate being born in the spirit with baptism, when we receive the Holy Spirit and begin our journey of faith within the Church.
“It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is useless.” This phrase also reminds us to give proper attention to our spiritual lives, setting aside time for prayer and meditation. Devoting time to our spiritual life may appear to be unproductive use of time, but it is the spirit that gives life. We might manage to stay alive in the flesh for seventy or eighty years, but sooner or later the flesh passes away and at that point we depend completely on our spiritual life.
The third description of where eternal life comes from arises when Jesus says, “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.” We have to receive the words of Jesus and if we receive them then we receive both spirit and life. How do we receive the words of Jesus? Well we have to listen to them prayerfully, and allow them to sink into us, and to challenge us and transform us. Above all we have to allow them to affect our attitudes and behaviours, so that we live our lives in accordance with the words of Jesus. At the heart of the words of Jesus we must remember the commandment that he gave us which he described as new and as his own. “Love one another, as I have loved you”. This is the characteristic attitude and behaviour of people who have received the words of Jesus. Inwardly we seek to receive the words of Jesus, and outwardly we practise the behaviours of love. By this we receive the spirit and life of Jesus. Jesus grows within us, and we move towards maturity in the spiritual life.
[There is in fact a forth description of how eternal life come to us comes when Peter says to Jesus, “You have the words of Eternal Life”. There is much that could be said about this wonderful acclamation of peter, but in a way he is not adding very much to what Jesus has already said. Jesus has just said, “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life,” So let’s focus on the three descriptions made by Jesus; there is already more than enough there.]
So, to summarise. Jesus wants to share his eternal life with us. He wants to give us this gift. How do we receive it? Well first in the Eucharist we receive Christ’s life within ourselves, his very body and blood. Secondly we receive eternal life from the Spirit. We give thanks for our baptism, but we must also take good care of our spiritual lives, making sure that we set aside time for prayer and meditation. Thirdly we receive eternal life from the words, the commands, of Jesus, when we let them enter into us and transform our ways of thinking and behaving. [And the most central word or commandment of Jesus is “Love one another as I have loved you.” This should grow to become our central attitude, our characteristic behaviour.] And although eternal life is entirely God’s free gift, as we grow in this way we can start to hope for a sense of assurance, a profound knowledge and trust, that God is indeed sharing his life with us, and that he will indeed continue to do so for all eternity. Amen.
23 August 2009
16 August 2009
The Blessed Virgin Mary
Sermon preached at 11am Eucharist at St Alphege, Solihull
Sunday 16th August 2009, The Blessed Virgin Mary
Readings: Revelation 11: 19-end 12: 1-6 & 10 Galatians 4: 4-7 Luke 1: 46-55
Today we celebrate the festival of the Blessed Virgin Mary, transferred from its normal date of 15th August. There are many different festivals in the churches year when we remember different events in Mary’s life, but this is perhaps the festival where we think especially of her. It is a very important date; 15th August is a public holiday in many countries because of this festival.
And why is it so important to have a special day set aside for Mary? Well first of all we have to acknowledge that not all Christians think it is important. More protestant Christians tend to play down the significance of the saints and encourage us to focus on Christ and on God. But this kind of thinking is relatively modern. It has only been around in the church for 500 years or so. The much older and much more widely established tradition of the wider Church has been to place great importance on the saints and on the BVM in particular. And why is this?
Well I believe the saints are important because they show us what can and should be happening to us. God calls all of us to holiness (Matt 5: 48, Rom 6: 19-23, Eph 4:23, 1Peter 1:15-16). We are all called to become saints, to take up our own special place in heaven, fulfilling our own special function for the good of all.
But the holiness that we aspire to does not come from our own resources. Our human nature can be very base and ordinary. Rather our holiness comes from Jesus, it is a sharing in the holiness of God (Heb 12:10). We are co-heirs with Christ, destined to inherit his glory (Rom 8:17). So this pattern of shared life in Christ becomes very important and it is the saints who show us how to do it.
Looking at the saints, and studying their lives helps us to understand how all this can come about in practice. There are many, many saints and their lives are all very different. But some of them have personalities that we can identify with. Some of them have passed through situations that we can recognise. There are some extremely inspiring examples here.
And the Blessed Virgin Mary is probably the most inspiring of them all because her co-operation with God is so perfect, so intimate and so very important to the salvation of the world. I would like to highlight some of her qualities in particular.
The first quality is her readiness to follow God’s plans. At the annunciation Mary famously says, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” Luke 1: 38. With great simplicity and humility she agrees to go along with God plans and to do her part, at great personal risk. Through her, Jesus is brought into the world, and by her Jesus is brought up and educated in the values of family life.
A second quality is her readiness to suffer with Jesus. Unlike most of the disciples, who ran away when Jesus was crucified, Mary stood near the foot of the cross and suffered in her own way alongside Jesus until he died. She was not able to do anything practical to help Jesus in that situation, but she stayed there in solidarity with him. We are left with a sense that she has a mother’s love, a great big heart overflowing with motherly love. She is ready to care for and to suffer for all her children, and in a certain sense this includes all of us.
A third quality is her ability to persuade Jesus to act. We see this most obviously at the wedding in Cena in Galilee (John 2: 1-11). The family who have run out of wine approach her. She approaches Jesus, and Jesus gives a couple of good reasons for doing nothing, but in the end he cannot refuse his mother so he performs an extraordinary miracle creating the equivalent of about 800 bottles of wine! And many, many Christians repeat this pattern in their prayers. Rather than pray directly to Jesus or to God, they pray to Mary, and invite Mary to somehow sort things out with God. And for reasons that are hard to understand this does seem to work. It seems to be a very powerful way of praying and it continues to be extremely popular.
Now I have to admit that, in the past, I personally have had a bit of a problem with this. I used to think that it must surely always be better to pray directly to God. But as I have got older I have come to realise that life doesn’t necessarily work like this. The kingdom of heaven is not just about God; we all share in it. Things happen by the mutual love and co-operation of a great many angels and saints. Just as we all have different roles in our local church, so different angels and saints have different roles in the life of heaven. Now you might be best mates with Fr Tim, so when you want a Baptism Information Pack sending out you telephone Fr Tim and ask for one. Well, Fr Tim, however pleased he is to talk to you, is eventually going to pass that request on to Paula in the Parish Office, because it is Paula who does that job of sending out Baptism Information Packs on behalf of Fr Tim and the whole parish. And if you were to regularly ring up Fr Tim asking for Baptism Information Packs he would certainly tell you to start telephoning Paula directly, and the truth is that the whole business would work much quicker and more efficiently if you did go directly to Paula. Well it is my belief that there are many things that we can ask for in prayer that actually get sorted quicker and more cleanly if we address them directly to Mary. That in no way undermines the authority of God. Rather it properly and respectfully recognises the way that God as ordered things, and the way that he wishes relationships to work. Also Mary knows how to approach God and to ask for things. So, it seems to me that very often God would prefer us to communicate in pray directly with is his servant Mary, and in my experience this does seem to work.
A forth quality of Mary is her ability to get things done very quietly and with no fuss and without blowing a big trumpet to announce all that is happening. This is to do with humility and simplicity and beauty and love. She has the absolute opposite attitude to our current day world where everybody has to seek to raise their own profiles, to publicise and promote their activities and to draw attention to themselves by shouting loader and more persistently than the other people. This very low key approach of Mary’s makes it very easy for us to overlook her, to fail to take her seriously, to judge her by the standards of this world. There is something very quiet and recessive about Mary, but in the kingdom of heaven this is not a weakness, rather it is a way of serving others that we are called to emulate.
So I would like to encourage all of us to develop our own personal relationship with Mary, by praying to her. We don’t worship Mary, because she is not God, but we do venerate her, because she is in very close relationship with God. She is a person and we can talk to her, in prayer, just as we can talk to any other person. Let’s talk to her, trusting in her motherly love for us. And let’s become students of all the relationships in heaven, so that when we ask for things in prayer we know who to ask, and how to ask, and so our prayers can become more effective. Amen.
Sunday 16th August 2009, The Blessed Virgin Mary
Readings: Revelation 11: 19-end 12: 1-6 & 10 Galatians 4: 4-7 Luke 1: 46-55
Today we celebrate the festival of the Blessed Virgin Mary, transferred from its normal date of 15th August. There are many different festivals in the churches year when we remember different events in Mary’s life, but this is perhaps the festival where we think especially of her. It is a very important date; 15th August is a public holiday in many countries because of this festival.
And why is it so important to have a special day set aside for Mary? Well first of all we have to acknowledge that not all Christians think it is important. More protestant Christians tend to play down the significance of the saints and encourage us to focus on Christ and on God. But this kind of thinking is relatively modern. It has only been around in the church for 500 years or so. The much older and much more widely established tradition of the wider Church has been to place great importance on the saints and on the BVM in particular. And why is this?
Well I believe the saints are important because they show us what can and should be happening to us. God calls all of us to holiness (Matt 5: 48, Rom 6: 19-23, Eph 4:23, 1Peter 1:15-16). We are all called to become saints, to take up our own special place in heaven, fulfilling our own special function for the good of all.
But the holiness that we aspire to does not come from our own resources. Our human nature can be very base and ordinary. Rather our holiness comes from Jesus, it is a sharing in the holiness of God (Heb 12:10). We are co-heirs with Christ, destined to inherit his glory (Rom 8:17). So this pattern of shared life in Christ becomes very important and it is the saints who show us how to do it.
Looking at the saints, and studying their lives helps us to understand how all this can come about in practice. There are many, many saints and their lives are all very different. But some of them have personalities that we can identify with. Some of them have passed through situations that we can recognise. There are some extremely inspiring examples here.
And the Blessed Virgin Mary is probably the most inspiring of them all because her co-operation with God is so perfect, so intimate and so very important to the salvation of the world. I would like to highlight some of her qualities in particular.
The first quality is her readiness to follow God’s plans. At the annunciation Mary famously says, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” Luke 1: 38. With great simplicity and humility she agrees to go along with God plans and to do her part, at great personal risk. Through her, Jesus is brought into the world, and by her Jesus is brought up and educated in the values of family life.
A second quality is her readiness to suffer with Jesus. Unlike most of the disciples, who ran away when Jesus was crucified, Mary stood near the foot of the cross and suffered in her own way alongside Jesus until he died. She was not able to do anything practical to help Jesus in that situation, but she stayed there in solidarity with him. We are left with a sense that she has a mother’s love, a great big heart overflowing with motherly love. She is ready to care for and to suffer for all her children, and in a certain sense this includes all of us.
A third quality is her ability to persuade Jesus to act. We see this most obviously at the wedding in Cena in Galilee (John 2: 1-11). The family who have run out of wine approach her. She approaches Jesus, and Jesus gives a couple of good reasons for doing nothing, but in the end he cannot refuse his mother so he performs an extraordinary miracle creating the equivalent of about 800 bottles of wine! And many, many Christians repeat this pattern in their prayers. Rather than pray directly to Jesus or to God, they pray to Mary, and invite Mary to somehow sort things out with God. And for reasons that are hard to understand this does seem to work. It seems to be a very powerful way of praying and it continues to be extremely popular.
Now I have to admit that, in the past, I personally have had a bit of a problem with this. I used to think that it must surely always be better to pray directly to God. But as I have got older I have come to realise that life doesn’t necessarily work like this. The kingdom of heaven is not just about God; we all share in it. Things happen by the mutual love and co-operation of a great many angels and saints. Just as we all have different roles in our local church, so different angels and saints have different roles in the life of heaven. Now you might be best mates with Fr Tim, so when you want a Baptism Information Pack sending out you telephone Fr Tim and ask for one. Well, Fr Tim, however pleased he is to talk to you, is eventually going to pass that request on to Paula in the Parish Office, because it is Paula who does that job of sending out Baptism Information Packs on behalf of Fr Tim and the whole parish. And if you were to regularly ring up Fr Tim asking for Baptism Information Packs he would certainly tell you to start telephoning Paula directly, and the truth is that the whole business would work much quicker and more efficiently if you did go directly to Paula. Well it is my belief that there are many things that we can ask for in prayer that actually get sorted quicker and more cleanly if we address them directly to Mary. That in no way undermines the authority of God. Rather it properly and respectfully recognises the way that God as ordered things, and the way that he wishes relationships to work. Also Mary knows how to approach God and to ask for things. So, it seems to me that very often God would prefer us to communicate in pray directly with is his servant Mary, and in my experience this does seem to work.
A forth quality of Mary is her ability to get things done very quietly and with no fuss and without blowing a big trumpet to announce all that is happening. This is to do with humility and simplicity and beauty and love. She has the absolute opposite attitude to our current day world where everybody has to seek to raise their own profiles, to publicise and promote their activities and to draw attention to themselves by shouting loader and more persistently than the other people. This very low key approach of Mary’s makes it very easy for us to overlook her, to fail to take her seriously, to judge her by the standards of this world. There is something very quiet and recessive about Mary, but in the kingdom of heaven this is not a weakness, rather it is a way of serving others that we are called to emulate.
So I would like to encourage all of us to develop our own personal relationship with Mary, by praying to her. We don’t worship Mary, because she is not God, but we do venerate her, because she is in very close relationship with God. She is a person and we can talk to her, in prayer, just as we can talk to any other person. Let’s talk to her, trusting in her motherly love for us. And let’s become students of all the relationships in heaven, so that when we ask for things in prayer we know who to ask, and how to ask, and so our prayers can become more effective. Amen.
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