Have you ever been overlooked, not chosen for something which you really wanted, something which could have been life affirming? Maybe a fantastic job prospect, or a key member of an important team. It can be quite disheartening, maybe even soul destroying especially if you had set your heart on whatever it might be. I’ll bet the overriding emotion at the time was disappointment, maybe some resentment and maybe even some feeling of a lack of self-worth. It has happened to me a few times during my life. Once I was passed over for a job at the hospital where I worked, a career move that I felt ready for. I didn’t get chosen for that job, but I still had my job within the Cardiac Research Dept. Another time when my Drama Group was staging The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, I auditioned for the part of Brodie. I felt that I auditioned well, really well to be honest, but I didn’t get chosen for the part. Instead I got a cameo part and was onstage for maybe a total of 5 minutes, if that. I was really gutted about not getting the part of Miss Brodie, and even now, I reckon I could have played it really well. I need to get over it as it was well over 30 years ago!! But – on both these occasions, OK so I didn’t get chosen for the job or the role that I wanted, but you know what? The job I still had; the role I did get – they were both just as important. The research department still needed me in my current job. The play still needed the role, albeit small, that I was given. Just because I wasn’t chosen for the parts I really wanted didn’t mean that I had no part to play whatsoever. I did. And I still do in the current areas of my life. Matthew tells us, in today’s gospel, about the Twelve who are chosen by Jesus to heal, exorcise, and to raise the dead. These are His Apostles and have been specifically chosen by Jesus over a period of time. Now I am sure that as well as the Twelve, there are many other followers of Jesus, other disciples who are not given specific roles, are not chosen to carry out these specific tasks. Maybe they feel overlooked, maybe they don’t. But whether they do or not, they still have very important roles. They are a broader group who would help propagate the word, as followers and supporters of Jesus at the time, and later, into the early beginnings of the Church. And while the notion of the Body of Christ was not yet written about, the Apostles and the other disciples need each other, they are all just as important to the message of the Kingdom as each other. My left foot has an important task, as does my nose, my eyes. But they are all very different each with very different purposes – roles. Put together, all my body parts make up the whole me. Just as the Twelve and the other disciples make up a whole proclamatory body. Just as my cameo role, and the other roles made up the complete play. We all belong……we all have our individual parts to play.Matthew takes the time to name them. He names the Twelve. And what a motley crew they turn out to be! Quite a mishmash of characters, personalities, backgrounds. At first glance you would not expect that they would mix well at all but think of them as ingredients for a rich stew or casserole. Each ingredient so very different from the next but put them together and something sacred happens in the stirring of the stew/casserole. A diverse group of men indeed. To name just a few of the Apostles, we have strong minded Peter, the eventual leader of the group, and the bold, loud and passionate Sons of Thunder, James and John – all fishermen. There’s Simon the zealot – light the blue touch paper and stand back! Then we have Bartholemew, aka Nathaneal, who reckons nothing good could come from Nazareth. Jesus had seen him sitting under the fig tree – maybe he was thinking, contemplating – maybe that was his demeanour – a thinker. Then – Matthew, the writer of this gospel – a tax collector of all things! Why would Jesus choose such a one as he? But He did. And of course, the last name in the list – Judas Iscariot – the betrayer. Apart from learning that Judas is less than honest when it comes to his management of the shared coffers, we know little about his actual personality. But Jesus chose them all – He chooses common people; uncommon leaders. He is not for the high and mighty, the eloquent and prominent to send out. He chooses this particular diverse group of ordinary men, emphasising the fact that God will use anyone regardless of skill or personality. He chooses ordinary people to do extraordinary things.This mix of characters enrages the Pharisees, who are portrayed as being rather aloof and self-centred. They just don’t get why Jesus would hang out with such a motley crew of, in their eyes, lower class citizens. The Pharisees are shirking their duties as religious guides for the people in general who are being described as harassed and helpless and are likened to sheep without a shepherd, wandering aimlessly through life and in desperate need of direction. The Pharisees should have been spiritually leading them, keeping them safe, but clearly they’re not. Jesus is the good shepherd, looking to keep His flock safe. Possibly He sees the Apostles as sub-shepherds or maybe even like sheep dogs (not being derogatory here) who have the task of helping to tend to the scattered sheep and bring them back into the fold. Unlike the Pharisees, Jesus has a deep love for people, all people, regardless of sin, shady past, misdemeanours. Quite possibly this does include the Pharisees, but boy, did they ever frustrate Him! Jesus sends the Apostles out to the lost sheep of Israel. The name apostles comes from the Greek apóstolos which means ‘one who is sent’ and who participates in the authority of He who sends them. The Twelve Apostles are sent out to the wider Jewish communities with their instructions. The directive Jesus gives them is highly specific. He is detailed about what He is asking of them. But perhaps the most striking and important aspect of this sending out of the Apostles is that Jesus is giving them authority. He is giving them authority to heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons. This giving of authority effectively heralds the start of apostolic succession; Jesus Christ was sent from God. Similarly, the Twelve are sent by Jesus Christ, and later, as St Clement of Rome writes, they go in the full assurance of the Holy Spirit to proclaim the coming of the Kingdom of God. And they will appoint their new converts to become bishops and deacons for believers of the future. We learn what we learn and know what we know from such as these.We are called to be the disciples of today, the apostles of today – sent out just like the first Twelve, by Jesus, to share His compassion and to further His cause. We are sent out with the unfailing love of Jesus. The same love which compelled the fishermen to leave their nets and to follow Him. The same love that compelled a tax collector to leave his booth and to follow Him. We each have our separate gifts, and these may be quite ordinary. We don’t have to be outstanding to be chosen for God’s specific or general purposes. God has plans for each of us and our unique combination of gifts are just as important to the spreading of the good news as the next person. We go where we are sent, where God sends us. Like He, in Jesus, sent the Twelve to the Jews first, and not to the gentiles. Where we want to go may be very different to where God wants us to go. But we are to be pliant to His guidance. And so, if we are not chosen for specific roles, we need to remember that we are all still very important to the Kingdom agenda and that God will, and does, use us as He sees best. He will be there to support us and guide us through the bad and the good, the rough and the smooth as we all make up the beautiful Body of Christ.Amen
During his time of teaching in the flesh, Christ often expressed his love for, and his desire to be one with people, especially for those who were rejected and unloved. One quite obvious way He did this was to share meals with them. We only need to think of the familiar feeding of the five thousand where he miraculously provided a great meal for a huge crowd of people who came to listen to him and be healed by him. Shared meals were, for the Jews, signs of acceptance and friendship. Like many people, the Jews were rather selective about those with whom they shared meals. In seeking out public sinners and tax collectors, Jesus was going against their traditions. Most Jews invited their friends or powerful people to their meals, the usual ‘Death by Dinner Party’ that we are all familiar with. In eating with sinners, Jesus was making friends with those who had no friends. He was showing them respect and love, he was inviting them to His table because they are the ones he yearned to be with, rather than the highest and greatest that most people seem to lust after. He was letting them see themselves in a new light and become a new people. Instead of being nobodies, people with no hope, no future, they were God’s beloved children and citizens of his Kingdom. Something they had never even dreamed of had become a reality The Kingdom of God was not meant just for the religious elite. It was also for them. T was for them first!It should come as no surprise to us that Jesus’ last act before his death on the Cross was to share a meal with his disciples – his Last Supper. The Eucharist is the retelling in the flesh of the Last Supper. In the course of this meal, ‘the Lord Jesus took some bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way he took the cup after supper, and said, “This Cup is the new covenant in my blood. Whenever you drink it, do this in remembrance of me”’ Such familiar words, such a familiar table, but so unfamiliar with the reason we are invited have we become! He gathers the lowly, and scatters the proud in the imagination of their hearts. Jesus’ last meal with his disciples is inseparable from the sacrifice of his life on the Cross, his supreme act of love. Love is manifested supremely in self-sacrifice. ‘Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends’ (Jn 15:13). In celebrating the Eucharist, we celebrate the memory of Jesus’ passion and death. As St Paul reminds us, ‘Therefore, every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are proclaiming his death’ (1 Cor 11:26). We also recall the events which led to his death, the values by which he lived, and for which he died, and we commit ourselves to live by those same values: his passion for a world re-fashioned in the image of a loving God; his compassion for the poor and outcast; his mercy for, and forgiveness of, sinners; his hatred of hypocrisy; his abhorrence of violence and his commitment to peace. His love for us. In receiving the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, we become one, not only with Jesus, but with one another. When St Augustine preached to his assembled congregation on the meaning of the Eucharist, he told them: ‘See what you are and become what you see: the Body of Christ… You are saying “Amen” to what you are: your response is a personal signature, affirming your faith. … Be a member of Christ’s body, then, so that your “Amen” may ring true!’So today we once again open our doors and hearts to all people, not our doors in fact, we have no more place here than anyone who has never been here before, we are just passing through, part of the ever changing Body of Christ, looking for our true home, which is prefigured here this day. It is for that reason that we know our sinfulness, that we know our need of God, and we know our need for each other, for we are called to be one body. For sure, if part of the body is harming another part, we try and stop it, but if we cannot, we cut it off, and hope that act of being cut off will heal the wounds. Our celebration of this great feast of Corpus Christi reminds us of our constant challenge: to keep alive the body of Christ by becoming, in the context of our time, his flesh and blood given for the life of the world.And we are not isolated individuals, but one body. As the people in the desert gathered the manna that fell from heaven and shared it in their families, so Jesus, the Bread come down from Heaven, calls us together to receive him and to share him with one another. The Eucharist is not a sacrament “for me”; it is the sacrament of the many, who form one body, God’s holy and faithful people, so we must build unity and love and faith, and the time to focus on that which is yet to come is here, now and forever.
Where are we going and what can I do about it? What can you do about it? Better to ask ‘what can we do about it’. What can Trinity Sunday teach us today? First, in Christ we discover that God is love. It is not just that God loves, but that God is, at the very core of his being, love. When we love, we share in the life of God. If God were alone from all eternity, then God could not be love. There would have been no one and nothing to love until Creation. Love would be accidental to God and so God could stop loving as he had once begun. But because our God indeed is love, then we are caught up in this mystery and, like all people from all lands, nations and times we may dare to cry out ‘Abba, Father!’Maybe that is all we need to know, but it does not unpack the meaning of Trinity Sunday very well and the Trinity is not shown by going to heaven and counting the persons of the Trinity. It points towards a love which is utterly mutual but which overflows, as the love of the Father and the Son overflows in the Holy Spirit. When parents have children, they too learn that love which overspills beyond the couple. Love becomes Trinitarian as its mutuality is opened towards others. Otherwise our loves might become introverted and narcissistic. So the doctrine of the Trinity is not abstract celestial mathematics. It is the most down-to-earth practical lesson in the mystery of generous and fruitful love. It is beautiful, because love is beautiful, and it needs to be said again and again because of that challenging line we just heard, ‘whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son’ John goes on to explain that there are those who prefer the darkness to the light, and so will follow the voice of the devil and not the gentle loving voice of God. God is a love which is completely one. What can we do about the mess we are in? Point to God. Show people where love is perfected and freely available, living our lives in the light of truth as given to us in scripture. This is the glorious doctrine of the simplicity of God, and right from the earliest times, the disciples had a glimpse of the mystery of this Triune love which they encountered in Jesus. This is not the belief in some strange divine threesome on a remote planet. It is the love which transfigures our own loving. All our everyday ordinary loving is marked with this mystery. It is a love which lifts us into equality, as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are equal. Its grace frees us from domination and manipulation. It is a fertile love, overflowing beyond itself. It draws us into unity with each other and with God, overthrowing divisions between nations, saints and sinners, the living and the dead. Our love is pregnant with the prayer of Jesus, addressed to his Father and ours, ‘that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly one.’ It can seem that that two is a natural number for community. If there are two people there is community, if they belong to one another, they are somehow fulfilled in the way that no solitary person is. We think of two as the natural number, in fact Plato thought that it was the first number, since one is meaningless as a number unless there is one more of the same sort with which to be compared.Even in larger groups, it resolves itself into two. Politics that works tends to resolve itself into two parties, Conservative and Labour, Republican and Democrat, and if you want to give other examples for other countries, I did say ‘politics that works’. Opinions boil down to two options, teams play one another. Either we are alone or we are in a relation to another, even a negative relation where there is anger, or hatred. In wars too, the complexities resolve themselves into two sides against each other, and others take sides behind one or the other. Yet the teaching of Christianity, its deepest conviction, is that three is the true number of relationship, not two. How can that be? In fact the answer is quite simple. Jesus said ‘Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them’. What he is saying is that if there are two gathered together, there is also, by the nature of things, three. The two can only be two because there is between them a relationship, and this is the third thing.In our world, not all relationships are relationships of love. We can be bound to one another by hatred, by competition, by anger. Yet even there, it is love that lurks at the heart of things. We hate people because we want them to be objects of love. We hate them because we want to love them but cannot. There is nearly always a germ of love to be found in great hatred, a love which is never quite extinguished, which is also what we can do – we can search for the image of God in those we are opposed to, and love that image because it would be self-harm, as Christians, not to do so. Of its nature, there is indeed no past tense in the verb ‘to love’. The Trinity is the proof of this. In our world, lots of things are alienated from their own nature. Lots of things are, in the deepest sense, not quite themselves. This is why we seek redemption. This is why the Holy Trinity is the sign of our redemption. With them, the two are always three, because the two are always in love, and love is in them, and one day, by their grace, there will be love for all, without a past tense, because we will dwell forever in the love that finds its image in God, to whom we will go if we live in the light and not the darkness. God is love, and those who live in love live in God and God dwells in them, and there is only one God, who is Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
You know how sometimes a word can be used in everyday parlance to effectively replace the word which actually describes an action or a thing? Let me explain…..So for example, when we clean our carpets we often say we are hoovering our carpets. We don’t say we are sharking our carpets, or ewbanking them or even dysoning them. I wonder how many of us actually do say that we are vacuuming them? The act of vacuuming has become so glibly known as the act of hoovering, when of course Hoover is a make of vacuum, not the act itself. Bear with me.So – Pentecost. The liturgical feast celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit onto the disciples of Jesus after his Ascension, held on the seventh Sunday after Easter, and heralds the end of the liturgical season of Eastertide. But in fact, Pentecost is way older than this – it dates right back to the days of Moses. The Jewish festival of Pentecost, or Festival of Weeks, occurs 50 days after Passover, was originally a harvest celebration but later became a commemoration of God’s giving of the law and covenant on Mount Sinai. But now – the coming of the Holy Spirit fulfils this meaning of Pentecost – the celebration of the gift of the law now embraces the giving of the new law in the Spirit. Pentecost, at least in Christianity, has taken on an additional significance to its original meaning.And when we think of Pentecostalism, we may think of very active worship, singing, swaying, swooning perhaps, charismatic worship. Very different to our tradition here and one in which I, personally, feel unable to comfortably participate. But that is the beauty of our faith – we worship, we show our devotion to Christ in a way which feels right to us – individually. The Spirit comes to unite, not to divide. But looking at the experience of the disciples in our first reading today – the Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost. From a strictly practical point of view during the festival of Weeks (Pentecost) was a very good time for the Holy Spirit to descend upon the disciples because Jerusalem will have been full of pilgrims from many countries and languages. And when it happens, when the coming of the Spirit happens, a sound like a rushing wind is heard and things resembling tongues of flame descend upon each person present in that upper room. They begin to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enables them. Speaking in tongues – this is one of the gifts of the Spirit mentioned by St Paul in 1 Corinthians and is something which I have never experienced. But lack of comprehension was not an issue for the people gathered at that inspiring Pentecost we heard about today. There was no need for behind-the-scenes translators, like you get at big international meetings. But wherever our hearers in the Acts reading come from, they understand what is being proclaimed by Peter and the disciples. This is a small-ish group of people who are inspired by the Holy Spirit and who become a force to be reckoned with. A forest fire begins with a small spark. A long, life affirming journey begins with one step. And this small group of people, upon whom the Spirit descends like tongues of flame, are beginning to fulfil God’s promise to Abraham – that the whole world will be blessed with the good news, language notwithstanding.Veni, Sancte Spiritus – come, Holy Spirit. I have many times been a tad disheartened that I haven’t experienced a sort of Damascene moment, a rush of fire through my soul. I cannot claim a major life changing experience due to the Holy Spirit. But you know what? I am now accepting that it doesn’t matter that I haven’t experienced this. There is no normal way for the Holy Spirit to affect us – we are all individual people and will each be infilled by the Spirit as He determines best. For me, it is a gentle, flurry-free infilling and I am learning to accept that that is how God is working with and through me. The Holy Spirit is referred to as the third person of the Trinity. Sometimes referred to as the forgotten or shy person of the Trinity. But in fact it is the Holy Spirit which is most at work within us, in our lives. Every moment of grace in our lives is the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is a person – not it – and is to be worshipped and glorified equally with the Father and the Son. The Shield of the Trinity (which you will see on your pew sheets) is a 13th-century diagram illustrating the doctrine of the Trinity: one God in three distinct persons (Father, Son, Holy Spirit). It shows that each person is God, yet they are not identical to one another. And quite frankly that dissolved my brain when we covered the Doctrine of the Trinity in my course last year.There’s a lovely story about St Augustine pondering the Trinity. While walking on a North African beach, St. Augustine wrestled with trying to understand the Holy Trinity. He then saw a young boy pouring ocean water into a hole in the sand. When Augustine questioned him, the boy replied, “I’m emptying the ocean into this hole.” Augustine pointed out the impossibility of this, to which the boy responded, “Neither can your mind understand the mystery of the Holy Trinity.” The boy then vanished, leaving Augustine to reflect that some divine truths are beyond human comprehension and must be accepted with humility. This encounter inspired Augustine to approach the Holy Trinity with faith and reverence rather than seeking full understanding.The work of Jesus on the cross means that we can commune with God via the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit already indwelt Jesus but until His resurrection, does not indwell us. The Disciples had the Spirit with them, but not IN them, until after the cross. Jesus breathes the Spirit over His disciples in the upper room on that first Easter morning. He fills them with the Spirit, but at Pentecost they receive an supreme infilling of the Spirit to empower them for what was to come. The Spirit speaks, guides, teaches, intercedes and grieves – God’s empowering presence within us. And even though we have the Spirit within us, it is not a one-time filling. We need to ask for infilling of the Spirit on a very regular basis. Veni Sancte Spiritus – Come Holy Spirit, fill our hearts with Your life. Help us not just to understand but to experience Your presence afresh. Amen.
