I have no sermon to give on Corpus Christi. Not because I have no thoughts to speak of – quite the opposite – but because we simply have no time for a sermon, procession and Benediction if we hope to keep our celebrations at least modestly within the expected timeframe. I have thoughts about that as well, having spent a long time in an area where the quality of Sunday worship was measured partly in how long it lasted – the longer, the better! When I first came here to meet you, someone made their dislike for sermons over five minutes quite clear, and I thought ‘how do you teach the children about the faith in five minutes a week’ particularly against a backdrop of other religions having adherents well versed in their beliefs and us being, generally, less so.Today is a day which needs thought and teaching, for all of us, because otherwise what we do can seem almost farcical, a little dressing up and a bedraggled parade. None of which would be true. It’s a matter of deep faith and love that we process the risen Christ in His body, soul and divinity around our parish, to bless it and to encourage others in their faith, to take what we believe out into the street precisely because those out in the street are not coming in here.We do all this out of love, and I have a sonnet to share with you by the wonderful Fr Malcolm Guite, which explains a little of how I, and I hope you as well, feel about this day, this gift;Love’s ChoiceThis bread is light, dissolving, almost air, A little visitation on my tongue, A wafer-thin sensation, hardly there. This taste of wine is brief in flavour, flung A moment to the palate’s roof and fled, Even its aftertaste a memory. Yet this is how He comes. Through wine and bread Love chooses to be emptied into me. He does not come in unimagined light Too bright to be denied, too absolute For consciousness, too strong for sight, Leaving the seer blind, the poet mute, Chooses instead to seep into each sense, To dye himself into experience.May he who has laid Himself upon the cross and died for our sakes, who lays His body upon the altar day after day, bring us closer to an understanding of what we are witnesses to, who’s body we share, who’s blood we consume, who’s church it is and who’s example we follow in the hope that where He has gone, we may also, as we do this day, follow. We should not fear death, because we have faith in everlasting life, but we should very much fear the death of our faith, for then the world knows nothing to counter the darkness which ever threatens to consume it. Today we celebrate the light, let us pray that we may magnify it by our lives and our actions that the world may come to know the meaning of this blessed, glorious day.Picture: EucharistSource: PixabayArtist: Robert Cheaib
‘Go, make disciples of all the nations, baptize them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit’. A few years ago, I baptised a baby in church, his Mother was there with us, his Father on Zoom in Nigeria and the Godparents on Zoom in Ghana, nobody else in church, because Mum had only just arrived, fleeing home to bring their baby to safety. They were Christ’s disciples, and in asking to have their child baptized, they knew that the Lord was indeed with them, and their newly-born and newly-baptized baby, till the end of time.Today is Trinity Sunday and the gospel passage chosen is the end of Matthew’s Gospel. It is a glorious and moving conclusion to the Gospel and the beautiful conclusion to the immediacy of the incarnation by which it begibs. Matthew has started with the genealogy, showing that Jesus was descended from Abraham, and from David. He tells us of the Magi, pagans, coming from the east to pay the infant Jesus homage. Matthew ends the Gospel with the disciples worshipping Jesus, falling down before him, though with some hesitation or doubt. The true king of Israel, the Messiah has come, and he is indeed God and He is still immediate before them, but ascends to make His immediacy permanent, until the end of time in the same way as He was and is for the Baptism family on Zoom.The disciples encounter Jesus on a mountain, which reminds us of Moses who received God’s law on a mountain. It reminds us of Elijah, the greatest of those anarchic holy men of old, who encountered God on a mountain. But on this mountain, the disciples encounter Jesus, their friend and teacher, yet they fall down and worship him – there is the new law, a New Covenant, made on a mountain like the first, and kept not in fear of He who inhabits the Ark, but out of love for He who has ascended – the immediacy of the divine presence now in sacramental signs, here in flesh through faith.The Holy Spirit enables us to continue this act of worship, and our own humanity allows us to hesitate, to be uncertain. The Spirit is given us to make us holy and lead us into all truth. The Spirit unites us. The eleven disciples hesitated in their worship. It did not all quite make sense yet for them. Christianity doesn’t always make complete sense for us. There are parts of the mystery that we can’t understand yet. But we live it. Our lives, as the lives of those who are baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, are lives of faith, hope and charity. Our lives become, in a profound way, part of the divine life itself, part of the Trinity who famously was prefigured at Mamre as the three men taking the form of God went to visit Abraham and Sarah.We who have been made in the image and likeness of God, now start to live mystically in God. We love each other and love our neighbours – though not always very well we readily admit. We hesitate, like the Disciples. We have faith in the risen Christ who died for our salvation. And we, like the parents of the baby I baptized that day, have hope in Jesus, for he said ‘I am with you always; yes, to the end of time’.Christianity stands or falls by this proclamation of the closeness of God who is Triune Love. Christians proclaim the Father. Not a stern Victorian parent, but the one who knows and cares even for the sparrows, the one portrayed in the parable of the prodigal son as rushing towards his child and embracing him, the one Jesus tells us is perfect.We run from the God of Love by turning the world or nature or history itself into our god, seeing in him only the reflection of our gradual decay. But there is no world spirit, no impersonal spiritual realm that can save us. There is only the Holy Spirit, the one who is the personal searching, healing and transforming one, who even searches the depths of God. Immediate, and before us and with us, until the end of time, and loving us in a way that an impersonal spiritual realm never could.The doctrine of the Trinity should make us uncomfortable, of course; not because it is for the clever to speculate about, but because it is the most radical challenge ever issued to human beings. It’s an invitation to share in divine love, and hope and peace, and to allow ourselves to be lost in that to some extent.If God really is this love who is involved with our world and who has embraced us, then we have a choice: we must either in turn love this God and embrace all that he embraces — and then of course, we shall be crucified as the distance we have put between ourselves and God dies away in love — or we must be content to watch the world around us from a distance, imitating the god who does not and can never exist. We enter into a mystery of love, in which one day we will dance and sing and rejoice, with and in the God who is Father, Son and Holy Ghost, who calls us, loves us and saves us. To Him be the glory both now and unto the day of eternity.
In the upper room, after His death and resurrection, the disciples encounter the ongoing reality of the living Jesus, and the whole world changes – not just theirs, but ours as well. When someone we love dies, we begin to idolise them – I don’t mean that in a negative way, but we carve memories out of hem in our hearts and minds which become a little removed, over time, from day to day reality, as they are no longer sharing in that with us, and maybe after some time has passed, we remember them as whatever the memory becomes. But not so Jesus, not so our faith and not so for the Apostles, as He is very much alive and in front of them, and He is very much alive and in front of us, too, which is why we must continually reject idolising Him and keep on living with Him in the present time that He calls us to. Jesus is not a memory who fades away but a person who stands before us and says ‘peace be with you.’This is a peace that flows from the reality of what Jesus has accomplished for our sakes on the cross, and it is part of who he was, is and shall be forever – a sign of peace to a broken world. As He was broken on the cross, so we are broken by sin and find our healing in the healing and Ascension of His own body. And so it is a peace that speaks clearly to us and calls us to change. It is certainly not the peace that time brings, the slow healer, it’s a peace which is present, immediate and comes in the current encounter that we have with Him, and it stands or falls as we stand or fall before Him. ‘Peace be with you’ is not just the first thing the Risen Jesus says to His disciples: it is the second thing as well. Twice He bids them peace. Twice He makes is resurrected body, bearing its wounds, speak of peace.His first greeting of peace is followed by his showing them his wounded hands and side. The first peace is the peace that stops us being afraid that here is maybe a ghost, or a hallucination. We are reminded that, as Pilate says, ‘ecce homo’ – behold the man. We are surrounded by the stuff of death – tablets to keep away what might kill us, waves that might engulf us, people who might turn on us, governments who might wage war at us, health warnings on everything to remind us, calories counted on menus to put us off. We can control the environment we are in to some extent, but death is always with us in one form or another. But Jesus has shown us His hands and His side. He is marked by death, but He lives. Death silenced him on the cross, but now he speaks to each man and woman.We are brought this first greeting of peace by seeing His wounds, then. They show us that death is not the end and that He is not, therefore, dead. This does not mean that the guilt of the sin which had Him put to death is not upon us today – by no means, we still live in the world to reach paradise by amendment of life. But this peace is a healer, as His body, which has conquered death shows – life is no longer leading to death, but the revelation of what life is. Do not be afraid, be still, for in dying I have changed the meaning of your death, the Lord says to us.But there is more to our faith than a calming of fear. The calming merely prepares us for another gift, as Jesus again says “Peace be with you’, and breathes on his disciples: “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The Spirit is not given to us to calm our nerves, but to enliven and energise. “Those whose sins you forgive they are forgiven, those whose sins you retain they are retained.”This second gift of peace is not an answer to death so much as an entirely new sort of human life, moving according to the inspirations and energy of the divine life. It does not just make us recipients of forgiveness and mercy: it inserts the us into the ongoing mystery of Jesus, real and present in our world forgiving sin, healing wounds and preaching the mystery of the kingdom. “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” It has brought us here, now, to this place so that we can effectively tell the world that death is not the end, and that life is found in the most unlikely of places - and that it is not us as individuals who matter, for Christ did not say ‘peace to you John’ or ‘peace to you Jane’ – but peace be with you all. Christ’s peace also brings us freedom from the desperate worldly fight to be loudest, or best.Today we celebrate the full depth of the peace of Christ, the peace we are part of by belonging to each other in the Body of Christ. He, Our Lord, is not another memory from the past, handed on by a forgetful band of devotees. He is the present offer of grace to us by the Father in the Spirit. Peace be with you, he says to us today. Receive the Holy Spirit, so that through us the world will encounter the joy of forgiveness and hope which, one day, will give the world freedom.
I wonder if you can love badly? Certainly you can love in a way that another person does not understand, or care for, certainly you can love someone who does not want to love you back, and of course it’s easy to think of ‘love’ as an amorous advance and all the complex minefield around that rather than the love that God has for us and the love that we are expected to show to each other if we take His name as Christians. Love then, is not something we can be measured on (unless we choose to give none at all, or to disguise our machinations as love, which is probably worse. But we are used to hearing about love, and used to hearing this Gospel today - an excerpt from what St John tells us that Jesus said to his disciples just before he went out into the night to be arrested and crucified. We are so used to hearing it that it is easy for us to switch off, because we all think that we know it already. We think we know all about love, even when there are people who we do not love. So maybe we should hear it! Indeed if any passages in the Bible should trouble us, surely they are this passage and the reading that we heard just before it, from the first of St John’s letters.After all, in one form or another for nearly two thousand years, Christians have been telling each other and anybody else who would listen to them that it’s love that makes the world go round. And that we have a monopoly on divine love, that we know best how to love. But how much better is the world as a result of this? And how full of love are our churches? The first letter of St John tells us:Anyone who fails to love can never have known God, because God is love.And in this Sunday’s gospel reading, Jesus is saying:This is my commandment: Love one another, as I have loved you.Yet we are so accustomed to seeing not failures of love, but manipulations and deliberate distortions of love, which is the very opposite of love, even in Christians – in fact maybe it’s even more starkly clear in us - that we do not even bother to listen when we hear these words again. We just think ‘well, at least I’m not the parish gossip/bully/self server/whatever.‘Loving somebody’ means ‘caring for somebody’ (so ‘a man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends’), and ‘loving God’ means doing what God wants us to do. In other words, it means making the world around us aware of God’s presence, God’s power within us. And this is not quite such a difficult thing to do as it sounds and when we do it well, we create an attractional church that is comfortable and inviting, aware of its wounds, not pretending to be anything else, and one that we would want to join. And one that other people will want to join as well, because it’s completely authentic.When we read in today’s gospel that the Father ‘loves’ the Son, what this means is that he lives for the Son – that everything he is is for the Son and He is in the Son. And when we read that the Son ‘loves’ the people whom he has called to be his friends – and that includes you and me! – it means that he lives for us and is in us. And when he tells us to love each other as he loves us, that means that we are being called to live for each other. To be in a community with each other based and rooted in love. For love is only real, it only lasts, if it produces more love.So the commandment to us to love is a command to share in his work – his campaign to bring all human beings back into oneness and love with God. And this is a love stronger than death. When we say ‘Yes’ in our hearts to Christ’s call to help spread God’s love around, we are not being expected to do this relying on our own strength but by the power of God, the same power that raised Christ from the grave. And by the power of the greater thing that we become when we allow Him to dwell in us and remake our community.In fact, if ever we say ‘Yes’ to God, we are never really alone. For, as Jesus said to his disciples at his AscensionYou will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and then you will be my witnesses to the ends of the earth.This power of being a living witness makes us people of joy, of truth and of love. We are witnesses to love! And we bear witness by doing that which we are witness to. It’s easy, and joyful, and it should be fun!
