23rd May 20066th Sunday of Easter
Fr David Cherry
Acts 10: 44-48; I John 5:1-6 ; John 15 : 9-17
“Continue ye in my love…; that my joy might be in you”
Christianity is natural and relational. To have a ‘faith
that overcomes the world’ is to believe not in a set of ideas or
propositions; but in a God who has made himself known in a
Person. We are Baptised into a community of Persons. Holy
Communion is about sharing in community.
We with the first disciples after the resurrection find ourselves in
community, believers in the Person of Christ, believing in all he said
and did for us; coming to terms with it – so that we may get it,
receive from him all that he wants to give us: fresh understanding, new
insight, renewing Love. We find ourselves in the place where God
is working in us so his joy may be in us.
God has chosen us for each other.
To be in community, an extended family if you like is a strange and wonderful
thing. The community of the church draws
strangers together. “Ye have not
chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring
forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain”. God has
chosen us for each other. If we believe
in a Personal God, who God draws together is no accident. It is God’s intention.
When one is infuriated by the church it is easy to knock it. We can slip into talking about the
institution – institutional Christianity – them over there. Notice how easy it
is to depersonalise the church – an institution rather than a community of
Persons. In our society, there is a
certain relish at the thought of institutional Christianity dying presumably
because that will absolve me from having to do anything about it. It’s safe to think of the demise of the
Church of England as inevitable and ‘their’ fault.
There is this purple passage from CS Lewis:
To love at all is to be vulnerable.
Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly
broken. If you want to make sure of
keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an
animal. Wrap it carefully round with
hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the
casket or coffin of your selfishness.
But in that casket – safe, dark motionless, airless – it will
change. It will not be broken; it will
become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or
at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation.
The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all
the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
The disciples gathering after the Resurrection will have been conscious
of this – their failure to love but also a growing awareness that their hearts
had been broken open to love. They are a
repentant community, vulnerable to accusations of betrayal, not yet perfect and
certainly not ‘successful’ AND growing in their understanding of what God was
doing in them. And the community is expanding and including those who were
automatically excluded.
Imagine being a vulnerable, small community which has been suffering,
having members prosecuted for belonging to the church and then finding the
notorious murderer of Christians, Saul, now Paul, is among you. he
challenge to welcome, to forgive, to include, to be in relationship. Worse still for the early Jewish followers of
Jesus: imagine Cornelius the centurion, the foreign-oppressor, the
uncircumcised now baptised and joins the church.
The small frightened community of Jesus’ followers is expanding. The way it expands is by the collapse of
firmly-held identities. It looks like
the sacred is collapsing into the secular.
It looks like the secularisation of all that was held to be Sacred. The
chosen remnant is subverted. Anyone can belong.
So what began as a defensive community is becoming an open community,
and a growing community. They find that
they no longer have to define their identity against anyone, but by gathering
around Someone: the magnetic and magnificent Person of Christ, who reveals to
them a new way of being a person, utterly human, utterly attractive.
The epistles – letters of Paul, Peter, John and others reveal to us how
difficult this process is, for they are letters to churches which inevitably
have problems, problems of living together.
All the problems in the world have been caused by religion is what I
hear often in (so-called) ‘academic circles.’
Oh really? Isn’t it just true
that all the problems in the world are caused by human beings who are trying to
find a way of living together and get it wrong? Sometimes.
So we ponder Jesus’ words: “Continue ye in my love…; that my joy might be
in you”
To continue in Jesus’ love, is to continue being faithful to him and one another – never letting go of each other, never dismissing each other. He has shown us what that looks like. We remember him washing the feet of his disciples and giving them an example. And in today’s gospel he tells us: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
Anthony the Great, a desert Father
wrote: Our life and our death is with
our neighbour. If we win our brother, we
gain God. If we cause our brother to
stumble, we have sinned against Christ.
(Silence and honey cakes p23ff)
Rowan Williams writes: Living in a Christian way with the neighbour,
so that the neighbour is ‘won’ – that is, converted, brought into a saving relation
with Jesus Christ – involves my ‘death’.
I must die to myself, a self understood as the solid possessor of
virtues and gifts, entitled to pronounce on the neighbour’s spiritual
condition. My own awareness of my
failure and weakness is indispensable to my communicating the gospel to my
neighbour. (Silence and Honey cakes p23ff)
And so we come to be renewed in Holy Communion: those who were far off and have been brought near; those who are learning what it is to die to pride and become vulnerable and joyfully repentant; those brought into relationship dependant on our God and one another; the community called into being who hear with hope the words of Jesus:
“Continue ye in my love…; that my joy might be in you”
Amen