Sunday 13th April 2008EASTER IV
Fr David Cherry
Acts 2 : 42 - 47; 1 Peter 2 : 19 - 25; John 10 : 1 - 10
The words of Jesus : “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.”
To live in this reality is to believe that there is enough, more than enough of God’s love.
We receive our beliefs from what is around us. I mentioned
Billy Elliot’s father a few weeks ago. He grew up in a
culture where men don’t do ballet. Taboos about behaviour
are often good (e.g. incest and other taboos which put a limit on
violent behaviour). And sometimes they are harmful (e.g. only
straight people are normal). The point is that they are a belief
system and the belief system is prior to us – we receive it,
absorb it, it becomes the basis of our lives, affecting the way we
relate to others, see the world, behave.
To grow up with loving parents is to grow in faith. One trusts
that their love is trustworthy and that one is worthy of love.
One has put one’s faith – all one’s trust in the love
of another. Such a faith is utterly natural to human
development. One can grow, develop with a sense of self as one
who is lovable and good. This sense of self, confidence in
who one has been created to be, because one can trust Another, I call
‘abundant life.’
Mathilde, like her brother, Tim, is at this point in her life.
She is receiving all the loving attention that her parents –
being woken up at ungodly hours – can give. She is
beginning to realise in her deepest self that she is someone who can
make others react and that she is worthy of attention; and that she can
depend on them for it.
Such is the abundant life you and I share in through baptism into the
life of Christ. Jesus demonstrates what abundant life is
like. Throughout his life he lives in total trust in his heavenly
Father, from whom he has come and to whom he goes. To grow up is
not a dispensing of dependant love. And his life, to us who
believe in him, who find ourselves trusting in Him, is a life of
abundance.
To receive baptism is to be saying ‘yes’ to the
‘abundant life’ that God offers. Baptism is to find
oneself incorporated into; and part of a community in which a sense of
abundance is the background reality, the basis of one’s life, the
rock on which one builds a life. To live in this reality is to believe
that there is enough, more than enough of God’s love. It
can be enjoyed by all. And that this love is more important than
anything else. But to many ears ‘abundance’ is
a fallacy and totally impractical.
The opposite of this reality of abundance is
‘scarcity’. You and I are brought up in a culture
where scarcity is the background reality. There is not
enough. It must be fought for and argued over. Life is a
constant contest. The three motives of our society are
money, power and sex. If one is off-limits, you will want one of
the others …. And I’ll leave you to work out the
permutations of those three.
The point is : that to live like this, contesting for a place in the
sun is to live a life which is based on a lie:
scarcity. And it is to find one’s humanity stunted.
The Christian life is altogether different. The saints (who many
would regard as mad, pathological – some were!) are those who
live in a quiet confidence that there is enough. They have put
their faith in, they trust in the abundance of God’s love.
You sense this when you meet someone who has opened themselves up to
the reality of God. And they work for equality, justice,
reverence for the earth.
Like their Lord, who was killed by humans who lived by a
‘gospel’ of scarcity – intent on maintaining power
and influence, saints are able to endure all kinds of deprivations,
because something is rock-solid at the centre of their lives : faith in
God’s love for them. And this is what we are doing when we
profess our faith in the God when we say the Apostles Creed before
Mathilde is baptised. We are professing our faith in a God whose
love is trustworthy to be the basis of our lives.
You and I, through our lives, are constantly called into sharing
God’s abundant life. We slip into a false belief that it is
natural to live in rivalry, dependant on our own resources. This,
to the saints, is a kind of neurosis, a life based on fear.
This is not how Mathilde was created. Neither, you nor I.
We need to be brought back, led back by Christ our Good Shepherd, led
out of a kind of captivity of the imagination, a darkness of disbelief,
into a new way of life.
The Rite of Sprinkling reminds us all that we have been baptised into a
new society whose faith is the reality of God’s abundant
goodness. Vidi aquam : “I beheld water flowing from
the Temple”– the abundance of water for our healing, to
sustain sustains life, to cleanse and wash away sin … The
Church, you and I, always need reminding!
The first lesson tells us what it is like to live like this. It
is a story of the founding of the Church, God’s People, a new
community: they were together, they shared their funds (please
note!) “they partook of food with glad and generous hearts,
praising God and having favour with all the people”
And this quality of Eucharistic life attracted others:
“… the Lord added to their number day by day those who
were being saved.”
God calls you and me into a life of abundance, a new life, lived with
and for each other. This is what the life of the Church is like.
Here in Holy Communion we are fed at the banquet of life, a foretaste
of a heavenly banquet where the saints, whose faith has been made
perfect by God’s grace, gather with us as we are fed abundantly
from God’s table.
Into this life, we come to baptise little Mathilde, praying that she,
with us, will come to know that Great Shepherd who leads us out into
pastures new: the Dead and Risen Christ who came that we might
have life, and that we might have it more abundantly.
Amen