Sermons

The Seventh Sunday of Easter

Sunday 20 May at 10am

Lesley Ashton

Readings: John 17.20-26 Acts 16.16-34

'I pray not only for them but for those who believe in me because of their message. I pray that they may all be one Father! May they be in us, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they be one, so that the world will believe that you sent me and that you love them as you love me.'

This is the prayer of Jesus for his disciples and for us. It is a prayer from Christ's heart to God his Father. It is a prayer of longing and of deepest intimacy; it speaks of Christ's sense of oneness and completeness with his Father, which he longs for his disciples and us to know and to share. There is in Christ a wholesome sense of confidence in who he is, he is clear about his identity and he is clear about his presence in the world and what he is called to do and to be, not only for his disciples but also for all people.

Christ's awareness and self-knowledge frees him to look beyond himself, to the needs of his disciples if they are to bring the light and truth of who he is to the world. They need to know that they are too contained within the intimacy of the God and his Son, in order to bring the message of God's love.

Well we Christians are good at identity, we can name ourselves Baptists, Methodists, Anglicans, Free Church etc etc. and it doesn't stop there. Many of us Anglicans identify with a particular tradition, Catholic, Liberal, Evangelical, Radical etc etc

Such divisions do not come from people failing in their commitment to Christ but from people who have tried to be faithful to their understanding of the gospel. We have inherited our history but the Anglican Communion still currently struggles to maintain unity within itself because of differences relating to the ordination of women and of sexuality.

The danger is that we become so absorbed with our own strivings that we fail to notice or listen to the strivings of others. The more intent we become on ourselves and those who agree with us, then the less we seem able to really listen with open minds to the stories and struggles of those who think differently. We then begin to neglect or move away from our own community and we find ourselves separated.

Separation moves us into a comfort zone where we can be reasonably confident that our understandings will be understood and upheld and where we have an identity that is based on our particular interpretation of scripture or of doctrine. The difficulty is that when we become so absorbed with our own interpretation of the gospel, we lose sight of the unity of the body of Christ. We forget that Christ's love for those who think or believe differently is as absolute for them, as it is for us. We come to believe and behave as if a particular doctrine is more important than the love we share through the grace of God. When we reach this point we are actually becoming the opposite of the message that Christ prayed that his disciples might communicate to the world.

The message he wanted all to know was about the love of God, the love that he knew and so much wanted not only his disciples to know but also the whole of the world. In our bickering and in our disunity we give a different message to the world, one that speaks of those who should be included or excluded, those who are worthy and those who are not. The walls we build between ourselves are an abomination of the gospel imperative.

In the church we engage in much talking about unity, but we do not see very much change, so perhaps we are talking about the wrong things or talking too much or talking to the wrong people.

We talk about buildings, how we might share them and use them, we talk about knocking churches down and having one church.
We talk about our worship together; we anguish over our covenant, what it means and how we might live it out. We are inwardly focused.

And I fear we are talking too much about the wrong things and for the wrong reasons and we talk to compensate for what we are not doing or becoming.

The theologian Herbert McCabe writes that 'Christian unity is not simply a matter of negotiations or reformulations, but it is the gift of God, the gift of God's own self. It is the unity of the Kingdom and it is not to be given in full before the Kingdom.'

If this is true then our knowledge and understanding of full unity is linked to the bringing in of God's kingdom, and we need to recapture again the gospel values that were Christ's values.

Can I suggest that we pause and look at unity from another perspective?

I suggest that we already have unity for our unity is given by God at our baptism. Have we simply forgotten or laid aside this truth as we have made an idol of our individualistic agendas?

I suggest that we do not need a covenant because we are people of the covenant made once and for all in Christ. We do not need more words or promises we simply need to get on with living as Christians who have been brought into a shared covenant of grace through the blood of Christ.

I suggest that each need to discover and be reunited again with our prime identity as a member of God's family, given to us in baptism and which we remember as we come together as a body to share Christ's presence in bread and wine. We say the words each time we break the bread.

'We break this bread to share in the body of Christ. Though we are many we are one body because we all share in one bread.'

Perhaps when we are more confident of our identity within God and know that we are totally and unconditionally loved by Him, then we will have less fear and more freedom to hear the voices of our brothers and sisters in Christ.

But of course to do this there is a cost, we have to put aside or move away from being fixed on those identities of tradition or denomination, This means that there has to be a self emptying, a sacrifice of all we know and cling on to. In John's gospel the moment of glory was also the moment of crucifixion and so there is the sense that our knowledge of the glory of God is also like Christ's, found in the place of self-sacrifice and obedience.

I also have a deep sense that our unity whether within St Edmund's, or in this community or in the world is demonstrated to the world not by what or how much talking we do, or even by how much we enjoy shared worship or buildings. I sense it is more to do with how we serve each other and the world. So one of the questions I feel we should ask ourselves is how do we bring blessing to this community and to the communities we work within.

I keep being taken back to the gospel reading for the Feast of the Ascension, it was whilst Jesus was blessing his disciples that he was taken up into heaven, into the glory of God and it seems more and more my experience that it is when we are being a blessing to others or that they are blessing us in some way that we have that sense of oneness with God, that we begin to understand that all that really matters is the sharing of his love and his glory and that in the end all that causes us to be in disunity will simply pass away.

Amen

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay