Sermons

Last Sunday after Trinity

Sunday 26 October at 10am

David Paton-Williams
Readings: Leviticus 19.1,2,15-18 and Matthew 22.34-end

What is your vision of the church?

Taize is an ecumenical religious community in France. About 14 years ago I went with a group of students to spend holy week there

As the week went on, people from all over Europe and further afield were arriving to come and share Good Friday of Easter ogether. Thousands and thousands of them came.

There was no way that the church, big as it was, could hold them. But the brothers had solved the problem. The walls of the church were on pulleys and they could be lifted up. One by one as the week went by, the walls were raised up until eventually there were just a set of pillars. And the people, gathered in tents on what had been the outside were now on the inside.

Taize is a place where people of all sorts of different traditions in the church come together - different understandings of the faith, different styles of worship, different ways of living it out.

And through the week people could choose to spend the time in silence, or in practical work, or in discussion groups

And then at the end crowds and the monks themselves, dispersed to the four corners of the world with a commitment to peace and justice. Here was a community that in many ways was living out the second great commandment - to love our neighbours as ourselves - our neighbours in the church, our neighbours in the world and our neighbours in the poor and needy.

And that community, as a place of love, was drawing people together.

But there was something else that was drawing people and that was the love of God at the heart of the community's life.

The worship was quite simple, and quite short - often no more than half and hour, although after the service had finished people sat on the floor and sang the famous Taize chants for hours sometimes.

The simple but profound life of prayer at the heart of the community drew people. There was a love of God, a commitment to Christ
and an openness to the Spirit that not only drew people but touched them and began to change them.

And the church without walls was big enough to include them all - the committed, the searchers, the worn out and jaded, the lost and confused there was room for them all to come and go freely as they wished, for them to explore, to think, to discuss and to pray

but there was also the heartbeat of the love of God giving a spiritual heart to the community. That has always seemed to me a vision of the church that made sense.

A church which holds together the two great commandments:

which is big-hearted enough to embrace people of different traditions and different ways of worship within God's church
- different ways of understanding and living out the faith
- perhaps those drawn to silence and contemplation
- those drawn to practical ways of living out the faith
- those drawn to bible study, discussion and fellowship

A church without walls where people can come and go
- the committed, the explorers and searchers, or whoever

A church where there is a free and friendly space where people can find a welcome.

But at the centre for there to be a spiritual heart to the community, a simple but profound love of God expressed in prayer and worship

a love of God that acts as the well from which we draw water to sustain us on our journey

a love of the God accepts and affirms us but then goes on to renew and redirect our lives, to transform us and bless us. Because the church is called to be a spiritual community and not only a humanitarian one.

In our day there are many who would reduce Christianity to no more than the love of neighbour

Certainly that is a healthy corrective to those who think you can love God while hating your neighbour or being apathetic to their plight.

We live in an age of ethnic cleansing, and racial and religious intolerance, that makes love of neighbour as vital and challenging a commandment as ever.

But love of neighbour alone does not make us Christian. That is to fulfil only one of the two great commandments.

At the heart of our faith and our life as Christians is to be the love of God, a commitment to Christ and an openness to the Spirit.

In the Old Testament to love God was not about warm feelings towards God, or even necessarily liking God (plenty of times people argue with God or rail against him) loving God was wanting to God's will.

That desire was born out of a sense of gratitude for all that God meant to the people, all that he had done for them.

In New Testament what God had done was seen in a new light - "This is love - not that we loved God but that he first loved us and gave his son to be a sacrifice for our sins." Our love for God, our genuine desire to do God's will - comes out of our realisation and acceptance of all that God is and does and means for us

The question I have for us this morning is this: are we seeking to love God with all our heart and soul and mind and mind and strength?

In the book of revelation there are seven letters which are described as coming from the risen Christ to the churches. One of them is to the church in Ephesus

The Christians at Ephesus are praised for many things
- how hard they have worked and how patiently they have borne in all their sufferings
- but then he says "But one thing I have against you, that you have lost the love you had at first."

They were so busy doing God's will and so tested by the sufferings they faced - that they had lost their first love -
the love of God.

They were good, faithful Christian people but they were giving out and giving out and they were not allowing God to refill them.

Like people drawing at a well they may have been working hard so that others could drink of the cool refreshing water and yet they themselves had not drunk from the well for some time.

Is it possible that we are so busy doing good and important things
things that may well need to be done
things that are important to us and that express the things that matter to us

Is it possible that we are doing all this and that at the centre we have lost our love for God

Do we need to be renewed in our walk with God
Do we need to seek God once again with all our heart and soul and mind and strength
Do we need to remember the first and most important commandment of all.

A sheep farmer from the dales was visiting a friend in the outback of Australia who ran an enormous sheep farm. He was surprised to find that there were no walls or fences to keep the sheep from wandering off. When he asked why his friend replied - out here we don't walls, we have wells.

At the centre of Taize is a spiritual well that sustains and transforms people spiritually, and at the centre of our church we need to have that same spiritual well.

We are called to be God's church here - a church without walls which can welcome and embrace all who come - but a church with a great big well at its hearts, at which we can experience once again God's love for us and have our love for him renewed so that we can share that love with the neighbours we are called to serve.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay