The Letters of Saint Paul (3) Paul’s view of the Church Third of four sermons - Sunday 30th June 2013

Welcome back to the sermon series on the letters of St Paul and this third address on his view of the Church. The subject fits this feast day when we mark his death and the inspiration of his life and teaching.

As for me Paul writes in the epistle from 2 Timothy the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Would that we might say the same when we’ve finished our course!

This teaching series draws on the inspiration Paul has given through the ages to Bible readers and my hope is that what I share might encourage you to pick up your own Bible and draw anew on its inspired teaching.

We’re looking today at how Paul sees the Church.

Previously we’ve looked at what he’s got to say about human nature, the good and bad in us and how we get our nature to be in its right mind. We looked last time at how Paul sees God as love shown in Jesus’ death and poured into our hearts by his Spirit, God whose unity is shown in the fellowship of three persons, as in 2 Corinthians 13:13: the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

The Greek word translated there as fellowship is koinonia and that word gives us a vital clue to his understanding of the Church.

A family I know were on holiday on a Greek Island. They were having a meal in the local taverna when they were greeted by a friendly local. ‘Koinonia’ said the gentleman, waving his arms around the family circle to indicate their evident sense of belonging. That 2 Corinthians ending, with its reminder of Christian koinonia or communion in God, is mirrored at the start of 1 Corinthians, Chapter 1:9 where Paul speaks of how God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship literally koinonia of his son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

The first of Jesus followers to meet with him after his death and resurrection had a koinonia or fellowship with him that extended outwards to fellow believers. Their commitment was to a fellowship built on teaching, sacrament and prayer from which the Church developed as we know it built on the same essentials.

The writings of Paul and other New Testament authors speak of Christian believers’ koinonia with Christ and with one another. Paul especially emphasises how this union is effected through the sacraments. In the one Spirit he writes in 1 Corinthians 12:13 we were all baptised into one body. Earlier in Chapter 10:16-17 he writes The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.

St Paul sees the Church as generated by both word and sacrament, a teaching picked up in Article 19 of the Church of England Thirty Nine Articles: ‘The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men [sic], in the which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance’.

To keep close to Jesus you need the Church, both its preaching and sacraments, which you can’t, as a rule, get at home!  

It’s Paul who teaches us most about the Church in the New Testament. His letters start as addressed to churches or to the Church of God in particular places – Thessalonica, Galatia, Corinth and so on. The apostle is first to use that Greek word ekklesia or assembly we translate as Church. It’s used in two senses, one of particular churches as in his opening greeting to the Churches of Galatia (Galatians1:2) but elsewhere as ‘the Church of God’, an institution over and beyond individual local Churches that’s actually expressed or brought into being in them. When he writes to the Galatians in Chapter 1:13 of persecuting the church of God he echoes his vision reported in Acts 9:5 where, questioning the Lord on Damascus road, he’s told I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. In hurting Christians Paul has hurt Christ!

This understanding of the mystical oneness of Christ and his Church comes across very plainly in Paul’s letters. It’s there especially in his teaching about the Church as the Body of Christ in Corinthians and in later letters like Ephesians and Colossians. We Christians are part of Christ’s life and work that fills all in all (Ephesians 1:23) and completes what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions (Colossians 1:24). Paul also speaks of the Church as the People of God, the Temple of the Spirit and the Bride of Christ though I’ve no time this morning to pursue those images.

As we think about what Paul has to say about the Church we can’t ignore the obvious point that his letters came about because of the love he had for the churches he founded. It’s his evident concern to keep them in the faith that flowed from Christ’s death and resurrection, safe from interest groups that threatened the apostolic faith. His so-called pastoral letters – 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus – show how that apostolic faith came to have guardians in the bishops that succeeded the apostles. By the end of the second century holy orders as we now know them had emerged – bishops, priests and deacons – as well as the assembly of New Testament documents we now know as the Canon of Scripture. Both Scripture and three fold order are with us still as double grounding in the risen Christ who is the church’s one foundation.

Today’s feast celebrates how both Peter and Paul anchor our bishops as successors of the apostles in their scriptural teaching. The strong tradition of their martyrdom in Rome gives the Diocese of Rome a special title – the apostolic see. The Anglican-Roman Catholic agreement honours that see or diocese and looks to a day when a reformed papacy will serve the unity of all Christians in the apostolic faith.

So what useful thoughts might we take away from this brief investigation of Paul’s view of the Church?

First thought - our communion with God as Christians is inseparable from our communion with one another and there’s a challenge because in choosing God we probably didn’t choose one another! Our evangelism depends not just on your faith and my faith but on generating an intriguing Christ-centred community.

Second thought - Christian faith grows by the Church’s gift as ‘the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ’s ordinance’. In more common parlance Paul strongly urges what we call Sunday obligation - gathering as the Lord’s people on the Lord’s day around the Lord’s table – and not neglecting Christian fellowship.

Third thought - the Church is both human and divine. With all its failings it’s Christ’s body and woe betide us if we make it our own. A 20^th century prophet heard God say: ‘I want my Church back’. Letting God have his church back in Horsted Keynes is our joyful task as we seek to put mission before maintenance and money.

‘St Giles Church seeks to grow in faith, love and numbers.’ May Paul’s teaching and prayers further our progress towards that end as we read his letters here and at home and as we partake of the one bread for we are Christ’s body, given once again Christ’s body, to become more fully that body which is the Church.

Dedication Festival 23rd June 2013 8am

As parish priest I get holes in my pocket from these (show)

I carry a lot of keys.

The two porch door keys are biggest, then the sacristy and then the safe.

What a privilege, though, pocket holes apart, for there are no more precious keys in the village than those that open Saint Giles Church.

It is our Feast of Dedication. We recall the day 900 years ago when our current building was set apart, after its construction, for the worship of God.

Church keys take us into church buildings - but what you do there is the real thing.

We worship. We lift heart and mind to God standing on the shoulders of thousands who’ve been here before us in this holy place seeking God’s face.

There was worship in heaven before Saint Giles was built and there will be worship in heaven after this building lies in the dust.

The question is will you and I in a century’s time be part of that worship?

We will need a key to do so.

That will be our faith in Jesus who opens wide the gate of heaven to those below.

By faith, the conviction of things unseen, we unlock possibilities for this world and the next.

The gift of faith gives you access to a sense of belonging, purpose and empowerment that makes life really worth living.

On this Feast of Dedication we have a challenge to deepen our spiritual life.

Take our prayer, yours and mine.

When the church becomes a house of prayer the people will come running. wrote Brother Roger of Taizé

The church’s mission is weak because her prayer is weak.

Refreshing our prayer has enormous implications if we really set our hearts to it – and the Feast of Dedication is good pretext if we will make it so.

Prayer is the key of faith. By it we unlock the eternity we were made for and the eternal love that welcomes open hearts to make them one with the just made perfect .

Prayer is the key that unlocks the way into what God has in store for each one of us.

Through the exercise of faith that is prayer we are able to make better life choices from the countless possibilities that lie before us all.

When I was 21 I remember getting cards with keys upon them. ‘Key of the door – 21’. Life has moved on so that the things I gained access to at 21, to vote, to open a bank account and so on, come earlier than they did years ago.

My church keys open up access to a building where through preaching and sacrament we encounter one whose oversight extends across this world and the next.

Your faith and mine, the Christian faith, owns that oversight and welcomes through it a purpose for living and a reason for dying.  

This is what lies behind what we’re about this morning on our Feast of Dedication: a call to our faith’s exercising itself more in prayer so that we may see even more of God’s possibilities coming about in our lives.

The Letters of Saint Paul (2) Paul’s view of God Second of four sermons – Sunday 9th June 2013

To encourage us to pick up our Bibles more and follow up on what we have read to us on a Sunday I’m inviting you to look with me this summer at the letters of St Paul and what he teaches there about man, God, the Church and the future.

Last week, after some background on Paul himself, we looked at what he has to say about human nature, the good and bad in us and how we get our nature to be in its right mind. In Paul’s understanding we’ve got God’s likeness so God is within us - yet so is sin and the wonder of Christianity is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ accepting us as we are, overcoming our deficiencies and making us more fully what we were born to be.

I said last week that Paul’s one of the most accessible of all biblical figures since we’ve got more biography and autobiography for him than we have even for Jesus himself. Today’s second reading is a brilliant example. 

The letter to the Galatians shows Paul’s irritated humanity but it also evidences how God took him, with all his imperfections, and made him his chosen instrument. I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it.  I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors.   But… God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles.

That passage stands alongside two accounts in the book of Acts of Paul’s conversion and it underlines to us the significance of the man and his writings for our Christian faith.

When God became one of us in Jesus it took the choice of another man to set forth the significance of that revelation.That man was Paul of Tarsus who lived from around 10AD to 64AD when he was most likely martyred in the Rome of Emperor Nero.

How then did Paul see God?

He saw, in Michael Ramsey’s analogy with a phrase in the Psalms, that ‘God is Christlike and in him in no unChristlikeness at all’. Because of the coming, death and resurrection of Jesus God is to be seen in a new and extraordinary fashion. He saw to quote Ephesians 2:4-6 that   God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ - by grace you have been saved -and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

In witnessing to God’s love shown in Jesus’ death and poured into our hearts by his Spirit Paul announces a God whose unity is shown in the fellowship of three persons, as in 2 Corinthians 13:13: the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

To believe this is to believe God isn’t One but One God in three persons. Paul can write with particular authority because as he says in today’s reading I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. He received how God had sent his Son in our likeness to be our Saviour, something no one could have ever worked out for themselves but something God himself had demonstrated in human history – that God is a triune God.

As we might have read from Paul in two weeks time in Galatians Chapter 2, save the readings are changed for dedication feast, I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. Galatians 2:19b-20

For Paul God is Christlike and would have us be the same. As Christ was crucified the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me so Paul speaks for himself of the life I now live being life with faith in the Son of God who now lives in him. As we heard last week human beings have sin within them that can be countered by inviting God’s loving presence to dwell within them on account of Jesus.

Christians are ‘J shaped’. The letter ‘J’ is like an ‘I’ pressed down that’ll spring up again. All through his letters, like in the Ephesians passage I just quoted, believers are said to die, get buried, rise and ascend just like Jesus. God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

What is true of God who in love came, died and rose is to be true of us Paul writes. I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

The sacrament of baptism contains all of this potential shaping of our lives to be like God as Paul taught in his letter to Rome. I strongly commend reading Romans for more meat of the kind I am sharing. It is probably the most significant Christian writing and it’s shaped the Christian vision of God as much as words can ever shape that vision.  Do you not know Paul writes in Romans 6:3-4 that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?  Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.

Paul’s view of God is inseparable from Jesus Christ with whom he has a mystical union. He looks at the Cross and sees our  cleansing from sin into holiness. He walks with the risen Lord Jesus who gives us newness of life. He witnesses in his writings how the Holy Spirit pours the love of Jesus into our hearts.

If you’ve no time to read much of Paul this week, at least try reading Romans Chapter 8. It’s one of my own purple passages that speaks of life and love in Jesus Christ. In verse 11 it speaks of God who gives life to (our) mortal bodies…through his Spirit that dwells in (us). It goes on in v28 of Romans 8 to say words of supreme encouragement: all things work together for good for those who love God. The last verse of Chapter 8 in the Message translation reads: Absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us.

The letter to the Romans and Paul’s other twelve letters are a tonic to anyone’s Christian faith. Last week I mentioned how the four shortest letters could be remembered using the vowel alphabet – a, e, i, o – Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians. We’re reading Galatians on Sundays. Why not read Ephesians, full of God’s truth and readable in 20 minutes, or Philippians, just as short and full of joy or Colossians, again just 4 Chapters.  

My purpose this month and next is to give you a taster of Paul’s letters. You need more than a ten minute sermon to get into Paul’s wisdom on God and once again times up – though I’d again encourage you to put in extra time at home, pick up your bible and let Paul speak to you himself – and God through him.

The Letters of Saint Paul (1) Paul’s view of human nature First of four sermons – Sunday 2nd June 2013

When did you last pick up your Bible?

I don’t know if you have purple passages you go back to again and again. Mine are very often to be found in the New Testament within the letters of St Paul.

To encourage us to pick up our Bibles more, I thought I’d invite you to look with me this summer at the letters of St Paul and what he teaches there about man, God, the Church and the future.

Here goes then, we start a four part series that’ll run on until the end of next month as we have to work round all age Sundays.

What does Paul have to say about human nature? About the good and bad in us? About how we get our nature into its right mind?

One of the great advantages in reading Paul is there’s enough of him – 13 letters – to make his character evident. Because his style is partly autobiographical we know more about him than we know about Our Lord.  We see his humanity full square!

Take this week’s passage from the start of Galatians. Look at all that emotion: I am astonished…there are some who want to pervert the gospel…let (them) be accursed. All pretty engaging stuff! Paul’s upset and rushes to the point in anguish and anger. He’s heard how Asian churches he’s planted in Galatia, modern day Turkey, are losing the plot with Jewish Christians forcing non-Jewish converts to be circumcised, a development that’s totally against the good news of a love that embraces without condition.

We’ll be reading more of Galatians week by week this month but first a little background on Paul.

He was born in what is now south central Turkey, a Roman citizen of Tarsus and a devout Jew (Acts 22:3). His double names, Paul, a Roman name and Saul, his Jewish name, express this dual allegiance. Paul’s date of birth is around ten years later than that of Jesus Christ.

Besides his letters we get a really good picture of his life in the Acts of the Apostles where we learn he was a zealous student of the great rabbi Gamaliel (Acts 22:3). Zeal was Paul all over, as a member of the Jewish Pharisee party when he persecuted Christians, and then, after seeing a vision of Jesus on the Damascus road, changed zeal in his new passion to share Jesus.

Paul’s Christian mission began around 40AD when after his conversion and 3 years preaching he gets driven out of Damascus. Off he goes to Jerusalem to meet St Peter, then home to Tarsus, from there to Antioch in north Syria and then with St Barnabas he embarks on the first of three missionary journeys that take the good news of Jesus to Asia minor, Macedonia, Greece, Crete and Italy.

The Roman Empire’s his mission field and there’s no doubt God’s choice of a communicator like Paul of Roman citizenship was second to sending his Son to earth in strategic importance to get news of Jesus taken from Jerusalem to the ends of the world.

The 13 New Testament letters we’re thinking about over the next four weeks were written to a number of Christian communities about their joys, needs and concerns. They became part of the canon of holy scripture by the end of the second century. As such they are privileged writings the Holy Spirit opens up to people in every age.

My purpose this month and next is to give you a taster of them with the hope you might pick up your Bible and read them yourself.

They run as follows: After Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Acts we’ve got Paul’s letter to Rome, his greatest work on God. Then we have the first and second letters to Corinth where Paul founded a church situated on the very bridge between Asia and Europe. The next four I remember using the vowel alphabet – a, e, i, o – Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians. These are short and sweet compared to Romans and Corinthians, but Galatians is probably least sweet of them as we’ve already heard.

Two letters to Thessalonica in Greece follow, then two to Paul’s assistant Timothy, one to his assistant Titus and then a very short one to someone called Philemon about a runaway slave. The letter to the Hebrews was once thought to be from Paul but that is now disputed.

Thirteen letters then, and four subjects over four sermons: Paul on man, on God, on the Church and on the future.

In five minutes what does Paul have to say about human nature?

St. Paul strongly affirms in 1 Timothy 4:4 belief that everything created by God is good. At the same time, he insists elsewhere there’s a power of disobedience at work that makes for talk of creation as being fallen away from goodness. This disobedience is there in the devil, a fallen spirit, and in us as fallen human beings. In spite of the fact that all things created by God are good, the devil has temporarily become ‘god of this age’. Evil exists, at least temporarily, as a parasite inside what God created originally good. In his autobiographical details Paul speaks of the war between God’s dominion and the dominion of evil as a conflict that’s there in his own heart as in Romans 7:19-20: For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.  He goes on to ponder who’ll rescue him from this wretched condition and announces it is Jesus who has rescued, is rescuing and will finally rescue him as a believer.

Paul’s view of humanity is a ‘yes, but’ view – yes we’re made good but left to ourselves we’re without hope for no way can we save ourselves from the sin that’s within us. We need a Saviour and there’s no doubt Paul’s discovery of Jesus as the Saviour colours his whole view of human nature.

There’s humility in Paul, humble awareness that for God to touch his life in any way at all is an exceptional miracle. I received mercy he writes in 1 Timothy 1:16 so that in me, as the foremost Jesus Christ might display the utmost patience. He saw himself as the least of Christians because he’d been a leading persecutor of Christians. By the grace of God I am what I am he wrote in 1 Corinthians 15:10.

For Paul and for us our humanity is flawed. We have God’s likeness, God is within us - yet so is sin. The wonder of Christianity is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ accepting us as we are and making us more fully what we should be. All of us, he writes to Corinth seeing the glory of the Lord are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit. (2 Corinthians 3:19) It’s a matter of where we’re looking. Inasmuch as our gaze is fixed on Jesus we’re being transformed into right minded humanity. When our gaze slips, so do our thoughts, words and deeds. 

You need more than five minutes to get into Paul’s wisdom on humanity but times up – though I would encourage you to put in extra time at home when you hopefully pick up your bible and let Paul himself speak to you.

Feast of the Most Holy Trinity 26th May 2013

Today we celebrate the revelation of God as an eternal fellowship of love, three persons equal in majesty, undivided in splendour, yet one God.

The doctrine of the most holy and undivided Trinity is challenging, relevant, intriguing and essential – four headings to steer our delving this morning into foundational truth and life.

Firstly it’s a challenge. Reason takes you so far in Christianity. We could never have invented God in three persons, it’s revealed truth. Then you have the question of weighing other revelations – Islam and Hinduism besides the Judaism from which the Trinitarian revelation came.

Preachers go on leave this Sunday for fear of a seemingly cold, calculated, mathematical doctrine. Three in one and one in three. Why three? Why not one, says Islam, why not more says Hinduism, why not none says the atheist mocking our feeble attempts to get our mind round God three in one.

There’s the challenge set before us in Trinitarian faith but that challenge comes from historical events. These clearly reveal the nature of God in the coming of Jesus, whose death and resurrection we've been following up to Ascension Day, and the coming of the Spirit on Pentecost day. It’s a challenge that might lead you to the church library so you can better answer for your faith to those who believe in one God, no God or many gods as opposed to one God in three persons.

Secondly the doctrine of the Trinity is utterly relevant. I was thinking this week as Parliament moved us towards same-sex marriage that marriage is a union of life-giving love because human beings are in the image of God who is himself a union of life-giving love. Keeping true to ourselves as human beings, and true to the life-giving nature of marriage is keeping true to God no less, God as he has revealed himself to us.

The world, all of life sprang from him – notice we talk of God with a single pronoun despite his three persons, also with a male pronoun on account of Jesus. The feminist rewriting of God as the Mother, the Daughter and the Holy Spirit may be attractive to some but is actually an irreverent rewriting of how God speaks of himself in revelation. Rewriting the Trinity as creator, saviour and sanctifier achieves inclusive speech but at the cost of depersonalising God.

God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is supremely personal. At our beginning and at our end there is God and there is love because God is love within himself. How could God be so without the distinction of persons within him? How do we know all of this – we do so from Christian experience as our second reading reminded us. St Paul writes we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we have gained access by faith…God…who has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit (Romans 5) The doctrine of the Trinity is true and relevant to our experience by which the coming of Jesus and the Spirit help us know God as loving Father.

Challenging, relevant – thirdly the doctrine of God should be intriguing. The eternal fellowship of love that is God draws us in to himself. What after all is the Church for other than to serve God’s purpose to bring as many souls on earth as possible into fellowship with him?

The doctrine of the Trinity is revealed first of all in Our Lord’s coming into a human family with Mary and Joseph, into village life in Nazareth, then into the missionary partnership of the disciples. That divine society continues after his resurrection and the gift of the Spirit as one, holy catholic and apostolic church which is God’s never-ending family! Joy is its characteristic, out-of-this-world joy, that’s the most intriguing of all qualities. In the presence of the Lord there is joy for evermore writes the Psalmist.

How intriguing God is, and we are. If you want evidence for God look in the mirror and read Psalm 8 what are mortals that you should be mindful of them, mere human beings, that you should seek them out?

St Nicodemus writes of each human as being the macrocosm compared to the microcosm of the cosmos. In mind and spirit like God we can contain the universe. Being in God’s image we too are intriguing – we point beyond ourselves. O Lord our governor, how glorious is your name in all the world. You have made (us) little lower than the angels and crown (us) with glory and honour. (Psalm 8)

A human being in isolation isn't a true human for, in John Donne’s words, no man is an island. What’s intriguing about God as divine society mirrors what we find intriguing about ourselves, namely our desire for society and friendship. This desire will be fully satisfied only in the communion of saints who can be thought of as standing near God as a corona or crown around the sun.

Challenging, relevant, intriguing – lastly the Trinitarian doctrine of God is essential.

It is essential because Christianity is a religion of salvation and that salvation stands or falls on the divinity of Jesus Christ. We read Jesus words in the Gospel all that belongs to the Father is mine…the Spirit will take from what is mine and make it known to you (John 16:15) Does my eternal destiny depend on my own good works, lacking as they are, or on a relationship freely offered me by God in his Son? In Jesus do we really meet with God himself? That, as they say, is the twenty four thousand dollar question hidden behind keeping a feast day for the Blessed Trinity.

This doctrine might sound cold and mathematical but it follows a logic of love, love beyond all measure, extravagant, unconditional love for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son Jesus Christ so that all who believe in him should not perish but have everlasting life. (John 3:16) To believe this is to believe God isn’t One but One God in three persons.

The essential truth behind today’s Feast has been told from Advent to Pentecost to reach its summary on Trinity Sunday.

It’s challenging, of course – God is God and has revealed himself this way and not another way.

It’s relevant - the way we see God affects the way we see ourselves and steers us from unworthy pursuits.

It’s intriguing because the loving fellowship of God in three persons chimes in with our sociable nature and would draw it to joyful completion in the communion of saints

It’s an essential doctrine because without it the divinity of Christ falls, the word of God is emptied of power and the sacraments become empty ritual for God’s coming to us in Jesus and the Spirit is denied.

Truth and life and worship are all thrown together in Christian religion so if we would live our lives best we should always take heed of revealed truth, however hard to grasp, and to worship which is our real grasp of it.

As Michael Ramsey wrote The Church’s perilous office of teaching is inseparable from the Church’s worship of the mystery whereby it exists.

May all I have shared serve that worship of God we now enter at the eucharist through Jesus Christ, to whom, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, be all might, majesty, dominion and power now and for evermore. Amen.

Pentecost Sunday  8am                                19^th May 2013

Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, “Out of the believers heart shall flow rivers of living water.” Now this he said about the Spirit.

Thirst for God is a gift of God.

It’s the one who is thirsty who comes to drink of him and that thirst, the exercise of our faith, is his gift even if it’s something we have to exercise or act upon.

The writer of Psalm 42 says As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God Psalm 42v1

At Pentecost we are led to think from that sort of physical thirst towards deepening the spiritual thirst which will keep God and all he has done for us in Jesus Christ central to our life.

St Bernadette was a shepherdess who lived in the Pyrenee mountains in the south of France over 150 years ago. She had something of a thirst for God.

One day she had a vision of Jesus’ Mother who told her to lift some stones in the ground and a stream of water slowly emerged.

That stream is well known today. It is in Lourdes where many people who’re thirsty for God go and find healing and refreshment. I’ve been there, drunk the water and bathed in it for healing.

Here’s some of the water (Lourdes water). I’ve put some in the porch holy water this morning so you could take some on the way out.

I said people who’re thirsty for God go to Lourdes and find healing and refreshment but you don’t need to go to Lourdes.

The stone you need to lift is here. By that I mean the things that weight upon your heart and quench the flow of the Holy Spirit in your life.

 What does it mean to be thirsty for God?

It means to know your need of him and to be actively addressing that need through prayer, reading scripture, and receiving the sacraments.

Our Lord taught in Matthew 5: blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness sake for they shall be satisfied. If you’re not actually hungering this morning are you at least hungering to hunger, or hungering to hunger to hunger?

To want more of God in your life we need to pray and through prayer you also receive more of God in your life.  It’s an extraordinary circle and it’s no circle of delusion.

I remember once feeling God was a long way away and saying to him ‘God if you’re there show yourself’. I happened to be walking in the garden and I felt a leaf on a tree speak to me: ‘I made you. I love you. I want to fill you with my Spirit’ That was when I first experienced the Holy Spirit in power and it helped me to pray more easily and love other people more.

When you’re thirsty for God and tell him so he gives you his Holy Spirit.

Before Pentecost Mary and the apostles kept a nine day prayer vigil to express their thirst for God and then we read how At Pentecost as we just heard they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind…and all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.

To be filled you need to be empty.

Holy Spirit Sunday is a challenge to all of our self-sufficiency. It’s a reminder that to be filled by the Spirit we need the resolve to empty ourselves in service.

Christians, to continue the water image of today’s Gospel, are made like fresh water pools. These need both an inlet and an outlet.

Water goes stagnant when it lacks either an inlet or an outlet. So it is with our souls. They go stagnant unless they both receive from God and give to God.

Pentecost is something very personal. It’s something that can happen in our lives today as either we lift the stones that block the inlet or increase our outgoings in venturesome love and service.

Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, “Out of the believers heart shall flow rivers of living water.” Now this he said about the Spirit.

Come down, O love divine, seek thou this soul of mine,
and visit it with thine own ardour glowing.
O Comforter, draw near, within my heart appear,
and kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing.

Rogation eucharist 5th May 2013

What we do in Church on a Sunday isn't just for us it's for everyone and everything.

I mean our reaching up to God in prayer with his church has an impact on us, on the church and on the whole world.

This morning we’re reinstating Rogation Sunday, at the request of the liturgy and worship advisory group, so we’ll be going across the churchyard saying prayers for the earth and blessing a field.

Rogation Sunday means asking Sunday. In past centuries asking God's protection over the crops in May was seen as an urgent need in an agricultural community. In restoring that tradition we’re extending it into prayer for the world of work and good stewardship of the world's resources including human labour whether in office, factory or field.

'Whatsoever you shall ask for in my name, that will I do' Jesus said in John 14 verse 13.

This Sunday is a challenge to our self sufficiency, a reminder of a hurting world needing care and prayer and an eye opener into how every eucharist lifts the world to God.

A little thought on each.

First that to ask God challenges self-sufficiency. To believe in God does that in any case and prayer is just an affirmation of that faith. I mean faith that our life and everyone's life and everything in creation exists through him and for him.

In our daily prayers don't we say 'Lord bless everyone in the world and, as you have occasion, bless me and mine that our lives may be better directed to your praise and service'?
Asking God makes him real in our thoughts, purifies those thoughts and through the gift of his loving presence fills our hearts with love for all around us. We become part of the answer to our prayers.

How many times have you prayed to God for someone and been left with a practical action to accomplish. I was praying for my oldest son and his family on Tuesday and afterwards felt I needed to go on Facebook and invite them down from London for the day - and this fitted their thoughts. God knew, but he needed my active love.

Doing what we shall do this morning is writing prayer large as the challenge it is to our self sufficiency. It is secondly a reminder of a hurting world in need of prayer and care. Saying those litanies may sound like reading God a shopping list but it’s more our taking responsibility with him for the way the world is.

Prayer, asking God for things, changes things. It does so through expressing and rekindling our love for the world and its sorrows and joys. It does so also by the direct intervention of God.

'Whatsoever you shall ask for in my name, that will I do'. Note that Jesus says 'in my name' so asking to win the lottery may have a qualification!  To win it so church can have an amenities annex with toilets may be more in his name than to win it so we can have a helicopter to hop to France.

To pray in the name of Jesus is to pray for what he would want in any situation and the prayers we offer on Rogation Sunday cover a tremendous range on that account. And no, they don't include a church loo but it's pretty obvious we'd get more people praying here and praying here longer if we had one.

Today's Rogation procession takes us out of our own concerns and challenges our self sufficiency as it gives us a reminder of the needs of the hurting world around us.

Thirdly and lastly it’s an eye opener into how every eucharist lifts the world to God. 

It does so through Our Lord's choice of bread and wine to be instruments of his love since each material incorporates the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands.

The collection we make at Sunday eucharist allied to our standing orders to St Giles  is presented alongside the bread and wine. It actually pays for the elements. Bread, wine, money are symbols of our life, of everyone's life as well as that of the whole creation. Life that comes from God to be taken, blessed, broken and shared by God who not only gives us life but gives us his life on the Cross and in the elements that are to us his body and blood.

There's something pretty awesome about Rogation Sunday. We pray for the fields and this makes a difference to them and to us. We’re reminded that the fields and the church go together for, as John Wesley taught, ‘God does nothing save in answer to prayer’. Without prayer God's hands are bound - so a prosperous community must also be in some sense a prayerful community.

The action at this altar on any Sunday is Rogation, is ‘an asking’. It's an asking for the Holy Spirit to bless the fruit of the earth and the labour of human hands, through their offering in the sacrifice of the eucharist and through our Communion with them when blessed that gives us new vision and fresh love to serve the world we’re both in and of.

'Whatsoever you shall ask for in my name, that will I do'.

So be it!