Happy to be religious

 

Sunday 16^th May – Easter 7

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26. The idea behind choosing two candidates and then casting lots was to give the casting vote to God in who would lead the new community. Though we never hear of Matthias again, his role is probably symbolic – twelve reflecting the twelve tribes of Israel so stressing the continuity of the church with ancient Israel.

1John 5: 9-13. A simple message with enormous implications. “Life” is in Jesus.  God raised him to eternal life and believing this we inherit eternal life by believing in his “name”. Jesus Christ – Joshua Messiah - God is salvation, the anointed one.

John 17: 6-19. The prayer “that they may be one” is used by ecumenists to push for reunification of the churches but is surely a forlorn task in the world where there are thousands of different denominations. And we must remember that this cause would not have been in the mind of the person that wrote it. He had in mind spiritual union between believers and God. I suppose he would have taken for granted that ecclesial unity was a forgone conclusion and would inevitably flow from that prior union. But of course, it hasn’t and you might argue that this was inevitable because of human failings, but nevertheless the notion of spiritual union – gets much better traction in Eastern Christianity where it is the explicit goal of human life – union with God – also called theosis. 

  

A common position for people to take nowadays is to say they are “spiritual but not religious”

What this means in practice is that they are attracted to some concepts culled from such diverse beliefs as Buddhism, Hinduism, paganism, new age, or perhaps Christianity in a pick and mix kind of way but don’t subscribe to any particular religious faith.

This handily doesn’t bind them to any particular ethical standards of behaviour or moral codes and they don’t need to involve themselves with any community. They have beliefs that make no demands on them at all while giving themselves an airy mystical glow.

But I am unashamedly religious.

The root of the word religion is mostly understood as meaning to “bind together” which I understand as meaning you have a unified world-view held together with common morals and values together with the need to relate to each other in all our intrinsic God-given differences.

So I have no qualms about describing myself as both religious and spiritual, because the two are two sides of the same coin.

I am indebted to the Bishop of Oxford John Pritchard who I knew years ago when he was the Archdeacon of Canterbury (incidentally , if you want someone to blame, it was John who encouraged me to seek ordination in the first place) who writes engagingly about how we live faithfully as Christians and our starting point is when we try and get our heads around being in union with God.

Because whatever we do in our everyday Christian life depends on that fundamental relationship with God which in Christianity is three persons, Father Son and Holy Spirit. They are as the Eastern church describes it as a divine eternal dance and when we come into that relationship with God we enter that dance.

Clumsily, and not knowing the tune or the steps at first, but as in any dancing you learn through practicing the steps over and over again.

It starts with being fascinated by God who we have learned to call Father. God cannot be smaller than infinity. God imagined the universe into being and sustains it by his thought. This is God beyond creation who nevertheless invites creation to join in the dance of Love for love’s sake. Our vision of God is enlarged by scientists, enriched by artists and deepened by theologians.

We then become friends of Jesus Christ, in the way described recently in John 15. We inherit that privilege of intimacy in ways described variously as being “in Christ” or “knowing Christ” or “receiving Christ” or Christ living in the believer

As present day believers in Christ John says that we are just as much like the keystone cops as the first disciple’s were, running around without much clue but if we keep an eye on what our best of friends was doing we may become a little less erratic.

That leaves the Holy Spirit. Pray daily that you will be full of the Holy Spirit so you can live in God’s world with God’s help. A punctured football can’t bounce, or if it has a slow leak – which we all do. But an inflated ball will bounce high and be fit for purpose.

We can’t live a Christian life in our own strength. We need to face God and draw on his limitless life.

We need to have our lives turned towards God as our consistent point of reference. Living as a Christian is this world we need to remind ourselves of the presence of God without being unduly pious. Just looking in the direction of God for just a moment before we make decisions puts things in perspective, reminds us who we are and who we serve and allows God’s Grace to work through us.

Having our lives turned towards God begats an attitude of life and disposition of the heart that turns our life around until it become just “who we are”.

 

A friend of God

 

Sunday 9^th May – Easter 6

Acts 10: 44-48. The very start of the Christian story charts the fact that Jews and gentiles were entirely equal in the new church, that God showed no partiality. This must have been so attractive for the “God-fearers”, gentiles who were attracted to Judaism but were hitherto always on the outside looking in. The building blocks of the new community of equals were being put in place.

1 John 5: 1-6. Whoever is born of God “conquers the world” in this passage. What does this mean? To me this means that the world, and everything in it is intimately connected to God, is not our enemy and we can commune with God through the stuff of ordinary life. “Water and the blood” are indicative of the baptism and crucifixion of Jesus, incorporation and identification with humanity followed by his sacrifice on behalf of humanity, mirrored in the church’s rites of Baptism and Eucharist.

John 15: 9-17. Friendship was given much greater importance in the ancient world that it seems to receives today. Being a friend of Jesus is a radical thing because friendship is based on having an equal relationship – not as a master and slave or teacher and pupil. Friends have no secrets from each other and shares everything he has with his friends even his privileged access to God.

 

Saying you are a friend of God or a friend of Jesus is a truly radical thing because as Jesus himself explains to his disciples, friendship is a relationship of equals. Not like a master and slave – that isn’t a relationship of equals – but friendship is a special thing that was previously bestowed on few people in the Bible. One of the most notable was of course Abraham.

I have been lucky enough to visit the tomb of Abraham in Hebron in the Holy Land and over it the building is both a mosque and a synagogue. The mosque is named after Abraham and is called the Haram El-Khalil – the mosque of the friend of God.

Think about the qualities of true friendship. A relationship of equals, not based on any notion of gain or exploitation. You enjoy their company just for who they actually are, not for what you can get from them. You don’t have to hide any secrets from them. They don’t mind sharing things with you. They want the very best for you and are not in competition so that they rejoice and celebrate with you when you do well and love greatly.

With that picture of true friendship, now read verses 13 to 15 again and imagine Jesus is saying them to you directly because Christianity really starts to transform a person when it becomes personal.

¹³ No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. ¹⁴ You are my friends if you do what I command you. ¹⁵ I do not call you servants^[a] any longer, because the servant^[b] does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.

What do we have to do to be recognised as a friend of God? Jesus makes that plain.

“Love one another as I have loved you”

Now as Nat King Cole once beautifully sung – “Love is a many splendored thing” it has so many facets and is rich and multi-layered.

Think of the lovely hymn to love Paul gives us in 1 Corinthians 13 and we need to look no further than John’s gospel itself to have it made plain that in plain terms – God is Love.

And yes, love can be expressed carnally as well as the Song of Songs makes clear but can’t be reduced to being just that.

Love is also service and self-sacrifice – not particularly sexy at all but absolutely necessary and meets us at the point of need.

Love is profligate, audacious, forgiving and gives us a status in God’s universe as a child of God.

And who doesn’t love their children? Happy is any parent whose children grow up to also become their friends.

This is the privileged position that anyone holds who tries to love as God loves us all.

Becoming a friend of God through his Son Jesus Christ we enter a divine dance with our creator. Keep close to God as we have heard in our gospel reading last week about the vine and the branches. Commune with God often, talk to each other often in private and corporate prayer so you keep that relationship open, and fruitful.

What you gain is a new kind of security, not based on what other people may think about you, but what the king of kings thinks about you.

You are loved, go and love likewise. 

 

I am the true Vine

 

Sunday 2^nd May – Easter 5

Acts 8:26-40. Luke had already stated (1 verse 8) that Jesus promised that the disciples would be witnesses to him in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and “the ends of the earth”. The Ethiopian eunuch is exotic enough to represent the ends of the earth to Luke’s readers. Here we also have Isaiah 53 quoted and applied to Jesus and the baptism and gift of the Spirit is affirmed.  The “Ethiopian” was on his way to Jerusalem to worship and was reading Isaiah so was he Jewish or at least a God-fearer? We’ll never know and the fact that he is a eunuch, so not acceptable to Jews in religious worship is made nothing of in this story which may be another sign of Christianity breaking through Jewish cultic barriers.

1John 4:7-21. This is a sublime and liberating doctrine equating God with love and provides a theological underpinning of Paul’s hymn to love in 1 Corinthians 13. There exists a gritty subtext of course that this love was not due to those who had split away from the main church this letter is addressed to. Those who had “gone out” from the community in chapter 2: 19. Notwithstanding this contextual point, it remains an inspiring piece of writing.

John 15: 1-8. Another of the “I am” sayings of Jesus in John’s gospel that emphasises our reliance on God and which simultaneously presents Jesus as the image of God. So far so good and comforting, but there is a sterner side to this parable. Vines grow slowly, typically taking three years to bear fruit and in the meantime careful tending and pruning were needed.  Jesus himself was subject to the same process he says so we are not above it. Happily, in Greek the word for pruning also means cleansing, so instead of being simply lopped off and thrown into the fire, that leaves open the path of cleansing by baptism and then repentance and ultimate forgiveness.

 

In John’s first letter we have a sublime piece of writing that equates God with Love. In the Acts reading we have someone wanting to be baptised into that Love.

And in the gospel reading we have a story about people growing in that love to better reflect God’s light and love.

So it is a story of being inspired by and attracted to God.

Then Demonstrating that we want to be incorporated into that love signified by Baptism.

And then instruction on how to live and grow in the faith into which we have been baptised.

I will assume that everyone is here of their own free will so you are attracted by God. I will also assume that almost everyone has been baptised, so the real lesson today is about how to grow in our faith.

In the “I am the true vine” saying we have that lovely conflation of Jesus as God incarnate so the words, while being the words of Jesus are actually also the words of the Father. This is made clear in John 17 when Jesus says that “I and the Father are one”.

We can stay close to the Father by staying close to the son. We drink from the well of the Spirit that proceeds from the Father that keeps us close to the Son.

We keep close through Private and public prayer, good works, engaging with the Spirit through study of scripture, and communing with God in the public act of Holy Communion.

Through those practices you are abiding in Christ and through those practices you will bear fruit.

I’ve said before that was a point of difference with my training vicar many years ago when he said to me that all you are asked to do by Christ is remain faithful. But I always maintained that keeping the faith wasn’t the desired end product. You are expected to bear fruit. That is the goal of the Christian life.

And in case we need a prompt, Paul kindly lists some fruit of the Spirit in Galatians and they are,

²² By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, ²³ gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.

These are how Jesus recognises his followers because as Jesus said “By their fruits you will know them” (Matthew 7:16) not by their appearance or their claims but by their fruit.

Admittedly that can also be a bit scary as well because so many of us are prone to introspection and are quite self-depreciating so we’ll often beat ourselves up by telling ourselves that I am not growing in love or joy or self-control or whatever but if we are asking the question of ourselves we are at least acknowledging the demands of Christ and their authority and if we can recognise where we are found wanting, we fall back on the repentance and forgiveness of God which is plentiful.

We worship and commune often with a great and good God who wills our salvation.

He will never give up on us so let’s not give up on ourselves.  Trust in God’s prior acceptance of you through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, and stand on that firm rock. Then keep as close as possible through prayer and worship and good deeds and you will grow into the person you were created to be.