Touch 12.2.12

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable unto you O Lord, our rock and our Redeemer, Amen.

There’s something that can be really remarkable about the sharing of the Peace, when we shake someone’s hand and exchange a greeting of ‘Peace be with you’.  It can be a good experience, or, not so good.  The first time I was really aware of this was some years ago during Holy Communion at an Abbey in England.  When it came to the ‘sharing of the Peace’, there were several people who totally avoided eye-contact, only touched my hand for a millisecond, and mumbled greeting, which could have been anything.  I didn’t know them, so couldn’t have upset them in some way.  I had a mad urge to say ‘Hello’ -  to get some human response because it felt meaningless, and pointless, just going through the motions.

But of course, there are other churches at the opposite extreme, where the peace is a much more extravagant and enthusiastic affair, where everyone literally greets everyone else, and the whole church grinds to a halt, and they hug and laugh.  And here at St Peter’s, we are somewhere safely in the middle of those two extremes of touchiness.

Everyone knows that touch is important, especially for babies and small children, essential for a baby to thrive and survive.  For those who were fortunate enough to have been a wanted child, caresses and cuddles are our first experience of touch, grounding our sense of security and self-worth for the rest of our lives.  We all know the touch of affirmation, the touch of care with which we greet those who are struggling, like the bereaved.

Originally the Peace was a kiss of peace, or a holy kiss of love, rather than a handshake…there are some people here who might prefer that…but either way, it’s a way of expressing the unity of a group of believers – one of the gifts that God gives to his church, and it helps to create togetherness.

Thinking about reaching out, and touching, let’s look at today’s Gospel reading, the incident of Jesus cleansing the leper, which must be important, because this incident is in all three synoptic Gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke, and they are almost identical in the words that Jesus did and said –

“a leper came to him, and knelt before him, and said – Lord, if you will, you can make me clean…and he stretched out his hand…and touched him, saying, I will; be clean. And immediately the leprosy healed him”.

Jesus was moved with compassion and he cures the leper with a word – and a touch.  In other miracles we read that words are sufficient for a cure.  And surely it could have been here as well.  But in this story Jesus does the unthinkable – he touches the leper – he bridges the gap between what is considered to be clean, and what is unclean – making himself, according to their customs, unclean along with the leper.

In ancient times, leprosy evoked dread, stigma, and alienation. The story takes place in the context of the Levitical system of laws, by which the Jews ran their lives.  The purpose of these laws was about protecting the physical health of communities who were terrified of contagious diseases. The leper’s blatant disregard for the biblical rules is shocking: he approaches Jesus, instead of remaining at a distance and calling out, ‘Unclean, unclean’ as he was supposed to.  Jesus shows how God works by refusing to sacrifice human beings to rituals. He touched him and declared him healed. Physical contact with a leper doesn’t spread leprosy, but touching a ritually unclean person – and a leper was that – meant becoming unclean. This was something that was not a huge problem, but it should be avoided where possible, and it was part of everyday life, and there were straightforward ways of dealing with it. Jesus tells the man to follow the biblical procedures, to do what the ancient health department laid down for rehabilitation of lepers: the priests had to see him before he could be let loose in the community. Jesus is simply telling the man to do what the Law requires: his kingdom means freedom for lepers, as well as everyone else.

By his touch Jesus is identifying himself with him, he bears his infection and uncleanness as his own.  Jesus’ willingness to become unclean himself totally shifts the boundaries of order.   Yet – as we know – with the word and the touch – instead of Jesus becoming unclean – the leper became clean.

According to the Law, the community is kept not just safe but righteous by expelling the unclean, who then becomes socially dead to the rest of the community, no longer able to contaminate the pure. When Jesus enters into relationship with outcasts and shares their social death, he starts a process of resurrection.  The unclean become full, living people born again. They are reincorporated…re-bodied into the community, and the community is healed into wholeness from separation, made new.

From the very moment of Jesus’ incarnation, God has been doing exactly this: restoring creation to order by entering a human body, staying with us in the darkest, sickest places, taking on social death, finally physical death, so that we can all become one, and rise from the dead.

Jesus too, was like an outcast from his family and his people.  No doubt he would have fulfilled expectations if he had settled down near his family, taken a wife, and exercised his ministry from his home, it would have been considered much more satisfactory.  But instead, he became an itinerant peasant, wandering the countryside, homeless, and jobless, of no fixed abode.  At the end of his ministry, when he is “examined” by the priests, he was found to be unacceptable, not a true member of the people, not worthy of either God’s love or that of the community.  And like lepers, dressed like corpses in their “treatments”, so Christ died, and was wrapped in linen cloths, and was then reborn to a new life, with a new community which not only accepted and loved him, but was loved by him.

We have to ask: is our society so very different from ancient Israel?  Is this really only a story from “far away and long ago”, or is it a story about today as well, because every culture has unclean people – those who are effectively touchable or untouchable…about who is part of the community of the accepted, and who is not.  Jesus’ love, seen in this miracle, offers us something very different from the usual way we are treated and judged.

We are accepted, not because our skin is perfect or our spirits unblemished, but because God is loving, and he reaches out with grace despite all our needs and our weakness.  We are accepted because we are God’s children, no matter what facade we present, no matter what sin, what fear is within us.  And Christ reaches out to touch us he reaches out to make us whole, to restore us to the relationship we should have with God and with our community and our neighbours.

As the oft quoted poem probably written by Teresa of Avila says:

Christ has no body but yours, No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good, Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,

But literally, we have hands to reach out, both in supplication to God, to receive the bread of life, but also to touch and hold each other.

That is what Jesus is all about. That is what our Communion Service celebrates.  Here Christ touches us, here he makes clean, and here he restores us to himself and to one another.

Opening your hands is a dangerous activity; you can never be sure what will end up in them.  When we go to the altar, reaching out with our open hands, we are surrendering so much to God, releasing all that stuff we hold on to, the doubts, the anxieties, the complaining, the sins, the depression, the worry – they’re all there too.  When we go to the altar, and receive the bread and wine, that’s the release part.  At the altar, we are invited into the presence of God, and into his kingdom.

As he stretched out his hand to the leper and touched him and made him whole – so he stretched out his hands on the cross to make us whole.  All we need to do is kneel at his feet and ask him, “Lord, if you will, you can make me clean” and he will reach out to us today.  He bids us to come to him.  He chooses to touch us  and to make us part of his family, his community, his church and he calls us to touch others with his love to touch them and to bring them into communion with him and with all who call on upon his name.

In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.

Waiting for God, waiting on God

Texts: Isaiah 64:1-9, Mark 13:24-37

You can buy almost anything these days. The other week, there was a fully functional antique RAF fighter jet for sale on e-Bay. This week, I read in the papers that you can now buy Christmas! I kid you not. If you can’t wait, you can order Christmas now for any day of the year. The company simply turns up on your doorstep and makes Christmas happen for you on the day of your choice.

‘Buy Christmas’ – that, to me, is the ultimate expression of the spirit of our age: we simply can’t wait. We are in a hurry; any waiting is a waste of time.  Why wait until 25th December – have Christmas now! So, celebrating the season of Advent is the ultimate gesture of a Christian counter culture. In Advent, the Church quite deliberately sets aside time to practice the holy art of waiting – waiting for the advent, or coming, of the Messiah. But what does it mean to wait? What precisely are we waiting for?

To answer these questions, perhaps we should first ask why our culture so hates waiting. Perhaps it is because waiting seems so very passive, and we price being active above all else. One symptom is that at work, colleagues who are about to retire are always at pains to tell us how they plan to ‘stay active’ during their retirement. Waiting, on the other hand, seems necessarily passive, and therefore goes against the grain.

But wait a minute – wait a minute. Before we agree too hastily that waiting is necessarily passive, we ought to pause and consider. To gain a fresh insight into what it may mean to wait, I want you to cast your minds back to those school French lessons. Can you remember the French word for ‘wait’? ‘To wait’, en Français, is attendre, which is one of those faux amis, or, ‘false friends’ for the learner of French. It is spelt and sounds like the English word ‘attend’, but has a different meaning. In French, attendre means ‘to wait’, which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the English verb ‘to attend’; or does it?

The first meaning the OED gives to the word ‘attend’ is ‘to direct the ears, mind [or] energies to anything’. In other words, to ‘attend to’ something is to ‘pay attention’ to that something. The second meaning given by the OED is ‘to watch over, wait upon, with service, accompany as servant, go with, be present at.’ This sense of the word, as least in its noun form, is still used today. So, in the court circular of 24th October this year, we read:

The Duke of York this morning arrived in China and was received by Her Majesty’s Consul-General for Shanghai … Mr. Alastair Watson and Squadron Leader Charlotte Fenn, RAF are in attendance.

In other words, Alastair Watson and Charlotte Fenn ‘attended’ the Duke of York when he arrived; or you can say, they ‘waited on’ him. There’s the connection between the English word ‘attend’ and the French word attendre. Presumably Mr. Watson and Ms. Fenn didn’t just twitch their thumbs and generally look bored at the airport. Instead, they would have paid close attention to their royal guest so that they could attend to his needs and wishes. This form of ‘waiting’ is, of course, enshrined in the word ‘waiter’ – one who waits on, or attends to, the needs and wishes of patrons at a restaurant.

Such ‘waiting’ – ears pricked, eyes peeled – is the kind of waiting that Jesus was calling for in Mark 13:

Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. (v.33)

That is the kind of waiting that the Church bids us practice during Advent. That kind of waiting is exhausting. If you get bored, you can be quite sure that you’re not doing it!

But what are we to wait for? We are, of course, waiting for God to come to us. But there’s the rub – how do we recognise God? To wait for someone meaningfully, we need to know what the person looks like. That much we learn from Samuel Beckett’s famous play, Waiting for Godot. Two men, Estragon and Vladimir, were chit chatting while waiting for the arrival of a mysterious character called Godot. Half way through Act 1, without warning, a boy Pozzo appeared along the road:

ESTRAGON: Is that him?

VLADIMIR: Who?

ESTRAGON: Er …

VLADIMIR: Godot?

ESTRAGON: Yes.

At this point Pozzo joins in: ‘I present myself: Pozzo.’

Whereupon Vladimir says to Estragon: ‘Not at all!’

ESTRAGON: She said Godot.

VLADIMIR: Not at all!

So, a puzzled Estragon turns to Pozzo, ‘You’re not Godot, Ma’am?’, earning an irritated answer, ‘I am Pozzo!’

It turns out that Estragon and Vladimir knew nothing about this Godot, not even what he looked like. So they were desperate for the first person who comes their way to be Godot, much to Pozzo’s annoyance.

During Advent, the Church bids us practice waiting for God – turning our heightened attention Godward to wait for God’s coming to us. The question I want to ask this morning is simply this: would we recognise God if and when God turns up? Would we do any better than Estraton and Vladimir?

Isaiah was waiting for God. He was waiting for God to make good the promise to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile. It still hadn’t happened – the people were too busy getting on with their own lives to bother with a pile of old stones; and God didn’t seem to care. Isaiah was getting pretty fed up by God’s no-show. That’s why in our passage today, he let out that heart-rending cry:

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down! (64:1a)

The word used there for ‘tear open’ is almost exclusively used for the ripping of cloth in the rest of the Old Testament. Isaiah had clear expectations of how he would recognise the answer to his prayer. If God rips open the heaven and comes down, then

… the mountains would quake at [God’s] presence, as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil (64:1b-2a)

There would be no mistaking of God’s entry onto the stage of human affairs; it would be spectacular. Interestingly, in rest of the Old Testament after Isaiah, nothing like that ever happened: there was no stage direction for ‘Enter God with fanfare’. If you carry on reading you Bible after Isaiah, the first time you come to anything remotely like an answer to Isaiah’s prayer happens in the beginning of Mark’s Gospel. After the baptism of Jesus by John, we read this:

Just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

Matthew and Luke also recorded this incident, but they used a tame word – the heavens ‘opened’ – a bit like an automatic door. Mark, on the other hand, used an action word – the heavens were ‘torn apart’. Matthew uses the same Greek word to talk about the curtain in the Temple ripping in two from top to bottom when Jesus died. It’s the word for ripping cloth! The resonance with Isaiah could not be clearer:

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down …

… he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.

No quaking mountains, no roaring bonfire, no boiling water. Just an ordinary baptism, like many before and since.

Every year at Advent, I ask myself the same question: if I were a first century Jew, would I have recognised Jesus as God’s answer to Isaiah’s prayer to rip the heavens open and come down? The more I think about this, the less confident I am that the answer would be ‘yes’. Saint John’s words ring louder in my ears as the years go by:

He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world  knew him not. He came unto his own [that's us, the church!] and his own received him not. (KJV)

Like Isaiah, I would have expected fanfare and special effects all round. I think I would have missed Jesus the Messiah. It is with this unsettling thought that I go into Advent every year, as I heed the Church’s bidding to practice once more the holy art of waiting, of attending to God with my ears pricked and eyes peeled so that I won’t miss God’s coming.

So I invite you to reflect with me on two questions during the rest of this service and for the rest of this Advent season. First, do we expect God to come to us? Or are we so indifferent that as long as the 10:45 service happens as usual, God can mind God’s own business, thank you very much. Second, if God suddenly turns up afresh in the midst of St. Peter’s, would we recognise God? Or do we have our expectations so badly out of kilter that we would in fact let God slip through our midst, out of the door and into Lutton Place, without us ever noticing?

Let us pray:

Keep us alert, we pray, O Lord our God,

as we await the advent of Christ your Son,

so that when he comes he may find us ready to recognise him

in the least of his brothers and sisters,

in whom the Holy Spirit dwells. Amen

Shepherds and sheep

Texts: Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24; Matthew 25:31-46

Last Wednesday I attended a service at Westminster Abbey. The service itself, and what was happening outside the abbey, would have resonated strongly with the prophet Ezekiel.

Inside the Abbey, I was attending a service of thanksgiving for the 400th anniversary of the publication of the 1611 King James Bible – a gift to the whole English speaking world from a Scottish King. In the preface, the translators described themselves as ‘poor instruments to make GOD’S holy Truth to be yet more and more known’.

Ezekiel would have applauded. He above all other prophets was a man who was totally identified with God’s word. In Chapter 2 he described a visionary experience in which he was told to eat a scroll of God’s words. The prophet’s task was proclaim this internalised word to the people. Ezekiel would have applauded the efforts of the 54 scholars who strove to make the word of God accessible to the people in their own tongue throughout King James’ realm.

If celebrating the King James Bible inside Westminster Abbey would have stirred Ezekiel’s memory of his own commissioning as a prophet, the Occupy London protesters outside the precincts of the Abbey – yes, they were there, too – the protesters would have reminded Ezekiel of a key theme of his own prophetic proclamation: that disaster was coming because justice had vanished from the land:

They take bribes to shed blood; you take both advance interest and accrued interest, and make gain of your neighbours by extortion; and you have forgotten me, says the Lord God.  See, I strike my hands together at the dishonest gain you have made … (22:12-13a)

‘Bribes’, ‘take interest’, ‘extortion’, ‘dishonest gain’ – the list has a modern ring. Ezekiel would have had no difficulty in understanding the grievances of the Occupy London protesters. Indeed, he emphasised precisely such matters in the chapter that the Lectionary bids us consider today, Chapter 34. The chapter begins like this:

The word of the LORD came to me: Mortal, prophesy against the shepherds of Israel. (v.1)

Today, the metaphor of ‘shepherds’ speaks to us of religious leaders; but throughout the ancient world, it was political leaders who appropriated this title to themselves. In one of the most ancient law codes that have come down to us, the Babylonian king Hammurabi describes himself as the ‘shepherd of men’, the ‘supplier of pasture and water’, who has been appointed ‘to destroy the ruthless and wicked and to prevent the weak from being robbed of his just rights by the strong.’

Ezekiel’s complaint is that the shepherds of Israel have done precisely the opposite:

Thus says the Lord GOD: Ah you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, … you have not sought the lost … So they were scattered. (vv.1-5a)

So, God will overthrow these leaders. Instead, as we heard from our reading earlier, God will be the shepherd: ‘I myself will search for my sheep … I will feed them with good pasture … I will strengthen the weak …’ and so on. God’s own summing up of all these metaphors is particularly striking:

I will feed them with justice. (v.16b)

Justice, mishpat in Hebrew, is a recurring theme in all the biblical prophets. The English word ‘justice’, with its judicial connotations, doesn’t do justice to the Hebrew word, which encompasses the whole of right government, so that misphat definitely includes the just distribution of wealth, and health, and opportunities. So, ‘excessive bonuses’ and ‘unsustainable structural deficits’ definitely fall under the heading of an absence of mishpat. There is no justice!

So far, Ezekiel is with the protesters, the ‘sheep’: he addresses a message of judgement to the ‘fat cat’ shepherds. But then he turns the table, and starts to address the sheep themselves:

Thus says the Lord GOD to them: I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep. (vv.20-22)

In other words, the strong constantly elbow out the weak amongst the sheep. It seems that the sheep and the shepherd have become indistinguishable. Someone once said to me that middle age is the age when we finally get the faces we deserve. Well, frighteningly, it seems that the people of Israel got the leaders that they deserve! To mix my metaphors, it’s dog eat dog for both shepherd and sheep!

I believe that the question that God is putting to us today through Ezekiel is this: have we as a society also got the politicians and bankers that we deserve? Or, to ask the same question differently, I wonder how many of the protesters in London and Glasgow and Edinburgh were protesting 10 years ago when ‘the going was good.’ How many of them, how many of us, took advantage of the easy mortgages and credit card overdrafts without any qualms, applauded the bankers who wrought such miracles, and repeatedly re-elected governments that made possible the boom decades? Few, if any, were protesting then. Even as the gap between rich and poor widened alarmingly, the standard of living for all was rising so fast on phantom money that no one complained! We all had a good time. The sheep colluded with the shepherds.

However, such collusion is unsustainable – something will break; that something is human society the way God intends it to be. This point was made in 1597 in a sermon preached at St. Paul’s Cross – an ancient open-air pulpit erected very near the site of the current protests outside Wren’s cathedral. The economy was booming – the idea of commercial lending and risk capital had started to take hold in London, initially with the goldsmiths doubling up as merchant bankers and venture capitalists. The East India Company and other monopolies had made a handful of people very rich indeed, and the riches percolated down to many levels of society. In middle of this boom, John Howson, who later became Vice Chancellor of Oxford University, said this when he preached at St. Paul’s Cross on the second Sunday of Advent, 1597:

If we shall be so affected that every man for his owne commodity will rob and spoyle another man, the society of mankind … must needs be dissolved.

Unlike the protesters outside St. Paul’s today, Howson did not just point the finger at the ‘fat cat’ leaders. He warns that fundamentally, the malaise in his day arises because every person for his or her own gain will ‘rob and spoyle’ their neighbour. And so it is today. The right response from St. Paul’s was neither to side with the protesters in their finger wagging, nor with the leaders of our economy in their comfortable indifference. To be fair, St. Paul’s did neither; instead, they did nothing. To my mind, the right thing to do would have been to call for national repentance, recognising that both the shepherds and the sheep are under judgement. There is no ‘them’ and ‘us’. Through our Gospel reading today from Matthew, Jesus our great Shepherd asks all of us to repent of the times when we have not fed the hungry, not given drink to the thirsty, not visited the those imprisoned in their own homes, and not welcomed strangers.

But we have not heard the call to national repentance from any of our churches up and down the land. Why is that? Giles Fraser, who famously resigned from St. Paul’s, suggested this answer in his very last sermon as Canon Chancellor:

‘For too long the Church has been obsessed with its own internal workings and with silly arguments about sex.’

In other words, the Church of God has been caught naval gazing. Canon Fraser goes on to say this:

‘Now is the time for a new debate and a new emphasis. For if we are not fully involved with complex discussions about the relationship between financial justice [mishpat!] and the way our financial institutions work, then we might as well give up on being a proper Church …’

I wonder whether we are naval gazers here at St. Peters. It is certainly interesting that we don’t often discuss the question, ‘How are we doing as a church in seeking justice amongst ourselves and in our community?’ Instead, we seem to be more interested in debating the size of our annual deficit and which version of the liturgy we should use. Perhaps we are in danger of forgetting what Jesus said earlier in Matthew’s Gospel:

Seek first the Kingdom of God and God’s righteousness [mishpat is part of this righteousness] and all these things will be given to you as well (6:33)

On the other hand, if we don’t seek God’s mishpat, then Jesus tells us that on the Last Day, we will be under judgement. Earlier, Ezekiel warned his contemporaries of imminent judgement: they would lose their Temple and their homeland. Some historians say that the bloody civil war that broke out within a generation of Elizabeth’s death can partly be blamed on gross economic inequalities. Howson’s warning of society disintegrating came true. Our readings today challenges us to become a ‘proper church’ before it’s too late.

Let us pray.

God says, ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.’

Lord, have mercy! Amen.

The rubber hits the road

Wilson Poon, St. Peter’s, Luton Place, Edinburgh, 19^th June 2011 (Trinity Sunday).

Texts: Matthew 28:16-20; 2 Cor. 13:11-13; Genesis 1:1-2:4; Psalm 8

In British politics, the second half of the summer is called the ‘silly season’. Parliament is in recess; nothing much happens – so the media have to invent frivolous stories to fill up pages and air time – hence the name ‘silly season’.

It seems that the Church also has a kind of ‘silly season’, which begins today. From December until now, a lot happens in quick succession. December saw the beginning of the season of Advent, anticipating and leading up to Christmas. This was followed hard on the heels by Epiphany, and then the season of Lent, again a period of anticipation, this time leading up to Holy Week and Easter. Forty days later there was Ascension, followed by Pentecost, which we celebrated last Sunday. Then what?

Then follows a 6-month lull, during which apparently nothing much happens in the Church calendar. We mark time by counting the Sundays after Pentecost, first Sunday, second Sunday, and so on, until the twenty-third Sunday this year. If it’s not a ‘silly season’, then at least it seems to be a ‘dull season’. But to think of this long period of ‘time after Pentecost’ in these terms would be a mistake. Our reading from Matthew explains why.

Picture the scene. The eleven apostles were huddled behind locked doors in Jerusalem, thinking that everything was over: Jesus dead and buried. They were feeling guilty about their part in betraying him to his death, and at the same time fearful for their lives. Then came the news from the women folk that Jesus was alive, and that he wanted to meet them back in Galilee. Fearfully, they made the journey back to where they first met Jesus. As they approached the agreed rendezvous, they saw Jesus.

‘They worshipped him,’ we are told, ‘but some doubted.’ ‘Some hesitated’ would be a better rendering of a word that denotes ‘being in two minds’.  What is more, the most straightforward translation of the Greek would say, ‘They worshipped him, but they hesitated’, not ‘some hesitated’. Every one of the eleven was hovering between worship and hesitation. They hesitated lest their eyes were deceiving them; they hesitated about the reception they would get from the one they betrayed.

Even as they hesitated, the victim of their betrayal took the decisive steps of reconciliation: ‘Jesus came to them …’ Amazingly, their betrayal did not have the last word: Jesus is risen! And Jesus did not repay their disloyalty with disloyalty: he came to them! Moreover, their desertion did not invalidate their first calling: ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.’ (3:19) Jesus is about to issue the same call again:

‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Going, therefore, make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.

There you have the ‘mission statement’ of the Church. And it is entirely appropriate that on the first Sunday after the birthday of the Church, Pentecost, that we should gather to consider our mission statement and ask how we are doing. Those who are familiar with this so-called ‘great commission’ may have detected a slightly unfamiliar note when it was read out to us just now. That is because I have doctored the words a little, with Fred’s permission. All our translations say, ‘Go therefore and make disciples …’ Now have a look at your pews paper to see my version: ‘Going therefore, make disciples …’ I made this change to bring out more clearly the Greek sentence structure. Jesus’ command has one main verb, the verb ‘make disciples’. What this consists of is explained in three subsidiary verbs, all in participle form: ‘going … baptising … teaching’.

First of all, then, making disciples is a matter of going. It is not a matter of sitting on our hands and waiting for others to come to us. To pick up from last week, it is about taking chocolate buttons to the high street, into the café and the work place, and offering chocolate there, rather than insisting that folk should come to our chocolate bar. Are we willing to be outward facing? Have we been going out, or sitting on our hands?

And making disciple is about going to all nations – a term used by the Jews to speak of ‘the Gentiles’. Now, telling a bunch of 1^st century Jews that they should go to the Gentiles was radical. As radical as saying to this congregation that we have to go and make disciples of folk who, shock horrors, may not appreciate the beautiful cadences either of the 1970 Scottish Liturgy or of a Byrd anthem. Are we willing? Or do we insist on exclusive membership criteria by the way we act – if they don’t like it, they can stay out?

The second component of making disciples is baptising. If this sounds very ‘churchy’ and exclusive, then it is only because we’ve made it so. For baptism is the sacrament that enacts, affirms and celebrates God’s acceptance of us into God’s community. In so far as it is a rite of passage into any form of club or society, then it is a rite of passage not for joining a gym, but a rowing team. The baptised becomes part of a community, not part of a gathering of individuals. Are we willing to engage in such community making? Or have we been functioning instead as a gym full of individuals, rather than a rowing team pulling together?

Notice that such community making is not an optional extra, because community is of the very essence of the God we worship. We baptise ‘in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.’ Now, whatever else the Trinity may mean, it means that at the heart of God there is plurality, and therefore community. In other words, communion, or inter-personal exchange, is of the essence of the godhead. That is why we read in Genesis that it takes Adam and Eve, a plurality of persons, to image God. Would anyone coming to our midst find that we worship the Trinity by the way we ‘do Church’? Or would they detect instead that by our actions, we actually confess a different god, some stand-alone monad devoid of inter-personal communion at its heart?

The third component in Jesus’ command to make disciples is ‘teaching’. Jesus told the apostles to teach the new communities created by baptism ‘to obey everything that I have commanded you.’ In other words, the Church is to be a learning community. And this learning community is not static, because Jesus’ voice of command did not cease with the Ascension. Remember these words of Jesus from John’s Gospel:

‘I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth.’ (Jn:16:12)

In other words, the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost ensures that Jesus’ voice of command to the Church continues. Do we listen to our master’s voice? Do we pray and listen and talk with each together enough to know what that voice is saying? Do we care? This is a good test: of each of the things we do as a Church, are we willing to say, hand on heart and without any embarrassment, that we do this because we believe that Jesus, through his Spirit, has commanded us so to do?

So there you have it – a three-fold mission statement for the church: to be outward facing by going to where people are, to confess the Trinitarian God by building community, and to be a life-long learning community who heeds the voice of its Lord. A church who seeks to live by this commission receives a gracious promise:

I am with you always, to the end of the age.

That ‘to the end of the age’ is important: the apostles had to learn, painfully, that Jesus was not about to come back and wrap it all up in their life time. Instead, it’s going to be a long-haul for the Church. The Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit is precisely to equip the Church for such a long haul. That is why it is singularly appropriate for the Church calendar to follow Pentecost with a ‘long-haul season’. This is the season when the Church considers and works out its mission.

Let’s remember what kind of church it was who was first given this mission. It was a failed band of apostles who first heard these words of Jesus. Jesus graciously came to this hesitant nucleus of the early church, not to condemn, but to assure them that their failure had not derailed God’s purposes, and that their disloyalty had not annulled their calling. Indeed, he gave them their calling back! They have failed, but they are still central to God’s purposes.

Are we ready, as a hesitant congregation in Newington, to let Jesus come to us to give us the same assurance, and to re-launch us on our mission at the start of the ‘long-haul season’ this year?

Let us pray.

Lord Jesus, come to us in our weakness and commission us again as your church in this locality. By the power of your Spirit equip us for the long haul, and send us out again in the name of your Father and ours. Amen.

1 Peter 1.21, “Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God.” (NRSV)

Introduction

Some years ago, before becoming a student yet again, when I worked for the government in California, our administrative unit would have to go and make reports and suggest policy to elected officials at least once a week. Our boss put a sign over the door which you would see as you went out, which read in capital letters, ‘What are we trying to do?’ The reason was that politicians are unequalled in their ability to obscure the issues and distract from the matter at hand, even sometimes inadvertently and with the best intentions. If we were to get our facts across, we had to stay focused above all on what we were trying to do, and not get distracted. As Christians today, we face an array of distracting challenges to our faith, some sophisticated, some not so sophisticated. Hardly a week goes by that I don’t read of someone deriding the Christian faith as based on a Monty Python-esque little bearded man in the sky. Peter reminds his readers to always be ready to give ‘an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence.’[i] Giving an account of what we think comes naturally to most people; it’s the gentleness and reverence part that’s tricky. All too often, some Christians have defended their faith with a wholesale projection of their worldview, complete with cultural baggage, political commitments, and social preferences. Sadly, it’s not uncommon for such packages to include hostility towards those not sharing them, which is hardly the sort of presentation likely to be viewed as either gentle or reverent. How can we be prepared to do that? The Apostle Peter suggests an answer in his first letter.

Peter’s first letter was likely occasioned by the coming Passover, suggested by his emphasis on the ‘sufferings of Christ.’[ii] Throughout, he wrote of Christ’s passion, what it meant, and Christ’s resurrection, including our text, 1 Peter 1.21, “Through him you have come to trust in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are set on God.” The structure of this text places the emphasis on the middle clause, the resurrection which leads us to trust in God, and is the foundation for our faith and hope. Why would Peter emphasize it? Because it’s the crux that everything hangs on, the validation of Jesus’ claims, the foundation for our hope. Paul wrote, ‘If Christ has not been raised then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.’[iii] Several centuries later, Augustine reflected upon the Resurrection and concluded that it was singularly central to the Christian faith, writing, ‘we are set apart from the pagans by believing that Christ is risen again.’[iv] So if this is the central issue, the one thing we are trying to focus on, we need to ask three questions: ‘Is it reasonable to believe the Resurrection story?’ ‘What does an actual resurrection demonstrate?’ and ‘What does it mean for us today?’

Is the resurrection story real? (History)

One of the least attractive personality types is the abrasive individual who always has to be right about everything. Yet in wanting to avoid that kind of behavior, we have to avoid the twin pitfalls of not wanting to give offense, and not wanting to commit to anything. Since Christ’s resurrection has been challenged, it would be easier to fall back upon calling it allegory, as indeed many parts of the Scriptures contain allegory. However, while we can have faith in things unseen, Peter reminds us that our faith can be anchored in the resurrection, writing we have come to trust in God who raised him from the dead.

There are four basic facts about the Resurrection that the vast majority of critical scholars will agree to: First, the Apostolic proclamation of not only the cross but the resurrection began very early, when the church was in its infancy. The passage at the beginning of 1 Corinthians 15 is now accepted to be not Paul’s writing, but Paul’s citing an early Christian creed, which most scholars agree he received when he visited Peter and James in Jerusalem, as mentioned in Galatians. While the letters of the New Testament are sometimes dismissed as historical evidence because of the ‘time-gap’ between events and their recording in writing, this passage recording crucial material about the Resurrection is dated as being written within two years of Calvary, even by prominent atheist Gerd Lüdemann.[v] The other three basic facts are contained in this passage in 1 Corinthians, so I’ll read it:

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to someone untimely born, he appeared also to me.

The second agreed-upon fact is that Jesus died by Roman crucifixion.[vi] Third, the disciples experienced what they thought were appearances of the risen Jesus, and were thoroughly transformed and willing to die for this belief. Finally, both James, Jesus’ brother and former skeptic, and Paul the persecutor converted following experiences they believed were appearances of the risen Jesus.[vii] These last two, James and Paul, are particularly important, as they provide what’s called ‘hostile testimony’ for the Resurrection. None of this requires a particular view of the inspiration of Scripture, merely that we treat it as we would any other historical record.

While these basic facts don’t lead everyone to faith, they do frustrate the naturalistic theories attempting to explain that Christ could not have risen from the dead. The claim of mass hallucination founders under its own weight, as hallucinations are internal to the brains of individuals, not groups. The claim that the Jewish leaders moved the body fails because had they simply produced some remains, Christianity would never have survived. Claims are also made that the disciples were liars. Variations on this include: the disciples stole Jesus’ body and lied, the disciples covered up the fact that Jesus merely fainted on the cross and survived, and the disciples kept quiet while legends regarding Jesus snowballed. However, as Origen pointed out in the early third century, ‘I think that the clear and certain proof is the argument from the behaviour of the disciples, who devoted themselves to a teaching which involved risking their lives. If they had invented this story that Jesus had risen from the dead, they would not have taught this with such spirit, in addition to the fact that in accordance with this they not only prepared others to despise death but above all despised it themselves.’[viii] While legends did attach to the lives of the apostles in later centuries, we do reliably know that all but John died as martyrs for their faith, not someone one does for a cause one knows is a lie.

Remember what I said about argumentative people who have to be right? The naturalistic theories critiquing the resurrection were actually picked apart by the critics of the resurrection, each targeting rival theories until none were left standing. Swiss theologian Karl Barth concluded, ‘these explanations…have now gone out of currency.’[ix] Ultimately, the only explanation for the events of the Resurrection story that isn’t dismantled is one that goes against what we usually see in nature, namely that Christ actually rose from the dead. But the fact that it’s not natural is the point. As Tom Wright points out, ‘the fact that dead people do not ordinarily rise is itself part of early Christian belief, not an objection to it.’[x]

What does an actual resurrection demonstrate? (Theology)

It is a bit ironic that the most reasonable option turns out to have also been the ‘faith option.’ One can start off with rationalist pre-suppositions and still wind up in the same place as the Christian who arrived there by simple faith as a gift from God. At any rate, the failure of naturalistic theories leaves us with a factual resurrection. But what does this mean? The Resurrection has been described as “the validating event” for Christian theology. Jesus told the Jewish leadership that his miracles showed he was the Son of God,[xi] predicted his coming death and Resurrection, [xii] and also prophesied that his vindication would be the sign of Jonah.

‘An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.’[xiii]

After the Ascension, Peter preached to the believers in Jerusalem that Christ’s Resurrection demonstrated that God had approved his teachings.[xiv] Wolfhart Pannenberg points out that the Resurrection, ‘for a Jew can only mean that God himself has confirmed the pre-Easter activity of Jesus.’[xv]

The resurrection is important because it wouldn’t do for Christ to accomplish something for us with his death, and leave us in the dark about it. God’s people needed to know that something had been accomplished. This is why John’s Gospel emphasizes witnesses to the risen Christ: the women bearing witness, Peter and John seeing the empty tomb and believing, Thomas seeing the risen Christ and believing. When he died and rose again from the dead, it let the followers of Christ’s know that his death was, as our Creed puts it, ‘for us and our salvation.’

The most commonly depicted benefit of the resurrection, that of salvation from sin, is found throughout the New Testament. Just taking Peter as an example, he described the outcome of our faith as the salvation of our souls.[xvi] He writes in 2.24 that Christ fulfilled the expectation of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah when he ‘himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that, free from sins, we might live for righteousness; by his wounds you have been healed.’ What Peter wrote about Christ as our mediator and savior was absolutely true, and overwhelmingly important, but it’s not alone.

Turning from the New Testament to the writings of the next generations, the early church viewed the resurrection as central and physical. The list of authors who hold to this is an endless roll-call of the great early theologians. This is important as their writings, while not authoritative in themselves, are the best interpretive aid to understanding the Scriptures. When one looks at their writings, one finds an interesting array of benefits deriving from Christ’s crucifixion. Irenaeus wrote of Christ’s essentially wiping the slate clean by ‘gathering up all things in himself,’[xvii] then revisiting the story of humanity’s failures and writing over it the narrative of his perfect obedience and sacrifice, much like a loving parent tracing over a child’s scribbled drawing to bring sense and order out of it.[xviii] ‘By the one man’s righteousness, the many will be made righteous.’[xix] Athanasius emphasized that Christ died to win for us the victory over death and the enemy.  Humanity had intruded sin and ultimately death into God’s ordered creation,[xx] but God promised in his new covenant to resolve the problem. The solution was Jesus not sidestepping death, but defeating it by returning to actual life, or as C. S. Lewis put it in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, ‘making death work backwards.’ Clement of Alexandria writes of Christ’s death on the cross revealing God to us fallen people and re-imaging us after humanity’s original divine model.[xxi] All it takes is one perusal of the selfishness, violence, and waste displayed on the evening news to know that our race is in sad need of some re-imaging, we need a reminder that all people are made in God’s image. Of course, such a fix only works if we use the perfect template, Christ, who is, as Paul reminds us, ‘the image of the invisible God.’[xxii]

All of these pictures of redemption can co-exist and support one another within the bounds of the Creed we recite every Sunday. All of these are supported by the resurrection. Yet despite this diversity of expression, the early followers of Jesus agreed upon the tremendous importance of the resurrection and what it meant. This is why the resurrection was a central part of the ‘Old Roman Creed’ the ancestor of our modern ‘Apostles’ Creed,’ which we find in fixed form all over the Mediterranean by the end of the second century. This is why we find the early church worshipping Jesus as divine from the very beginning, incidentally, leaving no time for legends to grow.

What does Christ’s resurrection mean for us? (Praxis)

We as a species have a remarkable ability to deflect reality. We have these big brains, but manage to keep them focused on wee little things. We distract ourselves with routine busyness. Get on the bus – go to work – go to school – get the groceries – pick up the kids – go home – watch TV. We don’t want to think about the big existential questions looming over us like the meaning of life or the end of life. I’m as guilty as anybody – I found out when I was four that one’s pet gerbil doesn’t last forever. Our family’s discussion revealed the shocker that people don’t last forever either, and I extrapolated from that my own mortality, which was unbearable for all of two or three seconds… until I realized I could go out and play and not think about it. That deflection is part of the human condition.

There was a memorable scene in an American television show where two women are in a cancer ward. One character, in the final stages of cancer, is a recent religious convert. The other, just beginning her treatment, tries to dissuade her from her belief in God: ‘There are lots of religions, lots of gods. These stories are just…allegories. They’re for us to derive principles from, not to be taken seriously.’ The first woman, who is facing her own imminent death, says ‘I’m dying. I don’t want allegory. I want answers.’ It’s a brilliant scene because it captures the two of them side by side, one from the reality we prefer to live in, one from the reality we will have to face someday.

But is God’s breaking into our reality (again) just debate fodder for academics? On the contrary, it is absolutely crucial to our daily life as Christians. Peter wrote that God has ‘given us… a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.’[xxiii] The resurrection is our encouragement. This is the source of hope we can hang onto through struggle. When we cry out inwardly in our distress, this gives us something to rest upon.

Unhappy as it is to admit, sometimes that distress is rooted in our awareness of our own disobedience. Fortunately for our wayward race, as Paul expressed it in his letter to the Colossians, ‘God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things…by making peace through the blood of his cross.’[xxiv] If the Resurrection was a factual, historical event, then we can know that we are not isolated from but reconciled to our Holy God. He made us, witnessed our rebellion against him, and was still willing to arrange for our salvation at such great cost.

When we are forced by death or disease to come to grips with the terrifying prospect of mortality in ourselves or our loved ones, we can recall that the divine Christ did not spare himself death. If the Resurrection was a factual, historical event, then we can know that victory over death has been won. Christ’s resurrection is the evidence of ours. God the Father raised his Son from the dead, and he will raise you as well.

Despite our living in an antiseptic age which seeks above all to minimize our discomfort, our culture’s songs and literature still frequently deal with themes of despair. For all the material advantages of the modern world, we still struggle with the uncomfortable realization that at some level ‘all is vanity.’ Beyond that emptiness, within recent history we have come face to face in our own civilization with the kind of overwhelming evil that qualifies as, according to one of our theologians, ‘meaning-destroying horror.’ When we suffer, we can recall that God the Father did not spare his beloved Son the awful suffering of the cross. When we are shocked by evil, we can know that God has demonstrated solidarity with our suffering through horrors via the cross, and we know about this because Christ rose from the dead.

We read in the Old Testament that God called a people to himself. From the first time when he called a people to him to now, he will not forget his people. The Resurrection was and is God’s announcement to the world that he has not forgotten his people. The God who is eternal, who knows all things, wants us to know that despite our rebellion, we matter to him and we are not forgotten.

God has also sought to share his presence with us, represented symbolically by the pillar of fire and the temple, and more concretely in the Incarnation, and the Spirit’s dwelling in us. Because of the Resurrection, we can now know he will always be with us, in the Eucharist, through our suffering, through our mortality, and even out the other side of it. God wants us to know he will always be with us, always shaping us into his image.

Conclusion

I think it’s reasonable to conclude that the Resurrection was a real, physical event. It showed the world what God had accomplished at the cross. Knowing this gives us a living hope to carry through our lives, as well as good news to share with others. With the ancient liturgies of the church, we can proclaim, ‘Christ is risen.’ We can confidently rest our faith in that truth on a rephrasing of our text in 1 Peter 1.21: ‘Because God raised Christ from the dead and gave him glory, let us trust in our God, and rest our faith and hope in him.’