Parish Of Opawa St Martins Blog

In the movie The Dead Poets Society Robin Williams stars as the new English teacher at a prestigious boys school who brings new and refreshing teaching methods onto a campus that is ill prepared for them. At first, the boys are encouraged to rip out pages from the approved text book as sign that they are to abandon the old ways and embrace a new pedagogy. For the headmaster, a red flag goes up when the boys disrupt the studious silence of the school as they are taken out into playground during class time to engage in what might be called the left and right hemispheres of the brain. The teacher has the boys standing on their desks to see the world from a different angle. His inspiring and unorthodox teaching style helped the boys find healing for their wounds, discover the deep desires of the heart and their dreams for the future. The headmaster, however, is sees this as a threat. Inspiring the students is last thing that should be happening. When one of the boys finds that his emerging identity is in conflict with his bullying and controlling father and the boy commits suicide, the headmaster seizes his opportunity. In the ensuing witch hunt, influential parents, board members and the headmaster in a play for power, turn on the teacher who is unceremoniously sacked from the school. But the winner in the story is truth. It is very clear that the boys can see what has happened. They were in the presence of a gifted teacher who had taken them on a journey in search of truth. The reason the teacher was forced to leave was because certain parents and a certain headmaster were unable to face the truth of their limitations, nor could they face the truth of who the boys were becoming. Some of the boys colluded with the witch hunt to save their own butts. Being on the winning side was seemed a good idea at the time, but they knew they had participated in a lie, and deep down they knew that the lie diminished their souls.

The teacher in this story is a figure of Christ, who is also inviting us on a journey, a journey of faith. Last week we noted that Jesus had reached a turning point in his ministry. He was beginning his journey to Jerusalem, and a new phase in which he will begin to train his disciples to be a core group; the nucleus of this thing that we will soon call Church. We often note the forgiveness of God, the love and compassion and the mercy of God. But the first instruction the disciples receive from Jesus is about the demands and expectations that God has of those who would be followers of Jesus. Brothers and sisters, the gospel before us today is not an easy message. Having invited them to be his followers, the first things Jesus tells the disciples is that this journey of faith is going to involve danger and risk; this will be a costly journey. It will take him to Jerusalem and once there he will undergo great suffering at the hands of the religious leaders and be killed, and on the third day be raised. He goes on to say that any who want to become a disciple must take up their cross also and follow him. Jesus is absolutely clear. Being a follower is not going to be a bunch of fluffies. It will involve engagement in the nitty-gritty of life and death, the struggle against small mindedness and roots of human sinfulness. Disciples of Jesus need to be prepared for this. They will need stamina and resilience; they will have to be tough, and they must be ready for the cost.

There is a cost to being a follower of Jesus perhaps for two reasons. One is that Jesus is committed to loving the world and all of us within it. A love that is committed to staying in relationship will do so even when it hurts. On a simple level, that means living the vision that St Paul offers in 1 Corinthians 13. Love is not selfish or rude. It does not insist on its own way. Love is patient. Love is kind. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. God is the love that stays connected to us even when we are messing things up. Love does not run away when things are getting difficult. This is the love that the teacher demonstrates in the movie. When the authorities start bullying him to do things the way they want; the teacher could have caved in to their demands. But he did not. He stood by them even though he knew that in doing so, his job and his career would be at risk. Jesus offers this kind of love. Jesus is the love bears all things, endures all things and hopes all things. He calls us to be ambassadors of this love, even when it means putting aside our own agenda, and even when it means risking our reputation and well being. This is the beginning of what Jesus means when he calls us to take up our cross. He calls us to share a Love that looks beyond ourselves.

The second reason that being a follower of Jesus will be costly is because Jesus is Truth. As he goes about his ministry he exposes truth, and speaks truth. There will be many who will not like this. This was the experience of Jeremiah too. Jeremiah’s call to be a prophet was strong. He describes the Word of God as being like beautiful food, almost like bait on the end of a fishing line. Once the food is swallowed, he finds himself irrevocably hooked by God. Jeremiah says in his prayer that the word of God is a delight, a source of joy to him, such that his mandate for being a prophet has become the overriding reality of his life. But the problem for Jeremiah is that the task God gives presents a heavy burden. Jeremiah is sent to the king and nobles of Jerusalem to give them an unpalatable message: that the King of Babylon will prevail against them; that the Egyptians will turn out to be a hopeless, unreliable, and self interested ally who will disappear when the crunch comes; and that Jerusalem should prepare a peaceful surrender rather than a foolhardy attempt to defend itself. Poor Jeremiah is accused of treason and of undermining the morale of the people. At various points he is thrown down a well, left for dead, put in stocks, and generally mocked by everyone. He is left without friends, a social outcast; just like the teacher in the movie. In hindsight, Jeremiah turned out to be the only prophet who spoke realistic truth. The advice of all the others became hollow words. Our reading today is his no holds barred prayer of lament, in which Jeremiah complains to God in a pretty forthright manner about the fact that he has become socially isolated. He says to God that he is in continual pain because of the heavy and demanding call that God has placed upon him. The point of course: Jeremiah has been faithful to the demanding call of God, and it’s brought nothing but trouble. And yet God gives Jeremiah hope and strength to continue. This will be the story of Jesus. He knows that the path before his will be fraught with danger, that his disciples will be at risk as well, and that they will need to be well resourced and well trained to cope with what is to come. So it will be with us. The journey with Jesus will require endurance and the ability to stick to the task even when everything looks wrong. It will involve taking up the cross.

Up until now the disciples have really only witnessed the upside of being a disciple. Jesus has celebrity status at this point in the story. The temptations for the disciples were to think the journey of faith would all be about fame, being popular, riding in like the lone ranger to the rescue with yet another miracle, the chance to watch Jesus put the authorities down with yet another wise crack. So Jesus has to tell them that the real task of being a disciple is still to be discovered. It will be about loving others even if it means putting your own life at risk. It will involve facing the painful truth about themselves and speaking truth to people who will not want to hear it. In short, it will mean disciples who can be brave and courageous for God, but also disciples who understand the humble servanthood that the gospel requires. St Paul described this in terms of allowing our egos to die and putting our God given gifts at the service of the Gospel for Christ’s sake. It may mean that God calls us to be the teacher of the movie Dead Poets Society, not to be the hero, but for the sake of God’s goodness, love and truth, and for the sake of Christ and the Good News he died to bring us.

This why we rehearse the story of Jesus’ death Sunday by Sunday as we celebrate the Eucharist. It reminds us that our lives are to be a living sermon that demonstrates a love that looks beyond ourselves, a love that is surprisingly unafraid and free. The Good News is that suffering and death never have the last word. God says to Jeremiah, “I am with you. I will deliver, I will redeem”. The witness of Jeremiah is that his prayer expressing his disappointment, by the grace of God, turns to hope and trust. The more risk we are able to take for God, the more we find that God’s restoring, creative presence can be seen and trusted. Jesus said, “Take up your cross.” In other words, be brave in your loving and courageous in seeking truth. And after he was raised from the dead Jesus also said, “Do not be afraid. I am with you to the end of world.” That is absolutely clear. That is good news and that is our hope.

The gospel today contains a turning point in the story of Jesus. Jesus has been faced a great deal of hostility in his ministry. This hostility has been growing, especially after the episode we reflected on last Sunday when Jesus abolishes the traditions around the food laws, thus beginning the process of tearing down the fences that blocked access to the table of the kingdom; fences and hoops that had been erected by religious leaders of his day. As you can imagine, the religious leaders were people with long memories and while Jesus may have got one over them this time, they will be back later and at an opportune time with big sticks with which to strike back at Jesus.

So now Jesus turns away from Galilee and the crowds to concentrate on forming the disciples. His goal will be to make them into a nucleus, a core group, who would become the new people of God, soon to be called the Church. This is going to be journey of trust and of growing in faith. It will involve going up to Jerusalem where Jesus will suffer and die, and it will take the disciples on an adventure that will transform their lives in ways they can never imagine. For the disciples, this will be a pilgrimage. One of the downsides of being in New Zealand, so far from the ancient holy places in the Middle East and in Europe, is that we don’t tend to go on pilgrimages to ancient holy places very often. If you ever get the chance to go on a pilgrimage: take it! They are lots of fun. They also may involve an arduous journey and much preparation. England has a number of places of pilgrimage. Elizabeth and I went to Walsingham in the late 1980s where there were bus loads of people coming to keep a religious festival. There were amazing processions that went for miles all the way around the town. There was an amazing range of leaders from all sorts of religious traditions wearing funny hats. People went to a sacred well to wash in water that was said to have healing qualities. There was incense, people chanting prayers everywhere. The pubs were bulging. The shops were full of trinkets. The atmosphere was vibrant and electric.

One of the reasons why people came on these pilgrimages was so that they could be taught the faith, not just hear about it, but so that they could physically live into it and enjoy a time of deep fellowship and prayer and closeness to God. Lots of the people there had made arduous journeys to get there. They were enjoying making new friends, and they were enjoying a greater intimacy with God. But one of the key things people were looking for was a closer connection with God, and a chance to deepen their faith and to be refreshed in their faith journey.

Many people found Jesus a confusing person. It was hard to work him out. He was sometimes elusive, going away into the mountains to pray or walking on water instead of travelling in the boat. He spoke in riddles and parables that some people found difficult to understand. Some people thought he was Jeremiah. Some said he was John the Baptist. Some said he was Elijah. In a flash of insight, Peter sees Jesus for who he really is: The Messiah, the Son of the Living God. Peter has been listening to the teaching of Jesus now for quite a while. He has been mesmerised by what he has heard. He is seeking faith, and the gift of faith has been granted to him.

Faith is not something we conjure up. It is not a package of beliefs we get by learning a creed off by heart or a formula we learn from a book. It is relationship and it is a journey. That is why a pilgrimage can be important, and why the imagery of pilgrimage and journeying is so prominent all through the bible. It reminds us that faith is a journey, that we need lots of time – leisurely ‘journeying together’ for that relationship to deepen and grow. We are all on a journey with God, and we are here because we are seekers, wanting to know Jesus more and grow closer to him.

Isaiah talks about listening to God, as we heard in the first reading before us today. At this point in Isaiah’s poetry, the prophet is still addressing the faithful in exile. The Babylonians are most probably the mockers and the revilers. They are the ones who mock Israel’s particular identity and rub in their status as defeated prisoners. Yet, the prophet invites them to recall the miraculous blessing God has given to Israel in the most unlikely circumstances. Abraham and Sarah were comforted long ago with the birth of Isaac in old age and they went out into the unknown because they lived into a future God was promising but was yet still unseen. So now for the exiles, the force of “new creation” will be enacted on the wounded and beloved people. The promise of a new beginning is not the only reason for listening to God. The people of Israel are invited to trust the teaching of God, which will be transformative, durable and reliable. God is inviting them to be a brave people, a people of courage, to live again into a counter identity rooted in God’s promise, as opposed to the expectations of the imperial and secular power brokers of the day.

So now, Peter has come to recognise Jesus as the trustworthy, reliable and durable Word-Made-Flesh. In a flash of insight given by God, he sees that Jesus is God’s unique agent of God’s restoration, healing, life and hope. We see in Peter the beginning of faith, the recognition of who Jesus is and a longing to be close to him, to listen to him, and to travel with him.

And that is our task. The journey of faith is not so much about acquiring knowledge about God, or knowledge about the bible or about the Christian faith, although this kind of study is very important. It is most of all about going on a journey with Jesus, being attentive to him in our prayer so that we begin to think the way he does, act as he would, and speak as he would. In other words, our hearts and our minds grow to be more and more Christlike. This is something that the grace of God does in us as we grow closer to Christ and seek to be more like him. This is the process of growing to be at one with God. I have heard many sermons say that when Jesus died he saved us from our sins. But the process of growing to be at one with God is much more than having sins wiped away so that we can be close to him. As we are invited to grow to be more and more like Christ, the Spirit of God elevates us into a new state of being. Greek Christians call this a process of Deification, in which the Spirit of God acts to raise us up to be more and more like Christ. So when Jesus tells Peter that on this rock I will build my church, he is saying that as we grow closer to him and more like him, he will make us into a temple made with people, a temple that will reflect his glory.

So today, Jesus is inviting us all to begin a journey. You may have been on this journey for a while, but as St Theresa of Avila said, God invites us to begin again often, to treat each point in our journey with God as a new starting point. So will you come on a journey? Well, be warned that this may not be an easy journey. The journey that Jesus travelling is a journey that involved in the struggle against injustice and the roots of human sinfulness. That means that the journey for Jesus will be a journey to the cross. Along the way, he will have to show the disciples that being like Jesus will involve servanthood, humility, self giving, and commitment.

But this will also be the most life giving journey of all. For being close to Christ is to be filled with his joy and hope and love. The closer we are to him, the more we know him, the more we will be filled with his life, his peace and his joy. He will make us into his holy people, a royal priesthood, a people after his own heart, and everything else will seem less important. This is what he is promising to do for Peter in the text before us today. He invites us to join him on the journey as well, to be brave enough to go on a journey of faith as Abraham and Sarah did, trusting only the promise of God. Jesus is beckoning you too, to come on a journey of faith, to allow him to make you into one of the building blocks of the kingdom, and to go on a most amazing adventure with God and his holy people. Thanks be to God.

The people of Israel were God’s chosen people. God had called Abraham and Sarah and made them a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people after his own heart. And then down through the ages God continue to call them and to nurture them. God was with them when they went down into Egypt. He called and sent Moses to be their leader when it was time to call them out. God gave them the law, made a covenant with them and gave them the Promised Land in which to make a dwelling.

It is hard for us to understand what it meant to be the chosen people of God. It is more likely that we will think of “being chosen” in negative terms. Kiwi people tend to think that anyone who thinks they are special in some way need to be brought down to size and kept in their place. Sir Ed Hillary is probably a very good example of a person who has a special place in our history, and yet when he was alive he insisted that he was just an ordinary kiwi bloke. Goodness knows if we let anyone think they are special they will get swollen heads. But this is not the way the bible portrays God’s relationship with Israel. Israel is often thought of as bride, someone God’s longs to seduce, to be with. It’s a love story where God and Israel are spouses enjoying a loving and faithful relationship. The relationship is to be a blessing to the world, not an opportunity to gain power or status or to make people feel superiour. Israel’s mission was to engage with God in such a way that they would be a blessing to others. So the biblical witness is quite clear. The people of Israel are God’s chosen people. Jesus was Jewish, and through him Gentile Christians are grafted on to the tree of Israel.

Having said that the Kiwi psyche is well attuned to any sign of arrogance that can come from a group viewing itself as the chosen and special ones. Rules can be made to bolster the identity of the chosen ones, to make clear who is in and who is out, who is special and who is not. In the contemporary situation, notice now the secular drive in the United States to “gain control of our borders” and exclude “illegal aliens”. The questions on the immigration cards that one fills in now when you enter the USA are classic. “Are you a terrorist?” is one of them. The rules become a fence around the table so that only the special ones can get there. If we imagine the kingdom of God as a table around which the people of God are seated, with Jesus as the host, the laws of the Pharisees have become a fence. Follow the rules they say, and you can sit with us at our table. Naturally, being in the right ethnic group all helped.

The prophecy of Isaiah though, radically expands the vision of God’s kingdom. The first reading today was addressed to the exiles not long after they had returned home from Babylon. Here God is the exile-breaker. That is God’s identity. He wants to end alienation and loneliness. God intends a homecoming for everyone. He wants to be in communion, to be in community with all peoples. Those who love God’s name, who want to be God’s servants, who want to hold fast to deep and close covenant relationship with God: these people will be welcomed by God into the kingdom.

But that is a radical programme for a community who just want to celebrate its chosen-ness. There were plenty of communities who read Isaiah’s vision but thought it in need of serious correction. The Qumran community for example, was a community which removed itself and went out into the desert to live a radically religious life of simplicity and austerity. When they read these passages in the book of Isaiah, they said, “Yes, we can include Gentiles.” But, they said, what Isaiah meant to say is that there will be a demanding initiation process for Gentiles, and once they are in there will still be an ordered hierarchy, which they described in detail. Gentile converts, of course, found that their place was a long way down the pecking order.

So the scene is set. Jesus knows Isaiah’s prophecies. In fact, Isaiah’s vision shapes a great deal of Jesus’ own self understanding. So Jesus begins to remove the metaphorical fence, the teaching of the religious people of his day that made it nearly impossible for you and me to sit at the table of God. Out go the food rules, the requirement for washing hands and so on. Jesus is putting in place Isaiah’s vision in all its radical simplicity: what matters is the state of our hearts, our openness to God, our ability to come to him with humble hearts. Out go the restrictions on other ethnic groups, all will gather together around one table. This is the point of being the priestly people of God, a holy nation. It’s not so that we can bolster up a privileged place with God, not to show that we are more holy than everyone else, and certainly not to prove that I am in and you are out or that I am more special than you are. The whole point of being a priestly people is to enable others to be in relation with God. Jesus was saying that the rules are stopping that, so then, they have to go. And that was Jesus was doing, and it became one of the reasons that Jesus found himself on the wrong side of the authorities.

Brothers and sisters, this is risky stuff. Building fences is such a human thing to do. Fences are so easy to build: the unwritten rules that send signals that children are not allowed because they make a noise or leave a mess; the unwritten rules that say only middle class white people are allowed here. What fences have we put up? The gospel calls us to tear them down!

Breaking down the fences to enable people to be with God is what we are to be about. That is what it means to be part of the priesthood of all believers. It means that all of us are tasked with removing barriers between people and God. Our task is to present God to others, to speak our faith with confidence and joy and hope; a hope that comes from knowing that God makes room for all and gives everyone who wants to know him a place to dwell and a future to live into.

Interestingly, Jesus was well aware of this. But reforming a few eating rules here and there was one thing. The rubber hit the road when he met the Canaanite woman in the Gentile region of Tyre and Sidon. Suddenly all the prejudices he was brought up with came to the fore. When she asks for help he insults her by calling her a “gentile dog”. Her response shows a great deal of wit. “Yes but even the dogs eat the crumbs from under your table.”

Heavy stuff! Here is Jesus showing no compassion; here is Jesus having to be reminded of his mission and the identity that God is calling him into. And that reminder is coming from an outsider: a gentile woman. That would have been a hit to the ego if ever there was one. Here is Jesus still learning. Dare I say it, God is showing Jesus something through this woman, calling him deeper into a new identity and a new way of being?

The unnamed woman is a person on the edge of society. People on the edge know what it is like to suffer, to be treated badly, to be ignored, to be under valued. That is why we need to listen to them because they are the ones who understand the gospel so clearly. They know what it is to receive God’s grace and to hear that they are profoundly loved by God. They know what it means to be welcomed by God and given a place at the table. Today, Jesus shows that he is big enough to learn about God from an outsider, from someone on the edge.

So in the words of Isaiah, join yourselves to the Lord once again. Come and eat and drink bread and wine together with the Lord. Come with humble hearts, hearts ready for God to enlarge to make room for the stranger. Listen to what the stranger has to say about God. And know this. God is one who ends exile and loneliness and isolation. We know that because God has already welcomed you and me. He is bringing you home and providing a dwelling place for you in his temple forever and ever.

We are gathered here today to celebrate one of our parish’s special days, the Patronal Festival for the church of St Anne. Sermons on St Anne in this parish traditionally begin by saying that we know virtually nothing about St Anne. We note every year that St Anne does not appear in the New Testament; and that the tradition that we have received really comes from mediaeval piety about Mary, sometimes called Mariology (which is just a fancy word meaning “Mary talk” or talk about Mary). According to this Mariology, the story of St Anne is a construction based on the life of Hannah, the mother of Samuel in the First Testament. Hence we have the name Anne, which is a variant of Hannah.

According this legend, St Anne becoming the mother of the Virgin Mary comes about in a miraculous way. God works a miracle! Anne and her husband Joachim are devout and righteous but they are also childless. Both Anne and Joachim are visited by angels, they meet at the golden gate at Jerusalem and kiss, and hey presto, Mary is conceived and eventually she is born. If anyone is keen to offer a re-enactment today, please feel free, although given the Anglo-Saxon heritage of many of us, we would appreciate it if any displays of affection don’t go too far!

So today we are going to think a little about miracles, because a miracle is at the centre of this story about St Anne. The miracles of God that we hear of all through the bible present a range of problems to the modern mind. On the one hand we believe that God cares for everyone equally, and loves everyone to the same degree. Yet in the stories of miracles, it appears to modern ears that God singles out certain people for special attention. And that becomes puzzling for some people. We cover miracles in year 7 and 8 at St Mark’s school, and every year someone will ask, “If God performed a miracle for that person, what about all the others who missed out?” Well that is a good question and a fair one that sharpens the dilemma around the issue of miracles; why is it that one person experiences a miracle and the other does not? We all pray for them from time to time. But the idea that God is able to single some people out for salvation, while leaving others to perish or suffer is one of the questions that will arise.

The underlying question here is really about the nature of God, and our ability to understand God. Sometimes we find ourselves disappointed with God, even angry with God for letting us down somehow. But more often than not, when we look back, it is our understanding of God that has had to change. Or we have learned more about ourselves and we find we have changed in some way too.

Nevertheless, in the bible God’s care for his people is often expressed through a miracle. That is the point of the miracle of St Anne conceiving Mary. Anne and Joachim are people who know who to trust, how to wait on God. And God coming to them is an expression of his great love for them. Essentially, that is what miracles are. They are stories and word pictures of the breakthrough of God’s extraordinary love and care that have come down to us from previous generations of Christians. These experiences of God’s love are so profound and so life changing, that the biblical writers and saints of old describe them to us in the language of miracles. That means miracles can still happen and still do happen, because God is always longing to love us just as profoundly today as he loved the people of ages past. Miracles of all shapes and sizes are happening all around us everyday, and one of our spiritual tasks is that of discernment: taking time each day to notice the points in our lives where God’s love has touched us, to recognise the miracle and then offer thanks to God for those moments. Perhaps that was St Anne’s gift, not so much that she became pregnant, but that she was able to discern that moment as a gift from God, a gift of profound love and care.

After all the earthquakes and aftershocks there has been the odd mention of miracles. It was said that it was a miracle that no one died in our Cathedral on 22 February. Usually when we talk about miracles in this way, we are thinking of something unlikely happening, or the near impossible. For instance, we hear of a huge pile up of cars on the road, but this one driver escaped uninjured. Someone survives for days under the rubble of a collapsed building and is rescued, and it’s a miracle. Yes, these things are miracles, but this kind of way of talking about miracles leaves out God. It just concentrates on the unusual event, but not on what God has done or is doing. These are stories of something freakish happening, statistical oddities. But a miracle in the Christian sense of the word is much more than this. A miracle is something that God does, and it’s about being brought close to God, to a point where we know we held profoundly in God’s love and care. Again, this is why we remember St Anne. We might know little about her. But we do know that Jesus was fully human, that therefore he had a grandmother. The tradition being transmitted to us is that his grandmother was a person of prayer, someone who trusted God, and who knew what it was like to be loved by God. That is the point of the legends about St Anne, and I am sure she would have passed that knowledge on to the young Jesus when he was born.

Nevertheless, the other side of this subject concerns the people who are desperate for a miracle and nothing happens. As we gather today there are people in Somalia and the horn of Africa who are desperately hungry, hungrier than we can ever imagine. Some will die today, and tomorrow, and the next day. Some of the dead will be children. Does God care about them? Do we care?

We ought to be praying every day for a miracle to happen for them. Not to pray for them is neglect. It may be that nothing miraculous will happen for them. But that is not a cause for us to doubt God’s love and care for them. It is not possible for us to understand all the mysteries of God. But what we do know from the countless stories all through the bible and from the saints of old, is that God’s love is steadfast and can be trusted, even if our lives at the present seem full of unresolved pain or full of injustices that leave us feeling numb.

The question is, does God care, and do we care? Yes, of course God cares. Our care is expressed through our prayer, which we pray repeatedly and often for those who are in severe need. But are care does not end there. All through the bible God calls his people to put their prayer into action. The gospel calls us to care for the stranger, to feed the hungry, to provide water for the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to care for the sick, to visit those who are in prison. We do that because we already know what it means to be loved by God, and because we want to pass on the grace we have received to others. And when we face Jesus at the last day, we will have to front up to the extent we have been there for others, passing on to them God’s love and care.

The miracle we experience Sunday by Sunday takes place here at this table. The miracle is that Jesus is here, present in this celebration. He is here offering his life. He is making present the same costly love that he displayed on the cross. He feeds us with his body and blood. Having experienced the miracle here, may the grace of God help us see the miracle of God’s love present in the places we live and work and play, and may God open our hearts to extend the love and care we have received from God to those we meet and to those in need.

Today the gospel before us offers three more parables of Jesus, incidentally, these are also from the Wisdom Tradition. We have the parable of the mustard seed and the parable of the leaven, then another pair of parables: the pearl of great price and the parable of the discovered treasure; and finally the parable of the dragnet.

The middle pairing of parables, the pearl of great price and the parable of the discovered treasure is where we will focus today. These parables are telling us how valuable the wisdom of Jesus is, what it is worth, what it costs us. Job, another wisdom book in the bible, says that the price of wisdom is beyond pearls. These parables are about the discovery of the most precious wisdom of all, the wisdom of Jesus, which is tasted in the kingdom of God.

A parallel can be drawn here between some of the activities of this parish, and these parables. Some of us enjoy greatly selling things. We enjoy the fair. We seem to enjoy collecting up other people’s junk and re-cycling it through the white elephant stall. Just the other day some people started up a regular second hand book stall. It would be as if we were rummaging through all the junk that people have donated, and finding a piece of priceless treasure. I guess that is part of the charm of the white elephant, the possibility, however remote, that there might actually be something incredibly valuable hidden in all the stuff. Maybe we are actually secret gamblers running jumble sales in the hope of finding something of value, or maybe we are hoping that we might stumble across someone’s unclaimed lotto ticket.

If we did find something really valuable, our reaction might not be the same as the merchant in the parable. The merchant sold everything he had so that he could obtain this one pearl. That looks ridiculous, but that is the way the parables of Jesus work. It is the extreme details in the story that make us sit up, that drive the point home. The point is that the wisdom of Jesus is beyond price. It is worth more than anything we can every own. Elsewhere in the New Testament St Paul describes the wisdom of the gospel as foolishness in the eyes of the world. And that is exactly what it looks like to others if you have tasted the joy of the kingdom is such a way that everything that our culture says is important, is suddenly put into perspective. When we taste the joy of the kingdom, when we see the wisdom of Christ and vision of God’s love and God’s future, everything else is put in its place and seems less important. Most of us experienced this on some level during the earthquakes. In the midst of disaster lots of things we thought were important were put into another perspective. Well, when we taste the goodness of God, God has the same effect on us, other things are relativised. And when we become committed to God’s vision of the kingdom, it can make us look weird in the eyes of others, even those nearest and dearest to us. But that does not matter anymore, even though the wisdom of God requires the greatest commitment, everything we have once and for all, and for all our lives.

This kind of commitment is sounds odd and looks odd in our world today for many reasons. One is that it is so hard for any of us to see our lives as a single unity, to be committed to one thing. If we think about a young person starting out in life today, we know that person is likely to have more than one career change before they retire. Most products we buy are regarded as consumables, and they don’t last long. So many aspects of our lives are temporary and short term. Compare that with our grandparent’s generation; many of them could have expected to have one career, even one employer for all of their working life. Loyalty between employee and employer was valued highly and expected. But in our day that is no longer a reality. Commitments made in terms relationships are often not as life long as they once were. For what ever reason people end up moving on from whatever commitments they had. After a while this begins to affect the whole way we approach life, even the Christian faith. The total commitment that Jesus is talking about sounds foreign and looks odd.

It looks odd, not just because most of us know that our lives may have to take different paths later on because the economy might crash, or a natural disaster may come upon us, or whatever. But also our culture values choice as one of the highest values. Freedom of choice is central to many of the assumptions about the way our society works. We are therefore suspicious of making any commitments that might limit our freedom of choice. Keeping options open is a barrier to making commitments.

So making the kind of total commitment that Jesus is talking about looks odd in our world, and anyone who has made such a commitment will look strange as well. But this is the kind of loyalty that is comes when we know we have touched by Love and having tasted it we can’t imagine being connected to anyone else. Christ becomes the person of value, more precious than anything or anyone else. The flip side of that is that this is the way Christ sees you and me. He sees in us the image of God, a loveable person of unsurpassing value. He wants us to experience his love, to taste it, so that having discovered what it is to be loved by God remaining connected to that love becomes the only thing of any importance, of any value. So we come to the crucial question being put before us. Can you as a baptised Christian, a follower of Jesus, living in the kind of world we have described this morning, make such a commitment to knowing Jesus, to being with him, to being his friend? Or would you see it as limiting your options, or as some kind of burden?

So we might look strange, but that others think doesn’t matter, because taking time to be with Christ is everything. That is the point of the pearl of great price. Jesus is the pearl. Does it cost more today to obtain that pearl than it did for other generations? Maybe so, maybe not. That is not the question. The question is, are you up for obtaining that pearl? Even if it does limit other options; even if it means you are giving up freedom to choose something else, none of that will matter once we experience the joy of knowing Jesus, of knowing we belong to him and he belongs to us. It’s a love story. Many of us have been in love and especially in those early stages all we want to do is be together. Think of the newly in love couple who talk all night, they were so enjoying each other’s company that they forgot the time and hey presto, it’s dawn. That is the kind of relationship Jesus wants with us. He wants to spend time with you and longs for you to be with him. The joy of being with him is the pearl of great price, the hidden treasure. The irony is that once we make that commitment, our lives do have stability because we become part of God’s one story of hope and salvation. And divine grace opens up a life committed to Christ to a fulfilment and freedom that truly makes us happy, a heavenly happiness that lasts forever into eternity.

Before we close, there are some more frightening words about gnashing of teeth and furnaces of fire, which may function as a warning against slackness in the community of faith. But as with last Sunday’s reading about the weeds in the field, these words are also intended to reassure the Christian community that judgement is God’s business, not ours, and that we are to trust that God will put wrongs to right so we can refrain from rushing to make hasty judgements against others.

Our task today: to reach for that pearl of great price. We are here because we have done so. Today God affirms you in that choice. God will give you the fullness of joy, and all the work he has begun in you, he will bring to completion.

Weeds are the bane of every gardener’s life. They are a real pest, even a disincentive to gardening. No matter how well the soil has been prepared, weeds always sprout, and they always do much better than the crop that is supposed to be growing in that patch. This year because of the disruption of the earthquake quite a few weeds in my garden got out of control, and according to gardening folklore if you let the weeds get out of control in one year, one faces seven years of a huge amount of weed seed growing at the rate of knots each spring. They are an unwanted, destructive nuisance, a pain in the neck. This is the dynamic that Jesus is alluding to in the parable before us today. We are told about the weed seed that grows in the midst of the crop grown by the farmer.

Two weeks ago we mentioned that Matthew sees Jesus as the Wisdom of God in human form. That is partly the reason why we have a reading from the Wisdom of Solomon today, and on a few other Sunday’s this year. This book comes from the Wisdom tradition. It was known to first century Christians and Jews and used by them as sacred scripture. The parable before us today has a Wisdom tradition flavour to it. The Wisdom tradition is a voice for patience and tolerance and for leaving the business of judgment to God. That is what this parable is advocating too.

As an aside, you might be interested to know that the Revised Common Lectionary that our church requires us to use had two options for the Old Testament readings at this time of the year (between Trinity Sunday and Christ the King Sunday). Your vicar is choosing to use the related readings option which means that as we go through a gospel systematically Sunday by Sunday, the Old Testament reading is one that is related to it. This is the way the New Testament writers approached the formation of the gospels. As they told each episode of the story of Jesus they saw a passage of the Old Testament behind it, because they want us to see that Christ as the focal point of all our human experiences. So what we are doing each Sunday is that as we listen to the readings we are being invited into a deeper relationship with Christ.

So Christ, the Wisdom of God, lays a parable before us about the weeds in the field. If we apply this to the church, we know that within the community of faith there is a mixture of good and bad people. I am sure we all know who should be treated as one of the weeds! Sometimes church people do some really evil things. We are all aware of Christian people who have done a great deal of harm to others. The behaviour of some is nothing short of scandalous causing people to want to have nothing at all to do with the Christian faith. When Jesus told this parable it is likely that he was helping his followers come to grips with the fact that he himself was being rejected by people who were very religious. The tricky aspect to this is that conflict within a faith community can trigger deep responses from the gut, so that we respond with a great deal of anger and rage that can lead to drives for purity, and sadly, even violent behaviour.

So this parable is about how the church should approach situations where there is a threat to the Good News taking root and growing. There are many in the history of the church who have taken the approach of the impetuous servants in the parable. The instinct to conduct a drive for purity is never far away. For instance, the medieval church had a whole department and specialist clergy for conducting the inquisition, which was very successful in countries like Spain in terms of creating a “pure church”. The spin off for countries like Spain is that they were spared the violence of the reformation in the 16th century. But the inquisition, and indeed the violence of the reformation as well which was also about two sides of an argument trying to drive out sinful catholics or protestants (depending on which side of the fence you were on), has left behind a terrible legacy of prejudice and a memory of violence unbecoming of Christian people. The urge to root out the destructive sinner is a temptation always lurking somewhere in human nature. The force of that is being felt in the Anglican Communion at the moment, where many are striving to introduce a covenant that will be able to impose “relational consequences” on those members of the Anglican Communion deemed to be sinners. If only the Kingdom of God could be made up of good and holy people; and if only we could remove all the sinners. Naturally, that requires that some fall into the temptation of thinking they are in a position to claim that they are the elite followers of Jesus, and that is where we begin to get into problems.

The problem with this is that all of us are human and all of us are equally in need of God’s healing and forgiveness. Archbishop Rowan Williams in his book Silence and Honeycakes describes the desert monk coming into the gathering of his fellow brothers to accuse another of his brethren of a sinful misdemeanour. As he does so, the community requires him to carry a bucket of water; the bucket being full of holes so that as he talks the water runs out on the ground. The point: as he is making his accusation, he must also be aware of his own sins that are running out of his leaky bucket as he speaks. All of us are human; none of us are perfect, all of us need God’s healing and forgiveness.

So in the parable Jesus is saying that a “purge” or a drive for purity is not his approach, and it is not to be ours. Like the wise farmer, he knows that pulling up weeds can do more harm than good. The same thing happens when we try and ban a movie or a book. In attempting to suppress harmful or unsavoury ideas all that happens is that we give the book or the movie more publicity and increase the number of readers and viewers going along to find out what all the fuss is about.

Obviously there are exceptions. Dietrich Bonhoeffer is an example of a Christian who decided that killing Hitler was necessary to stop the madness of the brutal war ravaging Europe. Sometimes there are people so harmful that they have to be removed to protect the vulnerable. But in general, if freedom of speech is denied, dictators flourish and the conditions are created for harmful misuse of power. That can destroy the very thing that Christian people long and pray for: the freedom to sow the Word of God and the freedom to practice our faith.

Like the patient farmer, Jesus is urging patience, which is a theme that will come up many times in these agricultural parables. We are living in a period between Christ’s first coming and the final culmination of the Kingdom. We have to expect that the community of faith will be made up of saints and sinners. Like the farmer who attempts to remove the weeds, we can make mistakes in distinguishing who is the saint and who is the sinner. Jesus is saying that human judgement is not sound enough to be certain. We can throw out “the baby with the bathwater” before we realise what’s happened. Our zeal for the purge can do a great deal more harm than good. And that is no better illustrated than in the death of Jesus himself, when those who thought they were doing the right thing for God actually put the Son of God to death. That is the risk when we make hasty judgements. We end up pushing Christ himself away from us; the Good News coming to us in the form of another brother or sister.

Instead, Jesus urges us to be patient. The New Testament writers see God’s delay in bringing judgement as a sign of God’s loving mercy. He wants to give us time to repent, to grow into the human being he has created us to be. He wants to give us time to become comfortable with who we are; time to allow the noxious weed to become a fruitful plant. God always sees past our mistakes and sins to see the truth of who we are; people made in the image and likeness of God. God is prepared to give us time to grow into his likeness, to become comfortable with the truth of who are and who we are becoming. With God there is always time to be forgiven. God is patient. God will not be one to rush to judgement.

Paul’s letters also urge us to wait for the second and final era of harvest time. The Lord of the harvest will pass final judgement. He alone is the one who has the ability to sort out the good from the bad. “Therefore do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then each one will receive commendation from God” (1 Corinthians 4:5).

With all the shaking we have been through in the last nine months it is easy to be pessimistic about what God is up to. In this parish we have dismissed very firmly the idea that God is ganging up on us in some way, or that God is trying to teach us a lesson. There is a lot we can learn about ourselves and about our world to be sure, but it if I were God and everyone was saying that I was responsible for sending those earthquakes to teach those people of Christchurch a lesson, I would be tempted to sue for defamation. But of course that would be an oxymoron! God is love rather than condemnation. God is forgiveness and comes to take away our fear. God is the promise of new hope and new beginnings.

The bible is full of writers who understood what it was like to live through a disaster. They see life as challenge in two ways. One kind of challenge is the toughness of life which tosses up the odd curved ball for us to deal with. In the midst of all the things we live through there is another kind of challenge. That is the challenge to hear the call of God on our lives and to respond to it. This is part of the message of the prophet Isaiah in the text before us today. Isaiah is saying that God speaks a word of promise and hope. Isaiah is addressing the exiles in Babylon who had been through unimaginable horror and the trauma of defeat. As they grieve for their old lives back in their homeland, and learn to cope with the isolation of being held captive in a foreign land, God speaks to them a word of promise. To the exiles he is saying, “We will get through this”. For my promise is effective and real. The road ahead may be long, sometimes arduous. But the word that I speak will have real outcomes; will provide a hopeful future such that the world will be amazed. Isaiah’s message: God will heal and restore. God’s faithfulness and steadfast love is your hope. God’s word is not just a sound that happens. It is a reality which has an effect. Just as rain and snow have an effect on the soil, enabling plants to grow and food to be produced, so the word of God has a real effect. God’s word is to announce restoration and healing. This will be effective in spite of the deafness of human beings, even if there are some who do not want to listen to God at all.

The New Testament calls Jesus the Word of God. He in his person is the inauguration of the kingdom of God. He is the announcement of God’s mercy and love. But he knew that there would be many who would not listen, because human beings are adept at non-listening. Jesus knew that because he spoke to crowds of people, and many, especially those who should have been best equipped to hear what he had to say, were unwilling to listen at all. Some, in fact, were openly hostile to what he had to say. That is why he would so often say things like: “Listen, anyone who has ears to hear.” In the speech of today we would probably say: “I might as well be speaking to a brick wall!”

Today Jesus tells the parable of the sower. In the parable, God is the sower, and the seed is the Word of God. The soil types are those who listen to the parable and there are four types of listeners. They are the hard surface, the dusty surface, and the cluttered surface. These are the soil types where people fail to hear Jesus for various reasons. In talking about the hard surface types (the path), Jesus is lining up for criticism the religious leaders of his day. These were the ones who thought they had no need to listen to Jesus, because they already had the truth, and were no going to allow Jesus or anyone else to upset their lovely religious systems. That exposes a temptation to be avoided: that of thinking that revelation is a defined package of truth that once received it has to be defended. We believe that the Spirit is given to continue guiding us into truth. That means we always need to be open to the Spirit guiding us to new understandings of God, so that truth is something that is discerned in every age by each generation as we encounter new contexts and in new situations.

The next two types of soil were people who said they would follow Jesus, but they got a bit of a “kick up the backside” because they were not really committed. The dusty ones were initially enthusiastic when they heard Jesus and they have shallow soil. They went through a period of rapid growth at first, but when the heat came on and following Jesus began to look a bit risky, they bottled. And so when Jesus was arrested, the disciples abandoned Jesus, betrayed him and denied him. In the face of difficulty they lost their nerve.

There were other kinds of enthusiasts too. These are the cluttered ones. To one such person Jesus said that foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has no where to lay his head. To another, a morally earnest person who felt he had a duty to first bury his parents he said something that sounds really hard to us: leave the dead to bury their dead. To another, he said sell all you have and give it to the poor and you will have treasure in heaven; then come and follow me. The thorns and weeds that entangle the sprouting seed of those who are trying to hear the Word of God and follow it are worries and anxieties, the lure of riches, even moral reasoning. Jesus was on the side of the poor and the marginalised, often these were the people who looked a bit dodgy. And so it was tempting to put respectability above following Jesus.

And so it is with us. There might be all sorts of reasons why we might not hear the Word of God. Some here today might be worried about their ability to hear God at the moment above the noise of the anxieties and difficulties we are facing. But if our hearts our open and we want to hear God, the Word of God is always effective and will grow in our hearts even if we can’t perceive it happening at the moment. In the gospels, the people who did hear Jesus and who responded with open and welcoming hearts found themselves transformed. People like Mary Magdelene; the blundering disciple, Peter; the man born blind who was healed. They may not have looked a very promising group of people, but God transformed them anyway, and through them he did far more than they could ever think of asking or imagining. That is our hope. We might see difficulties and trials and wonder if God is even present. We might think we are unworthy, or that God has another pool of people who are much better than us. None of that is relevant. God has you and he longing for you to listen and respond; to allow the seed of his Word to grow in your heart. The point is that the growth of the Kingdom is God’s work. God will plant the seed, He will cause it to grow, and God will act in us and through us. When God speaks, it’s not just a sound that is made. When God speaks, it is word of promise and hope. It is God’s loving and providential purpose that is at work in our hearts. We might have many good intentions in our lives, but never get around to fulfilling any of them. But it is not so with God. God’s purpose is always fulfilled. That is the conviction of one biblical writer after another. Look at Joseph who was sold as a slave. God used that situation of sibling rivalry and bullying to save Israel from drought and certain death. God even brought good out of the horrific time of exile, revealing hidden mysteries of himself for the first time that aid us in our journey today. God wants you to respond because he has made you and loves you. He will use you and me in spite of any failings and weaknesses we may think we have.

We all have our failings, the parts of us that are represented by the hard surface, or the dusty surface, or the cluttered surface, but our hope is in God who chooses us anyway. He is the one who works miracles who in the soil of our hearts and he will bring forth more good fruit than we can ever imagine or conceive.

Today we move away from the great festivals of the church associated with Easter, Trinity Sunday and Corpus Christi and return to the cycle of green Sundays; Sundays in ordinary time. In this part of the Church’s year we return to our systematic reading of one of the Gospels. Believe it or not, the Anglican Church does not trust its local clergy to choose their own readings. Our church has an international cycle of readings called a lectionary, which lays out the readings to be used in every church in the world wide communion. So we are reading the same readings that are being read in Africa, England, North America, Australia, and in all the other places the Anglican Church has been established. We think of this a gift shared; our common readings encapsulating the church’s best wisdom about which readings will be beneficial for the Body of Christ. Also, following a common set of readings becomes glue that holds the Anglican Communion together. As we are in Year A of the cycle, we are reading through Matthew’s account of the life and ministry of Jesus.

All the gospels have their own emphases when it comes to telling us about Jesus; who he was and what he was about. One of Matthew’s favourite themes is that Jesus is the embodiment of the Wisdom of God. We don’t hear much about Holy Wisdom in preaching these days. But it is a very important strand of the bible and of Matthew’s message about Jesus. The books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon can be classified as Wisdom literature and they make wonderful reading. In the bible Holy Wisdom is usually a personified as a female person. In my bible the notes refer to Lady Wisdom, opening the possibility that the biblical writers did indeed relate to God as “she” in the bible. In the book of Proverbs (see chapter 8) Lady Wisdom stands on streets and calls people to a great feast, to the table she has set laden with bread and wine. She pronounces her authority, describes her divine origin, and asserts that she was with God in the beginning as a master worker in God’s creative activity. When you think of the story of Jesus, does any of that sound familiar? Matthew noticed that it was very familiar indeed and told his story of Jesus accordingly.

Matthew is telling us all through his Gospel that Jesus is the Wisdom of God in human form. When Jesus is on trial, it is the wisdom of the wise and intelligent that is really on trial. Whereas John’s Gospel talks a lot about the Logos of God (Jesus is the Divine Word (Logos – see the lectern) of God who became flesh and dwelt among us), Matthew is saying that Jesus is the Wisdom of God made flesh.

There is a unit on Wisdom literature for the year 7 and 8 students at St Mark’s School. It is always fascinating to hear young people try and define what wisdom is and where to look for it. Boys most commonly start off thinking of wisdom as knowing lots of facts. Wisdom is knowledge they say, and knowledge is power. Here’s a question: What do you think Wisdom is and where would you look for it?

First century people had their own solutions to the question of what wisdom is and where it could be found. Some said that Wisdom is the Law of God (the first five books of the First Testament) which is the answer offered repeatedly by Psalm 119. So those people studied the Law (Torah) and tried to internalise its precepts. Some people said Wisdom is to be found in the Jerusalem Temple, so those people spent as much time as they could in the temple going through the cycle of daily temple services and sacrifices, allowing themselves to be carried by the rhythms of worship as if they were being held by a stream of water. Some said Wisdom could be found everywhere in creation, the beauty of this world where the divine artistry could be adored. Matthew understood Jesus as divine Wisdom made incarnate, made flesh. He is saying that being Christian is about making it our business to know Jesus and to understand the mind of Christ who leads us to the Father who is, after all, the ultimate Wisdom.

Today Jesus offers thanks to God for those who are most receptive to Wisdom. It is the little ones, the infants, those who are like children, who are most open to receiving the Wisdom of God. We are lucky in this parish to have lots of ministry going on with children and families and when we work with young children it is easy to understand what Jesus means. Children are trusting, because they have to be. They have to trust their parents, their teachers at school or pre-school, and they have to trust other adults. Their hearts are open to new learning and new possibilities. Open and trusting hearts: this is what God is looking for in his people, and what we need to be able to cultivate in our prayer life with God. By the time we become adults that can be difficult to do. One of our children’s ministry team says that she likes working with children in our parish because of what children show her about God, not because of what she can teach them. Children have an intuitive knowing when it comes to God, because they know how to trust with hearts full of wonder and awe. Marcus Borg tells the story of the parents with a two year old and a new born baby. The three year old kept wanting to spend time by herself with the new born. Wondering why, they listened through the baby monitor to hear what would happen. Their three year old said to the baby, “Tell me what God is like. I’ve almost forgotten.” The gift of children to us is that they remind us how to be open and trusting in our relationship with God. It is so important. Jesus’ observation (complaint?) in this part of Matthew is that the religious people of his day had hearts that were closed. They thought they had God all summed up in their laws and rituals, so that anything Jesus had to say could only be viewed as a threat. This is one the big temptations to avoid in our journey with God. If we think that by studying the scripture and maintaining a discipline of prayer that we are somehow becoming an expert about God, the defender of truth, we can make ourselves blind to the ways God comes to us and we can become critical of others. Being critical, becoming blind, these are things that diminish our souls. Therese of Avila said that we always have to be ready to go back to the beginning in our life with God, which requires us to have a certain level of humility. Jesus wants us to have wide open and trusting hearts, to be a church with a wide open door, so that we make space for those who are different and so that we are always open to new revelation from God.

The temptation that the religious leaders had succumbed to was the sin of pride. They not only wanted people to admire their piety, but they began to be severe demanding in the way they expected the people of God to live their lives. Well, Jesus had fun when he walked this earth. He went to lots of parties. He changed water into wine. He celebrated with the people and allowed his disciples to pick the odd grain of wheat or two on the Sabbath. Jesus had high expectations of his followers too, but by comparison with the religious leaders of his day, his yoke was easy and his burden, light. Jesus has come to lift our burdens, not add to them. Knowing him, being intimately connected to him is the highest form of wisdom. That is where we find rest for our souls. That is why we are here, for around this table, Jesus is as close to us as you or me. He is feeding us with his very self, and sharing his life. He is beckoning us to come closer: “Come to me all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will refresh you. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Whether or not Christ is present in the Eucharist was one of the fault lines that ran through Christianity in the reformation. Christians from the earliest times have always taught that Jesus is present whenever we break bread. This is the whole point of the resurrection narratives in the gospels, when the disciples on the first Easter Day recognised that Jesus was intimately present to them just as he had been before Good Friday when they broke bread together. That was a obviously a formative experience, an experience of being nourished in the resurrection life of Christ. No wonder that the sacrament of Holy Communion has from the start been the central act of Christian prayer down through the ages.

When the Reformation came, Martin Luther wanted the old Catholic Church to reform the way it taught people about Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. Thomas Aquinas’ teaching on the subject, which had come to be known as transubstantiation, made absolute sense to everyone in the 12th century. Aquinas used the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle to explain in philosophical terms how Christ is present in the Eucharist. That theory made sense then because everyone at the time understood the thought of these two great philosophers; the thought of Plato and Aristotle still shaped everyone’s understanding of how God worked and how the universe worked. But by the 16th century, the world had moved on and Thomas’ theories no longer struck the chord they used to. So when Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenburg one of his demands was that transubstantiation be reformed in favour of something that would enable the people of God to understand the Eucharist better.

But Luther was disturbed and shocked when the consequences of his call for reform became clear. Some of the reformers were going as far as saying that the bread was just bread and the wine was just wine. For example Zwingli, the Swiss reformer, championed what some have caricatured the “real absence” of Christ. He said the bread and wine are mere symbols commemorating Jesus’ death. He said that if Jesus was fully human, and that human body had ascended to heaven to sit at the right hand of God, there was no way it could also be here in this celebration as well. A human Jesus cannot be in two places at once, he argued. Therefore this is nothing more than a memorial meal. Luther was appalled. He tried to pull things back at the Marburg Disputation in 1529 but the Protestant movement found itself divided on this point. Luther said that Christ is indeed truly present in the Eucharist. Bread is still real bread, he said, but it is also contains the physical presence of Christ. Similarly wine retains it’s wine-ness, but it is also truly the blood of Christ. His doctrine became known as “consubstantiation”. Anglicans adopted this position as well. Anglicans call this the doctrine of the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist. The English reformation was political rather than a theological one. So we adopted a middle road half way between the Catholics and the Reformed traditions, and we believe in the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist. Having said that we also seek to be a broad tent. We allow room for those who are catholic or Reformed in their views, and the way we accommodate that is to keep on debating until we find forms of words that we can all say “amen” to.

In the mean time, reformed churches and the Puritans followed a line closer to Zwingli and others; somehow Anglicanism makes room for them in our church. The important point is that Anglican Church believes in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, in the bread and wine of Holy Communion. Unlike our mediaeval forebears, Anglicans refuse to define that presence in philosophical terms. The Anglican way, when it comes across the mystery of God, is to step back a little and adore the wonder of God. We tend to write poetry and hymns if we feel so inclined, but we avoid defining the mysteries of God in philosophical terms.

The fact that our church believes in the Real Presence of Christ is why it is possible for us to have the Reserved Sacrament and to take communion to the sick in the way we do. In St Mark’s Church there is a little cupboard in the sanctuary called an ambry with a red light next to it. The red light is always on as a reminder of Christ’s continual presence in the elements of bread and wine kept in the ambry. We treat that bread and wine with special reverence, and we use the bread and wine consecrated here at our principal Sunday Eucharist when the church is gathered, to take communion to the sick and to those who cannot be here. In that way they remain in communion with Christ and with us, which is why our intercessors to pray for them by name in our prayers every Sunday.

Some people find it hard to believe in the real presence of Christ in the elements of bread and wine. A good way to understand this is to go back to the incarnation, to the story of Christmas and Christ’s birth. At that particular point in time when Christ was born, God assumed a human body, so that all people could be redeemed, so that we could all be joined to God. Christ’s humanity, then, is very important. His humanity is a significant instrument of our redemption. God becomes human so that he can assume every aspect of our nature, so that he can redeem it and reconcile it to God. His risen and glorified body reaches out to people in every time and place so that he brings the whole of creation into communion with God.

But the consequences of the incarnation go further and deeper. Through his dying and rising, he makes all of us members of his Body, the Church. In the resurrection he draws us closer to himself and sets us on a journey of transformation, so that as we become copies of his humanity, we also become more and more like God. In the Eucharist, he continues to come to us in a physical way, through bread and wine, to feed us, to nourish us. Christianity is an incarnational religion. God takes signs and symbols like bread and wine, water, the giving and receiving of rings, the touch of a someone in the laying of hands, and speaks us to us directly through them. In God’s hands, these signs and symbols become reality. The Eucharist is an intimate abiding with Christ as he comes to us in a common meal as we eat and drink together from the one loaf and the one cup. St Augustine once said (in simple terms) that we are what we eat. As we eat this bread and drink this cup, we become more and more the mystery we celebrate. We become a new humanity, part of Christ’s risen body.

So if we believe all that, the amazing unimaginable mystery of God becoming fully human in Christ for our salvation, and if we believe something as astonishing as being made a member of his Body even though we know we are imperfect, then it is not so hard a thing to believe Christ’s own promise that he comes to us here, and that he is truly present to us in Holy Communion. The incarnation is a continuing reality. Just as God became human in Christ, so he comes to us in the physicality of bread and wine. Jesus gives his life to us in bread and wine. He is nourishing us, strengthening us to be the new Israel, the new humanity as he promised: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.” (John 6:54).

In the reading from St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians we heard one of the most ancient parts of our tradition. It is the familiar narrative: On the night before he died he took bread, gave thanks, broke it, and shared it. Four actions: taking, thanking, breaking, and sharing. All of us should recognise these four actions as a representation of the life of Christ: He takes our humanity, his life is focused toward God in an attitude of thanksgiving. He is broken on the cross for us, and his life is continually given for the world. That is what he is eternally being and doing. He eternally comes to take flesh in our lives and in our hearts. He continually prays for us and gives thanks to God for who we are and for the love in our hearts that comes from God. He is still absorbing and defeating the evil of the world, and he is still giving his life for us and to us. Taking, thanking, breaking, sharing. Let us give thanks for this amazing gift, for God’s presence, and for the sacraments in which God communicates to us in flesh and blood. Let us give thanks for Christ’s body of blood that meets our needs so perfectly as it nourishes our hearts and our spirits, as it touches all our senses: touch and vision, taste, smell, and hearing. So when we reply to the minister’s words: “The Body of Christ” let our “Amen” be our “yes” to God and our “yes” to who we are.