Good Friday - He takes away our fear

Long haired preachers come out every night

try to tell you what’s wrong and what's right

But when asked how ‘bout something to eat

They will answer in voices so sweet

Chorus

You will eat, bye and bye

in the glorious land above the sky

work and pray, live on hay

you’ll get pie in the sky when you die

                  Joe Hill 1911

Some years ago Christian Aid came up with the slogan “ I believe in life before death” The allure of pie in the sky when you die has never really done it for me. What the world needs, what I need to day is healing, is reconciliation of all that denies life and fragments life leading to a purposeless life. What I crave for is life before I die.

To have my life restored, healed, mended means that I have to acknowledge that it is broken, I am lost, I am ill at ease.

Good Friday is a day when we have to confront the painful truth that our lives are broken, that we can not live pain free, it is a false illusion to believe that nothing bad will happen to me, or those around me simply because I believe in God.

Good Friday offers at its heart an amnesty not amnesia, hope not pretense.

We have to look upon the cross, we have to behold the cross on which hung the savior of the world if we are going to be able to start the healing in our own lives.

There is so much that distracts us from this demand, that encourages us to avert our eyes or shield ourselves from the glare of this terror – just as a pair of sun glasses protect us from the harsh glare of the sun.

The story of our life will be the story of our life permanently, this is not a dress rehearsal, we only get one life but we do not have a time limited offer on forgiveness, healing or restoration.

Good Friday is God’s statement that is as powerful and eternal as the first word spoken so long ago “let there be light”. The eternal word of God now speaks  “Father forgive”.  These words are not words that seek to deny the reality of life, the brutality of the Romans soldiers who drive nails through flesh, the betray of love that leads to denial and the cry “Crucify” These are not air brushed from history or from our identity and the reality that we live, but the words of Jesus on the cross “Father forgive” ensure that our lives can be healed, restored and reconciled.

God doesn’t take away the kinks and twists or the hurt and humiliation, he does not airbrush out the wrinkles or paper over the crack. What he does through the cross and resurrection is take away from us the guilt and the fear, so that we can start again and life in hope.

Grace is forgiveness we can’t earn. Grace is the weeping father who looks out from his security and home to long and distant road looking for his lost son.

Grace is tragedy accepted with open arms and somehow turned to good.

Grace is what the wasteful death on Golgotha did.

In a moment we will come and kneel, bow, or simply stand at the foot of the cross and draw from this broken bleeding, despised and rejected figure strength and hope for this life, for the journey that is ours, for the decisions we need to make today.

As we stand, kneel or bow, before the Saviour of the world who for us hung upon a cross we find acceptance, forgiveness and healing for all that denies life – our life and the life of those around us.

Most people think

Great God will come from the skies

take away everything

and make everybody feel high

but if you know what life is worth

you will look for yours on earth

and now you will see the light

You stand up for your rights.

   Bob Marley 1973

Maundy Thursday - Mass of the Lord's Supper

It is often said of the English in particular that they eat to live: compared to their European neighbours and indeed many other cultures of the world who live to eat.

The politics of food are all around us,

Whether it is the fact that we eat so much when so many in the world do not have enough to sustain life.

Whether it is the fact that food has for many become a way in which we deal with the grief or loneliness created by our increasingly technological and demanding urban lifestyles leading to ever increasing ill health.

The results are all too plain to see, although the power of denial means that many of us refuse to recognise the tail tail signs of our dis-ease and expanding waste lines which are often the result of terrible emptiness in our lives, an emptiness that we fill with calories resulting in ever increasing instances of obesity in children and adults alike.

Something has changed about the way in which we view food, no longer are we prepared to put in the time and effort to source and prepare food for ourselves or those around us, in stead we seem content in snatching a solitary meal in our increasingly hectic and unfulfilled lives or sending for a take away that is as indigestible and it is inhospitable.

When we look at the gospels it is no surprise that eating together is a common feature of Jesus life and language about the kingdom. A wedding, a demand to eat at the home of outcast, the kingdom of God described in terms of a food and feasting, the accusation that Jesus is a glutton and a drunkard, the breaking of taboos and laws around food all are part of a recipe for disaster that brings us to the upper room on the night that Jesus was betrayed

You may not know the wonderful story of Babettes feast, but when Babette, who for the last decade has been serving a basic gruel, of boiled fish and rice, to the members of small 19^th century Danish protestant religious community, finds herself in possession of £10,000 francs she offers one last and final gift to the community – a meal.

Babettes feast is a wonderfully and lovingly crafted and presented meal which the community at first resolve to endure in silence, this travesty, this disgraceful waste of money they decide is counter to their spirituality and morality and the only way they can endure the experience is by remaining silent as they eat.

 However as the meal progresses they cannot remain silent and in the course of the meal ancient feuds and petty squabbles are healed and at the end of this gastronomic triumph the community, which was facing its own annihilation recovers its first love and purpose and relationship with one another and with God that will ensure its survival for the future, a future of course radically altered by the experience of meal. One might be tempted to think that £10,000 francs is a high price but I am not so sure!

If eating is a spiritual as well as a necessary and material activity then the Christian experience is rather different to that of other faith communities. I have not exhaustively researched this but I expect that Christianity is unique in the way in which its spiritual understanding of sharing food makes it so different.

The Eucharist of course began as a meal. The Jewish roots of the Eucharist are clear, Jesus himself was Jewish, he and his male disciples were doing what all Jews have and continue to do for millennia – meet at the beginning of festival of Pesach / Passover and share a meal that takes them back to the depths of  their history as a people when they were slaves in Egypt.

But what we do tonight and have for two millennia as Christians is more than the gathering every Friday night by Jewish families at the beginning of Shabbat/the Sabbath; different to the Islamic community breaking the fast every night of Ramadan; not to be confused with the sharing of blessed food that every Hindu does when at Temple:

For the Christian understanding of the Eucharist takes us a step nearer, and for religious traditions other than Christian a step too far, towards God.  It is this understanding that helps us understand the significance of this evening, when on the night in which Our lord was betrayed, he took bread and blessed it, broke it and gave it to his disciples.

It was within the first decades of the early church that the understanding of what we share at the Eucharist changed the practice of that early church where Christians gathered week by week and maybe even day by day and shared food together.

If the Eucharist was at first always celebrated as part of a meal, an agape we might call it, it was precisely because those first Christians came to realise that something very different was happening when bread was taken, blessed and broken and when wine was taken, blessed and shared that it was taken out of the context of a family meal. Because of the realisation that this was somehow different, it was taken out of the daily eating habits of Christians and enshrined in a very different context; one we are very familiar and is known as the Mass, the Holy Communion, the Lords Supper

For what we claim as Christians is that we are no longer eating bread and drinking wine, but we are in fact eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood  - whether we understand those terms literally or symbolically.

And so here is the unique experience that Christianity offers the world as a way into the mystery of God – that by partaking of the Eucharist we become one with God.

To understand this mystery some draw upon the famous phrase coined by one Ludwig Feuerbach in 1863  “You are what you eat”. So when it comes to the sacrament, the bread and wine of communion, we share in this and in turn become the body of Christ in the world and our nourishment is supplied directly by God – When Jesus started to speak in this way it became to much for his Jewish listener and we are told that this was the only time in his ministry in Galilee that some could not bear his words and so no longer went about with him – John 6.

Others have called upon our common use of English. When I drink a glass of wine I drink the wine. At first it may appear not to have an effect upon me but in truth it is already beginning to affect my body and perception of reality. By the time I drink my second glass of wine I may find that my mood is altered, I become more animated, better company and expressive in my words and actions.  By the time I have drunk my 3^rd  or 4^th glass of wine  I may be as one under the influence of that wine, and there comes a point sometime after the  4^th or 5^th glass of wine when I become drunk. I drink the wine but now I am drunk by the wine in turn.

We have gathered tonight to join in a meal as friends, as a family under God, we gather remembering that night when Jesus shared his last meal with this friends, his family. But as this evening progresses we will come to realise that we gather to share in something far greater than just a meal, we gather to partake of God in a way that is unique and if we allow it life changing.

So to return to the question I began with:

Do you eat to live or live to eat  - the answer for us as Christians is that when we gather for the Eucharist we do so in order that we might find in the food of the Eucharist LIFE.

The altar of repose at St john

The altar of repose at St Matthias 

Holy Week

It is often said that “a week is along time in politics”, attributed by some to a former British Prime minster Harold Wilson.

The psalmist tells us that “A thousand years in your sight are like a day that has just gone by, or like a watch in the night.” (Ps90.4)

The events of this holy week cover the last days of Jesus’ life on earth. Sunday saw his entry into Jerusalem and we are told that crowds met him with wild anticipation, hope and joy. They threw their cloths down on the road to create a 1^st century red carpet for the man of the moment. They cut down branches to provide shade from the hot sun for the son of God to make his way to one of the wonders of his world, the temple at the heart of this ancient city.

It is a week that touches our humanity at its deepest level, it is a week in which the ancient faults of our humanity are exposed; betrayal, jealousy, the use of power to control and shape our destiny and as these powerful emotions spiral out of control we see the all too familiar consequences of anger, violence and death.

A week may be a long time in politics, the cheering crowd of Palm Sunday become the jeering crowd of Good Friday, a day that will change the thousands before and all the many thousand since. A week in politics is always relative and with the perspective of history may loose its power and significance for all but those for whom this was their time.  This holy week is our time and it changes for ever our destiny and yet it can pass so quickly and without us pausing in the business of our lives. There are plenty of added opportunities to join us in prayer and indeed in church.

Thursday 2^nd of April 8.00pm we gather with Jesus and his disciples in the upper room and recall how the Son of God took a towel and washed his disciples feet. We then remain in church until midnight keeping watch with Peter and his friends until Judas appears and with a kiss betrays the Son of God.

Friday 3^rd of April 2.00pm we gather again in church and re-enact the final hours of Jesus’ life, as we too stand at the foot of the cross and behold the wood of the cross on which hung the saviour of the world.

Saturday 4^th of April at 7.30pm as the sun sets on this holy week we light a fire and from its flames light the paschal candle that symbolizes the Risen Christ and keep vigil until the moment when  we once again declare “Alleluia Christ is Risen” and our Easter celebration begins.

Passion Sunday - We want to see Jesus (Jn12.21)

A child whispered, “God, speak to me”
And a meadowlark sang. The child did not hear.


So the child yelled, “God, speak to me!”
And the thunder rolled across the sky
but the child did not listen.


The child looked around and said, “God, let me see you”
and a star shone brightly.
but the child did not notice.


And the child shouted, “God, show me a miracle!”
And a life was born but the child did not know.


So the child cried out in despair,
“Touch me, God, and let me know you are here!”
Whereupon God reached down
and touched the child.
But the child brushed the butterfly away
and walked away unknowingly.


(Old Hindu poem by Ravindra Kumar Karnani)

“20 Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. ²¹They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, ‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus’ ”

In the preceding passage Jesus has raised his friend Lazarus from the dead. After raising Lazarus from the dead the Pharisees and chief priests wanted to kill Jesus because many of the Jews who had witnessed the miracle were beginning to follow him. The verse immediately preceding the passage of scripture we read as our gospel this morning records the Pharisees saying:

“Look the world has gone after him”

Then we read that some Greeks went who up to worship at the Temple came to Philip and said “We want to see Jesus”.

The Greeks, representing the whole world; the world beyond the Jewish communities of which Jesus and his disciples were a part,  make a request to Jesus’ followers because they believed Philip and the others would lead them to Jesus.

It is significant that unlike many others who met with Jesus in the days of his ministry in Galilee they did not choose to go directly to Jesus but turned to one of his disciples Philip and asked him.

The approach of the Greeks is very different to that of the sick and possessed who seek out Jesus or where brought into his presence to receive from him a touch or a word that would transform them, heal them, restore them to a community that was content to ignore and banish them.

There is no explicit indication from our Text that they ever met with Jesus, nor is any detail given of how their lives were changed, their horizons expanded and their knowledge of God enriched. Well not directly but if course Jesus’ response recorded in the next verse is for the Greeks, then it is for the world for which they are representative, and it is for us this morning – “Jesus answered The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” v23.

Today we begin, in the Anglican church, Passiontide and our focus  this week and Holy week that follows is on the Son of Man who is glorified through his passion for the world, through his love of this world that leads him to accept his cross. It is in his passion, his suffering and terrible death that we see him endure out of love for this world and in his endurance become a new light and hope that is the Son of Man glorified.

“Sir we wish to see Jesus” declare the Greeks to Philip and we see in this encounter the reality of our own lives and faith. That people will encounter Jesus when we stand beside them on the 89 bus, as we elbow ourselves onto a packed tube at Liverpool street, as we push our shopping trolley round Sainsbury, when we pummel the horn of our car at an inconsiderate driver!

In the search for Jesus that many in this world are embarked upon they will naturally turn to his followers in order to find the healing and meaning in life that Jesus holds out to those who seek him. However the sadness is that when many do they are greeted with something falling short of the welcome that Jesus offered to those around him when he trod this earth.  Will they find in us something of the passion we see in Jesus in the last week of his life? A passion that broke the rules, that showed the world that nothing is impossible for God and for those who place their lives in his hands?

This lent, using Bob Jackson’s Everybody welcome course, we have been looking together at the quality of our welcome as congregations at St John and St Matthias and last Sunday some of us gathered to look at the quality of our worship and I am glad to say that for both congregations those who took part expressed their belief that our worship scores highly when it comes to answering the question: does our church service make you feel spiritually alive as you encounter God together? And the question would a newcomer always be shown the relevance of Jesus to their lives?

What has become clear in the conversations of the last three weeks is that we need to do more to enable, by the quality of our welcome, those in our community, and those we call friends, to enter our church building when we are here, that there is still more that can be done to enable those who come in to our lives to experience the life changing encounter with Jesus.

Tonight is the last session and we will be asked look the factors that enable those who enter our building to become part of the church community and experience the opportunity of belonging to a Christian community who are engaged in the search for Jesus.

Returning for a moment to the encounter between the Greeks and Philip, this points us to the need for us to continue to build our relationship with Jesus, as we ourselves look to see Jesus, so that others who want to see God can see God through us, through our very being, through our daily actions, and the way we live our lives. There are many people around us who have given up on the church. Some of them are hurt and angry while others are kind and pleading, and they look to us to see Jesus.

Maybe all of us tonight, whether or not you able to come back to church at 5.00pm can ask of yourselves before you go to sleep tonight: how are we going to show them Jesus tomorrow?

You and I come to church because we want to see Jesus. We are seeking Jesus and I think the best way for any of us to see Him, is to see him in those around us. Notice, that the Greeks were not saying, "We would like to see the beautiful temple," or "We would like to have an audience with the high priest, Caiaphas."

I hope you don't come to church just to see a beautiful building or look at stained glass windows or the works of art. There are many beautiful cathedrals, especially in Europe, but many of them, even though they are beautiful, are empty of people. I hope you came here, saying, as the Greeks did, "Sir, we would see Jesus."

These Greeks were begging to see Jesus. In the Greek language the verb means to beg continually, not just a one-time action. These Greeks were begging Philip with the same intensity as the Greek woman whose daughter was demonized begged to see Jesus.

Philip might have been too preoccupied, to busy, to caught up in his own concerns or his own encounter for that matter to have heard the cry of the Greeks. But he did hear them and he went with them, possibly because he did not have the answer himself, and found Andrew and together they went and told Jesus.

If we open our ears we will hear the cry from those around us. There are people everywhere who want to see Jesus just as these Greeks did. They are here in this city and in every city in the world. They are in our neighborhoods, our offices, our schools, and our households. Have you heard them begging and crying, "We want to see Jesus"?

Why do these people want to see Jesus? Because they know that Jesus alone can help them. Money cannot help them. Designer clothes cannot help them. Computers cannot help them. Their work cannot help them. Only Jesus can save them.

There are Greeks in our time crying out, "We would like to meet with Jesus, the friend of sinners and publicans." They are crying to us, are we listening?