Parish Of Opawa St Martins Blog

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.

Today we celebrate the Holy Trinity, God revealed to us as three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; yet at the same time one God. This is the only feast day in the Church’s year that celebrates a particular doctrine of our faith. All our other feast days celebrate an aspect of the life of Christ, or the lives of the saints. This is the only festival in our calendar designed to highlight a particular doctrine – we believe in one God who is at the same time three persons.

This understanding of God is not an easy one to explain with words, but it is central to our understanding of God. Perhaps a way into this is to remind ourselves that the essence of God is love. And so when Christians think about God and deepen their relationships with God, we see as of first import, three persons living in divine harmony, in a circle of love, a community where each person of the Trinity is totally focused on the needs of the other. So while there are three distinct persons, there is divine harmony and unity within the Trinity such everything they do they do they act together as one, so that we can affirm that there is one God. And so in this circle of love is the source of life which is continuously made available to you and to me, and to the whole of creation.

Divine love is at the core of the Trinity because God is love. This is a love that brings complete unity and harmony. We also find that life is at the core of God. Another meaning of the Trinity is life generating life. That is why the first reading today is the creation story from the first chapter of Genesis. We know God as the creator of all things, the source of all, the ground of our being. Genesis 1 is a theological reflection about God and creation, and our place in creation. It is not an attempt to offer a scientific explanation for when God created, or how long it took for God to create, or what method God used. It is simply affirming that the world exists because God wills it to exist. God is not a celestial engineer whose creative work took place at just one point in time, as if winding up a clock and then leaving it to run by itself. God created the world in order that all may enjoy the richness of the life God has to offer. And because love is at the core of God the life that God creates is good; God is one who longs to stay in relationship with us and is bound up with our destiny. So to say that God is creator, is not to return to some past event way back time to reflect on some mysterious origin. To say God is Creator is to say that we exist now because God wills us to be. God is eternally loving us into life and willing us into existence. To know God as Creator and Source of Life is like standing next to a spring of beautiful life giving water in the middle of a beautiful garden. God is the constant creative, loving, life giving breathe of life that sustains us. So when we hear that God looked at what he created, and behold, it was very good, we know that even now God looks at you and me, he sees what he has created, and he says, “Behold, it is very good.”

God’s work of creation is never done. It is on going. When God called the people of Israel and made them his holy people, it was a creative act. When God sent Jesus Christ into the world, it was a creative act. When God raised Jesus Christ from the dead, and made him the first born of the new creation, it was a creative act. And when God poured out the Spirit on the church and made us each a new creation in Christ that too was a creative act. So if God creates, and if God is the source of everything, and if love is therefore at the root of creation, there is no longer anything to fear, neither in this world or in the world to come.

So the Trinity is life generating life: the Father giving life to the Son, and sending the Holy Spirit. It is dynamic energy and it is creative. The Trinity is also a community of persons which is also central to a Christian understanding of God. This is why Christianity is a communal religion. If we take the Trinity seriously, then we are to be a people who seek to build a loving community. These days, when the pressures on people in our community are so great because of yet more earthquakes and aftershocks, we really need to treasure the sense of community that is around us. It is a gift from God. The earthquakes are making life stressful, are they not? We are becoming tired and stressed, and it’s at this very point that our energy levels for caring for others might begin to wane. Well we are surrounded by God’s love, the holy Trinity is holding us, sheltering us, bearing our pain, drawing us into a circle of love. In your prayer stay close to the heartbeat of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; come to know them as a community of love, and ask them for the energy you need to help us share this gift of community with the world around us. Theologians have a word for this. They talk about us being an echo of the Trinity in the way we build community with others, in the way we look beyond ourselves to the needs of others. Whenever we do this, we imitate something of the Trinity. We become witnesses to the life giving creativity of the Trinity, and to the miracle of love diffusing itself. Whenever we choose life, whenever we create, share, or enrich another’s life, we imitate the Trinity. Whatever is life giving is of the Trinity, and God is present.

Our work of learning to be a ‘community of faith’ also imitates the Trinity. We imitate the Trinity whenever we respect each other, when we are open to others, when we listen to their stories, their pain and their joys; when we help them dig out silt, or hold them when they can’t take any more shaking. Whenever we give up habits which harm others, when we take up our obligation to stand with the weak and the poor in our society, we imitate the Trinity. Imitating the Trinity means entering more and more fully into the life of God both personally and as community of faith, and it’s a life which is never static or selfish or boring. So today, in our lives together be a sign of the Trinity. Be a people who resemble our God in heaven. Today, as in every day, our God invites us to choose the dance of life, to enjoy God’s lavish gifts of love, and live!

The Christian story of Pentecost is a story of the birth of the Church. Today we are celebrating the church’s birthday with music and song! Pentecost is a celebration of the birth of the church, and when we look at Luke’s story in Acts 2 we can see what the early Church believed itself to be.

To begin with, Luke tells us that the followers of Jesus gathered in Jerusalem. Day by day, they devoted themselves to prayer, the teaching and fellowship of the Apostles, and the breaking of bread. It was while they were doing these very simple basic things that the Holy Spirit suddenly comes upon them with the sound of a violent wind and with tongues of fire. This is the moment when they are transformed from a group of shattered and grief stricken followers of Jesus into fearless Apostles who would take the good news of God into the known world.

As always, the Apostles turned to the only scriptures they had to make sense of this new experience, the Hebrew Scriptures. In ages past, it was the unpredictable and untameable prophets, the spiritual elite, in whom the Spirit of God dwelt. These were people like Moses and Elijah. It was they who spoke the word of God, who encouraged the people when they were down, rebuked them when they went astray, prayed for them, and agonised over them. They were the sign of God’s care for the people.

But all through the bible it was the prophets who also longed for the day when all the people would experience the Spirit of God directly for themselves, from the least to the greatest. Jeremiah, Isaiah and Ezekiel, and especially Moses all prayed to this end. The Prophet Joel’s prayer is the one that Peter himself quoted on the Day of Pentecost. He declared that in the last day, God would pour out the Spirit upon people of all sorts, men and women, slaves and free, young and old. “Your young shall see visions and your elderly will dream dreams…” Joel’s vision was that everyone would be caught up in the rushing wind of the Spirit.

The Day of Pentecost is Luke’s way of showing us that the death and resurrection of Jesus has released the Holy Spirit so that finally the words of the prophets and mystics of old come to be a new, lived reality. Jesus’ death and resurrection have opened up a new reality; the Holy Spirit is now available to all, activating the presence of Christ in the new community of Israel, the people of God, you and me.

So now, more detail comes into focus as we discern this picture of the church. To begin with, we had the followers of Jesus gathered together for prayer and for fellowship and to hear the teaching of the Apostles. Then we see that this entire group is caught up in the outpouring of God’s Spirit, after which there is a whole expanded range of people living within this new spiritual reality opened up by Jesus’ death and resurrection. The astounding thing to those first disciples was that God really did pour out the Spirit upon people of all sorts. In this story God acts unilaterally to include both Jew and Gentile in the fellowship. That was radical stuff for those first Christians, most of whom were Jewish. What Jesus himself had talked about was turning into reality. The book of Acts tells us that there were plenty who didn’t like it and tried to resist the movement of the Spirit. It must have been tempting to set up two churches; one for Jewish Christians and one for the Gentiles. But as we see in the letters to the Galatians and the Corinthians, Paul refused to stand for it. From the beginning the Church is a highly diverse group of people who belong together because they are called together by God. This is not better illustrated for us than in the story of the day of Pentecost. Look at the list: Galileans, people of Jerusalem, Parthians, Medes, Elamites, Cappadocians, people from Egypt and Lybia and Rome. All them of hear the gospel in their own language. All are joined to the church through baptism and worship God together.

So this thing we call the church, the Body of Christ energised by the Spirit, is now an incredibly diverse group of people of all sorts. They are men and women, slave and free, Jew and Gentile. They are a koinonia, a fellowship or a communion, where barriers of race, age, gender and social status are torn down so that they are one; joined by the Spirit to be one Body. They are given birth into this body by baptism. They are bound together by one Spirit and they belong together in one radically new community: the community of the resurrection. These are the ones who live the resurrection life in the here and now.

To complete this picture of the church, we need to look at what this group does. Of course they are not just a club of holy people enjoying each other’s company. The last part of Acts chapter 2 tells us that this diverse group of people of many nationalities and cultures and languages, came together week by week. They shared their possessions with one another, especially those in need. In other words, they were a prophetic movement. They challenged the injustice of the empire and culture around them. They did this by sharing what they had and caring for the poor and including the weak. They took part in a radical meal, the breaking of bread, in which all shared equally in the bread and wine. This was a meal that demonstrated their discontinuity with the values of the empire, for now when they broke bread together, they gathered around one table where all the people were equal regardless of race, gender and social status. They continued in the prayers and in the teaching of the apostles. They continually gave thanks to God, and they proclaimed this radical good news of the Kingdom of God to all.

So today, we too, celebrate our diversity of gifts and culture and language. We give thanks for those who have worked down through the ages, to make the gospel audible in every language. We celebrate the gift of God’s Spirit which is intensely and intimately present through all creation. We give thanks for the Holy Spirit fanning the fire of faith in those first disciples. We give thanks for the way the Spirit blew those apostles to all peoples of the world, and that the Spirit made them into one body, the Body of Christ, proclaiming God’s good news to all people.

Today we are reminded that now is the time for us to continue this mission. When God would drove those first Christians out of Jerusalem, they were scattered them like seeds all over the earth. Their message changed many lives. Eventually, (if we believe all the legends), it cost most of them their lives as well.

Today, the wind and fire comes into each one of us. It comes to fan our faith, and it comes to empower us to accomplish what God wants done in the world and it comes to empower us to be a prophetic community in our own time. The Spirit is still calling us go against the tide and to live the values of the Kingdom. We too, are to share what we have so that others may live. We are to break bread together; to be the community who share a meal in which human stratifications of race, gender and social status are irrelevant. We are sent into the world, to live the good news and to work with God to redeem the whole creation. That is our task; we are all called to be part of it. We are to make ourselves available to be God’s ministers wherever we are, and in all we do. And let’s face it; our world needs the Good News at the moment. It needs generous and faithful Christians who can share it, who can give an account of the hope that is in us.

Today as we will be invited to have our hands anointed for ministry. We are Christ’s hands and feet. We are his mouth piece. We are the only instruments God has to proclaim the Good News. Our hands will be anointed to show us that when we were baptised we became ministers of Christ. Our hands are the hands of Christ, our words are to be his words, our feet to be his feet who will carry the Good News to all the world. Brothers and sisters, the Spirit is longing to renew us and refresh us and to bring us peace. Come to be anointed with open hearts, come to listen to what the Spirit is saying to the Church. Come that the flame of the Spirit may burn brightly in your hearts.