Made complete in everything good

Here's the sermon that I shared at St Catherine's Wickford this evening:

The writer to the Hebrews ends his letter with a Benediction: Now may the God of peace, who brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, make you complete in everything good so that you may do his will, working among us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be the glory for ever and ever. Amen. (Hebrews 13: 16-21)

What does it mean, I wonder, for us to be made complete? Following the feeding of the five thousand (John 6.1-14), Jesus asked his disciples to gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost. So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. Similarly, through our offering of ourselves to God, Jesus provides a means by which what is disparate and fragmented within our lives can gathered up, unified and completed.

That was certainly my experience in offering for ordained ministry. In my working life I had experience of partnership working to create employment opportunities, with a particular focus on assisting disabled people in finding and keeping work. In my church life I had involvement in setting up a church-based day care business and a detached youth work project reaching out to disaffected young people. In my personal life I was writing and painting and finding a limited range of opportunities to share my creative work.

I realised, as I went through the selection process for ordination and then my ministerial training, that ordained ministry could hold and utilise all these disparate experiences and, as a result, could provide a frame within which all these disparate fragments of my life could be gathered up, held together and unified. And so it has proved, as each context for my ministry to date has provided unique opportunities to make connections between faith, work, art and social action through partnerships and projects. That has, of course, been even more the case since discovering the HeartEdge mission model which integrates congregation, culture, commerce and compassion.

Through HeartEdge, I have also experienced the way in which mission and ministry in, from and outside the church provides a framework, forum or context in which all of our skills, experiences, interests and failures can be gathered up, integrated and used for God’s glory and in God’s service. My personal experience of that reality has been in relation to ordained ministry but, again, the HeartEdge model of mission is clear that this gathering up of all that we offer applies to us all, whether lay or ordained.

Later in John 6, Jesus gives a cosmic or eschatological twist to this phrase we are considering when he says it ‘is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day’ (John 6. 37 – 40). These words come in the middle of Jesus’ teaching about being the Bread of Life which followed the feeding of the 5,000. When Jesus gave thanks over the bread, the word used is ‘eucharistesas’, the word which gives us ‘Eucharist’. Jesus shared the bread around in communion, then, when everyone was satisfied, he instructed his disciples to pick up the fragments using that same phrase, ‘so that nothing may be lost.’ Just as none of this ‘eucharisticized’ bread was lost after the feeding, so, because ‘Jesus is the bread of life, [those who] see and believe in him … receive eternal life [and] become a fragment which he will gather up on the last day.’ (John, Richard Burridge, BRF 1998)

Christ’s was a once-for-all action that is then re-presented and re-membered in and through the Eucharist. The Eucharist being our most significant and meaningful form of Remembrance. We bring the broken fragments of our lives to the one whose own body was broken on the cross but who endured that experience out of love for us to bring us through brokenness into reconciliation and resurrection. In return we receive his body and blood into our lives through a fragment of bread and a sip of wine. Our life is joined to his. The broken fragments of our lives are gathered up and incorporated into the story of God’s saving work with humanity. The fragments of our lives are accepted – overaccepted – and unified or completed as we are brought together to form a new body - the body of Christ – in which all things find their place and where all shall be well and all manner of thing be well.

God takes us and our offerings and places them in a far larger story than we ever could have imagined by giving them a sacred story and making them sacred actions. As we retell and re-enact what Jesus did at the Last Supper, we also remember what God did to Israel in ‘taking one special people, blessing them, then breaking them in the Exile before giving them as a light to the nations to bring the Gentiles to God.’ ‘In the telling of those stories and the performance of those actions we are transformed into God’s holy people.’ That’s what the regular celebration of the Eucharist is about. When the Eucharist is served, each of us offers all that we uniquely are at the altar and we receive from God everything we need to follow him by being a blessing to others in our daily lives.

This teaching also tallies with the use made elsewhere of Harvest imagery for the Last Judgement – a sense that all can be safely gathered in - and is reinforced for us in the Letter to the Colossians where it is stated that in Christ all things hold together, as through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. Christ came to gather up and reconcile to God all the disparate fragments of our lives that none should be lost, even through death. That is why he gave us parables of lost things being found. It is why he states that there is room for all – many rooms - in his Father’s house and that he goes there to prepare places for us. It is also why St Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 13 that faith, hope and love remain. The word he used for remain hints that such actions continue beyond the grave into eternity i.e. that we can take something with us when we die, that the fruit or acts of faith, hope and love grown in this life continue into, and continue to bear fruit in, the next. In other words, our deeds of faith, hope and love are not lost with our death in this life but continue into eternity where they are completed.

As a result, we have, I think, a basis for saying with Walt Whitman that: ‘Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost, / No birth, identity, form — no object of the world, / Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing; / Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere / confuse thy brain. / Ample are time and space — ample the field and / nature. / The body, sluggish, aged, cold — the embers left / from earlier fires, / The light in the eye grown dim shall duly flame / again; / The sun now low in the west rises for mornings / and for noons continual; / To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible land / returns, / With grass and flowers and summer fruits and / corn.’

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Walt Whitman - Continuities.

When Jesus Met Hippies

Many books have been written on the Jesus People movement in the US, but what about its impact in the UK? 'When Jesus Met Hippies' by Andrew Whitman explores how this counter-cultural movement of Christians found its own expression in the UK, reshaping the lives of individuals along with the life and mission of the new and existing churches across the nation.

By discovering the interaction between different characters and groups from across the Atlantic, experience an immersive retelling of the successes and failures that led to an enduring legacy. How did this new breed of Christians radically live out their faith and evangelise the youth of the UK in the 1960s and '70s? And how might it inspire fresh revival in the different yet equally chaotic era we live in today?

The book explores:

• the context of revival in the USA from the 1967 “Summer of Love” onwards
• the back-drop culture of the UK in the so-called “swinging sixties”/“permissive society”
• my own story and how Jesus broke into my life in his grace and truth
• prominent groups like the Jesus Family (“Lonesome Stone”), Jesus Army and Jesus Liberation Front
• emergent Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) and its impact on us in the UK, especially early worship-leaders
• the link between the Jesus People and the burgeoning charismatic movement
• events across the UK like the Nationwide Festival Of Light, Spree ’73, Come Together.
• whether there was actually a full-blown revival here in the UK or not
• musicians like troubadour Larry Norman and the long-lasting Greenbelt Festival
• new churches like Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel and John Wimber’s Vineyard Fellowship (including Lonnie Frisbee and Alpha), and Bill Johnson’s Bethel
• cult groups that surfaced, like the flirty-fishing Children Of God with their ‘Mo Letters’
• ministries that reached out to druggies, bikers, hippies, that came out of, or were parallel to, the Jesus People
• the cross-carrying Baptist preacher Arthur Blessitt preaching the length and breadth of the UK
• whether there is evidence of another Jesus People Movement in the USA today or not

Whitman was born in 1953. University introduced him to a hippy lifestyle, but in 1971, his siblings embraced Christianity. Drawn to a Christian rock musical in 1973, he found faith for himself. After a transformative encounter with Jesus, he immersed himself in the Bible and fellowship. His journey led to involvement in Campus Crusade for Christ, forming a Christian rock band, and ultimately, lifelong ministry.

See also my posts on The Jesus Rock Revolution and the Jesus Movement, Gospel music: influence and imitation, Looking down the wrong end of a telescope, Rock gets Religion and Larry Norman.

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Out Of Darkness - On Solid Rock.

So that nothing may be lost

Here is the reflection I shared in the lunchtime Eucharist for St Martin-in-the-Fields:

In my previous parish we used to begin our Evening Communion services with a call to worship from the Wild Goose Resource Group that began with 'Gather us in' and went on to describe the diversity of all those gathered in. It connects with our Gospel reading today (John 6.35-40) in that Jesus said the will of God the Father, who sent him into the world, is that Jesus should lose nothing of all that God the Father has given to him and raise it up on the last day.

Earlier in this same chapter we have been given an example of this in the feeding of the 5,000 where, at the end of the meal, all the fragments of bread were gathered up so that nothing may be lost. Jesus then gives this story of meeting basic needs a cosmic or eschatological twist when he later says it ‘is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day’.

These words come in the middle of Jesus’ teaching about being the Bread of Life, which followed the feeding of the 5,000. When Jesus gave thanks over the bread, the word used is ‘eucharistesas’, the word which gives us ‘Eucharist’. Jesus shared the bread around in communion, then, when everyone was satisfied, he instructed his disciples to pick up the fragments using that same phrase, ‘so that nothing may be lost.’ Just as none of this ‘eucharisticized’ bread was lost after the feeding, so, because ‘Jesus is the bread of life, [those who] see and believe in him … receive eternal life [and] become a fragment which he will gather up on the last day.’ (John, Richard Burridge, BRF 1998)

This is the reason why Christ came, which he revealed both here and in the parables he told about things that were lost; the lost sheep and coin. The shepherd and woman in those two stories are exactly the same; because of their concern for the sheep and coin which are lost, they will not give up searching until these have been found. The sheep and the coin are loved and this love is revealed or proved through the search.

The point of those parables is for us to know that we are similarly loved by God because he also searches for us until we are found. That search is the story told in the Gospels; that Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he laid down his own life for us becoming obedient to the point of death — even death on a cross – in order that all might be safely gathered in as those who are gathered in rise with him and return to God. Christ went on that search to seek and save those who are lost and thereby to ensure that none shall be lost and all shall be safely gathered in. We are loved by God so much that his Son left all he had in heaven to become a human being and die to gather us in. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, searches for all souls with God’s attentive love, looking and listening, finding and carrying; carrying us home, like a sheep on the shoulders, from the cliff edges of our lives.

Those who are lost almost universally consider themselves worthless but these parables and this story of the fragments gathered up specifically deny that assumption. What is lost is actually the most precious thing or person of all; the person or thing for which everything else will be given up or set aside. What is lost and found, discarded but then gathered up, is us. We are the ones for whom Christ searches at the expense of all that he has, including, in the end, his own life. We are the most precious lost person for whom he searches, the discarded fragment that will not be overlooked and will not be wasted. We are precious, we are loved.

Christ came to gather up and reconcile to God all the disparate fragments of our lives that none should be lost, even through death. This is why he speaks of the kingdom of God as being a banquet to which all, especially all who have experienced exclusion, are invited. It is why he states that there is room for all – many rooms - in his Father’s house and that he goes there to prepare places for us. He also calls us to respond in this same way to others and to the resources he provides for us in the world he created.

As a result, we have, I think, a basis for saying with the poet Walt Whitman that: ‘Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost, / No birth, identity, form — no object of the world, / Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing.’ And so we pray, ‘Gather us in, from corner or limelight, from mansion or campsite, from fears and obsession, from tears and depression, from untold excesses, from treasured successes, to meet, to eat, be given a seat, be joined to the vine, be offered new wine, become like the least, be found at the feast.’

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Steve Scott - The Resurrection Of The Body.

All Souls: All is safely gathered in

Here is my sermon from tonight's Choral Eucharist for All Souls at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

I was in a helicopter flying over mountain ranges in Kosovo. My father was alongside me. Also alongside were relatives from other bereaved families. We were part of a small squadron of helicopters carrying bereaved relatives from Pristina airport to view the site of a plane crash.

On Friday 12 November 1999, a plane chartered by the World Food Programme crashed in northern Kosovo. All 24 people on board died. 21 passengers and three crew, including my brother Nick, who was one of three Britons to die in the crash. The 21 passengers were all humanitarian workers for non-governmental agencies. Each had been travelling to contribute to the relief effort in Kosovo. Nick was one of a 15-strong Tearfund disaster relief team helping ethnic Albanians rebuild their homes. He had had one six week spell of relief work and was returning, with another member of the team, for a second period.

In foggy conditions, the plane had smashed into a mountaintop 20km north of Pristina. A few yards more and it would have cleared the mountaintop but that wasn’t to be and, as a result, we were being taken by helicopter to see for ourselves the wreckage strewn in small pieces near the top of the 4,600-foot mountain.

Confirmation that the plane had crashed and that there were no survivors did not come until the day after contact was lost with the plane. I remember taking a phone call from my parents who had been notified that contact had been lost with the plane and feeling absolutely unable to accept or comprehend the news. This was something that simply could not be happening.

Once the crash had been confirmed my father and I were flown to Rome by Tearfund to wait for further news together with the families of the other 23 people who died in the crash. After a few days we were flown to Kosovo to see the crash site for ourselves. On arrival at Pristina Airport we were loaded into helicopters and flown the short distance into the mountains and over the site of the wreckage. This was the worst moment for each one of us. As we saw the small pieces of the plane strewn over the mountainside we knew exactly what had happened to our loved ones and were faced full-on with the reality of their death.

When we returned to Pristina Airport, some refreshments had been organised for us in a tent and members of Tearfund who had worked with Nick had travelled to the airport to be with us. We sat and listened as they told us about the effect that Nick had had on the Albanian people with whom he had worked and also on other members of the team as they had valued his friendship, support and advice.

As they talked, the tears flowed; theirs and ours and, I believe, God’s as he was with us enabling us to express our grief. As they talked, I had a growing sense that Nick had gone into God’s presence and had been welcomed with the words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” In that moment I glimpsed something of the glory into which Nick had entered and that glimpse continues to sustain and strengthen me in my loss.

Over subsequent days, I heard many more stories of the way in which Nick’s life had influenced others and over the years since I had seen the way in which the inspiration he provided led others to continue the work that he began. Young people whose lives were turned around through the youth project that Nick worked for have continued his youth work and also his charitable work in Uganda, while Nick’s involvement with Tearfund inspired another member of our family to join their Disaster Response Team. In these ways, the stories about Nick that begun to be told at Pristina Airport have continued to be told and in the telling my sense that Nick has been welcomed into glory has grown.

This evening we’re remembering All Souls which is, in part, about the finding of ways to come to terms with loss and waste and horror and grief. I believe Jesus’ words in John 6 provide a clue as to how that may, in some sense, be possible. My own experience of loss and waste and horror and grief which I have shared gives us, I think, one way of reflecting on Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel reading that it ‘is the will of him who sent me that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.’

These words come in the middle of Jesus’ teaching about being the Bread of Life which followed shortly after the feeding of the 5,000 and the 12 baskets of fragments that were gathered up afterwards. The fragments of bread scattered on the hillside would not have looked dissimilar to my view from the helicopter of the plane’s wreckage scattered on that Kosovan mountain-side.

When Jesus gave thanks over the bread, the word used is ‘eucharistesas’, the word which gives us ‘Eucharist’. Jesus shared the bread around in communion, then, when everyone was satisfied, he instructed his disciples to pick up the fragments using that same phrase, ‘so that nothing may be lost.’ Just as none of this ‘eucharisticized’ bread was lost after the feeding, so, because ‘Jesus is the bread of life, [those who] see and believe in him … receive eternal life [and] become a fragment which he will gather up on the last day.’ (John, Richard Burridge, BRF 1998)

This teaching tallies with the use elsewhere of Harvest imagery for the Last Judgement – a sense that all can be safely gathered in - and is reinforced for us in the Letter to the Colossians where it is stated that in Christ all things hold together, as through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. Christ came to gather up and reconcile to God all the disparate fragments of our lives that none should be lost, even through death. This is why he gives us parables of lost things being found. It is why he states that there is room for all – many rooms - in his Father’s house and that he goes there to prepare places for us. It is also why St Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 13 that faith, hope and love remain. In other words that our deeds of faith, hope and love are not lost with our death in this life but continue into eternity.

As a result, we have, I think, a basis for saying with Walt Whitman that: ‘Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost, / No birth, identity, form — no object of the world, / Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing; / Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere / confuse thy brain. / Ample are time and space — ample the field and / nature. / The body, sluggish, aged, cold — the embers left / from earlier fires, / The light in the eye grown dim shall duly flame / again; / The sun now low in the west rises for mornings / and for noons continual; / To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible land / returns, / With grass and flowers and summer fruits and / corn.’

It was in the telling of tales about Nick that I found a measure of peace and acceptance in regard to what had happened to him and where he is now. The telling of tales about my brother confirmed our love of him and God’s love of him. This suggests to me that we should not be afraid of tears, of memories, of stories, as they are an expression of the love we feel. It is as we cry out in our grief that God meets with us. Jesus is alongside us through his Helper, his Spirit, and can speak to us and for us in groans that words cannot express. It is as we speak of those we have lost that a measure of peace will come.

After all what is the Eucharist, if it is not primarily a retelling of the story of Jesus’ death? It is as we re-tell and re-enact that story that we receive Christ and the peace, comfort, forgiveness and healing that he brings to our troubled lives, emotions and spirits. So, when we remember, we are eucharistizing. Telling tales about Nick was a way for us to begin to gather up the fragments of his life, as Christ is also doing. It was, therefore, a participation in the gathering in, the eucharistizing, and the reconciling of Nick to God that is the work of Christ and which means that God can and does say to him and to all those lost to death, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’ ‘Enter into my rest.’ That is also what we are doing at the altar rail tonight as we receive communion while remembering our loved ones before God; we are receiving the fragments and becoming one body together. That’s also what All Souls is.

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Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings - Call on God.

Nothing shall be lost

Here is my sermon from today's Choral Eucharist at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

Yesterday, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that he welcomes “the Evening Standard’s campaign on tackling food poverty and waste,” as “hunger is a complex, widespread and shocking blight on our country and more needs to be done to highlight this issue.”

In commenting on this statement, the paper noted that the Archbishop has good scriptural reasons to join the Food for London campaign. They noted that after ‘feeding the five thousand, Christ instructed the waste to be gathered up afterwards’ and said that it was in that spirit that the Archbishop had supported this campaign.

It is positive to see a major newspaper quoting scripture and doing so with some understanding. This contemporary reminder of the feeding of the five thousand and the 12 baskets of fragments that were gathered up afterwards give us one way of reflecting on Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel reading (John 6. 37 – 40) that it ‘is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.’

These words come in the middle of Jesus’ teaching about being the Bread of Life which followed shortly after the feeding of the 5,000. When Jesus gave thanks over the bread, the word used is ‘eucharistesas’, the word which gives us ‘Eucharist’. Jesus shares the bread around in communion, then, when everyone is satisfied, he instructs his disciples to pick up the fragments using that same phrase, ‘so that nothing may be lost.’ Just as none of this ‘eucharisticized’ bread was lost after the feeding, so, because ‘Jesus is the bread of life, [those who] see and believe in him … receive eternal life [and] become a fragment which he will gather up on the last day.’ (John, Richard Burridge, BRF 1998)

This is the reason why Christ came, which he reveals both here and in the parables he told about the lost sheep and coin. The shepherd and woman in those two stories are exactly the same; because of their concern for the sheep and coin which are lost, they will not give up searching until these have been found. The sheep and the coin are loved and this love is revealed or proved through the search.

The point of those parables is for us to know that we and all souls are similarly loved by God because he also searches for us until we are found. This search is the story of the Gospels:

‘Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death
— even death on a cross.’
(Philippians 2. 6 – 8)

Christ went on that search to seek and save those who are lost and thereby to ensure that none shall be lost and all souls shall be safely gathered in.

How much are we loved by God? So much that his Son left all he had in heaven to become a human being and die to rescue us for God. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, searches for all souls with God’s attentive love, looking and listening, finding and carrying; carrying us home, like a sheep on the shoulders, from the cliff edges of our lives.

The lost almost universally consider themselves worthless but these parables and this story specifically deny that assumption. What is lost is actually the most precious thing or person of all; the person or thing for which everything else will be given up or set aside. What is lost and found is us. We are the ones for whom Christ searches at the expense of all that he has, including, in the end, his own life. We are the most precious lost person for whom he searches. We are precious, we are loved.

As a result, we have a basis for saying with Walt Whitman that:

‘Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form — no object of the world,
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere
confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space — ample the field and
nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold — the embers left
from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim shall duly flame
again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings
and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible land
returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and
corn.’

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Orlando Gibbons - O Lord, Increase My Faith.