The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

“In Christ there is no East or West”, our gradual hymn reminded us, “but one great fellowship of love throughout the whole wide earth.”
And the hymn concludes, “In Christ now meet both East and West”, as “all Christlike souls are one in him.”
This metaphor is wonderfully personified for us today in the form of baby James Atkinson, who is to be baptised later in the service.
As some of you will remember, James’ parents, Neil and Lillian, and their two older children, were regular and committed members both of our Sunday congregation, and of our Thursday Holy Hamsters congregation up until about a year ago, when they left Hampstead to move a long way east to Hong Kong.
The Atkinsons are currently worshipping at St Stephen’s Chapel, Stanley Village in Hong Kong, and during the week, I have had a very friendly email correspondence with their priest in Stanley Village, demonstrating that not only in Christ, but also in modern global technology, East and West can meet as easily as if we were in adjoining parishes.
As, thousands of miles apart, we wished one another peace and joy and the assurance of our mutual prayers, I was very struck by this vision of unity and communication within Christ’s Church, all across the globe.
It is this same sense of the Christian church as a single, unified body which we heard described in our reading from the Epistle to the Ephesians, read to us by Neil just now:
“There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all.”
We worship on this, the Lord’s Day, with Christians all over the world, drawn together by their baptism, by their faith in God revealed in the Scriptures, and by their sharing in Holy Communion. 
Whilst we should never stick our heads in the sand, and pretend that there are no divisions between us and our Christian brothers and sisters, or that all branches and members of the Church are in complete agreement on every subject(!), it is essential that we remember above all, our shared faith in one Lord, and our shared baptism in his Holy Spirit.
Christians generally would agree on the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, upon which our faith is built, and which we declare together each week in the words of the Creed, and hear repeated in the first part of the priest’s Eucharistic prayer.
We can share in Holy Communion and in heartfelt prayer, and we can strive to bring in God’s kingdom of peace and justice throughout the world.
Surely these tremendous and exciting bonds are more significant than the doctrinal disagreements and misunderstandings which divide us; even though these are magnified by the attention they receive from the media.
All of us who are baptised into Christ, as our reading told us, are called to make “every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”
But, as Paul reminds us, each of us has been given different gifts by God, with which we are called and enabled to build up the body of Christ.
We don’t yet know what James’s particular gifts will be, but as we witness his first step on the journey of Christian faith today, we pray, together with his friends and family, that he will use them to the glory of God, and in the service of humanity, and we pray that we, too, are fulfilling our own calling and making full use of the gifts we have received from God.
Last week, I celebrated a baptism in the afternoon, in which the parents had chosen a reading from Psalm 139:
“For you yourself created my inmost parts;
You knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I thank you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Marvellous are your works, my soul knows well.”
Watching the Olympics this week has also perhaps reminded us all, quite what a miracle the creation of the human body is, as we watch the extraordinary feats of which it is capable, both physical and mental.
The Olympics, too, bring together nations, races and peoples from East and West, from North and South, and offer us a brief glimpse of a world in which cultural and political differences may be laid aside in shared endeavour – the kind of world we see in Biblical visions of the new Jerusalem, in which the shared endeavour will be the worship of our God.
As we witness a child being brought to baptism, and give thanks for the miracle of his or her birth, we are reminded of the glory of a human being made in the image and likeness of God, and at the same time, we can reflect on the potential for good in each one of us, and the extent to which we reflect God’s love and compassion towards one another throughout our lives.
But our Epistle reading ends with a warning.
Although we rightly celebrate the potential of a child beginning their journey in faith, we are reminded that on that journey, we are called to mature and to develop the gifts we have been given, to use them to the glory of God, and to draw others to the light of Christ.
In this way, as the reading encouraged us, “all of us [may] come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ.”
Together we shall shortly exhort James to “Shine as a light in the world to the glory of God the Father.”
He – and we – are to continue to do this throughout our lives, sustained by the knowledge that we are accompanied by Christ’s pilgrim people all across the world, and nourished by the Body of Christ at Communion.
So we too will “grow up in every way into Christ”; into that living Body in which there is no East or West, but one great fellowship of love.