SERMON FOR PARISH EUCHARIST
HAMPSTEAD PARISH CHURCH
4 AUGUST 2013
Trinity 10, Year C
OT Lesson : Ecclesiastes 1.2, 12-14; 2.18-23
NT Lesson : Colossians 3.1-11
Gospel : Luke 12.13-21
Text: Christ is all and in all (Colossians 3.11)
It’s easy enough to see what our Gospel reading was getting at, or indeed to identify with the sense of futility so memorably sketched in our first reading from the book of Ecclesiastes. Here in Hampstead we may not be much into the rebuilding of barns to make room for a bumper harvest, but we know enough people who are busy amassing wealth in other ways, and spending it liberally on education, property, holidays, and a nice fat pension pot. If we are honest, many of us can identify with at least some part of that picture. And when we have done all that, when we have tasted the good life and found it strangely unsatisfying, perhaps especially when we look to the future and are confronted with the certainty of death, we begin to ask the same questions as they were asking two and even three thousand years ago. What’s it all for? Is there anything beyond death? Instead of losing sleep over the latest risk to my investments, what would make me really happy?
Turn the pages of the gospel, and you will find Jesus advising his disciples to leave behind them all those concerns for the daily necessities of life – our Heavenly Father knows what we need, and he will take care of us. We should strive for his kingdom, and all the rest will fall into place. Even our striving for the kingdom will be unnecessary, ‘for it is your Father’s good pleasure’ he says, ‘to give you the kingdom’ (Luke 12.31-32). Maybe life was a bit simpler in the rural communities of first century Galilee, but it wasn’t long before the members of the Christian Church had to work out how to strive for the kingdom of God in the rather more complex social setting of their more urbanised multicultural Greco-Roman world.
St Paul uses a range of metaphors, typically concerning the body to explain how the members of a church might relate to one another, but what lies at the heart of his gospel is the concept of being ‘in Christ’. His was the first generation to experience the fundamental change which flows from the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Through the gift of His Spirit, we are caught up into this new life, which transforms our own experience of life and death, bringing joy and hope where once there was nothing but misery and despair. In today’s reading from Colossians he hammers it home – indeed in the previous chapter he has nailed it to the cross – summing up his message of renewal in the words which are to encapsulate the new life of his converts, and dissolve the barriers of language, class, race and gender that would otherwise divide them. Christ is all and in all.
But what does he mean? I sometimes feel that our very familiarity with the language of Pauline theology may get in the way of our understanding. Ah yes, we say, St Paul – clever chap, but difficult to understand. So let me start somewhere else. I hope we all know what it feels like to love and to be loved, even if for some of us the most intense experience may be a distant sunlit memory. One of the things that I think we all know about love is that it has the power to dissolve all the barriers I have just mentioned, and even those of time and space. We know from our own experience that love can reach out to someone who is not in the same room or even on the same continent as we are; or we meet an old friend, whom we haven’t seen for thirty years. We pick up the threads of our friendship exactly where we left them, and nothing has changed – our love for one another is untouched by the passage of time. We continue to love those who have died, and we may even be fortunate enough, from time to time, to experience a moment when we feel their love reaching out to us. You may say, don’t kid yourself, it’s all in the mind. But things don’t cease to exist just because we can’t touch them or see them. Why should the reality of love, which we could never touch or see in the first place, be any different?
Jesus himself experienced life on more than one level. On one level he walked the dusty roads of Palestine, he caught fish with his friends and baked them over a fire beside the lake, he touched the sick and healed them, he set children on his knee, he laughed and he wept, he knew weariness and hunger. On another level he knew God as His Father, and he talked about His Father’s kingdom as a parallel universe in which his loving rule was absolute. These two worlds were distinct but they were not unrelated. Because He inhabited both worlds, he was able to touch the dross of this world with the gold of His Father’s love. When his compassion moved him to do that for people who sensed his power and put their trust in him, they were physically healed and spiritually transformed.
Now let us take one more step down that road. Let us dare to suppose that St John was right when he perceived that God is Love – not simply that God loves us, or that we should love God, but that God IS Love, that Love lies at the very heart of that parallel universe which Jesus knew as His Father’s kingdom. If that’s true, as I believe it is, then it might explain why being ‘in Christ’ is such a powerful image of the Christian life. When we love someone, we enter into their lives and they enter into ours in ways which change us both. The miracle of the Incarnation is perhaps just that, that in Jesus God was prepared to be changed by His Love for us. He embraced us, He enfolded us in His Love not as we ought to be, but ‘just as we are’. ‘Just as we are’ means that He did not shrink from taking upon himself not just our loveable side, but the whole package, and that was enough to crucify Him. But death could not hold Him, because He was equally inseparable from his Father’s Love, which was the ground of His life, as it is the ground – the creative source – of all life..
In our reading from Colossians Paul urges us to set our minds on the things that are above, where Christ is (Col 3.2), and to clothe ourselves in the new self which bears the likeness of Christ (Col 3.10). In the preceding chapter he has prayed that our hearts may be encouraged and united in love … so that they may have the knowledge of God’s mystery, that is Christ himself (Col 2.2). This is not an intellectual exercise. It’s more like falling in love, so that we are drawn into the life of Christ, just as He allowed himself to be drawn, at such cost, into our lives. As we turn to Him, we find that He has already turned to us. Moreover, He comes to meet us in the bread and the wine of Holy Communion, strengthening His Spirit within us as we are renewed by His grace.
For Christ is all and in all. Thanks be to God. Amen.