Sermons from St Faith's
'The Hope that is in you'
Revd Sue Lucas, Sunday, May 25th, 2014
You might know the Groucho Marx joke about not wanting to belong to
any club that would have him as a member…well, the great William
Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, preacher of the Social Gospel and
one of the architects of the National Health Service once in a
sermon – I believe preached from the pulpit of Liverpool Parish
Church – claimed just the opposite – ‘the Church is the only
organisation that exists for the benefit of those who do not belong
to it.’
And this is deeply true – it is true in a very particular way of the
Church of England, for we are a Parish Church – we are not
Congregationalists, but we belong to those we are given to in our
parish boundaries – there is nowhere in England that is not prayed
for, that is not the pastoral responsibility of somebody – and we of
course are given to them. There is a benign kind of
arbitrariness to parish ministry.
But it is true of the Church of God, not just the Church of England
– for we are the body of Christ – the sacrament of Christ, just as
Christ is the sacrament of God; WE are the crucified and risen body
of Christ – by one Spirit we were all baptised into this one body,
this sacramental body, this active sign of faith and hope and love.
As we move towards the end of the Easter Season – Ascension Day on
Thursday and the great completion of Pentecost ten days later- there
is a move from the Christ event to the event of the Church - and our
readings begin to focus on the Easter events as they form us into
the Church – for the risen Christ must ascend, must leave us, to his
Father and our Father, but will not leave us orphaned – but form us
into the Church, the body of Christ; as Teresa of Avila puts it,
‘Christ has no body now on earth but yours; no hands but your to do
his work; no feet but yours to go his way; yours are the eyes
through which he sees the world, and the ears through which he
hears.’
Today’s readings give us a sense of what shape, as it were, the body
of Christ has; for to be the sacramental body of Christ is to be a
community shaped by faith, hope and love.
Faith, for ‘faith is trust in things or which we are not certain and
assurance of things not seen.’ Paul makes this clear – in an
incredibly nuanced bit of philosophical theology, in front of the
Arepagus, the birthplace, if you like, of the polis, the political,
the secular state; Greek philosophy insists on an unknown God, and
in this, they are not wrong; for knowledge is power, and what we
know, we control; a God we could know like this would truly be an
idol. But in another way, of course, God makes himself known
with astonishing directness and generosity in the life and witness
and death and resurrection of Jesus – as gift and not given, as the
one who unmasks idolatrous power in weakness. This, then is
the shape of our faith in Jesus.
And to be shaped by faith is, indeed, to ‘give an account of the
hope that is in us.’ An Emily Dickinson poem begins, ‘Hope is
the thing with feathers.’ It is beautifully satirized by Woody
Allen who says, ‘the thing with feathers has in fact proved to be my
nephew, but he has gone to a specialist in Zurich and appears to be
recovering.’ The Dickinson poem suggests hope is a fragile
thing, a delicate thing; and perhaps at times it is – yet also it is
substantial, perhaps in a way something very concrete and material;
for it is hope that gives substance to our faith. Hope has the
shape not of facile optimism – no, for true hope – the hope of the
Gospel – is clear-eyed that life can at times be very hard and
difficult and bitter; do not forget that Christ’s resurrection body
takes the marks of the wounds of the crucifixion into the very heart
of the Godhead. Yet, at the same time it insists that the hurt
and bitterness never have the last word, for in Christ, God goes on
making us his new creation; by hope, we reinterpret the past, live
in the present, and represent the future selves we do not yet know.
For the greatest of all, of course, is love – the love of which our
Gospel speaks – the relentless love that God has for each one of us,
the relentless love that never lets us go; the relentless love that
paid humanity the ultimate compliment of sharing our life; the love
that did not turn away from the death of the cross, the love by
whose power Christ was raised from the dead. It is this love
that forms us in faith and builds us up in hope; and it is love into
which we are called by our baptismal promises. First, to know
that God loves us – relentlessly, committedly – whatever we do; for
there is nothing we can do that makes God loves us more and nothing
we can do that makes God love us less. Being the church is our
response to God’s love – we express it in every sacrament – and we
are called in turn to mediate, to represent that love to the world –
to love those we dislike and despise, those we hate and fear, those
who have hurt us, those the world despises and marginalises, the
great unwashed as well as the great and the good, the awkward, and
the bloody minded. Can we do it? Dare we? How can
we begin to love those we can’t like? Well – a starting point
is to pray for them – for in that we begin to see them as as much
the subjects of God’s relentless, committed love as we ourselves
are. Not easy – but our baptismal vocation.
And we do not do it alone, of course – for we are promised the great
gift of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit by whose power bread and wine
become the Real Presence of our Lord and Saviour – and by whose
power we become what we eat – the resurrected Body of Christ.
And when we do we become the sacrament of Christ as he is the
sacrament of God – effective living signs of God’s relentless love –
not just for one another, but for those in our parish – and for the
life of the world. Amen.
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