Sermon. The Meaning of Life is: Come and Have Breakfast!

Sermon. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford. 10.4.16

Third Sunday of Easter (Year C)

Gospel: John 21.1-19

This sermon is indeed too long. I did not have the mix of time and concentration to edit. People offering feedback were immensely kind. Believe it or not, I held their attention (it was claimed). 
Perhaps the nutritious bribery (see end of sermon) helped. 

Another friend suggested I might replace the text with a haiku. If you're of that school, I offer:


Fishers without fish?
Abundance is here to stay;
join Me for breakfast.

Or

Fishless fishers, we!
He will help us. He will call:
Companionship lives!

In terms not of the normal secular calendar, but of the Church's calendar, history is repeating itself. Two years ago, I was not with you over Easter; I was fulfilling prior commitments to my then church. I appeared (as it were) on the Second Sunday of Easter. And – what do you know? - Fr Brian took his well-earned break over the Third Sunday of Easter, and I was in charge, and so preached for the first time. A preaching anniversary, then.

I am not sure you (those of you who were around) will remember that sermon!... Once again, I am teasing. I mean I am sure you will not remember that sermon. And why should you?

Whoever we are – someone quite new to church or archbishop emeritus – whoever we are, we are unlikely to remember the structure or detailed content of sermons. We are a literate culture, and we tend not to write notes during sermons (though don't let me stop you). So we treat them as 'of the moment'. We can hope that something might stick - some phrase, or image, or word of challenge or comfort, or maybe just a tone of voice which strikes us as loving or authentic. And that is enough.

You won't remember my sermon two years ago. But just maybe, once I mention it, you may recall one aspect of that sermon. This: I asked you a question. And I made it clear it was not a rhetorical question but a real question, looking for an answer. Remember? The question I asked was: What is your favourite Easter story, meaning your favourite gospel story of the encounters people had with the risen Lord Jesus?

I remember this very clearly, because (frankly) you gave me the answer I was expecting. You, inasmuch as you said anything (you're better now), tended to point to the story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. [Some did remember this!] This is often a favourite. It was also the reading that day (which of course may well have influenced you).

I remember that I then said that the story, the narrative flow, the structure of the Emmaus story is an excellent model for what we do in church:

• we too gather, maybe despondent, confused, distracted or exhausted, but we gather in faith that the risen Christ joins us (or we him);
• we too attend to the Scriptures, trusting that they make fullest sense in the light of the risen Christ, and in expectant hope that in one way or another our hearts burn within us when he mystically unfolds them for us;
• we too look in faith to the risen Christ as the one who mystically breaks the bread, so that we recognise him there, and receive him into our very selves;
• we too look to be sent back into the world with some new strength or encouragement or insight, to be able to say words which ultimately mean 'we have seen the Lord; we recognised him in the hearing of the Scriptures and in the breaking of the bread, and so all of life is new'.

That's why our service has the Gathering, the Liturgy of the Word (the Bible), the Liturgy of the Sacrament (the bread and wine), and the Dismissal (the Sending Out).

So every time we gather, Sunday by Sunday, but also whenever we gather around the table, we ourselves are on the road to Emmaus. Alleluia! Indeed (also from that first sermon, by the way):

[signed] Alleluia!

Or [differently signed] Alleluia!

Am I being lazy, or nostalgic, revisiting an old sermon? I don't think so. I think it bears repeating. (Remember that we don't remember sermons.) But it's also a way in to my personal confession. My own favourite resurrection story is... today's. I mean the first half (the half that is often forgotten, as there is such a focus on Peter and his threefold declaration of love). The third appearance in John. The risen Lord Jesus and the miraculous catch of fish. Why?

It's a story with some resonances with the way to Emmaus. The disciples are still despondent, somewhat lost. It occurs to Peter to return to his old life as a fisherman, and the others go along with it. Is this a 'displacement activity'? Is it a mark of a sense of utter failure – fishing for human beings has failed... back to square one? Is it that thing which people know very well in grief: the need to just do something, perhaps especially to do something in the midst of nature? We are not told. It may have been all of this and more.

Then Jesus appears.

And immediately we have the classic problem with all the resurrection accounts. Jesus is both recognised and not recognised. His first word to the fishermen is 'Children', or even 'Little children', or, alternatively, 'Lads'. It's an intimate term. So it doesn't work to imagine the disciples thinking they were being addressed by a complete stranger. The Beloved Disciple does indeed say: 'It is the Lord'. But this turns Peter into a spin. Chaotically, he dresses, then jumps into the sea, and wades through the shallow water. But notice this especially: when all are gathered, we have the line: 'none of the disciples dared to ask him, “Who are you?” because they knew it was the Lord.' Let me tell you: that makes as little sense in Greek as in does in English. None.

So there is something abidingly mysterious about the story. When we add to the recognisability-and-unrecognisability of Jesus the miraculous nature of the catch of fish (or at least Christ's surprising underwater knowledge) and the intriguing - nay, baffling - detail that we are told there were precisely 153 fish, here is something a long way away from a normal story. Since we are talking about the resurrection, this should not surprise us.

But! That is only half the story. The other half is that in other ways this is indeed a simple, a natural, a homely story.

• A friend visits a lakeside at dawn;
• he finds his friends fishing, and shouts some advice to them;
• they are very successful;
• they join him at the lakeside for a celebratory breakfast;
• it is simple but nourishing – bread and fish.
  You see? Simple, homely.

And this is how the resurrection accounts are. They have something mysterious about them (remember how Mary Magdalene didn't recognise Jesus until he said her name; remember the disciples were in a shut and locked room, then Jesus is suddenly with them). And, at the same time, they have something simple and very much human-scale about them. A friend comes to be with a friend.

I've said this before, but, again, it bears repeating. Notice what Jesus does not do. He does not show himself to Pilate, or Herod, or Caiaphas, or any crowd, to prove them wrong. He shows himself only to his friends. Then, he does not chastise them for deserting him. He doesn't even lead them - nudge them, encourage them - towards a prayer of repentance, before they can be reconciled. He simply – perhaps too simply for our tastes – says: 'Little children... you have no fish have you?... I'll help... then come and have breakfast.'

Do we believe this? Can we trust it? You see: this really is revelation. It is a truth about Gd only Gd can tell us.

We might, through our own natural reasoning, just about work out for ourselves that Gd is broadly on our side; the Creator is going to be favourably disposed to Gd's own creation (for Gd is consistent). But we'd never from reason and deduction alone come to think that this means

• that Gd longs, more than anything, to be our friend;
• that Gd longs for companionship with us, which means (literally) sharing together in the eating of bread;
• that Gd longs for that companiable friendship so much that Gd will offer that before we are ready, before we have come to repentance and facing up to things.
  Repentance is important, but note that it follows on. First we, like the first disciples, have to hear those words of invitation:

'Little children, come and have breakfast. Let's eat and spend time together', 
says the Lord.

If you believe and trust in this for yourself: [Signed] Alleluia!

If you half believe and trust, or wonder whether there just might be something in it, Alleluia too! 
You are in the best place to explore. To ask yourself how you might make that invitation your own.

And, if you want, as you might, some concrete, embodied symbol of that companionship-call from Christ, I have here [shows] some token, biscuit fish-and-chips, and some breadsticks. 

We can enjoy these over drinks after the service and nourish ourselves on the invitation.

[Signed] Amen. 

Sermon on eating His flesh and drinking His blood

Sermon. 23 August 2015. St Michael and All Angels, Little Ilford. 

Trinity 12

John 6.56-69

There's a slogan going round the internet. Maybe you've seen it. It says this: 'To my children: Never make fun of helping me with computer stuff. I taught you how to use a spoon.'

No doubt the primary intent is to say in a humorous way that family members need to be patient with each other (which is a good message). But it's also a good reminder that if we are here today, we are here because someone fed us first. (And it's lovely that we have infants among us, the demonstrate this.) Indeed, if we eat today, it is because someone taught us how to eat. So, before we have our sophisticated dinner parties with any amount of cutlery, before we were taught how to eat, we all gurgled and munched and gnawed and sucked and swallowed and spat food out. All of us.

I realise this isn't really news. But it may be something we're not used to reflecting on. In particular, we may think these words are not proper for a sermon. It's very hard to avoid this thought at one level of consciousness or another: Gd is Spirit, pure Spirit, and so must relate first or mostly to our spirits, or, as people say today, our 'spirituality'. The religious bits of us. Not really with our bodies, with all their primitive ways and needs.

And I think today's gospel tells us it is not like that.

We're are now at the end of our excursus into chapter 6 of John's Gospel. Jesus as the bread of life. Last week we would have had the most shocking statement in this section, and maybe the whole Bible. (We didn't have it in fact, because we swerved away to mark the Blessed Virgin Mary.) I mean Jesus has just said: 'Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life within you.' And what may be even harder to hear is that some say the Greek is better translated 'gobble on' or 'munch' on the flesh of Jesus. As I say, primitive, bodily stuff.

Now, it has to be worth saying that we don't know what Jesus meant! 

It's very natural for us to think Jesus is referring to the eucharist. And we know that Christianity does not take the eucharist to be literally an act of cannibalism. But John never actually makes the connection with the eucharist (and when it comes to the Last Supper, John concentrates of foot-washing; food barely gets a mention.) So it might be something else, some sort of mystical finding nourishment in Jesus and his words and example, perhaps. We are never going to be able to pin down the meaning of Jesus in John.

But it is clear that Jesus teaching that we are to eat his flesh was difficult for people to accept. They may not have liked his language. They may have thought it sounds to much like cannibalism. They may have been especially offended by talk of drinking Jesus' blood, as Gd in the Hebrew Scriptures forbids the consumption of blood, any blood.

Whatever Jesus and/or John originally meant, we are where we are, and we do honour the eucharist. Week by week, and indeed more than that, we eat together. And that is what most Christians do, throughout the world, and from early days. So we cannot help but make some links between what Jesus is saying here, and what we do. And I think this is to the good.

There are many ways of celebrating the eucharist. It can be very simple. It can be very ornate and involved. You can say every word. You can chant every word. But the element that is always there is that it is about us as a Christian community doing something together, including doing that most primitive of things, eating. So we are obeying Jesus (for elsewhere in the gospels of course he does tell us to 'do this in remembrance of me'). More than thinking with our heads, or even feeling with our hearts certain things about Jesus, we do something. We may not be in the habit of speaking about obeying Jesus, but it's not always wrong! And it is as our bodies that we obey. Because indeed we are our bodies. They are not some mere 'instrument' for our souls. Christian tradition does indeed at times talk about our bodies and souls and can give the impression they are two distinct things. But they are really two ways of thinking of the same thing.

And something else, people who study human behaviour tend to say that meals form community. I think we can see why. If you want to differentiate between classes or castes, an effective way is to refuse to eat with those you think are beneath you. If you want to bring people together, and say that at heart we are all equal, we are all of equal worth, you share a meal. If you want to mark some life-event as one family or community, you share food. And that is what we do, at a eucharist. We may think it's not really a meal, as we usually only eat one morsal and drink one sip. But it is still a meal. We have, as bodies, to take, eat, swallow, do exactly what we do when we have a big meal (although admittedly normally without a spoon).

So we (here, quite concretly, St Michael and All Angels) are formed by our eucharistic meals together week after week. Every time we celebrate the eucharist we are combining obedience to Jesus with our commitment to one another. And that is a powerful combination. It is not cannibalism. It is not magic. It is not the only thing we as Christians have to do. But it's worth considering that it may be our obedience to Jesus, which we act out in our bodies, and our commitment to each other, as equal in Gd's sight, so that we share what we have, may actually make our faith, rather than the other way round. 

Amen. 

The Sublime Message of John: Gd Likes Us!

Sermon. All Saints, Forest Gate. 9 August 2015

Trinity 10 (Year B)

John 6.35, 41-51

We begin in the middle. That's how Dante begins his Divine Comedy (it's a good read). But it is also where we are. I come to you as guest for the first time, and both you and I are already in the middle of our stories. In particular, we are both in the middle of hearing (whether for the first or for the thousandth time) Jesus in the sixth chapter of John's Gospel. Jesus is giving us some sustained reflection on himself as the Bread of Life.

We are not at the start. We have already heard, a couple of weeks ago, of the 'Sign' that Jesus performed – the miraculous feeding of thousands. And we have heard already that Jesus has linked this to the divine provision of Manna, bread from heaven, to the People of Israel in the wilderness. But we are not yet at the end, or even the climax. In particular, we have yet to hear the most shocking thing that Jesus has to say. Only next week do we hear Jesus say (do come back and check that I'm right): 'unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life within you'.

So, we are in the middle, but where is that? Where are we? We are, we might think, in a place of great encouragement. For in today's passage Jesus makes big claims about himself, and offers good things to those who come to him. It bears repeating. Jesus says:

'I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty... I will raise that person up on the last day... whoever believes has eternal life... This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die... Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.'

All of this bears repeating because Jesus himself is so repetitive: to come to Jesus, or be drawn to Jesus by the Father (which is the same thing), is

• to be one who is to be raised up,
• to live forever,
• to have eternal life.
  And all this is so, because Jesus is the Bread of Life.

But if that's the good news, the bad news is that we cannot indefinitely put off the question: 'Yes, but what does it mean?'

There is one thing, I have to suggest, it cannot mean. It cannot mean what it seems to mean on the surface. It cannot mean that those who come to Jesus do not die, that they, in the most plain and straightforward sense, live for ever, live as if they were mortal, but in fact are indestructible. Both at the times Jesus lived and spoke, and at the time John the Evangelist wrote things down (and ever since), those who were followers of Jesus died, of natural causes and also in tragedies and through violence, just like those who were not the followers of Jesus. (Think about it: if those first Christians didn't die, we can be sure we'd have heard about it. Indeed, if those first Christians didn't die, they themselves would be around to tell us about it!) Christians are mortal, every bit as mortal as non-Christians. Whatever it is to 'live forever' because of Jesus, it does not mean that we escape that very natural, everyday, necessary process of dying, of ceasing to function as a biological organism. No. Not that.

And so we are forced – and that, not because we are wishy-washy or feeble in faith, but because we take words and truth seriously – forced to say that 'life forever', or 'eternal life' may well include entrance into heaven after death, but if it is also for now (and Jesus says also now), then it includes a quality of life in this mortal (death-prone) life, Jesus offers a life-giving quality to our life.

Actually, the Greek also may nudge us to think more in these terms. The Greek for 'eternal life' is 'zoe aionios', meaning literally 'life of the age'. This might indeed mean 'life of an impossibly long period of time' and so for practical purposes the equivalent of never-ending life. Or it might mean - by implication, not literally - 'life of the age to come'. The life of the time/space/reality where Gd's purposes are consummated, where our peace, justice and celebration all abound, where, even if we are on earth and not in heaven, things on earth are as they are in heaven.

Let us think of the contrast Jesus makes. 'Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died' we have heard Jesus say (and he repeats it). Now, this does not, absolutely cannot mean that the Manna was poisonous! No, the Manna is Gd's gracious gift to the people in the wilderness [see Ex 16]. It did indeed come down from heaven, and to rely on and enjoy the Manna is a mark of proper dependence on Gd, a mark of trust and faith. So – heavenly rather than poisonous. And yet, Jesus seems to be saying, it only worked to keep people alive at some levels, and not at others. It does not have the quality of eternity, of the 'aionios' about it.

That is how many commentators would describe things – and myself, probably, until I came to reflect on it again in anticipation of today. There is ordinary, mortal life, which, sure, for the people of faith, includes miracles too. But then there is extraordinary life offered by Jesus, which, sure, still means that people die, but which infuses life with the quality of heaven. The choice is between life wholly on earth (good) and life on earth but also with a foretaste of heaven (better), life of eternal value and worth.

But perhaps things are not that simple.

It is true that the Manna was not poisonous. Rather it was a gift from Gd. But neither is its story an entirely happy one. Gd gives the Manna not because people have with great devotion prayed to Gd. No, rather, the people have just let out an excessive, sulky complaint, and not to Gd but to Moses and Aaron (as if they were in charge). They say this:

'If only we had died by the hand of the LORD in Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.' [Ex 16.3]

In other words, it is part of the people's misplaced murmuring and moaning against Gd's action, forgetful of Gd's liberating grace. And preachers may not say this very often, but look it up in Exodus and beyond - for all their complaining, the generation which came up out of slavery in Egypt did all die in the wilderness (apart from Joshua and Caleb alone). So, yes, the Manna is a miracle from Gd. But because of the circumstances around it, it is also associated with something like divine punishment. 'You ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.'

So can we say that the bread of life, the bread which brings 'eternal life' is what it is, because it is free of any sense of Gd's punishment; it is forgiveness, pure? That the life of the age to come is (is, actually is) reconciliation is surely a central message of John's gospel. Think about it. It is in John that we hear most of Jesus' resurrection appearances (to Mary Magdalene, to the male disciples gathered, to Thomas, to the disciple fishing, and to Peter).

He speaks to whom? To those who betrayed him, who denied him and ran away, and... he encourages them, eats with them, and breathes the Holy Spirit on them. He challenges them, yes. But nowhere does he condemn them. And more: nowhere actually does he call on them to repent or say sorry for their betrayal (that must have come later). He is simply with them, as a friend who has come back to his friends, because his friendship was that strong. (It is also in John that Jesus says: 'I call you friends'.) So our reconciliation comes through Jesus who enjoys our company, our companionship, enjoying breaking bread with us (which is what 'company' and 'companionship' mean).

No doubt many sermons being preached at this very moment will be saying that John

Chapter 6 is about the eucharist, the Lord's Supper, communion, mass, even though there is no mention of it, explicitly, in the text. I don't know about that. (Really: I do not know.) But... I do trust that the eucharist, as it has come to be, makes sense - and lives out the sense - of the life of the age to come as seen in the resurrection of Jesus.

We meet Gd first of all not as judge, and not even as teacher, doctor, therapist (or whatever), but as a friend who comes to his friends, and will stick with his friends, because his friendship is that strong. Even more simply put: 

Gd likes us! 

We are in the middle of that life-giving story, now. Now, how can be take the story on?

Amen.