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MARK 4: 35-41

Some years ago I crossed the Channel in a really bad storm. It was fantastic! The ferry rolled from side to side; it swooped forwards down the waves and surged up the other side. People were being sick everywhere. Every toilet, every basin had someone standing over it. Passengers were lying on the floor. I confess to feeling somewhat smug that I felt fine! Then I went on deck and looked at those amazing waves, towering up above the ship and wondered what would happen to me if I fell over board. I would never have survived. I could not have been rescued. What would happen to a small boat out there? I know small boats do survive big storms but it would be pretty scary. That’s what the disciples experienced on Galilee. It must have been bad. They were fishermen after all. They were used to this Lake. They would not have been scared of nothing. If they were scared enough to wake Jesus and say “Teacher, do you not care if we perish?” it must have been really bad.

It’s a story which has been given many different meanings. One of the commonest sees the boat as the Church. It’s like Noah’s ark. It may be small and the waves outside may be really big but it will survive and it will keep us safe. There’s some truth in that. The Church is a place of safety in a world which sometimes feels very hostile indeed. The Church is a safe, secure structure grounded in God so it cannot fail. Within it are the sacraments that give us life, and the people who travel us on the way.

It’s a good image but not a sufficient one; it ignores the fact that it was not the boat that saved the disciples. It was Jesus. The boat was nothing without Jesus. The Church is nothing without Christ. It may seem a strange thing to say but people often do forget that the Church is Christ; without Christ it is just a building, a hierarchy, even a tyranny. People in the Church often do forget Christ and their behaviour becomes quite un-Christlike. That is a sad fact of life. People in authority sometimes forget they are supposed to be shepherds caring for lost and hungry sheep and become instead governors like Pilate or priests like Caiaphas.

It is Christ who makes the difference. It is Christ whom we follow. When we look at the world around us and see disaster looming – disaster in the civil wars in the Middle East; disaster in the ecological scene with climate change; disaster with the ongoing carnage wrought by Covid – it is easy to despair, to think those things are just too big for me to handle. I’ll just keep my head down and hope it doesn’t happen. Or we’ll just cut England off from the rest of the world and stay safe.

Is this what Jesus wants us to do? Cut ourselves off from Europe and ignore the refugees? ignore those fleeing poverty or war in Africa? Jesus tells us to love our neighbour. When asked who our neighbour is he told the story of the Good Samaritan. Our neighbour is anyone in trouble. It might be the person living next door who has cancer. It might be the young homeless person who asks me for help. It might be a refugee, or it might even be some kids in Zimbabwe. Our safety within the ark of the Church must never blind us to the needs of people outside.

But our story today takes us further than that. There are many kinds of storms in life, storms that threaten to overwhelm us. St Paul describes these: the sufferings he has endured for the sake of the Gospel. Mobs beat him and stoned him; the police flogged him. Friends disowned him, Jews persecuted him. He was caught in shipwrecks, suffered from heat, hunger and thirst. Every one of these was a temptation to turn away from Christ, or to lose faith in a Christ who seemed to be asleep, not caring, not bothering to rescue him from his suffering, but he never gave up.

Most of us are not called to endure those kinds of storms, but there are others. There are emotional storms as well. There are storms when we fall in love, sometimes appropriately, sometimes inappropriately; there are storms when we mix up love with lust. These throw us off balance and send our perspectives into chaos. There are the storms of anger when we feel unjustly treated, frustrations when people block our way. Much of this is about sin; sin causes those storms in our lives. St Ignatius tells us that the action of the good spirit in our lives is like water dropping onto a sponge – soft, gentle, hardly noticeable; the action of the bad spirit is like water dropping onto a stone, loud, noisy, splattering and divisive. Those are storms. When emotional storms sweep over us we need to look for the sin that is probably there. Or, perhaps more helpfully, we need to remember this picture of a boat in a storm and Jesus asleep in the stern. Just looking at Jesus changes our perspective. He is asleep and resting, why should we be so disturbed? He is not bothered by the storm, why should we be so upset? Just looking at Jesus can be enough to calm the storm in our hearts. And if it is isn’t, then we need the humility to go and wake him and say “help me, I’m perishing.” That is called repentance.

Yet, this picture of Jesus asleep in the boat goes on intriguing me. It brings me to times of prayer; times of prayer that are not stormy – quite the opposite. Nothing is happening. There are no waves. The sea is completely still. The boat is not moving. There is nothing to look at. I am bored. And Jesus, if he is there, is asleep. He doesn’t listen to me; he doesn’t speak to me. If he is there at all he is fast asleep. Can I wake him? Can I get his attention? I sing. I shout. I jump up and down. I do all sorts of amazing things and still he sleeps. In the end I try to shake him, and still he sleeps.

I expect we all know this kind of prayer. For many of us it is not just an occasional experience but the whole experience of prayer in our life. It’s not dramatic. We don’t feel we can call it Dark Night of the Soul, or even Dark Night of the Senses. Maybe the Cloud of Unknowing is better – just that sense of being in a fog, feeling nothing, doing nothing, going nowhere. Where is Jesus? Is he really there? Why does he seem to sleep on when I need him? Is it enough to stay there and do nothing? That can be an excuse for laziness; it can be a kind of complacency. Nothing may be happening because I am so taken up with myself that I cannot sense anything, not even Jesus. But let us assume we have tried all that. I have checked out my sinfulness; I have expressed my faith; I have tried waking Jesus. Nothing works. Well, I think there is one thing left. It is called ‘desire’. Do I want Jesus to be there? Do I want him because he is good and not because I want him to give me lovely feelings.

In the end Christian life is about desire: the desire for God. Everything else leads to that or flows from that. And although God is immanent in this world he is also transcendent, far beyond its furthest reach. Our souls reach out to him because he made them. Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in him. This desire for God reminds us we do not finally belong in this life. Good as it is, beautiful as it is, it points beyond life, beyond death to God. “Here we have no abiding city for we seek one to come.” Sitting in the boat, in a flat sea with nothing happening we look to Jesus, but he is asleep. And maybe that is very important. If he were awake and chatting to us we would be fascinated, happy to sit there for ever enjoying his company. But we are not on earth simply to enjoy Jesus’ company; we are here to learn to want God. Looking at Jesus asleep in the boat reminds us of how much we have enjoyed his company in the past. But it’s not enough. Jesus on his own is not enough. He wants us to move beyond into that place where he as Son, lives with God. He wants us to desire God. “Late have I loved you O beauty, so ancient and so new.” That love in our hearts draws us out of ourselves to the God who put it there. The desire for God may not be comfortable; it may be like thirst or hunger, much of the time. We may get just enough of that sweetness of the presence of God to make us long for more. So we look at Jesus sleeping in the boat; we remember the times past spent with him; we look with love on this sleeping figure and move beyond it to the place where we shall meet him properly and in the fullness of his love. That is the place St Augustine describes so beautifully in the City of God: “There we shall rest and we shall see; we shall see and we shall love; we shall love and we shall praise. Behold what will be in the end, without end! For what is our end but to reach that Kingdom which has no end.”

^{Trinity 1   2021      Mark 3 : 20-35}

^{Let us pray: without you my table is empty, make haste O Lord and do not delay. Amen}

              ^{(a prayer  from the inexhaustible treasury of the Imitation of Christ)}

^{The Collect for today, the 1st Sunday after Trinity, asks God to grant us the help of His grace; and our New Testament reading  speaks of  grace, as it extends to more and more people, increasing thanksgiving to the glory of God.}

^{God’s Grace – we  can recognise it straight away when we see it in others; we are only too aware when we lack it ourselves.}

^{This morning we stand mid-way between 2 great  feasts of the grace of God in Jesus Christ our Lord: Corpus Christi, and the Sacred Heart which both point to God’s  love, poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit  who has been given us.  And John in the opening chapter of his gospel points to this great generosity of God: “from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace”  (John 1:16)}

^{our collect prays :}  “because through the weakness of our mortal nature we can do no good thing without you, grant us the help of your grace, that in the keeping of your commandments

we may please you both in will and deed.”

Far be it for me to sit in judgement, but our gospel has some disturbing portrayals of people who (probably) lack grace : a family setting out to restrain one of their own number (in this case Jesus);  a kingdom and  a house divided against itself.

Our Lady Mary obviously  has grace, the one who is full of grace; the one above all who does the will of God, who hears the word of God and keeps it.  Ponders it, treasures it and lives it.

      ^{Without you my table is empty; make haste O Lord and do not delay.}

^{What is grace? I thought I would look it up in a dictionary of Christian theology, and discovered that it is a most complex thing which would keep us here all morning if we were to  spell it all out!  So instead I offer just a few glimpses of  grace, this wonderful fact of the Christian life. We recognise it straight away when we see it or experience it.}

^{Recovering members of AA joyfully proclaim that God has done for them what they could not do for themselves.}

^{We can recall the wonderful words of Paul from his 2nd Letter to the Corinthians :}

             “ my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

                                        Most of can say Amen to that.

Brother Lawrence, of the Practice of the Presence of God, used to pray this prayer when faced with a difficult or impossible task :   “Lord, I will not be able to do this unless you enable me to do it”.

He  would then just  get  on with the tasks at hand,  and found that unexpected  help and strength came from Above.

Our New Testament   reading suggests that grace  increases thanksgiving, to the glory of God, and St Thomas a Kempis  celebrates this link between thanksgiving and grace in the Imitation, in a marvellous chapter entitled “gratitude for the grace of God” :

“God does well in giving the grace of consolation, but people do ill in not returning it to God with thanksgiving. And this is why the gifts of grace do not flow in us – because we are ungrateful to the Giver, nor do we return all to the fountain-head. For grace is ever the reward of the one who returns thanks, and that shall be taken away from the proud which is wont to be given to the humble.”  Bk 2:10

Let us pray that the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ will flood our hearts, and extend to more and more people, and  that in the keeping of his commandments, we may please him in both  in will and deed.  That what begins with us individually, will fill our cup to overflowing, and  spill out and over for others……… …………….this is surely part of mission.

         ^{Without you my table is empty; make haste O Lord and do not delay.   Amen}

Trinity Sunday 2021. Isaiah 6.1 ‘holy, holy, holy..’

The vision of Isaiah is one we deeply familiar with; ‘holy. Holy, holy is the Lord’, the Lord of hosts; in every Eucharistic prayer it is sung, and often we use it to acclaim God, holy God, holy and strong, holy and almighty have mercy on us. Perhaps we may think of the way composers have set it to music, that wonderful setting Bach does in the B minor mass, where you can sense the swinging of the thuribles from side to side as the words are sung. It is a vision which comes unbidden,through the silky curtain of the divine train, cascading down from fifty metres above, all around him; and though there is no account of what of God he saw, we know that the seraphim were up there, two winged creatures with three sets of wings. One set of wings covered the face; one set of wings covered the feet; and the other set of wings were used to fly. Incense everywhere

      It is still, however far our familiarity goes, an amazing account. It is quite hard to imagine– how do you get an exalted throne, the top of an altar, angels, incense and flowing silk into one frame? Yet this is a glimpse of the one God, the One to whom no image or likeness can be made; no-one can see, can know God and indeed as we know, traditionally according to Hebrews Isaiah is killed, by Manasseh for saying that he saw God (Hebrews 11.37-8) and according to John 12.41 Isaiah saw Jesus’ glory.

      Yet of course it is far from clear, far from clear that Isaiah does any such thing. He is blessed with a vision, but what we take away is the image of the seraphim singing holy holy holy, the trisagion of Christian worship and our worship is of the one God   to whom no image or likeness can be made.

      Yet these three holies, have been taken to indicate that Isaiah, howsoever dimly, howsoever haltingly, is given insight into the three of the one, the one of the three; it is not the only view but  certainly this one has much to be said for it, for the God of Isaiah is the same as the God of Oor Lord and Saviour; the one source, the one reconciling and the one holy- and peace-making God, three focuses of the one God in Old and New Testaments.

      I do not use the word ‘person’ as it is hard to use the word without thinking of an individual and the last thing the God of JS is, is three individuals. The God who is the source of all, who is the source of Jesus is the one God to be sure, but as Jesus way of living and worshipping with God shews us, there is in Jesus a way of living and dying which communicates the message of God, that what is lived by Jesus is such a resource of life and meaning, that it calls to be seen as being of the same ‘stuff’ as God, the one whom He and we address as Abba, ‘Father’. God communicates to us completely in Jesus Christ, Father who is all Father is because the Son is all who the son is because the Father is all who the Father is. The great glory of the three and one which Isaiah glimpses, that we see in the way from Nazareth to Calvary and Emmaus and to Pentecost.

      (I hope that you are as unsettled as I am by the ease people think that ‘Father’ and ‘Son’ describe God? Can you imagine? God is not male,not female either. God is not gendered, no less the eternal Son; that is counter fashionably time serving, stupidly inapposite, wind and air. It is about as sensible as  to say God is a drag superstar.

There is a deep focus which is source of all, a focus or communication, word and that is two; but it is three which we sing, ‘holy, holy, holy…’ There are three; the Spirit is not just an afterthought. The Spirit is where we start after all; we would not be remotely interested in the Trinity if the Spirit had not already touched us, As St Paul teaches us: ‘When we cry, “Abba! Father!” ¹⁶it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God’. As Christians we are already involved with God, the Spirit has already got inside us.

      The Spirit lacks a special name; the Father, the Son are also Spirit and holy but they are who they are because of the other. This cannot be said of the third. Theologians wrestle with this and happily not without good result. (when you hear something like that you know that the preacher is going to mention St Thomas Aquinas). St Thomas thought that gift was marked the relation of the Spirit to Father and Son,full gift;  gift of the giver, the giveness of God, God as donation, something which far exceeds our weakness for binaries or for getting things too fixed

      The Spirit is called gift without reserve, wholly and without remainder, the sending of the Father-Son, utterly irreducible to either, not a gift, but gift fullstop. That same Spirit which is between the angels, which pours out the gifts and which teaches and nurtures, world-mothering and glory-templed, the Spirit  which may also sinks to the deepest of dark depths and holds at once the peace and joy of fulfilment together with the groaning of what God has created; The Spirit, perhaps that place holder where God seems absent and seriously so.

 The Spirit Creator of course, of all things, diversity and unity, all of it, not just things that are natural but all the things which have something of the human in them – towns, societies, cultures the lot. God is as much the creator of Maghull,Takeley or Romford of toothpaste or the B minor Mass as of mountain ranges, of Mars or of Betelgeuse.

It is in that context that we confess the One in Three, the One God who is indeed personal and whom we recognise in three focusses,  of God’s working in old and new testament; they are as one as one can get and in that same, unfathomable love, that mystery which is so universe dwarfingly vast – that is what love is -, we will give thanks for God and all God is and does and we join from where the seraphim sing and join in their everlasting praise; we will receive its real signs, of source, word and gift, ‘holy. Holy, holy…’

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”

*****

“When the day of Pentecost had come …”: – it’s a completion.

We’ve ceased singing the psalms at a sprint. We’re about to put away our special booklets. We won’t be sprinkling our praise and conversation so liberally with Alleluias.

As the name implies, it’s been 50 days since Easter, 50 days of seeing all in the light of the Resurrection, of re-reading this life through the lens of God’s overturning of human judgement.

And to say this is the fiftieth day means it comes after seven weeks of seven days. This completion is one not of ending, of privation, but of fullness – of harvest and its first fruits, of the law complete and given through Moses. The fulfilment of God’s promise. It is not surprising that when Paul writes of the Spirit, he writes not only of gift but of fruit. Fruit we are to offer.

As today coincides with the last Sunday of the College’s year, we can ask, are we at an ending or somewhere else?

Today’s Whitsunday gospel comes from John, from the discourse of Jesus at the Last Supper. When Fr John preached here 3 weeks ago he said these words cannot have sounded reassuring in the ears of Jesus’ disciples that fateful night. Talk of going away and of another one coming, a shadowy figure, whom they did not know, would not have been welcome at the feast.

Going away – finally going away – may be much on our minds.

But when Jesus says, “It is to your advantage that I go away,” can this be true?

Well, we’ve had several more weeks, the Ascension, days of prayer and pondering of scripture and the fathers to get to know the Spirit better and, today, the recollection of the gift given – we’ve had time to reflect.

The Spirit of God, of course, is never absent from anything God sustains in being. The Spirit imbues continuously all physical energies with their force.

The Spirit imbues continuously all matter with its form. This uninterrupted cosmic interplay of being and becoming is a dance that God forever choreographs. God allows no coming or going to end that, until time itself runs out.

The going away of Christ, then, and the coming of the Spirit which we contemplate today, are of a different order – not a stop, a cessation, but a transformation, a new significance. The disciples, from being servants surrounding a master, become, yes friends but even closer – those who know instinctively what Jesus is about.

Ezekiel has reminded us twice this past week that God puts a new spirit within us. Or, as Jeremiah explains, no longer shall they teach one another saying know me, for they shall all know me.

 On the day of Pentecost Jesus’ own Spirit finds home in human hearts, in our hearts.

Can this really be right? If there is no need to teach one another, why have you been studying at the College these past 2 or 3 years?

Well, the transformation that God effects in us is a little more subtle, a little more human, a little more loving than that.

“When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth.”

“All the truth” – there’s fullness! 7 by 7.

It is an utterly unstinting promise from the One who is the Word, the One through whom all things came into being, and without whom not one thing exists.

For myself, I am one thing. And all the truth? – that’s beyond me; it’s meant to be beyond me. For my understanding to be illuminated so comprehensively, I need others’ eyes with which to see, others’ minds with which to think.

The Spirit, who gave the diversity of languages at Babel, also gives the ability to hear and understand within such diversity.

And it takes time – the time of the Church’s existence – we can’t bear it all at once. And it takes a fellowship, a new fellowship ever more diverse, ever increasing across the regions of the earth and across time. Each has our glint of the fullness of truth; the same Spirit illuminates each of our minds.

And so God chooses to bring forth his assembly, his church, at Pentecost, an assembly animated by the one Spirit.

This is good news.

Not least for those due to be ordained.

When the Bishop calls down the gift of the Spirit on you at your ordination, like an epiclesis on the host, this is not so that you can go into the parish filled with all knowledge, all truth, a fail-safe vision and plan-of-action.

No.

But you can go with a fresh heart, a new spirit, an expectant listening to hear of God’s deeds, renewed day by day, believing that the Spirit sets the pace, goes before,

and encompasses you in one universal fellowship, a fellowship that has power from on high to discern truth well.

You don’t have to do it.

You don’t have to achieve the parish Mission Action Plan.

You just have to welcome the Spirit, day by day, breath by breath.

Perhaps the Retreat Association’s icon in this church today, of the Woman of Samaria with Jesus at the well, can offer a picture of this welcome.

She comes with a pitcher on a long rope.

Jesus asks her for water.

But the hospitality is mutual.

For already that well is full to the brim with water and his hand is dipped in it for blessing.

The same blessing which we meet in other Christians imbued with the Spirit.

As St Paul puts it in Romans, just after writing of the Eucharist: “Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.”

Our lives, our understanding of truth, our voices of praise blend in our common welcome of the coming of the Spirit.

To finish: if I were not afraid you would think it an advertisement, I would say:

the Spirit is poured out on all flesh that all may sing Songs of Praise.

Amen.

(1 John 5:9-13; John 17: 6-19)

          This period in the Church’s year can seem rather strange – our Lord has ascended to sit at the right hand of the Father, yet we are waiting for the Spirit to come down at Pentecost and settle upon the disciples; so that the Church can begin to grow and go out into the world. It can seem like a time of hiatus – perhaps somehow similar to that curious passage in Revelation, where we are told that after the Lamb opened the 7^th Seal, there was silence in heaven for half an hour. Perhaps this is another time of silence, as though for this week or so until Pentecost, God has absented Himself from the world. Yet if we believe in the God who is Emmanuel, the God who is with us, then we know that cannot be the case.

          If we look to today’s readings for guidance on the significance of this time, it doesn’t seem immediately apparent that we have much of an answer. The reading from the letter of John tells us that we have ‘the testimony of God’, and that for those who believe in His Son, this testimony is in our hearts; and that perhaps rather circuitously, this testimony is that ‘God gave us eternal life, and this life is in the Son. Whoever has the Son has life, whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.’ The choice of this passage at this time implies that we are to see this ‘Testimony’ as the Holy Spirit, that we have the Spirit working in our hearts, giving us life. This implication would have been clearer if the compilers of the lectionary had made this passage from the letter of John slightly larger. Because the verses we have had today are preceded by those proclaiming that our ‘testimony’ is Jesus Christ, who ‘came by water and blood, and the Spirit is the one that testifies, for the Spirit is Truth.’

          I was struck by this because quite by chance this week I had been reminded that in earlier times these verses were greatly expanded by a text that had been interpolated here into John’s letter. The verses, which are now considered to be a pious fraud, were used for centuries as a Biblical proof for the doctrine of the Trinity. That is, until the revival of classical learning, together with better understanding of what were the oldest Biblical texts, led scholars, beginning with Erasmus, to come to the uncomfortable realization that this verse didn’t exist in the oldest surviving texts of the New Testament. We can now usually find these expanded verses in the footnotes of modern editions of the Bible, and I may be deluding myself but I couldn’t help but think that perhaps they can help us understand what this apparent time of hiatus for God really means.

          What verses 7 and 8 of the 5^th chapter of John’s letter formerly said was this – ‘There are three that testify in heaven, the Father, the Word , and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one. And there are three that testify on earth – the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three agree.’ It is after this that we have the words we heard today about the ‘Testimony of God’ being greater than that that of humankind. These verses may help us understand what this time can mean for the Church, because perhaps not too surprisingly, given when these words most likely begin to appear in the New Testament, they seem to echo what the Fathers of the early Church said about the Ascension. They seem to echo what they understood about the role that our Lord returning to the right hand of the Father had in the economy of our salvation.

          For instance, Cyril of Alexandria believed that in the Ascension, the Christ opened for us ‘a new and living way’ into God’s presence – Christ has now gone up not for his own benefit, because ‘He was, and is, and always will be in the Father.’ Instead the significance of the Feast of the Ascension is that on it, the Word, in Cyril’s words, ascended as a human being, revealing himself in a new and unfamiliar way.’ This is so that ‘being like us…and hearing the command to ‘Sit at my right hand’, he might transmit to fellow members of the human race, the glory of being children of God.’ For Cyril, the great mystery here is that the Christ became man, so that it could be ‘as one of us that he sits at the right hand of God the Father, though in truth he is above all creation and is one in being with his Father.’ In Cyril’s scheme of things, Jesus appeared as a human being before the Father at this time, so as ‘to enable those who had been cast out from the Father’s presence because of sin to once again behold the face of God.’

          This didn’t mean that for Cyril or the other Fathers that they thought it took God a week or more to sort this out, before he was able to send the Spirit out on his people. But that this was the time when we could again reflect on what God has done for us in Christ, and on this part of his plan of salvation. In the words of another Father, Pope Leo the Great, Cyril’s near contemporary, the significance for us of the Ascension is that the Son of Man is ‘revealed as Son of God in a more perfect and transcendent way once he (has) entered into the Father’s glory.’ He has now become in Leo’s words, ‘indescribably more perfect in divinity to those from whom he was further removed in humanity.’ This enables us to have ‘a more mature faith’, whereby we can stretch our minds upward ‘to the Son in his equality with the Father’, as our faith is summoned to the heights where the Son now sits with the Father.

          I hope that it is not too much of a stretch to see the glory Leo and Cyril are talking about as being the same as that which we heard Jesus talking about in the passages we heard today from John’s Gospel. As Jesus said there to his Father, ‘All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I have been glorified in them.’ And we are glorified, because he has given us the Word, because of which ‘the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world.’ Here we have one of the paradoxes of John’s Gospel, a paradox which gives this gospel its Gnostic air of despising the world, so seemingly despising the creation that the Bible also tells us is good. In this same discourse, Jesus says that we are not to be taken out of the world, and he asks his Father here and now to sanctify us in the truth, so that just as the Father sent his Son into the world, so Jesus can now send us into the world. This seems to mean that Christ is glorified in us if we are prepared to do what he did – if we are prepared to witness to the Truth, the Truth of God’s Word, which is of course also paradoxically Jesus the Christ.

          The truth that there is always something greater than this world, the truth revealed in Jesus that not only sustains and upholds the world, but which loved it enough to send its Word to it, as John’s Gospel also proclaims. The kind of love that led Jesus to the way of the cross, which of course begins in the following chapter of John’s Gospel from the one we have heard today. The way of the cross that finds its completion in Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension, so revealing that Jesus’ return to the glory of the Father’s right hand is through the cross, through his suffering love for our world; a love that we are called upon to share and which will glorify us.

          Earlier on, I shoehorned into this sermon the old Trinitarian proof text from the 1^st letter of John, and I will return to it again, because in its witness to the Trinity, it reminds us of what can sustain us in our discipleship, as we face up to a world indifferent or hostile to Christ, and whose understanding of love can now be very different from ours. It can sustain us, when being willing to suffer in witnessing to God’s love to the world can seem futile or foolish. In the first part of the old 7^th verse, we have the heavenly testimony to God, Father, Word and Spirit. The testimony revealed in this Word coming into creation, joining itself to us completely, being willing to suffer and die for our sakes, and to take our humanity and creatureliness back to the Father, so that it can ultimately be what God has always intended it to be when we were created.

          As we heard in John’s Gospel, Jesus had said that we are to be in the world, but he prayed to protect us from the evil one, and asked his Father to protect us in his name, so that we may be one in love, as he and his Father are one. To that end, the old 7^th verse tells us that we are to look to the three that testify to God on earth – the Holy Spirit moving among us who brings together the testimonies of Heaven and Earth; the waters of repentance which cleanse us from our sins and enable us to hear the Word, and which gives us admittance to Christ’s body. And perhaps most importantly of all for us, as we try to navigate our way through this world, the Blood. The Blood outpoured that witnesses to God’s love for our world, and for each of us – the love and the paradoxical glory revealed in the sacrament that we are about to share. In the Eucharistic mystery, we share as the Body of Christ, we come face to face with the Word, with the Bread of Life, we encounter that Word in the fragility and seeming insignificance of the bread that will be broken, and the wine that would normally be poured out for us in other times, to be the blood that we would share. The Eucharist is the supreme reminder that we can always call upon the Spirit, the water and the blood as we navigate our way through this world, and remember that we are called not just to be one body as the Church, but we are called to be one with Jesus, as he is one with the Father.           As we look to Pentecost, may God, Father, Son and Spirit, give us the strength, wisdom and faith to live up to the glory he has called us to, and to show the glory of his love to our suffering world. Amen.