Sermons

Fifth Sunday of Easter
Sunday 2 May 2010 at 10am

David Paton-Williams

Readings: Acts 11 v1-18, John 13 v31-35

"My children, I will be with you only a little longer….

Can you remember what it was like learning to ride a bike?

There you were proudly riding along with your stabilisers on either side. And then one day the stabilisers weren't there any longer.

This time when you got on mum or dad held the seat as you cycled along. Perhaps you were worried what would happen if they took their hand away - surely you would crash and fall to the floor.

And then all of a sudden you found that you had been wobbling along all on your own. Until you did come off - and graze your knee
- and there they were again to comfort you.

Or perhaps you remember struggling to swim and mum or dad or your swimming teacher had their hand just under your tummy supporting you on the surface of the water. And you were sure that if they took their hand away you would sink.

But then you found that you were indeed swimming all on your own, well for a few feet anyway, and just as you began to sink again,
there they were to support you again. Well that must have been the way the disciples felt when they realised that from now on they were going to be on their own.

They were like toddlers in the faith. Just learning what life was like when they lived it by faith.

Jesus had been teaching them to trust, day by day, in the providence and care and support of their heavenly Father

They seemed to be tottering along - often falling flat on their faces, making a mess of things, and always Jesus was there to help them pick themselves up and try again.

And then Jesus begins to tell them that he is going away:

Whether we think of this as his death on the cross or as his ascension into heaven, it was to be the end of his visible presence with his disciples.

You may be able to imagine how they would feel.

He would not be there to rely on, to guide and teach them, to support and encourage them when things went wrong or to hold their sometimes argumentative group together and settle their disputes.

How were they going to cope on their own?

One of the key ways they would cope was to follow Christ's example: love one another, just as I have loved you.

They had to go on learning from Jesus tying to put into practice the love they had seen in his life and death.

Now of course letting a child go their own way - whether that is on a bike or in the swimming pool, or in life generally is a risk. But it is a risk that the parents know they have to take.

And so it was with the first disciples.

There was a very real risk (you might say even a certainty) that they would get things wrong, that they would lose sight of the way Christ had loved everybody - even if that was sometimes a demanding or challenging love and lose sight of the way Christ had always relied on his heavenly Father and then that they would turn back in upon themselves.

And what a terrible risk that turned out to be.

Philip Pullman argues that the balance between the good that religion has caused and the evil it has caused is a very fine balance indeed.

Now you might want to argue about just how much good or evil our religion has caused but we can recognise that sadly there is all too much on the negative side.

Far too often in the past, and still today, and in our own lives, Christians have got things wrong. and started living out of fear or an exclusive arrogance or a lust for power or all sorts of other things that can flow from a self-centred life.

And in doing so we have torn the church apart, and inflicted great suffering other people and cultures, and on the natural world around us.

Very often though, people have got it right as well.

We see one example of that in our first reading today as Peter tells the story of how he learnt and grew in his vision of God's generosity and love.

From his upbringing he had learnt that everyone not of his faith was unclean and an outsider, and if you wanted to be faithful to God
then the last thing you should do was to go eat the unclean food of unclean people.

But he also remembered Jesus breaking through those sort of barriers when he ate and drank with notorious sinners. And now he sensed that God was saying to him that he had to leave behind his old fears and prejudices, his old ways of seeing people who were different from him.

He realised that God did not make a distinction between his children and so neither should Peter.

He was being called to show the same generous love that Jesus had shown to him. "Love one another, as I have loved you."

What an enormous step that was for Peter. He was leaving behind the tradition he had grown up with, and all the ways he had learnt to see the world and he was taking the risk to be different, to learn and grow in faith and love.

And he did it by remembering the example of Jesus and listening to the Spirit within him.

Because the truth was that he was not on his own. As Jesus was at pains to tell his friends before he left them, the Spirit of God would be with them.

That would be very different from having a visible physical presence to share their lives it would be much more like the unseen hand under the water, there to support and guide and comfort but not it did not take away Peter's need to learn how to live and love for himself. And that's how it is for us.

For the whole of our life God has been the unseen presence, the hand on the back of the bike, the hand just under the surface.

Knowing he is there doesn't take away from us our need, our calling to learn to live and love like him. Even he can't do that for us.

But there is this mysterious relationship between his grace and what we do. He makes our living and loving possible but it has to be us who does it - in and through his grace.

Sometimes we feel his steadying, guiding, supporting hand and sometimes just knowing that he is there helps us to have the confidence to trust him, the confidence to live free of fear and arrogance free of our destructive compulsions, free to grow and change and leave things behind

Sometimes we get frightened, or over-confident or just forget that he is there, and we begin to wobble, we begin to sink, sometimes we even fall off badly or feel like we are drowning But even then his unseen hand holds us and helps us begin again.

So our gospel today is only part of the story "My children, I will be with you only a little longer…." We need to carry on and read Jesus' promise of the Spirit of truth, who will lead us into all truth and who will be with us forever.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay