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An elderly woman walked into the local country church. The friendly usher greeted her at the door and helped her up the flight of steps. "Where would you like to sit?" he asked politely.
"The front row please," she answered.
“You really don't want to do that," the usher said. "The pastor is really boring."
"Do you happen to know who I am? she declared indignantly.
“I'm the pastor's mother,"
"Do you know who I am?" the usher asked.
"No." said the woman.
"Good," he answered.
Do we know who we are? Where do we find the root of our identity? People like to define themselves and others in all sorts of different ways, social background, employment, politics, even taste in music. The church is no different. We manufacture labels to define ourselves and to define others, to keep ourselves in and sometimes others out. Not that there is anything wrong with labels – they are just language. It is how we use them and respond to them that is important.
For Jesus however identity it is simpler.
‘I am the Vine, You are the Branches’.
I wonder - what does the image conjure up for us? – Life, energy, growth, and fruit - rich fruit that can be made into the wine that is such a potent symbol in the scriptures. If Christ can turn water into wine, can offer wine as his blood, then we too can be transformed and bear fruit as we abide in Him.
How do we picture Jesus as the Good Shepherd? It is the subject of much Christian art, frequently with Christ carrying a lamb over his shoulders. Christ is identified as both shepherd and sheep in the pages of the scriptures – Christ our Passover lamb sacrificed for us. Shepherds visit the infant Christ, appear in parables and we should not forget that David was the shepherd king and the psalmist writes of the Lord as our shepherd.
We must abandon any romantic notions of shepherding. This was hard work, watching the sheep on the hills by day, gathering them in to the sheep fold and watching them by night. Sheep may be an image of silliness today, but those farmed by Jesus’ contemporaries were considered more trustworthy than goats, although physically very similar, with a keen ear for the shepherd’s voice. Shepherds it seems were distrusted, hence Jesus’ identification with being a Good Shepherd rather than hired hand. A shepherd knows his sheep and they know him.
A locked room is something that frequently we seek to escape from. There may be a few doors in our houses with locks, often to the smallest rooms; we may lock our front doors at night, but certainly where we live we may not need feel the need to do so when we are in the house during the day.
Today’s Gospel reading however happens in a room with the doors firmly shut. Indeed if you read John’s similar account of the resurrected Christ’s appearance we learn:
John was the last gospel to be written, and the writer clearly felt that the locked room was an important detail that Luke had omitted. Why lock the doors? For fear. By the time John was being read in the scattered churches of the first century religious intolerance towards the Christian faith, no longer a minor Jewish sect but quickly becoming a religion in its own right, had grown beyond the earliest persecutions we read of in Acts. Those first hearers of John’s writings would have understood the meaning of locked doors, as increasingly they had to lock their doors to worship.
Kirsh Kandiah asks for advice for new preachers. My response – never go over 7 minutes.
Now I admit that I regularly preach for more than 7 minutes and in certain contexts can preach for many times that length, but often those longer sermons are based on a 7 minute core.
Context is important. The typical 7 minute sermon would be shared in the context of liturgical worship, principally a service of Holy Communion. Although the liturgy should be seen as a whole it can be divided into two parts, that of Word and Sacrament. The 7 minute sermon fits into that first part of the service.
"What is happening? Today there is a great silence over the earth, a great silence, and stillness, a great silence because the King sleeps; the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages. God has died in the flesh, and the underworld has trembled.
Truly he goes to seek out our first parent like a lost sheep; he wishes to visit those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death. He goes to free the prisoner Adam and his fellow-prisoner Eve from their pains, he who is God, and Adam's son.
Last year in a first, Pope Benedict took questions about the Christian faith on Good Friday in an Italian television special. I cannot promise to answer all those questions on the Christian faith, or pretend to have all the answers. But I hope I can explain why we do what we do on Good Friday.
Rowan Williams explains:
Today we gather at the cross as our journey through Holy Week draws closer towards its close.
John’s Gospel is our guide. Last night we celebrated the last supper, Christ’s body and blood. But John’s telling of that story is seemingly left open as Jesus shares only bread, even with the one who would betray him.
It is at the Crucifixion as Christ breathes his last that John completes the communion. As Christ takes the wine, he declares it is ‘finished’ and gives up his Spirit. As his side is then pierced blood and water pour from his side at the time the Passover lambs were being sacrificed in John’s chronology.
(This post was written for Preston Yancey’s excellent blog series “at the lord's table: a conversation)
It is often said in various forms, in different contexts, with different intentions. People however are a problem, a problem for which Christ is the solution, but that solution is very much a work in progress.
My own faith journey could be read in a number of ways. Baptised in secret as a baby (something I discovered in my twenties), grew up in a non-practicing home but in English Christian Schools where we prayed and worshiped every day, a vocational call at 13 (although I had no idea then what it meant), commitment and adult baptism at 16, five years in a Reformed Charismatic congregation, then a few more in something more Pentecostal.
And then people happened. I had seen it before, the church I was part of in my teens had a break down in relationships between the eldership, but by then I wasn’t involved enough to be hurt by it. In my mid-twenties it was different, I was involved. What happened isn’t so important, the why maybe more so.
This year we have been using reflections from The Nail for Holy week. These are last years reflections.
Jerusalem is desolate. The people have been deceived by false comforts. The children cry to their mother’s ‘Where is bread and wine?’. A startling picture that speaks more to other nations ravaged by war and natural disaster than our own supposed age of austerity. Luxuries dreamt of by former generations are cheap and plentiful. We may now ask ‘Where is the finest bread and the finest wine.’ But our children do not go hungry.
So said Timothy Leary re-working his LSD influenced “Turn on, tune in, drop out” for the 90’s onwards.
When it comes to Bishop’s there are few as ‘Jacked In’ as Alan Wilson, who blogs, tweets and speaks on social media. If the Church of England had a cyberdelic subculture then Bishop Alan could be its figurehead. Which is why his article for the Guardian Comment is Free Belief pages is so interesting – “The Church of England needs a reboot, not a rebrand.”
There is much to agree with here. Continuity with history, be it the parish system, the Anglican Communion, or establishment has much to commend it, but just like an old computer there comes a point when a full hard drive format and clean installation is needed. The question then is do we start rifling through draws looking for the master install disk? Could we agree on what the master install disk is? I suspect that is what Charismatics, Catholics, Conservative Evangelicals and Liberals are all already trying to do.
The Old Miaphysite Western Rite Catholics have made a generous offer to theologically sacramental and orthodox Anglicans who support the ordination of women to all orders.
Holding Apostolic Succession from both the Union of Utrecht and an C18th off-shoot of the Antiochan Orthodox Church, Patriach Schlapp Blechter, relaxing on his reclining cathedra, issued the following statement:
At present the plan is to ordain and offer bishops who are higher than a parish’s diocesan episcopacy – so called "High’ing" Bishops.
