Our Father, Our Mother

Sermon preached by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, 3rd Sunday After Pentecost (June 21, 2009).

Readings:  1 Samuel 17: 1, 4-11, 19-23, 32-49; Psalm 9: 9-20; 2 Corinthians 6: 1-13; Mark 4: 35-41

Today is a doubly auspicious day – it is both Father’s Day and the summer solstice.  If you believe what you see in the TV ads, the conjunction is apt; since two of the primary responsibilities of fatherhood would appear to be the quintessentially summer activities of barbequing and washing the family car.  Now, I don’t know about your household, or the one you grew up in – but in mine, our little charcoal briquette barbeque had long rusted to flakes in the backyard before I even hit my teens, and washing the car was one of the things I had to do to get my pocket money for the week.

Our preconceptions about fatherhood are shaped by our experiences of it – either as children, or for some of us, as fathers.  In western society in the past, the image was one of a stern, somewhat distant CEO of Family Incorporated.  There was love, certainly, but it was often expressed formally; an undercurrent to a firm hand of motivation and discipline of the children.  More recently, popular culture has tried to burnish the nurturing side of fatherhood – think of all those sitcoms from Father Knows Best on down, where dad is bumbling, but means well.

The fact is, however, that all of our collective experience shows you cannot distil the qualities or expressions of fatherhood into a few crude stereotypes.  Apart from the primary and secondary sexual characteristics, we all know that there is no essential difference between mum and dad.  And believe it or not, for all the images of the old, white-haired man on the throne, waiting to hurl thunderbolts, Christianity understands that idea.  For – and this may come as a surprise to some of you – our tradition is a gender-bending tradition.  And this may be one reason why the contemporary church struggles so much with issues of God and gender.

The complicated gender identity of God is present from the beginning.  We are told in the creation story of Genesis that humankind is created in the image of God, both male and female.  It’s even more complicated when Jesus comes long, identifying himself with Wisdom.  Now, in the Hebrew tradition, Wisdom is a distinctly feminine attribute of God who, in Proverbs, is portrayed as a woman present with God at creation; the Word of God bringing all things into being.  Sound familiar?  It was Jesus, after all, who once exclaimed, “Wisdom is vindicated by her children.”  And finally we have the Holy Spirit, also portrayed in Greek in feminine terms, thus compelling ancient artists wary of mucking up an uncomplicated masculine gender for God to render her as a dove.

In recent decades, our eagerness to move away from patriarchal language has caused us to reflect more deeply on the gender of God.  In some cases, this has caused us to try and cast the divine in genderless terms, resulting in such delicious circumlocutions as “God wants to bring all people to God’s self, so that God may show God’s love to all God’s children.”  Nary a personal pronoun to be found.  Even St. Paul gets all P.C. on us – the famous “the grace of Lord, Jesus Christ; and the love of God; and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit,” being a case in point.  It’s as if the First Person of the Trinity is God; and the other two are just along for the ride!

Another, more recent strategy, is to mix things up a little – as we will in today’s Eucharistic Prayer – referring to God as both Mother and Father.  This approach hits closer to the mark, I think.  For if we are truly made in God’s image, male and female, then God is fully gendered, male and female.  In a tradition in which we refer to some people as “Father” or “Mother,” regardless of if they have children (I recall the 90 year old woman, who deferentially referred to me as “Father,” when I went to visit her); where men can be considered brides of Christ; where nuns can take on the name of male saints; and where priests and monks dress in non-gender appropriate clothing (I mean, please – look at what I’m wearing!); there is an undercurrent of recognition that gender differentiation is as much a social construct as it is a biological one; and that each of us has the power to redefine gender by defying cultural preconceptions and inventing our own.

Consider our readings, obviously not chosen to illustrate this point – but rather simply the lections of the 3^rd Sunday After Pentecost.  In our Old Testament account from First Samuel, David is disdained as not conventionally masculine enough to defeat the fierce Goliath; but by cleverness, he kills him.  In the next chapter, which we don’t hear today, David immediately goes on to meet and fall in love with Jonathan, Saul’s son, and enters into a covenant with him because, we are told, “he loved him as his own soul.”  Our second reading is from Paul, a man we often caricature as the worst type of father figure:  Cranky, domineering, unreasonable, rule-bound.  And here, indeed, Paul happily accepts the metaphorical title of father:  “I speak to you as children,” he says.  And, yet how does Paul view a father speaking to children?  “My heart is wide open to you – open wide your hearts also.”  How very un-Pauline, or at least unlike our stereotype of him.

And finally, the Gospel.  It is an account of a miracle.  Now, as I’ve said before, miracle stories serve an important purpose.  They verify that Jesus is who he says he is, an emissary of the Father (or the Mother, if you will).  Since only God can control nature and overturn its laws, Jesus’ ability to still a storm demonstrates that he has the power of God.  But there is always a subtext to the miracles of Jesus, and this one is no exception.  “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” his desperate companions plead, as the boat threatens to capsize.  At once, Jesus “rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, ‘Peace! Be still!’”

In this account, the disciples are – as so often happens – portrayed as helpless children who would perish without the protection of their Mother (or Father, if you will).  God, cast in the role of a nurturing parent in whom one can place the trust of one’s very life, does not fail to provide the care and protection when it is asked for.

In all things and in all ways, God is experienced as a personal being.  We may not primarily think of her in gendered terms, but we definitely see her as having human attributes.  As creatures made in God’s image, we discover ourselves reflected in his face; and the best qualities of human nature are written there.  As we celebrate fatherhood, let us also celebrate our Father God, our Mother God – the God who disciplines, the God who nurtures, the great housekeeper, the great mechanic, masculine and feminine, butch and effeminate.  All the possibilities of our gender derive from God; and we celebrate them in ourselves.  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009

 

Lover, Beloved, and Love

Sermon preached by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, Trinity Sunday (June 7, 2009).

Readings:  Isaiah 6: 1-8; Psalm 29; Romans 8: 12-17; John 3: 1-7

As many of you know, the first parish I served at was St. James, in the Downtown Eastside.  In those days, we had three full-time priests on staff, and we maintained a quaint custom whereby the junior of the three would be designated to preach on Trinity Sunday.  Or, at least that’s the story I was told when Fr. David advised me that I would be preaching that day, eight years ago.

Others might have blanched at the prospect of trying to untangle this thorny doctrinal knot, but I dove in as others might dive into the New York Times crossword puzzle.  I happened upon the analogy of an egg – which I often inflict as a children’s story.  If you think about it, the metaphor is obvious:  you’ve got one object with three parts – a shell, a yolk, and the white – and if you remove any of the parts it ceases to be that object.  Where the parallel collapses, however, is that an egg – unlike God – is divisible, as anyone who has made a soufflé can attest.

Now, I sometimes get teased for the amount of time I spend exercising, but I can assure you that the wheels are turning even when the wheels are turning, so to speak.  For instance, last Sunday, after the house blessing at Corinne and Don Newman’s, I went bicycling for a couple of hours around Halfmoon Bay – and I began thinking of my next sermon.  Suddenly, the real identity of the Trinity dawned on me.  That identity is the Lover, the Beloved, and Love – an utterly indivisible whole.  And I think our readings help illustrate this.

Take our first one, the call of Isaiah.  This is a significant episode, because when God appears to mortals in the Old Testament, it is usually as something other than God – a burning bush, perhaps, or a pillar of smoke, or even sheer silence.  Here, God appears as the entity himself – and God is definitely a he in this manifestation.  The first thing we notice about God is that he is quite large, to put it mildly.  The temple, which for Palestinian Hebrews was about as grand a structure as they would have personal knowledge, can contain only the hem of his robe.  God asks the rhetorical question, “Whom shall I send?” and Isaiah responds with the phrase that has inspired the hymn heard invariably at seminaries and ordinations, “Here I am, Lord! Send me!”

Alert listeners may think that the significance of this passage lies in the threefold “Holy, holy, holy,” exclaimed by the seraphs as God appears – presumably foretelling the Trinity which would be revealed with the coming of the Messiah.  But, personally, I think this is to credit too much discernment on the part of Isaiah and his audience, who lived over seven hundred years before the birth of Christ.  Threefold exclamations of various sorts are strewn all over the Old Testament, after all.

Rather, I think that the importance of the Isaiah passage is that it portrays the Father, the Creator, the First Person of the Trinity, in the role of Lover.  As the one who brings everything into being, who appoints rulers and elders to guide and direct God’s chosen people into righteousness, who sends the prophets to warn and correct; the Lover demonstrates the attachment he has for that which he has brought into being, and for those whom he has chosen to be the bearers of his love.  This passage is no different – as Isaiah is called, God offers the assurance a few verses after our reading that the defeat of Israel by the Syrians will be like the felling of a mighty tree – but that the holy seed will be the stump, from which something new and even grander will spring forth.

In our Gospel passage from John, we hear again that famous exchange between Nicodemus and Jesus. To him, Jesus offers the assurance that his coming was the most sublime act of God’s love – “For God so loved the world…”  And, to ensure the point isn’t lost, Jesus adds that “God did not send the Son to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”  To me, this identifies the Son, the Saviour, the Second Person of the Trinity as the Beloved.

Now, what does it mean to be beloved?  One thing it means is that you are the mediator of love – a sort of transmitter through which love passes, being amplified in the process.  All of us, I think, have experienced the empowering and enriching quality of loving and being loved.  It magnifies your being.  The love exchange compounds exponentially with interest.  So it is with Jesus.  He is the single most powerful and tangible expression of divine love for us.  And the natural response on our part is to receive and radiate it back to God, as well as to everything associated with the God whom we love.  With, that is to say, everything!  Unrequited love is sad, but unrequited divine love is a tragedy.

This full circle of love is completed with the Holy Spirit, through whom, Paul tells us, we are adopted as children of God, co-equal with the Son of God.  As we heard in the gospel last week – Pentecost, the Feast of the Holy Spirit – Jesus describes her as that which leads us into wisdom and truth, and so into life which is life indeed.  A life worth living is a life guided and animated by love.  But the guide can lead us to surprising places, for in his dialogue with Nicodemus, Jesus further describes the Spirit as being as free and unrestrained and unpredictable as the wind.

But in all this talk about love, we must not lose sight of the fact that it is a difficult allegiance to maintain.  Love can make conflicting demands on our heart, and too often we think that true love is that which leaves us with the warmest, fuzziest feeling on the inside.  It is important in such cases to understand the motive behind any loving impulse.  Is the motive to satisfy some self-interested desire, to boost self-esteem, to fortify walls of denial or projection?  Or is the motive to contribute something to that full circle of divine love, to fulfill vows of service and self-offering, to expand the boundaries of truth and wisdom as the Holy Spirit beckons us to roam farther outward from the constructed limits of our comfort zone?  The delights yielded by love do not come without some measure of sacrifice – as was demonstrated most starkly when the Beloved strode to his cross.  And so even the love we have for an intimate partner does not fully blossom until we practice the mutual self-offering that nurtures the full potential of the other.

The love of God is the source and pattern of all earthly loves – this is the lesson of the Trinity.  And so let us be as lover, beloved, and love to all whom we encounter in this endless journey we share, being like Midas in all that we touch, where love is gold.  This is the invitation into the reality we all intuit – let us dare to live it.  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009

 

The Breath of Life; the Spirit of Truth

Sermon preached by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, Pentecost (May 31, 2009).

Readings:  Ezekiel 37: 1-14; Psalm 104: 25-35, 37; Romans 8: 22-27; John 15: 26-27; 16: 4-15.

I’m preaching a somewhat abbreviated sermon today, in order to allow time for delegates to report on our 2009 diocesan synod.  Synod occurs around the same time every year, the weekend prior to Pentecost.  The timing is auspicious, since it allows us to reflect on the role of the Holy Spirit, whose festival this is, in guiding the deliberations of the church.

There are some who would claim that the Holy Spirit is an utterly concocted Christian creation – a clumsy accretion pegged onto a faith tradition already struggling to define how the Son and the Father are one God, not two.  But concerning the Trinity, I will have more to say next week!  In fact, however, the Spirit of God reflects a belief with a lengthy lineage.  In the beginning, in fact, a ruah – a wind, breath, spirit, or even a form of temperament from God, moves over the waters before God gives the initial command forming the order from chaos we call creation – “Let there be light!”

Breath, of course, is the traditional sign of life.  Ancient texts – including the Bible – speak of death idiomatically as the breath leaving someone or something.  We are reminded perhaps of King Lear holding up a feather to the lips of his dead daughter, Cordelia. But we also see this understanding made explicit in that stirring story of the Valley of the Dry Bones from Ezekiel, which we heard as our Old Testament reading.

Given all this, it should be no shock that later theological reflection personified this life-giving breath as a vibrant and active dimension of God.  In Proverbs and books of the Apocrypha – those texts in between the Old and New Testaments – Holy Wisdom is described as being with God at creation.  Portrayed as Woman Wisdom, she proclaims, in Proverbs 8, that “I was …at the first, before the beginning of the earth…when God established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above…when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him like a master worker; and I was daily his delight.”

By the time of Jesus, it was common among Hebrew scholars to view the Spirit of God active in the world as a sort of natural Torah, or natural law – in this way, it was felt, the laws and statutes of God were universalized.  No one was free of the judgement or mercy of the Almighty, since the operations of creation itself, and the natural and proper limits of human behaviour, were all ordained by the Creator.  Thus it is that Paul writes in Romans, that those who have never even heard of God, but who behave righteously, “show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience …bears witness.”  With this perfectly orthodox Hebrew belief as his guide, Paul can make the logical progression, as he does in our reading today from a few chapters later in Romans, to speak of the Spirit animating that same heart, pleading with the Father to guide us onto the paths of righteousness.  This is a gift available to everyone.

And so, finally, Jesus’ announcement of the coming of the Advocate, Helper, or as he finally describes him, the pneuma tais altheias – the Spirit of Truth – comes not as a clumsy appendage, but as a spiritual “aha!” moment.  Note the Greek word for “spirit” – pneuma –  has the same multiplicity of meanings as the Hebrew word.  It, too, can also mean “wind” or “breath,” in other words, that which gives life.  We are perhaps reminded of Jesus’ words to Nicodemus earlier in John, when he says “the wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes – so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus explicitly connects the spirit which makes life possible with the Holy Wisdom which reveals the mind and will of God.  And that Spirit, says Jesus, will act as his agent in the world to, quote, “take what is mine and declare it to you.”  As Paul rightly noted, it is the Holy Spirit, this active dimension of God, which keeps our faith from being a dead letter.  It is the Holy Spirit which prevents Christianity from being a religion of fundamentalism and literalism.  As the New Testament scholar Harry Maier once exclaimed to a class I was a part of, “the Holy Spirit didn’t go to sleep nearly 2000 years ago, when the canon of Scripture was closed.”

And that brings us to something as prosaic and apparently far removed from Jesus’ farewell discourses, as our 2009 diocesan synod.  Synods can be cranky and boring affairs at times; but they can also provide occasions of remarkable – dare I say breath-taking – profoundness.  They are gatherings where the Spirit happens.  Synods are places where year after year, the Spirit has demanded ever-widening inclusion, knowing that the creation of God has no bounds, but is as limitless and diverse as the universe it inhabits.  Synods are places where the mighty – the elders and leaders of the church – have been rebuked by the Spirit, as once again this year the drafters of our budget were urged to go back and find money to fund youth and societal ministry.

The Spirit is not asleep, anymore than she is a clumsy and late add-on to an ancient religious tradition.  The Spirit is God, the God who sanctifies that which is created; the God who makes holy that which others consider of no account; the God who leads us into the fundamental truth of her love manifested in all of it.  May the Holy Spirit continue to be our guide, so that we can carry on the ministry of Jesus in our own time and place.  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009

 

Living As If

Sermon preached by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, 7th Sunday of Easter – Ascension Sunday (May 24, 2009)

Readings:  Acts 1: 1-11; Psalm 47; Ephesians 1: 15-23; Luke 24: 44-53

When I was about 12 or 13 years old, I was obsessed with the book Watership Down, by Richard Adams.  For those of you who don’t know it, it’s a fantasy novel about rabbits who face challenges and near-annihilation as they seek to establish a new warren for themselves.  I must have read the novel six or seven times; and the heart-rending epilogue perhaps twice as many as that.  In fact, in preparing today’s sermon, I read the ending again, and – sure enough – the tears started flowing.  Let’s face it, what sensitive pre-teen who raised and showed rabbits wouldn’t be fascinated by a story of anthropomorphic talking rabbits, and the mythopoeic world they inhabit?

Watership Down is not a difficult book for young people to understand.  But I was baffled by the title of one chapter.  It was in Latin, and it would be another ten years or so before I tried my hand at learning the language.  The title was “Dea ex machina.”  It would be some time before I found out that this was the feminine version of deus ex machina.  This phrase, meaning “god from a machine,” refers to a literary device in which a person, thing, or event suddenly appears out of nowhere to help a character out of a seemingly impossible situation.

The thought came unbidden to my mind as I contemplated my Ascension Sunday sermon and the imagery from the Acts of the Apostles – the reading appointed for Ascension Day this past Thursday – where Jesus was, and I quote, “lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.”  The apostles stand around looking up, and suddenly two men in white robes appear, saying, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up towards heaven?  This Jesus, who has been taken up from you…will come in the same way as you saw him go.”

What we have in the Ascension narratives in Luke and Acts – a two-part account written by the same author – is not so much a deus ex machina as a deus in a machina, god into a machine.  Jesus’ final appearance in Matthew is on the unidentified mountain in Galilee to which he had summoned the disciples, where he commissions them to spread the Gospel and baptise.  In John, Jesus appears on the beach by the Sea of Galilee, where he fixes the disciples breakfast, and then takes Peter aside to commission him with the famous words, “feed my sheep.”  And, as we all know from our Good Friday and Easter readings this year, in Mark, Jesus doesn’t appear at all after his crucifixion.  That gospel ends abruptly with the discovery by the women of the empty tomb.

But in Luke and Acts there is no ambiguity about what happened to Jesus after the resurrection – but ambiguity is precisely what we’re left with.  For devout, thinking Christians, the idea of Jesus rising up into the sky on a cloudlike cosmic elevator strains credulity.  If nothing else, it suggests a physical transportation to a physical place – but where?  Given the problematic nature of the Ascension claim, it is little wonder that books like The Jesus Scroll and The da Vinci Code; or movies like The Last Temptation of Christ, have gained such currency.  These peddle the theory that Jesus lived happily ever after, perhaps in a little cottage on the Riviera with Mary Magdalene.

The fact is, we’ll never know what happened to Jesus after his resurrection.  And, I would say that the fact that the disciples experienced the presence of the living Lord for a time should be enough to satisfy.  Because what is really important about the Ascension is not the literal details, but that it acts as a terminus for Easter.  It is a festival which occurs forty days after that event – and we should all know by now to perk up our ears when we hear “forty days” – reminding us, as it should, of the forty years in the wilderness for the Israelites, the forty days Moses spent on Mount Sinai, the forty days Jesus spent in the desert wilderness receiving his commission from the Father, and the forty days of Lent.  In this case, the fortieth day sends a clear message that another time of preparation and discernment has come to fruition.  Jesus’ earthly ministry has been bequeathed to those who would follow him.  And in seven short days we will commemorate that with the Feast of Pentecost – the bestowal of the Holy Spirit enabling us to be Christ’s agents.

Our readings this Sunday – this in-between Sunday – reflect the strange stasis of the already and the not yet.  The first reading, from Acts, follows directly upon Jesus’ Ascension, giving an account of the first order of business for the apostles – which is to find a replacement for the now-dead traitor Judas.  Once again twelve, they are prepared for Pentecost, literally the “fiftieth” day after Passover, and for the final commissioning by the Holy Spirit.

The second reading is from First John.  It wraps up the discourse on love and faithfulness we have heard from that book throughout Easter.  The final message is that eternal life is in the Son, and whoever believes this, believes in God.  It is uncompromising and stark – and the reader is accused of turning God into a liar if he or she does not believe in this testimony.  If nothing else, this passage drives home with a hammer what this season has been all about – that the Resurrection is central to Christian identity and Christian hope.  And, coming as it does just before Pentecost, that is a point well worth mulling over.

The final communication is from Jesus himself, from the so-called “high-priestly prayer” found in the Gospel of John.  The prayer reiterates over and over, in a somewhat convoluted style, the mutual identity of the Father, the Son, and the disciples of Jesus – us, in other words.  There is a progression outward into time.  And it reminds me of the analogy told by Herbie O’Driscoll, that to live as a Christian is to live at the outer edge of an ever-expanding concentric circle – a circle with a common centre.  As we reach back our hand touches the hand of someone who brought us into the faith, whose hand in turn reaches back, until the hand that is finally touched has the imprint of nails.

This is what it means to live in a post-resurrection time.  It means to live, paradoxically, in a resurrection time.  It means preparing for the commissioning that is at once always imminent, yet which has already happened.  It means living as a community prepared at any time to see Jesus return in the same way he went – however that was – knowing that, in fact, he has never left us.  It means dwelling in these mysteries, happy and unafraid, allowing them to fire our love and propel us to action, as though the ministry of Jesus never ended.  Because it hasn’t.  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009.

 

Courageous Love

Sermon preached by the Revd Neil Fernyhough, 5th Sunday After Easter (May 10, 2009).

Readings: Acts 8: 26-40; Psalm 22: 24-30; 1 John 4: 7-21; John 15: 1-8

Fads and fashions in popular music come and go, but one theme that stretches across time and genres is love.  From the sappiest, eye-rolling schmaltz to the loudest thrashing punk death-metal anthem, that four letter word gets tossed around like a hapless beach ball.  You’d almost think love was as cheap and plentiful as oxygen, and as natural a human impulse as breathing it!  As a Christian and as a pastor, all I can say is, “I wish!”

Our readings are on the same theme as a Celine Dion tearjerker – love.  But with a twist.  That beautiful passage from the First Letter of John, which many of us know so well from weddings, devotional books, and dare I say greeting cards, proclaims the truth that God is love, and we should abide in love.  We are meant to understand that the eunuch who, converted and baptised, rejoices and goes on his way, has discovered that love.  And, in our final reading, our Gospel, we have unmasked that love in which – or rather, in whom – we are called to abide.  Jesus Christ, the risen and ascended God.

Love is such a messy, fascinating, complicated, joyful, and – yes – terrifying human reality.  You could spend a lifetime trying to define it, and never do more than peel off the outer skin of an onion.  But since it is Mother’s Day, and the season of Easter, love is definitely in bloom (to quote another old love song).  But what the heck is it, for us as Christian people?

For the author of the First Letter of John, love is not only from God, and of God, love is God.  It prompts us to recall that when Jesus is asked to sum up the teachings of the law and the prophets, his response is, simply, love – love God with all your being, and love others as yourself.  A complete circle of love, a complete inhabitation of love.

Which is fine.  But it still doesn’t get at what love actually is or how to do it, so let me hit it with my best shot, to quote a more modern love song.  Love is a state that exists only in relationship.  When the love is between two beings with thought and will, the relationship requires sacrifice in order to remain healthy.  In other words, I need to give up some of my desires in order to help fulfill the desires and needs of the one whom I love.  This is seen in the sacrificial love of Jesus – obviously in his self-offering on the cross, but also in his teaching.  Thus, as an illustration of the love commandment, the Parable of the Good Samaritan features a man who sacrifices money, time, honour, and reputation in order to live out love – thereby entering into a relationship with someone whom ordinarily he would have had ignored.  So lesson one is that love is not about using another to fulfill one’s own needs or desires.  It is, instead, the impulse to fulfill theirs.

Love fails to thrive when relationships are damaged, ignored, or never even begun.  And there are, sadly, many examples of this in the church.  The common denominator is objectification – turning a subject into a self-serving object.  And so, we objectify the Church when we fail to develop approaches to worship and doctrine which transcend disagreement.  We objectify our fellow human beings when we fail to engage with culture and give the place of honour to the poor and oppressed.  And we objectify creation when we fail to take leadership in the environmental crisis, in word and action.

To love God with all of one’s being, and to love one’s neighbour as oneself requires us to view the Church, our fellow human beings, and all of God’s created order as subjects, rather than objects.  God is not something for which we “do” religion; nor are the poor objects of pity, to whom we “do” charity; nor is the environment a collection of unrelated objects out of which we extract materials to “do” any number of things.  Belief, salvation, and life itself are focussed on you and me only in the context of our wider relationships – with families, households, nations, and creation as a whole.

It is significant that we believe God, in Christ, perfectly united the physical and spiritual.  Jesus was a living divine lesson that everything imbued with the Spirit of God.  In this interpenetration of the spirit with matter, we see the perfect ideal of the sacrifice involved in loving relationship.  The physical is emptied to take on the spiritual; and the spiritual must adapt to physical finitude.  Sacrifice is the being of loving relationships and the nature of reality itself.

For us, this means that we must give something of ourselves to and for the other – the Church, our fellow human beings, and Creation itself; limiting our desires in order to nurture our God-given relationships.  But love must begin inside – since self-acceptance is the precondition to relationship with others. You can’t fulfill the commandment to love your neighbour if you can’t love yourself.  The forging of one’s identity with integrity is one of the most difficult tasks you can undertake – or avoid.  Yet self-acceptance is impossible if one is not accepted in a person-to-person relationship.

Søren Kierkegaard defined Christian heroism as “risking unreservedly being oneself, an individual human being alone before God, alone in this enormous exertion and this enormous accountability.”  Let us risk being ourselves to ourselves, and with one another, and from this acceptance, let us renew our relationships, and extend our love to every one and every thing, according to Christ’s commandment.  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009.

 

One Flock, One Shepherd

Sermon preached by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, 4th Sunday of Easter (May 3, 2009).

Readings:  Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23; 1 John 3: 16-24; John 10: 11-18

By now you should all know that I like hats.  Which may be why I end up wearing so many in the church.  One of the hats I wear is as co-chair of the diocesan Ecumenical and Multifaith Unit.  We used to labour under the unwieldy name “Inter-church and Interfaith Relations Commission” or ICIFRC until I proposed this change both as being more streamlined, and also because the acronym EMU well-represents the difficulty in getting dialogue and cooperation between faith traditions off the ground.

Exposure to other paths of faith, Christian and non-Christian, can open your eyes in strange and sometimes unexpected ways.  I’ve found that it highlights the infinite variety by which people approach the divine, distilling distinct beliefs into beautiful variations of worship, praise, music, and prayer.  For instance, I recall walking into a Buddhist temple in Richmond, and seeing an altar on which pyramids of oranges had been placed.  Nuns with shaved heads welcomed us, while sonorous, metronomic chants could be heard from another room.  Or the Baptist and Pentecostal churches I’ve visited, where musicians with guitars, drum, and keyboard are found where we would expect the altar to be.

But exposure to these different traditions also reaffirms the many things we have in common as spiritual beings.  After all, human nature is human nature; and while we derive different understandings of the world, of God, and of God’s will for us, what separates us is so often simply the vagaries of culture and our own upbringing.  This first began to dawn on me when I took a course in religious philosophy as an undergraduate student.  I prepared a paper comparing Buddhist and Christian ethics, and discovered the Five Moral Precepts of Buddha.  They are:  Do not kill, do not steal, do not commit sexual immorality or sensual overindulgence, do not lie, and do not get intoxicated on drugs or alcohol.  With very little tweaking, this ethical code could be applied to just about any major religion you’d care to name – including Christianity.

Given the convergences as well as the deviations between the faith traditions of the world – never mind between the countless strains of Christianity – it makes me wonder what it means to say that we should be one flock, under one shepherd.  That imagery, from Jesus’ discourse to the Pharisees following the healing of the blind man, represents the most resonant of the many “I am” statements found in John’s Gospel.  It invites us to ask whether that metaphor still has any relevance for us in a pluralistic, post-modern, and increasingly post-religious age.

Given that we don’t see them around here at all, I think it’s fair to ask what a shepherd does.  Essentially, he or she protects livestock from predators or thieves, while making sure the herd doesn’t scatter and that it grazes where it is supposed to.  In the early church, the symbolism was potent.  It hearkens back to Ezekiel’s portrait of God as the ideal shepherd, in contrast to wicked ones who plunder the flock and allow them to become lost.  It also reminds us of a yet more ancient narrative – that of the shepherd-boy David, risking his life against bears and lions to protect his family’s flock, before Samuel was directed by God to designate him as king of Israel.  The uniqueness of this allegory in John is, obviously, the shepherd’s readiness to die in order to protect his flock.

For an early community seeking cohesiveness and direction from above, and struggling in an oppressive and dangerous milieu, the image of the shepherd would have been a comforting one.  And it remains a comforting one, still.  Psalm 23, a setting of which we sung this morning, remains an immensely popular passage of scripture for those who are critically ill as well as for those who mourn.  The human desire to fall back into the arms of an infinitely wise, powerful, and loving God, as a child would a parent, becomes stronger the more extreme our circumstances become.

But one thing we do know about sheep is that (a) they have few natural defences against predators; and (b) they will go exactly where taken by a shepherd.  For a church that has evolved, sometimes painfully, from a model of institutional hierarchy towards the empowerment of laity, this is a hard allegorical animal with which to identify.  And, returning to my original point, what are we to do about those who adhere to other faith traditions, or to none at all?  Are they wolves?  Thieves?  Sheep under other shepherds?  Do we even care about them at all?

In my thinking, this allegory operates on many levels.  We don’t need to take the ancient, hierarchical one as a given.  We can, as Jesus did so often, move beyond the literal approach to something more affirming of our partnership with God.  For example, we can view our relationship with Jesus the shepherd as one of trust.  In other words, we can live our lives secure in the knowledge that, regardless of the challenges we might face, Jesus stands as a barrier between us and hopelessness.  For the true predators for us are not Roman officials or rapacious landowners and tax-collectors.  They are not even those from other cultures, customs, or beliefs seeking to steal us away like helpless, voiceless, senseless livestock.  No.  The true predators are death and despair, moral and psychological violence, and all those things which deny the fullness of life and love.  In a death-peddling culture of consumerism, militarism, and institutionalism, those things aren’t too hard to find.

For me, as one passionately committed to interfaith and ecumenical dialogue and cooperation, what this means is that all people of faith are truly under one shepherd.  In fact, everyone is.  It reminds me of the story shared by Bishop Michael from his trip to India a few years back.  Visiting a Roman Catholic school, he noticed a sculpture of a spinning wheel, the national symbol, with the symbol of the six major religions of India between each spoke.  The bishop quipped to the principal that, given then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s pronouncement of the exclusive truth of Catholic Christianity, he would have expected the cross in the centre.  “Not at all,” replied the principal, “With all due respect to His Eminence, the centre is empty, since at the centre is God – and all the religions revolve around Him.”

As we follow our shepherd along the path he treads before us, let us be always aware of the humility, concern, and compassion he calls us to emulate; a calling issued to all, regardless of creed, culture, or custom.  For it is only as one flock – the flock of the children of God – that all people may graze peaceably.  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009.

 

Living the Resurrection

Sermon preached by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, 3rd Sunday of Easter (April 29, 2009)

Readings:  Acts 3: 12-19; Psalm 4; 1 John 3: 1-7; Luke 24: 36-48

At my father’s funeral, we sung the hymn All Creatures of Our God and King.  It contains that moving sixth verse, which reads:

And even you, most gentle death,
waiting to hush our final breath,
O sing now, alleluia!
You lead back home the child of God,
for Christ our Lord that way has trod:
alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!

That hymn, penned by St. Francis of Assisi 800 years ago, proclaims a profound truth which we are all too apt to avoid today.  That truth is hope, specifically that hope promised to us in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  It is remarkable just how seldom we talk about the resurrection, even during Eastertide, which is supposed to be all about the subject.  You’d almost think that there was something indecent, fearful, or dare I say even silly about the concept.

Even though resurrection is key to our identity as Christians, we have ladled buckets of doctrinal goo onto it over the centuries.  And so there is a temptation to run screaming in the opposite direction when something potentially complex and theoretical looms on the horizon like a conceptual Godzilla.  I understand.  And that is why there is a profound need to rescue resurrection from where it has been locked up as something too unbelievable, too mysterious, or too abstract for serious consideration.  After all, you can’t get much more down to earth than eating a piece of broiled fish, which is what the Risen Christ does in that beautiful vignette from today’s Gospel reading.  Resurrection is as real and solid as flesh, as affecting and concrete as an encounter between long-lost friends.

Christ’s transformation from death to life – a new kind of life – prefigures that same reality for everyone.  Without the resurrection, we may as well not be sitting here.  Without it, our reception of Christ in the sacrament of the bread and wine is a meaningless sham of pretend piety.  Without it, as St. Paul famously remarked “we are of all people most to be pitied.”

St. Luke portrays a Risen Lord in the flesh, yet already glorified.  It is clear from his account that the time between Jesus’ rising and his Ascension is a sacred period – one of learning, of the nourishment of faith.  Christ’s appearances here have a purpose, and they have an effect.  That purpose is made clear in today’s Gospel passage – he “opens the Scriptures” to his followers, proclaiming the inescapable possibility that we can know God and God’s will.  And the effect is clear from the anecdotes conveyed in the readings from Acts and the First Letter of John.  Christ’s resurrection transfigures individual lives, and indeed the life of the world, defeating death and sin through the establishment of a new way of being.  Not only are broken lives restored, but social rules themselves take the pattern of the laws of God.

The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, writes in The Resurrection of Christ, “For Luke, history and theology are one…[Luke] draws out…the important truth that in the Resurrection one epoch of history, human and divine, reaches its climax and another epoch has its beginning.”  This new epoch of which Ramsey speaks is the epoch of the resurrection of the dead, and so wherever someone holds fast to Christian belief, there and by that fact resurrection of the dead occurs.  In other words, this is not just a hope – it is a reality; one made concrete and operative by our faith in it.

This makes us anxious, because, we ask, “how can we place our hope in a future state?”  This anxiety speaks to a deeper one, namely, is there anything at all that one can hope for as a Christian?  As the theologian Willi Marxsen puts it, “if what one hopes for is declared already to be present, but present reality contradicts what one hopes for ([because] resurrection of the dead hasn’t happened yet!), then the result can all too easily be hopelessness.”  Indeed, what are we to make of this apparent contradiction – of the “already” but “not yet”?

The model of Jesus’ ministry provides us with guidance.  He lived as if the loving God was real and active, not conceptual and inert.  Jesus expressed his faith by living out salvation – and those who received his gifts of grace can be categorised as either consumers or participants.  The nine lepers who, when healed, went on their way are consumers.  The tenth, who turned to Jesus and glorified God, is a participant.  Those who participate have faith:  They live salvation and experience eternal life right now.  It is in this spirit, in this faith, that Peter addresses the crowds after the miraculous healing of the lame man: “Why do you wonder at this, or why do you stare at us, as though by our own power or piety we made him walk?…The faith that is through Jesus has given him this perfect health.”

If nothing else, resurrection faith is this lived experience of the rising to new life from the death grip in which the creatures of God are held by the forces of evil and destruction.  We need to understand that if we live as though God’s salvation were a reality, it will be a reality.  We need to discern and interpret the wisdom of God, written into nature itself, and then live according to those principles.  Indeed, it may be said that a Christian is one who has experienced God’s salvation, and awaits new events of salvation with as much confidence as she or he would await the rising of the Sun at daybreak.  To live as a Christian is to live in a state of ongoing, imminent expectation.

The expectation above all others is that the dead shall be raised, and thus even at the grave we make our song, “alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”  This is the season of alleluia, so let us shout it, but above all let us live it.  The resurrection of Jesus invites us to risk his own salvation faith in our lives.  Because he lived out salvation, what was expected to happen, what he had said would happen, did happen.  With that faith burning in our hearts, our own resurrection is now.  Each moment that you inhabit God’s saving love, you have reached the goal, you have saved your life by losing it, and your brokenness has been made whole.  That experience of the Risen Christ begins here and now.

In the conclusion of his book on the resurrection of Christ, Ramsey asserts that Christ does not so much descend to us in the Eucharist, as we are raised up to heaven where he has ascended.  The suffering servant crucified has been replaced with Christ victorious on the cross, crowned, robed, and enthroned.  Christ’s sacrificial death has been joined by his triumphant rising – the Passion has illuminated by the Resurrection.  In this Eucharistic feast, and in every moment of our lives, let us join him there.  Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009.

 

Fragile, Beautiful, Frightening

Sermon Preached by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, 2nd Sunday of Easter (April 19, 2009).

Readings:  Acts 4: 32-35; Psalm 133; 1 John 1: 1 – 2: 2; John 20: 19-31

“No one claimed private ownership of any possessions.” – Acts 4:32

“Most people are on the world, not in it. They have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them – undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.” Those words, written by the environmentalist John Muir in his journal over one hundred years ago, resonate with us today perhaps more than they ever have before. This is Earth Day, an observance dating back to 1970 – almost forty years ago. And while this day does not appear on the Christian calendar, we happily observe it here at St. Hilda’s; convinced as I know we are that, for people of faith, every day should be Earth Day.

We observe it this year with pride in the example this parish sets in promoting sustainability, under the direction of our environmental steward, David Moul. We have taken steps to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions; including energy efficient lighting, weather-stripping doors, insulating pipes, and the imminent replacement of the oil furnace in the hall with electric heat. We practice recycling and have taken steps to conserve water. We have planted many native species and have removed ivy. Our outdoor lighting is “dark skies” friendly. We have a green purchasing policy. We are a signatory to the Earth Charter and maintain membership in the Sunshine Coast Conservation Association. Just in the past couple of months, we have undertaken a promise to support preservation of the glass sponge reefs off the coast of Sechelt; have been active in getting support of local councils for the World Water Day resolution; and have resolved to focus on improving access to clean water for everyone as part of our commitment to the UN Millennium Development Goals. And we have just learned, in the past week, that we are to be the first green accredited parish in the Diocese of New Westminster.

We do these things not because we are a community of environmental activists, although many of us are – but because we are a community of spiritual activists. We are followers of a man who trod lightly on the earth, and invited us to live simply. Our ancestors in the faith were those whom, we heard today, “were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common.” And we take seriously the commandment of Jesus to anchor our personal and common identity in the rule of love, which finds voice in our shared ministry of reconciliation.

The sense of communalism conveyed in the brief account from the Acts of the Apostles appears today, the second Sunday in Easter, because it articulates what the world should look like in light of the resurrection of Jesus. Life triumphing over death is love triumphing over despair, and goodness triumphing over evil. It is, in other words, an active demonstration of God’s principles – an underlying ethic of unity which reflects the reality that the Holy Spirit is the common possession which makes everything else possible.

Another environmentalist, Aldo Leopold, put it well when he wrote, “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” It is part of the common witness of Christians and all people of faith that we are part of this larger community, on which no individual claims ultimate right. The wind, water, earth, and all the life sustained by these and other elements is the possession of the One who brought them into being; God, who united the building blocks of creation in a wondrously complex way.

It is the height of idolatry and arrogance for human beings to supplant God and seize the gift for our own, acting as if creation and Holy Spirit weren’t gifts held in common possession, but resources to be exploited for gain. What a constrained and shrivelled view of existence that is! It is at the root of the culture of death dealt by the false god of consumerism, with its cardinal virtues of greed, selfishness, and isolation.

In today’s gospel reading, we see Jesus meet with the disciples to commission them. He stands at the threshold between the physical and eternal worlds; and in Thomas’ confession of him as “My Lord and my God,” we see Jesus recede from the physical world behind the curtain of faith. It is fitting, therefore, that Jesus gives the disciples – and us – a final instruction. That instruction is to exercise our power of moral discernment; not for the condemnation of the world; but, as Jesus says earlier in this same gospel, in order that the world might be saved.

My invitation to you today is to use this Paschal season, from now until Pentecost at the end of May, to consider the ethical consequences of Jesus’ commission. When it comes to sustaining the planet, making sure mouths are fed, the homeless housed, the war-ravaged places are peaceful – how can you save the world through reconciliation and the forgiveness of sin?

We have made a good start at St. Hilda’s. My hope is that we will continue on the fundamental commission we have to heal what threatens to tear life apart. We do this through prayer, sacrament, and action. We do this by building relationships, and making responsible decisions to live our lives in ways consistent with what we profess to believe. We do this by ensuring that the Jesus of faith is as real for us as the physical Jesus was for Thomas.

Fragility can be both beautiful, and frightening – and it is made all the more so by its intricate complexity. In this sense, creation resembles the nature of God herself. Let us play our part as fragile, beautiful, and – yes – sometimes frightening beloved creatures of God; and take seriously our commission to build bridges of reconciliation and forgiveness; and so save the world God made. Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009.

 

Telling the Secret

Sermon preached by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, Easter Day (April 12, 2009)

Readings:  Isaiah 25: 6-9; Psalm 118: 1-2, 14-24; Acts 10: 34-43; Mark 16:1-8

The Gospel of Mark is trying to keep a big secret.  Jesus keeps telling people not to reveal to anyone that he is the Messiah.  Now, I don’t know about you, but when something amazing or incredible happens to me, the first thing I want to do is to tell everybody.  If I became a secret pen pal with Barack Obama, for example, I can imagine that I’d spend the bulk of my time with friends and family biting my tongue.

Those who encounter the power of Jesus in Mark are repeatedly urged by him to tell no one.  For instance, after Jesus heals a leper, he commands him, “See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer for your cleansing what Moses commanded.”  So, of course the man went off and what he was told, right?  Of course not!  Again from Mark, “He went out and began to proclaim it freely, and to spread the word, so that Jesus could no longer go into a town openly.”  In the same way, after Peter correctly identifies him as the Messiah, Jesus “sternly ordered them to tell no one about him.”  And yet, his fame spread through the countryside, to the point that just a few days after this exchange, when he enters Jerusalem, crowds spread their cloaks before him on the road, shouting “Hosanna!” and greeting him as the new King David.

The message lies not in the secret, but in its failure.  According to one account, on hearing the shouts of acclamation as Jesus entered Jerusalem, some Pharisees asked him to order the people to stop.  Jesus responds, “If tehse were silent, even the stones would shout out.”  Well, one stone in particular did just that – namely, the one that covered the opening of the tomb where Jesus’ body was laid.  “Who will roll away the stone for us?” the women who go to anoint Jesus’ body ask one another.  What they find, of course, is the stone already removed, their rabbi’s body gone, and a young man in a white robe telling them that Jesus has risen and returned to Galilee.

In the other gospels, with variations on the theme, Jesus is met by some of the disciples, and afterward suddenly appears among all of them to commission them.  Other appearances follow; and two Gospel writers attest to Jesus’ ascension into heaven.  But in Mark, we have something quite different.  Here there is no tender encounter between Mary Magdalene and the man whom she supposes to be the gardener.  There is no encouragement by Jesus of a doubting Thomas.  There is no homey scene by a lake, where Jesus broils fish for the disciples’ breakfast.  There is no amazing encounter on the road to Emmaus, where Jesus makes himself known in the breaking of the bread.  And there is certainly no stairway to heaven, as Jesus rises up to the sky on a cloud.  Rather, in this oldest of the Gospels, Mark ends his narrative abruptly.  The women discover the tomb empty; and, we are told, “they fled…for terror and amazement seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”  The end.

For once, Jesus’ plea – “tell no one” – seems to have worked.  The odlest and most relaible of the manuscripts record no sighting of Jesus; nothing to indicate that he had rise, beyond the pledge of the man in the tomb – who might have been a grave-robber for all that the women knew.  Why, we’re even led to believe that the women kept a fearful silence.  What a peculiar way to an account of Jesus’ life, the primary significance of which supposedly rests on his resurrection from the dead!

But there is a catch.  Those early Christians who listened to this tale knew, as we know, that Christ had risen from the dead.  The story ends with an implication that just as the secret couldn’t be kept during Jesus’ earthly life, it will not be kept in his risen life, either.  In fact, the author brilliantly invites us to finish the story, by giving an account of our own encounters with the risen Lord.  With his crucifixion, the Gospel seems to be saying, the right time for the revelation of the Messiah has come.  And we, like the disciples, would see him.  Whether in the act of prayer, in receiving the sacrament of Communion, or in the faces of the people we encounter every day, we would see him.  And we, the church, as the Body of Christ, would continue his mission to build a new way of being in the world – one founded on and sustained by love.

We are never without the presence of Jesus Christ – our founder, leader, brother, and Saviour.  We are a community of the resurrection; and, to quote Bob Dylan, “we’ll tell it and speak it and think it and breathe it; And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it.”  That Jesus Christ is risen; and through him the fullness of life, hope, and love has come into being.  It is a gift shared with all creation, with all people – regardless of anything.

At the outset of Lent, a month and a half ago, I shared with this congregation a prayer that I pledged to offer throughout that season.  It is one I offer again, illuminated as it is now with the brightness of this Easter morning.  “God, you have created us and embrace us just as we are.  Please help us to know and believe in the very depths of our being that there is no obstacle between us and you; that we are reconciled to you now; and that today and every day is the acceptable time – your promised day of salvation for us and for all of your creation.”  Amen.  Let us go out and find the risen Christ!  Happy Easter!

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009

 

The Unleavened Bread

Sermon preached by the Revd Neil Fernyhough, Maundy Thursday (April 9, 2009)

Readings:  Exodus 12: 1-14; Psalm 116: 1, 10-17; 1 Corinthians 11: 23-26; John 13: 1-17, 31-35

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you.” – Jn 13:34

First Corinthians 5, verses 7 and 8 are not included in our readings tonight – but they should be. There, Paul writes, “Our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed for us. Therefore let us celebrate the festival; not with the old yeast, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”

In these two sentences, that great apostle who bridged the cultural, intellectual, and spiritual chasm between the Hebrew and Greek traditions, articulated a radically new understanding of Jesus Christ. Paul portrays him as a universal figure of deliverance, and indeed the herald of a new way of being human. This passage neatly sums up what is being implied in the readings we do hear on this day, Maundy Thursday.

We begin with an account of the institution of the Passover festival, which informs the meaning behind the Seder Jesus shares as the Last Supper with his disciples. The implication of a link between the events is then made explicit in our epistle reading, which records Paul’s memory of what we have come to call the “Words of Institution” – the tradition by which Jesus inaugurated the chief ritual of the earliest Christian community. This is the sacrament we now know as the Eucharist, derived from the Greek word, “thanksgiving.” Finally, our Gospel reading offers a snapshot from that final gathering – the washing of the disciples’ feet by Jesus.

There is a reason why the events of Holy Week coincide with Passover. Consider the account in Exodus. The ritual points to one essential message: The blood of the lamb on their doorposts saves the Israelites from destruction when the wrath of God visits Egypt. In the directions for the liturgical festival commemorating that event, the worshippers are instructed to eat in a hurry (perhaps standing up), anxious, at risk, and ready to leave. The worship includes placing lamb’s blood on a doorpost – obviously not for some literal purpose, but as a reminder – a reminder that the Hebrew people are marked as special. There is conveyed in this act a sense of being wondrously protected, valued, and safe. Moreover, both eating in a hurry and being marked for safety are acts in which even children can engage. Hence, it is no surprise that it is a child who asks, “What do you mean by this observance?” The answer to that question is simple and powerful. What this ceremony meant to the Hebrew people – serially oppressed, violated, and killed by powerful outsiders – it also meant to the earliest Christians. We are not to be at home in the empire, but ready to leave and be liberated.

The sacramental meal we share is the Passover feast of the New Covenant. In the eucharistic meal, Christ grants communion with himself. God acts, giving life to the body of Christ, and renewing each member of it. It is a proclamation of the work of God in creation, redemption, and sanctification. It is a sacrifice of praise by which the Church speaks on behalf of the whole creation – a festival of its reconciliation with God. It is a memorial of the crucified and risen Christ, and a foretaste of the new realm that is coming into being. It is the sacrament of Christ’s real, active, and living presence with us – “this is my body…this is my blood” – however we imagine that presence to be manifested. It is an invocation of the Holy Spirit, through whom we are sanctified; renewed; led into justice, truth, and unity; and empowered to fulfil God’s mission. It is the communion of the faithful, demanding reconciliation and sharing among all members of the household of God. And it is a sign of renewal, beckoning us to our calling as ministers of the reconciling love it represents. Through the Eucharist, we are transformed into the image of Christ, and thus become his effective witnesses in the world.

In short, the Eucharist is more than “food for the journey.” It is our identity, and it is our life. And that life is a life marked by the love which this meal represents in the sacrificial self-offering it symbolizes. In this sense, it is telling that the name of this day, Maundy Thursday, is derived from the Latin word mandatum, taken from the beginning of John 13:34, which we heard read this evening: Mandatum novum do vobis ut diligatis invicem sicut dilexi vos. “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you.”

And this brings me finally to that extraordinary vision of Jesus washing the feet of his devoted followers. The mutual service epitomized in this act was not, I think, meant to be received as a literal direction; but rather as an example of the sort of humility which we are commanded to follow. And a prophetic one at that, given the events that were about to unfold. The message of the foot-washing underscores the message of the new Passover; and Jesus’ role as the paschal lamb who delivers the whole world from destruction. That deliverance is only possible through mutual love. God’s love for us, made tangible in Christ’s willingness to be immersed in the darkest shades of the human experience in order to nullify them. And our love for one another, taking the tender humility of this extraordinary man as our model.

On this evening, we are about to cast our gaze back to a betrayal, a cataclysm, and an abyss. But before the plunge, the pledge of hope – a shaft of light streaming from behind dark clouds. It beckons us to understand, to really, really appreciate what it means when we partake of the gifts of God for the people of God. The power and the promise of this meal belies its simplicity and sparseness. For what is offered, and what is received, is nothing less than food for the world. “Our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed for us. Therefore let us celebrate the festival; not with the old yeast, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” Amen.

© Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009.