In Him All Things

Preached at Christ Church, Abingdon
19^th July 2015: 7^th Sunday after Trinity
John 15:1-17

O Lord, our glorious, loving and holy God, we thank you that you are a God who speaks and who has given us in your Son a living Word who points us to You and that reality which words cannot express: your unfathomable, great and jealous love for all that you have made. Send your Holy Spirit among us now, we pray, to reveal yourself to our hearts in the person of your Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, and by the same Spirit, unite us with Him that we may evermore dwell in Him, and He in us. Amen.

What is salvation? Salvation is one of those churchy words that we don’t really use much in everyday life, unless it’s to talk about a new football manager being appointed to a club in trouble. In this sermon series, which we’re concluding tonight, we’ve been working our way through the seven “I am” sayings of Jesus in John’s Gospel and looking at what they tell us about Jesus the Saviour and the salvation that is to be found in Him. In each, Jesus reveals a slightly different nuance of who He is and what He’s about.

Tonight we’ll be digging into Jesus’ description of Himself as the True Vine and we’ll be thinking about what that image tells us about the kind of Saviour Jesus is and what it means for us to be saved by a Saviour like Jesus. What we see emerging from this extended figure of speech that Jesus uses here in John 15 is that salvation is incorporation. And there are three elements of this that I want to draw out for us this evening:

1. Salvation is incorporation into the Saviour; that it involves a personal relationship with Jesus.
2. Salvation is incorporation into the Saviour’s work; that it involves us in what Jesus is about.
3. Salvation is incorporation into the Saviour’s community; that it involves us with everyone else in relationship with Jesus.

That’s where we’re going, but before we get there I just want to step back a bit to think about what it is Jesus is actually saying when He says, “I am the true vine.” First, let’s reflect on those two small words with which Jesus begins: “I am the true vine.” Earlier on in the series, Keith called our minds back to Exodus 3 when God met with Moses in the burning bush revealed His name as: “I AM WHO I AM.” He explained how these words on Jesus’ lips are a claim to His divinity, to His unity with the Father. But I want to think about something much more mundane than that. I want to think for a moment about what it is that any of us are doing when we begin a sentence, “I am…”

As I’m sure we all learned at school, every complete sentence has two parts to it: there’s the subject (who or what the sentence is about) and there’s the predicate, which tells us about the subject (such as what it’s like or what it does). When Jose Mourinho first arrived as Chelsea manager back in 2004, he caused quite a stir when he announced to the gathered media, “I am a special one.” He himself was the subject of that sentence and what he wanted us to know was that he was special (or at least, he thought he was special—I’ll let you judge for yourselves the content of his claim!). But the important thing is this: every time we use the words “I am…” we shed light on who we are and what we’re about. If I am the subject, then the predicate always reveals something of myself to another.

In our case, then, the subject is Jesus, speaking about Himself. And in one sense, of course, that’s not particularly interesting. We speak about ourselves all the time. Yet what makes the “I am” sayings of Jesus so special is the One who is the subject of this self-disclosure. For the One who’s doing the revealing is the One whom the apostle Paul says in Colossians 1:15 is “the image of the invisible God”; the One whom the author of the letter to the Hebrews describes as “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Hebrews 1:3); the One whom the prologue to this very Gospel says makes known the God whom no one has ever seen (John 1:18).

We often come to these “I am” sayings of Jesus so flippantly, with such familiarity that we fail to recognise the riches of what’s right in front of us. This is God revealing God’s self to us. In Jesus, God condescends to make Himself the subject of our enquiry. We really ought to marvel in wonder at the grace of a God who would stoop so low as to be known by finite beings like us. And just look at how He does it. Jesus takes a simple, ordinary, everyday image like a vine to communicate His truth to us. God doesn’t stand before us and lecture us with technical, theological jargon we don’t understand. Rather, as Martin Luther once said: when God speaks to humanity, God always speaks in baby talk. God doesn’t send Jesus into a seminar room at Oxford University, He sends Him into the crèche.

Time and time again Jesus does this in the Gospels, especially when He’s telling parables about the Kingdom. He uses the mundane to illustrate the sublime, the earthly to illuminate the heavenly. And this is the nature of the man Himself, for He is the One in whom Him heaven and earth meet. This is the mystery at the heart of the Christian faith: that God has freely chosen to reveal Himself to the world in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Every “I am” saying of Jesus, therefore, is a reminder that we don’t climb up the ladder to find God, but that He in His grace scrambles down the ladder to find us. If we are to know anything about who God is and what God looks like, we are dependent on Him to show it to us, and He chooses to do that through Jesus.

“I am the true vine,” Jesus says, “I am the vine; you are the branches.” If Jesus is the subject, what does this predicate say about Him? Why a vine? Why not a pair of trousers? Well, for a start, trousers weren’t really the fashion in first century Palestine.   Vines, however, were. In the ancient Mediterranean world, the vine was one of the three most familiar trees of the region, along with the olive tree and the fig tree. Vines were grown all over Palestine, as indeed they still are today. Jesus could speak in this extended metaphor because He knew people would know what He was talking about. It was baby talk.

It’s a bit different for us here in England. When I think of vines, I think of a vineyard we visited up in Yorkshire a couple of years ago. If you’re sitting there thinking, “I didn’t think you could grow grapes up in Yorkshire,” you’d be dead right. It was a disaster. It was windy, cold and wet, but did they cancel the tour? No, of course not, because it soon became apparent that they certainly we’re making any money from wine, and most disappointing of all, there were no samples at the end of the tour. All that’s just to say that the horticultural image of the vine probably doesn’t mean as much to us here and now as it did there and then to those first disciples. But perhaps things are different here in sunny Abingdon? I don’t know.

And yet there is more to Jesus’ use of this metaphor than the familiarity of the vine in the local countryside. By speaking of Himself as a vine, Jesus was tapping into a rich vein of Old Testament imagery. In several places in the Old Testament, Israel was referred to as God’s vineyard. Psalm 80:8-11 says:
You brought a vine out of Egypt;
you drove out the nations and planted it.
You cleared the ground for it;
it took deep root and filled the land.
The mountains were covered with its shade,
the mighty cedars with its branches.
It sent out its branches to the sea
and its shoots to the River.
The vine was a symbol of the nation. It was even used on Maccabean coinage in the years before the Roman occupation. Thus for Jesus to say not only that he was the vine, but that He was the true vine, was for Him to claim that He fulfils the role of Israel, that He is the true representative of God’s people in the world.

Particularly significant (given the context of Jesus saying this as He bids farewell to His disciples), Jesus here is claiming to bear fruit through a new people of God formed in Him. The image of the vine and the branches is used to signify a certain kind of relationship. It speaks of dependence, of mutuality, of an organic union between the people of God and the God who saves them. Salvation is incorporation. And first of all, it is incorporation into the Saviour. “Remain in me, as I also remain in you,” says Jesus in v. 4. μείνατε ἐν ἐμοί. The Greek implies a sense of deep and lasting intimacy, which Eugene Peterson draws out wonderfully in The Message: “Live in me. Make your home in me just as I do in you.”

Salvation means incorporation into the Saviour. Jesus uses the word “abide” 11 times in these verses. He uses the words “in me” or “in my” a further 8 times. That’s significant. John Stott rightly points out that the commonest way of describing a follower of Jesus in the Bible is to say that he or she is a person “in Christ”. The apostle Paul uses the term “in Christ” (ἐν Χριστῷ) as a synonym for Christian (which itself is used only 3 times). The words “in Christ” (or their equivalent) appear 216 times in Paul’s letters. They occur a further 26 times in the Gospel and letters of John. Theologian Paul Murray claimed that, “nothing is more central or basic than union and communion with Christ.” He argued that union with Christ is “the central truth of the whole doctrine of salvation.”

We see this in Romans 6:3, for instance, when Paul says, “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into his death?” Later on in the same passage Paul says: “Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.” Through faith and baptism, we are brought into Christ; we are identified with Him and made participants of His death and resurrection. In business, a corporation is a company or group of people who are legally authorized to act as a single entity or person. Incorporation literally means to be formed or united into one body. That is what Jesus is talking about here in John 15. By calling Himself the vine, Jesus reveals a salvation that means participating in Him.

“I am the vine; you are the branches,” Jesus says in v. 5. “If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” If you’ve ever spent ages trying to figure out why some electrical device wasn’t working only to find out later that it wasn’t actually plugged in, you’ll understand what Jesus is talking about. Salvation means being plugged into the Saviour. It implies a living connection between Christ and the believer. And in vv. 7-10 we get an idea of how this living connection is to be maintained: by remaining in Christ’s word, by prayer in Christ’s name (that is, in line with what He represents), and by obedience to Christ in both. Incorporation into Christ means conformity to Christ and what Christ’s about.

Salvation is incorporation into the Saviour, but it’s also incorporation into the Saviour’s work. So that’s the next question, isn’t it? What is the Saviour’s work? Again, the image of the vine and the branches tells us all we need to know:
“He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.” (v. 2)
“No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.” (v. 4)
“If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit.” (v. 5)
“This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit.” (v. 8)
“You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last.” (v. 16)
You tell me: what do you think the work of Jesus the True Vine is? To bear fruit! That is why a vine exists. That is its raison d’être (perhaps its raisin d’être!). So if the mission of a vine is to produce grapes, the mission of the branches is the same. Indeed, the branches bear the vine’s fruit.

It’s no accident, I don’t think, that Jesus’ first recorded miracle (or “sign”) in John’s Gospel is turning water into wine, and that His last “I am” saying is: “I am the true vine.” In a sense, they act as bookends to Jesus’ ministry telling us what it’s all about: bringing joy and fullness of life, filling our cup till it overflows, inaugurating the end-time party to end all parties. That’s what Jesus is about. And the picture Jesus paints of the vine and the branches tells us that if we’re in Him, that’s what we should be about too. In fact, it goes further still. It says that we are to be the means by which Christ blesses the world; we are, if you like, to be the delivery mechanism.

We often have far too limited a sense of what salvation is. We tend to think of it as having our sins forgiven so that we can go to heaven when we die. But that’s not what the Bible means by salvation. That might be part of it; but it’s too self-centred, too individualistic, and frankly, far too small. A more biblical vision of salvation is our getting hooked up with God, swept up into the great tidal wave of God’s loving move towards His creation. Theologian Will Willimon writes: “Salvation isn’t just a destination; it is our vocation.” Salvation is the invitation to share the Saviour’s life, and by extension, the Saviour’s ministry. Ultimately, therefore, salvation isn’t about us; it’s about God and God’s purposes being accomplished in and through us.

The Good News of Jesus Christ is even better than we dare to imagine: we are not saved from this world for another; we are saved by Christ to be Christ’s agents of transformation of it. To be saved by Jesus means to be sent by Jesus: “I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit,” (v. 16). Friendship makes demands upon us. Friendship with Jesus is no different. Incorporation into Christ the Saviour, therefore, means incorporation into Christ the Saviour’s work. His work is our work. By the grace of God in Christ who calls us His friends, we are made, in the words of Paul, “co-workers with God” (1 Corinthians 3:9).

Once we realise that being saved by Jesus means far more than having a personal relationship with Him, we are prepared to see that salvation in Jesus Christ is social. Salvation is incorporation into the Saviour’s community. In other words, Jesus’ mission isn’t merely to bear fruit through a number of individual branches, but to bear fruit through branches that are all united one to another through the one vine. This community-forming dimension of Jesus the Saviour isn’t an optional extra; it is an intrinsic part of the salvation He came to bring. If we look at vv. 12-17, we see that Jesus’ chief concern there is with the formation of the new people of God who bring God’s blessings to the world by being a community of love.

It is in community, in the Church, that we practice salvation. This, in itself, is missional. Back in John 13:35, Jesus says: “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” The church historian Tertullian imagined pagans looking at Christians and saying, “See … how they love one another; and how they are ready to die for each other.” The quality of our fruit is tied to the quality of our community. As you go to a vine to find grapes, so ought the world be able to go to the Church and find Christ. Commentator Andrew Lincoln writes: “The result of the relationship to Jesus is to be fruit-bearing and that entails his followers’ love for one another … The union between Jesus and his disciples is to result in a community of love that has its source and model in the love which Jesus demonstrates.”

As I was preparing this sermon in the week, I was struggling to find an illustration that might adequately capture what it is Jesus is saying here. Then it dawned on me. I didn’t have to find one. We already have one: it’s called Holy Communion. This simple act of meal encapsulates everything I’ve been trying to say. Jesus says earlier on in John’s Gospel: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them” (John 6:56). As we receive bread and wine, we accept Christ’s identification with us in dying on our behalf and we seek to participate in the movement of Christ’s risen life towards the Father. What’s more, as we receive bread and wine, we have to eat with anyone Christ calls to His feast; we are sat around the table with everyone else who is “in Christ”—a family we would never have chosen for ourselves.

But there’s also one final reason why the meal Jesus gave us is such a perfect sign of His salvation: because having been fed and watered, we’re sent out again on a mission to bear fruit for the world. William Barclay writes: “When a knight came to the court of King Arthur, he did not come to spend the rest of his days in knightly feasting and in knightly fellowship there. He came to the king saying: “Send me out on some great task which I can do for chivalry and for you.”” The purpose of our communion with Christ is to go into the world, but it is only through our communion with Christ and our communion with Christ through one another that we have something to offer the world. Nemo dat quod non habet. You can’t give what you don’t have. Or, as Jesus Himself says in v. 5: “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.”

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Weak, But Yet Strong

Preached at Christ Church, Abingdon
5^th July 2015: 5^th Sunday after Trinity
2 Corinthians 12:2-10; Mark 6:1-13

Last weekend, I was in the car listening to Saturday Live on the radio and they were asking people to share their stories of when they were at their best. They read out a text from a woman named Maggie, who wrote: “I don’t want to sound too boastful, but I was at my best when I won a ‘Highly Commended’ for my potato in the Coomb Flower, Autumn Fruit and Veg Show.” Angela said she peaked in 1973 at the age of 19 when she won a competition for holding dolly pegs—she managed to hold an impressive twenty-one in just one hand. Another woman called Ros emailed in to say that her high point was graduating from university just before her 60^th birthday with a Master’s degree in Death Studies, having never been to university before.

When were you really at your best? How jarring it would have been to hear the apostle Paul calling in and saying, “I was at my best when I was hungry, thirsty, cold, exposed, and worried; when I was being imprisoned, whipped, beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, and insulted; when I received a thorn in my flesh whose sharp incision bore into me with an insistent and searing pain which God refused to take away.” Paul’s got it all backwards. We boast about our achievements, about our successes, about the things that make us look good—you know the kind of thing you find in the typical, nauseating Christmas letter crowing about how their 3 year old granddaughter has just passed her Grade 8 cello exam and will be playing with the London Symphony Orchestra next month.

“I will not boast about myself,” Paul says, “except about my weaknesses. … For when I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Corinthians 12:5, 10)

To most of us, this will sound ridiculous. Who would boast about their weaknesses? Can you imagine kids in the playground boasting, “My Dad’s smaller than yours” and another saying, “Yeah, well my Dad’s poorer than yours” and yet another saying, “My Dad’s smaller and poorer than both your Dads put together”? No, of course not. Paul sets before us a strange new world revealed to us in Jesus Christ in which strength and weakness are not opposites or logical incompatibilities, but rather go hand-in-hand. In Christ, through Christ, and with Christ, Paul shows us that we may be weak, but yet strong.

In Acts 18, we read that Paul spent 18 months teaching and preaching in Corinth, second only in time to Ephesus. As he usually did, he went first to the Jews in the local synagogue and then when he was driven out of there, he took the gospel to the population at large. And although he faced opposition, his message had great success in bringing many people to Jesus. But now things have gone wrong. In his absence, people had come in and preached a rival message of the gospel, opposing Paul and questioning his apostolic credentials: his truthfulness (1:15-17), his speaking ability (10:10; 11:6), his unwillingness to accept financial support (11:7-9; 12:13), and seemingly also from this passage, his failure to speak compellingly of or enable the Corinthians themselves to have amazing spiritual experiences.

So Paul writes 2 Corinthians to defend his authority as the Lord’s apostle. Yet, he does so in a most unexpected way. Tom Wright says: “In this letter, he [Paul] goes down deeper into sorrow and hurt, and what to do about it, than he does anywhere else, and he emerges with a deeper, clearer vision of what it meant that Jesus himself suffered for and with us and rose again in triumph.” Paul plunges the depths. He exposes himself. He lays himself bare. He reveals his utmost weaknesses and vulnerabilities, and says, “Judge for yourselves whether or not I am who I say I am.” In v. 6 of our passage, he says that he doesn’t want anyone thinking more of him than they can see or hear from him.

If you’ve ever heard the Radio 4 comedy, I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, you may have heard them playing a game called Swankers. It’s basically a boasting game. The teams take it in turns to be guests at a party bragging about some impressive aspect of their lives, which the next guest has to try their best to out-do. In the first half of our passage, Paul shows that in a game of Apostolic Swankers, he was more than a match for the so-called super-apostles who had so bewitched the Corinthians. “So, you think unusual spiritual experiences are evidence of spiritual stature, do you? Well, I happen to know someone who was taken up to Paradise itself, who walked in the royal garden as a companion of the heavenly King. I could say more, but if I did, I’d have to kill you.”

Paul could have boasted about himself if he wanted to, and if he did, it’s probably fair to say he’d have top trumps. Yet, he chooses not to. Instead, he tells us of a thorn in his flesh—what this is we don’t know, and though there have been lots of guesses it doesn’t really matter. Whatever it was, this thorn, Paul says, was given him as a reminder that God’s power is not the same as human power. And when he begged God three times to remove it, God simply told him: “My grace is sufficient for you.” Paradoxically, Paul realizes that the only strength that matters is weakness, because it’s in our weakness that we encounter the grace of God.

Whereas the strong want to use God, the weak want to be used by God. And that is what makes them powerful. Brother Yun, the exiled Chinese church leader and evangelist rightly says, “It is not great men who change the world, but weak men in the hands of a great God.” And the definitive example of that is Christ Himself. The cross is the ultimate demonstration of Christ’s weakness. And yet… And yet, it is through the cross that forgiveness for sins is won, that the powers of evil are destroyed, and that the power of God is revealed in resurrection. God’s power being revealed in weakness is what the meal we are about to share is all about.

Christ allows us to embrace weakness in the trust that it may become, with God, an opportunity for Him to reveal His power. As my former lecturer at Durham University, Walter Moberly, writes, “Even pain as acute as that of the thorn in the flesh can become, in Christ, a channel for the power of God which brings life to others.” I experienced that this week when I had the very great privilege of meeting Brian. I saw in him a man who was weak, but yet strong: a man who was willing to be open and vulnerable, and through whose openness and vulnerability, God showed me a thing or two about what it means to love.

We don’t need to run or hide from our weaknesses; rather, by the grace of God, we can boast in our weaknesses because He uses our weaknesses to show His power. Indeed, it’s my boast today that God has chosen a shy, timid introvert, who really doesn’t like being the centre of attention and who has a bit of a stutter under pressure, to preach and to be the vessel through which He may speak His Word to His people. I’ll boast about weakness like that. Thanks be to God!

Draw Near

Draw near with faith, receive your King
In broken bread and outpoured wine;
For us He made this offering
Of God, to make mortals divine:
So eat and drink with grateful hearts
And feast on all His love imparts.

Draw near, O Lord, through sacred sign
And by Your grace Yourself convey;
Conceive in us the life divine,
Lord Christ, be born in us, we pray:
Come quick, make haste, do not delay
Let this be our new Christmas Day!

Draw near with power from above
To plant in us the life of God;
There let it grow in perfect love,
Your flesh be ours and ours Your blood:
So as we eat and drink, consume
Our hearts, that they may be a womb.

Draw near, O Son of God, draw near,
And share with us divinity;
Incarnate in Your Church, appear,
Revealed in full humanity:
Let us be now Your guise on earth
Through which You bring new life to birth.

Draw near to us, Immanuel,
Godhead and man in You made one;
Come, dwell in us, in You we’ll dwell,
So we may share the name of son:
Forever God to us is bound,
That all in Him may e’er be found.

Draw near and cast the veil aside
That faith alone can penetrate;
With baited breath, Your ransomed Bride
Waits You Your vow to consummate:
For this You did the heavens leave
That God to us as one might cleave.

Draw near again at last and make
Complete the work in us begun;
Grant then that we of God partake,
Conformed in likeness to the Son:
From glory, still more glorious,
Till You are all in all in us!

Mother Church

Preached at Trinity Methodist/URC, Honley
30th March 2014: Mothering Sunday (AAW)
John 19:25-27

What is a family? Who is in your family? What does your family look like?

Someone a few years ago gave us a tea towel saying: “Friends are the family we choose for ourselves.” Friends are also part of our family. Sometimes they can even be closer to us than our real or biological family. There’s a proverb in the Bible that says the same thing: “There is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” It’s possible to have friends who are more like family than family are.

It’s one of the amazing things about the story we’ve just read that even as Jesus was in terrible pain and about to die, he was thinking about other people and more worried about their problems than his own. Jesus looked down at his mother and his best friend standing next to her at the foot of his cross and in love he entrusted them to each other. There at the cross, Jesus created a new kind of family; a family where all of Jesus’ friends became brothers and sisters to one another.

There’s a story in another place in the Gospels when Jesus is told that his mother and brothers are outside looking for him and he responded by asking, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” He then pointed to his friends sat around listening to him and said that whoever lives the way God wants them to live is his brother, his sister and his mother. This is God’s family; a family of people like Mary and John who are willing to stand with Jesus to the end even through the pain of the cross.

Jesus gives us a whole new picture of what it means to be family. It is a family of all different sorts of people; people from every place and country, people from every age and ethnicity—men and women, old and young, rich and poor, black and white. This is a family of people tied together by more than genes; it is a family of people tied together by the love of Jesus and a desire to follow him in living lives that make God happy. In this kind of family, God is the Father and we are the children.

This is a family like no other. A third century Christian teacher called Cyprian once said: “You cannot have God as your Father unless you have the Church for your Mother.” And like any of the families we’re born into, you can’t choose your siblings; some you’ll get along with, some you won’t. In the Church, we are related to everyone who is a friend of Jesus. As a Methodist minister in America, Will Willimon, put it so wonderfully, “We have got to eat with anybody Jesus drags in the door.”

Like most families, the Church family can be dysfunctional at times. It too has its fair share of spats and quarrels; but what makes the Church family unique is that it always keeps coming back to sit and eat with one another around the Lord’s table. Because we are related to one another by the simple fact of being Jesus’s friends, it means that if we want to sit and eat with Jesus, we also have to sit and eat with anyone else Jesus chooses to sit and eat with. It is the love of Jesus which holds us all together, which binds us as family.

Now I want to stay with the idea of the Church as our Mother for a bit longer. I want you to think for a moment of what that means. What do our mothers do for us?

There’s a huge long list we could make: they love us, they care for us, they forgive us, they pick us up when we fall down, they change our dirty nappies when we’re babies, they feed us, they cook for us, they clean for us, they wash our clothes, they nurture us, they tell us off when we’ve done something wrong, they give us a hug when we’re feeling down, they encourage us, they spend time with us, they talk with us, they play with us, they eat with us, they laugh with us, they cry with us, they watch over us, they protect us, they give us the freedom to make mistakes, they teach us things, they show us how to do things. The list could go on, I’m sure.

Something else they do for us that we haven’t mentioned: they give birth to us. We are all here today because a mother gave birth to us; they carried us in the womb and gave birth to us. The Church is our Mother because it is the place where Christians are born, where people begin life in relationship with God. Now when I talk about ‘the Church’ I’m not talking about a building, but about people, about the Christians who come together to worship God and centre their lives on Jesus. None of us get connected with Jesus by ourselves; we come because other people show him and share him with us, we come because Jesus reveals himself to us through God’s other children, through his family. It is through the Church we learn the life of faith.

The Church is the place where Christians are born. And like the love of our heavenly Father, Mother Church loves us and accepts us just as we are; we are welcomed and cherished without doing anything to earn or deserve it, but simply for being ourselves. Sometimes, like children, we come home with a scraped knee and mud all over us and it is the Church our Mother who cleans and dresses the wound, washes and changes our clothes. It is in the family of the Church that we learn both to receive forgiveness and to give it as well. Sometimes our mothers tell us off for doing something dangerous, selfish or unkind and sometimes Mother Church will do the same. We are loved as we are; but too much to allow us to stay infants forever.

The Church, like a mother, also teaches us to speak. She shows us who we are and why we’re here. She tells us our story, our family history. She explains why we’re special, why we’re different and why we don’t behave like everyone else does. Mother Church names us as God’s children and helps us work out what it means to live as God’s children. She instructs us in what’s right and what’s wrong. She feeds us and nourishes us with the food of God’s word in the Bible and God’s presence in the bread and wine of Holy Communion. Mother Church helps us grow and flourish as the people God made us to be. She holds us in her land like a clutch of helium balloons and releases us to soar upwards into God. She rejoices when we rejoice and when we’re sad she puts her arm around us and comforts us.

This is the family Jesus creates at the cross for anyone who will be his friend. It’s not exclusive little club for holy Joes; it’s a Sunday school for children learning how to walk. Mother Church is our home away from home; it is the place we come in order to find God’s presence, power and purpose for our lives, preparing us for the day that home is here to stay. The question for us this Mothering Sunday is this: The kettle’s on and the food is in the oven; but are on our way back home to God?

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.