Sermon Archive
Spirals
Sermon preached by John Armes at Holy Communion on 25 April 2004, the third Sunday after Easter
Acts 9.1-6 ; Revelation 5.11-14 ; John 21.1-19
One of the occupational hazards of being a clergyperson is festival-fatigue. I was talking about retirement with a friend recently and he was horrified when I exclaimed, 'I'll be so glad when I don't have to organise any more Christmases and Easters!'
This feeling is not peculiar to clergy. I'm sure that farmers and dentists and teachers and lawyers and shopkeepers grow weary of their routines too. Even the successful pop singer surely must tire of her chart-topping hit when she's sung it (or mimed it) for the 2000th time. And millions of people, meagrely rewarded for a life of toil have far more reason than I to bemoan their lot.
And when I come to think of it, the way I celebrated Easter in 1979 when I began my ministry, the way I experienced it inwardly as a young man, the way I organised it for public worship, was entirely different from that celebration, experience, organisation in 2004. This is not only because the world is different each year but also because I am different.
Looked at in this way, it is the very thing I'm complaining about, the relentless cycle of the church's year, that becomes an annual reminder to me that I have moved on. I come back to the same place and yet it is not the same place. I have moved and the world I inhabit has moved. And so, as Easter comes round again each year it offers me the chance, if I'm willing to take it, to find how the Spirit has been alive in me.
In other words, the Christian year may appear to be a circle, but our journey through it is, as educationalists might put it, like moving up a spiral. We constantly return to the same place yet each time we return we see the place differently not least because we ourselves are different. Like returning to our old school, or rereading a once loved author.
T S Eliot saw that this process expresses something immensely profound about the human spiritual condition:
the end of all our exploration
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Potentially then each Christmas, each Easter brings us closer to that moment of arrival when we shall be ultimately at home, the deepest yearnings of our souls answered and fulfilled - when our earthly worship gives place to the worship of heaven pictured in the reading from Revelation. For the moment, however, we only gather faint intimations of a state of enlightenment and completion that is at present beyond our capacity to experience.
We can see this learning spiral at work for Peter. The self-confident Peter full of grandiose ideas of Messiah-ship, the Peter who has proclaimed that he will die with Jesus, has made his journey outwards into the wilderness of denial, failure and loss. As the spiral turns inwards again it brings him back to another encounter with his Lord. Now as he walks with Jesus we see a wiser, humbler, greater man. The fisherman has returned home and by the lake where he was first called he is called again and, as if for the first time, he is able to make his hesitant profession of love and obedience.
And for Paul too; Paul of the Damascus road experience. His conversion is often portrayed as if it defies all the usual rules of personal growth and learning, as if it comes out of the blue. And yet when Paul himself comes to tell the tale he recognises that he had been 'kicking against the goads.' In other words, his over-zealous persecution of the Christians has been his way of hiding from himself his own sympathies for them.
Paul is struck blind. The spiral has turned and he cannot face what he sees. He is blinded not least by the strangeness of the culture into which he has entered, one that seems to deny all he once stood for. But the great thing about Paul is that it is precisely because he is a stranger in this new company, that he comes to them with his own unique perspective, his own unique place on the spiral, that he is able to help the church to change beyond all recognition from the little gathering of Galilean fishermen. His greatness lies in his difference.
A big-mouthed failure and a cruel stranger. If we ever needed an illustration of why our church should be a place for failures and outsiders then in Peter and Paul we have it. This is why our failures (and we have many do we not?) are only disastrous if we fail to learn from them, fail to allow them to bring us around the next loop in our learning spiral. This is why we look to welcome strangers even though sometimes strangers can be so strange, they can come at things from such a different perspective, with such crazy notions, that they uncomfortably threaten our own peace of mind. In the same way the early church found it immensely difficult to cope with Paul and his determination to reject every dependence on the Jewish law. But just as God spoke to them through Paul, so God's influence is felt through the impact of other people, within the church and outside it.
This is the kind of church, prepared to be changed by strangers, ready to countenance failure that God instituted in Jesus. 'Cast your net on the other side' is as much a message for us as for those early disciples. 'Bring some of the fish you have caught' is still the affirmation now as then that God is ready to use what we have to offer in order to let his people grow.
Jesus calls Peter to follow him. You cannot follow someone by standing still. Similarly, by belonging to the church, any church, we are opting into a community in which growth and change are an integral part. Perhaps this may be an uncomfortable thought for some of us, but the church is not locked in a vacuum labelled Bible or Reformation or Victorian or 1960s or 2004. It is composed of people like you and me who are involved in the process by which God makes all things new.
What, I wonder, would the great Dean Ramsey and his enterprising if perhaps rather establishment parishioners have made of a church that served vegetarian cuisine in its basement, dealt in radical theology books and painted gaudy murals to attract passers-by to a less than conventional message? I hope that the St John's of 2154 will seem just as strange to us - and that wherever we are by then we shall be able to thank God for it.
In the meantime it's our task in our present moment to seek to discern the movement of God's Spirit within us and between us. This year's Retreat in Life, launched this week, the Vestry meeting tomorrow to explore our building needs, the West End churches plans for a community profile in the autumn will all, in their different ways, enable individuals and groups to take part in this process of discernment. Given where I am, given where we are, where is God calling us to follow?
There are many resting places on this road, many loops within the spiral. Perhaps this is why Christians have struggled over the centuries to understand one another, to grasp that two apparently contradictory perspectives might both be true. But the important thing, perhaps, is that we are alert to the newness that God continues to bring into being.
It is given to us to live as those who believe God affirms what we are becoming. To recognise that every corner on the road offers hope for new life and the refreshment of the Spirit, that if I am jaded it is not because God has ceased to live but rather that I have ceased to notice. For every festival invites us to give voice with new feeling to old songs and to discover that the ancient message of joy and hope can put new songs upon our lips.
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