Sermon Archive
Making Jesus Visible
Sermon preached by John Armes at Holy Communion on 2 April 2006, Passion Sunday
Jeremiah 31:31-34 ; John 12:20-33
Sometimes, when I'm wandering around this church, the building almost seems alive, it pulses with vigour. And when I feel this I imagine that the whole building is a great transmitter sending out waves of positive energy.
It's like those little diagrams we drew in science lessons at school; concentric circles emanating out from a power source. It's almost as if here God has dropped a pebble into the water of life, its energy moving inexorably across the surface of existence.
The same can be said of many church buildings, many religious buildings, from which people pour each week, spreading outwards to live faithfully in whatever circumstances and opportunities are given to them. But forgive me for dwelling for a moment longer on St John's which is, after all, where we are this morning (and where, after this service, we shall be thinking about how we might develop our buildings.)
What excites me about St John's is that its positive energy is so diverse and colourful. We have our Sunday identity, of course, the people who gather here and are sent out from here. We also have our weekday activities. These include the welcome our Guardians offer to our thousands of visitors, the hospitality of our café and the opportunities for learning and growth offered through our bookshop. They also include the insistent call to social and international justice, heard through the One World Shop, the Peace and Justice Centre, our murals and numerous events at the Festival and other times of the year.
To me, in my imagination, it is as if the golds, the reds and blues of the inside of our building, of our gorgeous windows are also being transmitted – all the different wavelengths pulsing outwards, speaking to those who listen, inviting in, sending out.
St John's, in other words, is not simply place, it is also people. Take the people out of the place and it would be simply a museum of what used to be. Take the place away from the people and we would be scattered, unrecognisable. Place and people, a combination that is more than the sum of its parts; a symbiotic relationship in which our location and our building call forth our mission, and our community in turn uses and reshapes the building to develop that mission.
Human beings have always found holy places, constructing them to focus their deepest values and sometimes discovering that the places themselves begin to drive and energise those values. Our ancestors used to build stone circles in deserted settings that expressed a reverence for sun and stars. The early Christian church often re-used these ancient shrines, developing its own spirituality of the desert place, of the closeness of God in the wildness of nature. Look through our countryside and you will still find such places.
The medieval church developed these shrines in accordance with their priorities. If you visit Mont St Michel in France you will find the island is crowned by the great abbey, a building on three levels. At the bottom is where the commoners lodged, with the animals, in the middle is the space for the nobility, at the top, above them all is the church, once glorious, now stripped of its pretensions.
That even great places, spiritual power-houses like Stonehenge and Mont St Michel are now shells of their former grandeur – oddities, artefacts – should be both a warning and an encouragement to us. A warning that life and God keep moving and we must be ready to move too – energy can drain from buildings, the transmitter fail and go silent. But it is an encouragement in that this building is itself evidence of our willingness to change. Even the windows I mentioned a moment ago are a later addition. Each generation has been willing to reshape the building to make it fit for the service of God in their day, using it as one way of incarnating the values of God, the things that are of ultimate importance.
And all this in a building, not set in the wilderness or on some remote rocky outcrop, but in the middle of Scotland's capital. A building that expresses the assurance that God is to be found here in the ordinary and the everyday, where people live and move and have their being – in the political realities of modern civil society.
Today's gospel reading begins with some Greeks asking a question that has inspired many sermons, 'Sir, we wish to see Jesus.' The request seems to be untimely. Philip and Andrew get in a bit of a tizzy about it, and even when they go to tell Jesus he doesn't give them a straight answer. Yet what he does do is to begin to explain what it means to see him. It means that we will see a grain of wheat that must die before it can bear fruit. It means that if someone wishes to serve Jesus they must be prepared to follow, even to the cross. Jesus is clearly deeply troubled by his realisation that death is inescapable and he is tempted to ask that he be saved from this fate, yet instead he asks that God be glorified by his death.
Our task, then, may be put quite simply: to help others to see Jesus. This means to invite others to discover how God may be glorified by a figure lifted high upon a cross – a lifting up in death and new life that is offered to all people, without distinction. As Jesus says, 'I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.' All that we do, in other words, is to be done not to make ourselves safe or comfortable but to glorify the God made real to us on a cross.
We are children of that new covenant Jeremiah speaks of in our first reading. No longer a covenant that leads us by the hand but a covenant written on our hearts, an integral part of our programming, an instinctive understanding of the character and the values of God. This too should under-gird our encounter with others. Indeed, if we get our new buildings, perhaps somewhere in them should be boldly inscribed the words Jeremiah puts in the mouth of God, 'they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.' An inclusive vision, not only to make Jesus visible to others but also to discover, to affirm and to delight in those ways in which God is already visible in others… 'from the least of them to the greatest.'
In short then, we are this generation's representatives within the dynamic relationship between St John's as people and St John's as place. This building is the product of that same relationship within past generations. Over the last few years we have used the best powers of our discernment, drawing on all that is written on our hearts about the ways of God, to clarify how our buildings may best empower our mission now, and fifty or one hundred years from now.
The energy that emanates from this place is no accident, it is the fruit of Christian discipleship responding to and inspired by the grace of God. It is our task, in this generation, to ensure that when the casual visitor wanders down our terrace or pops into our church, he or she will be captivated by the energy of a place and a people who seek to make Christ visible. A community walking the way of the cross, excited by the joyful particularities of God's call to us, in this city, at this time, with any who wish to join us, and always ready to say, even in the face of challenge and disappointment, what Jesus said, 'Father, glorify your name.'
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