ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

A Sermon Preached at Evensong and Benediction on the Seventh Sunday of Easter, 16th May 2010 by Fr Gerald Beauchamp

Readings: Isaiah 44. 1-8; Ephesians 4. 7-16

Perhaps the hardest thing that any of us ever do is to grow up. The physical part is fairly automatic. Given enough food and shelter our bodies grow without our having to give them much thought. We may or may not like the result but we are how we look. But looks aren't everything and inside there's a fair amount going on. We have personalities, emotions, desires; likes and dislikes. We form opinions and relationships. We have faith. The growing that we do in all these areas is immensely more complicated. We have to put in a lot of effort and we don't always get it right. We may well at some point have been told to 'grow up' and its pretty wounding when it happens.

Indeed, one of the phenomena that is perhaps new in our culture is that with people living longer many have their parents until way into later life. People retire with their parents still alive. And there's a bit of growing up that we have to do that we can only do when our parents have gone. While we have them there's always a home that we can flee to. But once the parents have gone then we become the older generation. Now the buck stops with us. There's no longer a ceiling and that's not always comfortable.

As with individuals so with the church. The church is founded on Christ and his Holy Spirit. We know from the Acts of the Apostles that the church grew considerably in numbers and spread to many important cities in the Roman Empire like Ephesus. St Paul and others wrote teaching, advising and admonishing. And here we see a development. Initially, some thought that the risen and ascended Christ would soon return' 'the Lord is at hand' (e.g. Phil 4.5; Jas 5. 8). So there wasn't much point organizing the movement. That would happen 'automatically'. People came to faith as a result of apostolic preaching and the example of holy and virtuous lives lived by Christians and then they waited.

But Jesus didn't come again in a way that seemed obvious. So there was a cooling down of expectations. Far from the new Jerusalem literally descending from heaven Christians had to roll up their sleeves and build the city themselves. Christians had to grow up and become the Body of Christ, visible for all to see.

The Letter to the Ephesians illustrates this development. It shows a division of labour that has gone beyond simply appointing deacons like Stephen to do what the apostles didn't have time to do. There were now a variety of roles that the church identified as part of its life: 'Some are called to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists ...' There are pastors and teachers, too and no doubt a number of others. Note that there's no mention of priests. The three-fold order of ministry of bishop, priest and deacon as we understand it now wasn't present until a couple of centuries later and its not been without its critics as the Reformation shows.

For two thousand years the church has grown. It has matured. It has taken decisions about its life that have both emerged from the inside (like creating structures of authority) as well as caused by challenges from outside. Under the Emperor Constantine the church hitched its wagon to earthly power. You can't have a worldwide religion without resources but this meant that the church has sometimes ended up being behind the times; hanging on to structures of power and ways of thinking that are passing away. Looking back we can see that the church found it hard to adjust when Europe's absolute monarchies bit the dust and modern democracy emerged. The church was slow to oppose slavery and in more recent times race and human sexuality have caused major upsets.

The church finds itself on the horns of a dilemma. If it is to be faithful to scripture and tradition it has to be conservative: conserving the very things that are the foundation of its life - worship, the sacraments and so on. But if the church becomes conservative in the wrong way - setting everything in aspic, fencing itself in behind a Berlin Wall then it becomes detached from the very world that God wants to save. The problem is that although its fairly easy to see in hindsight what was a proper development and what wasn't its very hard to see what's right at the time. We all hail the prophet's voice from the safe distance of the future. In the meantime we have a tendency to say 'Away with him!'

The glitch in our own day is that we've inserted the language of rights into our church life. We've grown up with a way of thinking that took off in the 18C and has given us the sort of society that we live in today. Many of us have just voted in a general election. That was our right. When we buy things from shops or online we have certain rights. Some of us over the years have been involved in advocating the rights of those who have been denied them: the right of black people in South Africa to vote and the rights of gay people to live freely and without fear. But rights language sits uneasily in the life of the church.

The church is a body that has many parts. It's not composed simply of individuals who think that they have a particular vocation. Over two thousand years the church has seen eddies and flows in its life with movements such as monastic communities or those wanting the church to go in a particular direction. The Church of England with its synodical government seeks to blend both those with vocations (bishops, priests and deacons) with those voted in at an election with houses of bishops, clergy and laity. Sometimes this combines the best of both worlds and sometimes not. And when its 'sometimes not' the results can be disheartening for those inside the church and off-putting to those outside. When that happens we need to go back to something very ancient; something that the early church understood and lived supremely. That is, that the things of God are a gift not a right.

Life is a gift not a right. It's a privilege to be enjoyed and in our thanksgiving for what we have received we have a spirit of freedom that far transcends the liberties that exist under an earthly government of whatever form. Because the gift comes from 'on high', from 'heaven', the place (however we conceive of it) from which Christ descends and to which he finally ascends then there's a channel of communication (call it 'grace') that is accessible to all who believe. As Christians it is in this mode of existence that we live first and foremost knowing that however much we may seek to create heaven on earth we'll never have things entirely our own way.

We should have no fear of the language of rights in the secular world and we should pressurize our new government to protect and extend rights wherever possible. But as Christians we are called to live in a way that is freer, more open-ended. We are to grow up; to ascend into heaven; to go where Christ has gone before. He has blazed a trail and he invites us to follow. The joy of becoming the older generation is that once there's 'nothing above us' we can discover that there's 'everything above us'. We can flourish in new ways.The risen and ascended Christ shows that the sky's the limit. So as we grow older we should live without fear: never curb our imaginations and never rein-in our prayers. And what's true for all of us needs also to be true of the church.