ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

Sermon preached by Fr. Julian Browning at High Mass on the Third Sunday of Epiphany, 24 January 2010.

Readings: Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; 1 Corinthians 12.12-31a; Luke 4.14-21.

I Corinthians 12.13: In the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body.

Hearing the word of God means doing something about it. When the word of God goes stale on us, we do nothing. And the words themselves do go stale, they need reviving. There's so much about the Body of Christ in our services that the phrase can lose its edge. Let's sharpen our senses, our spiritual vision, because what worked for the Church at Corinth can work, if we want it to, for All Saints Margaret Street. Paul uses all that body language to describe the Church at Corinth. It is the body of Christ. Body talk was a wellknown way of describing human society in the ancient world. Like the body, human political society should be harmonious, in balance, everybody with different things to do, differing functions, but interdependent. We understand that, and if we are of a conservative disposition, and some of us might be, we rather like it, because everybody stays in his or her place, yet contributes to the good of all. It's the classic argument for hierarchy. Paul turns the argument, if not the body, on its head. This amazed his readers, because Paul describes the body of Christ in which hierarchy is not important after all; instead we have unity, diversity and equality of all the different parts of the body. I hear your sharp intake of breath at the preaching of revolution, but that is how it is in the body of Christ. It is one body, indivisible. It is diverse, Jews or Greeks, slave or free, and all the different parts of the body are equal and indispensable. If one member suffers, all suffer. Just one step further, and I'll get on to us. Paul deals with a local problem. In the eyes of God, suggests Paul, the less respectable members of the Church of Corinth, the weaker members of the Body of Christ have greater significance, more honour, than the stronger, more capable Corinthian Christians. It is as if Paul is leaving us a clue about how God functions. When we are weak, and admit our weakness, we no longer trust ourselves. When our defences are down, there is room for God in our lives, we let him live with us. So God's power is made perfect in our weakness. In the words of last week's Collect, God transforms the poverty of our nature by the riches of His grace. It sounds shocking to us because we like to get a grip and run our lives, but God needs our weakness not our strength.

Let me ask you a personal question. You might find this intrusive. Do you sometimes drift off during services in this church? Not drift around, just take time out? I do sometimes, it's a perfectly natural thing to happen. It's partly the way this body is physically arranged. There's you in the stalls, and then there's the choir and organ, then there's us lot getting our footwork right, and everyone has their particular function, and it's a bit of a holy blur, so we can switch off when we've nothing to do and no one's going to notice. But the main reason we drift off when we're not doing anything is because each of us is the centre of his or her own universe. That is the human condition, and we spend our lives defending it. Only when we admit that this is more of a weakness, than a strength, does God have someone to work with. When we die to self, or, at least, realise that this is required of us, then God has somewhere to live, in our hearts. This is so counter-cultural, so against the spirit of this age, that I don't expect us to get this in one, but faith in God, trust in God, means renouncing myself as my own base, my own centre, my own end. Our whole spiritual journey is about growing in trust. Our centre in this world is no longer our self. Relying on self is a weakness. When we acknowledge that as a weakness, God can give us his strength. Our centre becomes instead the Body of Christ. We can understand what that might mean, if we try to look at our worship in a new way, the Body of Christ way, united, diverse and equal. This means that when the choir sings, our prayer ascends with their voices. When somebody reads, it is our proclamation. So everything we do, at the altar, or in silent prayer, or reading a lesson, we do with others, on behalf of others. There is then a unity in our worship, so that the service becomes one prayer offered to God by one body, a generous prayer in which we can open our hearts to the joy of God because we are not thinking about ourselves all the time. We sing hymns together. Hymns are a good example of what I mean. What is a hymn, but a prayer sung together? The repetition of the tune verse by verse, the rolling out of the well-known words by rote, these serve to take us out of ourselves, to change our centre from self to God. We never pray alone. We are part of something much greater than ourselves, the Mystical Body of the Church, worldwide and eternal, of which Christ is the head. In spite of our weakness, or because of it, our lifework is as members of that body, to show Christ to the world at a particular time and in a particular place, a job only we can do. That's the challenge we face. You see, the Body of Christ walks and talks, like us, and goes outside this church wherever we go. The way is clear ahead for us. There are no obstacles except those of our own making. We are already members of the Body of Christ through our baptism. We just have to re-activate it, remember it, from time to time. Do this in remembrance of Me.

When we do re-discover ourselves as members of the Body of Christ, God's strength is made perfect in our weakness. We find that we take part in Christ's ministry ourselves. In today's Gospel, Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. We return home too, return to our lives, anointed, as Jesus quoted from Isaiah, "to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free." We can do that now. Then a rather unexpected thing happens. When we know ourselves to be members of the Body of Christ, it really doesn't matter if we do drift off occasionally in church and wonder what's for lunch. It doesn't matter at all. Others are praying on our behalf, and we would do the same for them. Our thoughts and our feelings are of no account whatever. We don't have to try so hard to keep up, we really don't. We are where we are supposed to be. Here is Christian Unity, the subject of our prayers this week. In the one Spirit we were all baptised into one body.