ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

The Seventh Sunday of Trinity, 26th July 2009
Sermon preached by Fr. Julian Browning at Solemn Evensong and Benediction

Readings: Job 19. 1-27a; Hebrews 8.

The truth about God turns out to be a person we follow, Jesus Christ. It's a relationship thing. You might not have picked that up from tonight's lesson from the Letter to the Hebrews. Hebrews is terribly High Church, over the top. It has all the things we've learned to love: it's all about priests and sanctuaries and sacrifices, acceptable worship, incense and tents and curtains and sprinkling, it's home from home. It's addressed to a church in crisis. In the case of the Hebrews, who were probably a community in Italy, they had lost faith and were going back to the old ways of doing things in the synagogue. They had forgotten what Jesus Christ had done, or they just didn't understand it any more. They were no longer living in the present, and trusting God. So they went back to complicated rituals, curtains and all that, because Jesus was no longer alive to them.

That's our problem too. I mean, I think we have a problem with Jesus, if we are honest, and there's no point being anything other than honest. Is Jesus in our lives now, or not? How does it work? Most of us hedge our bets. We live out our lives in our own way, with a sidelong glance at Jesus who is a very good example to us, when we need a good example, which is usually when we are criticising others. Meanwhile, Jesus, I suppose, gets on with his life in the world, healing and redeeming and leading the Church. We are frightened that we are not going to live up to the high standards of Christianity, in fact we'd rather not, so we keep a distance between ourselves and Jesus Christ. But we are not called to be perfect, any more than we are called to have a perfectly defined sun tanned body; we are called, and are called by a voice which is insistent and within us and which we know is real - in our beginning is the Word - we are called to be authentic, to be ourselves before God, whose throne (in Hebrews language) we can now approach because we have within us the spirit of Christ. Being perfect, in the Letter to the Hebrews, is being free, being forgiven, being sanctified. Salvation is not about 'being good', or 'getting it right', but about being connected with God. The spirit of Christ helps us do that, get connected. Christians can go where only the high priests of old could go, into God's presence.

What is the spirit of Christ within us? It can't be something that tears us apart, making us inhuman and unrecognisable to our friends. Jesus is going in the same direction as we are. On the road to Emmaus the two disciples did not recognise Jesus, but he was there all the way, and he was there at the end at the meal they shared. Our lives remain ours. We have the spirit of Christ within us when we find that we can hold in some sort of balance our pain and hurt and that of others without anger and retaliation, and can actually transform such negative emotions into love and forgiveness. As on the Cross. That's just one example, but an important one, because what is not transformed is transmitted to others and the pain continues. We never thought we could do it, change the world like that, but we can. Christ is with us. His love helps us to love. The hateful and the harmful are transformed. Souls are healed. That's God's work and we help Him do it. It's not so much about religion, as relationship. Connecting with God.

This spiritual journey with Christ to re-connect ourselves with God doesn't go in a straight line. There will be false hopes, disappointments, mistakes, and counter attacks by an ego which doesn't really want to approach the throne of God at all. But what we can expect, because God is gracious and loving, is a new freedom, a way of travelling light through the world. The answer, as Job discovered in his unpredictable journey, is that we don't need an answer. Truth sets us free. In this life we do not need to know every aspect and theological facet of the Truth. But we can know the freedom.

At the end of the chapter we read from the Letter to the Hebrews, there's a not very High Church comment made about a long quotation from Jeremiah. We hear that "what is becoming obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away". I'm not sure we want to hear that. It sound like a blueprint for revolution or a Puritan smashing up of all we hold dear. But maybe it's about the way we try to connect ourselves to God. That might have to change. Spiritual progress usually starts with change. Our old way is to see ourselves as sinful no-good human beings struggling to be divine, with the odds against us. Our new way is to see ourselves as divine children of God, with the spirit of Christ happily within each of us, growing up to be human beings.