ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET
The Eleventh Sunday of Trinity, 23 August 2009
Sermon preached by Fr. Julian Browning at High Mass
Readings: Joshua 24:1-2a & 14-18; Ephesians 6:10-20; John 6:56-69
John 6:63 It is the Spirit which gives life
Let's have a spiritual crisis, shall we? The disciples had spiritual crises, why shouldn't we? The spiritual crisis described in today's Gospel might well be one of yours. Some of the disciples didn't understand Jesus's flesh and blood talk, eating flesh, drinking blood, sensitive matters, could be cannibalism. Anyway, they don't get it, so some leave, some stay, and there were probably some who stayed but kept threatening to leave. The good thing about a spiritual crisis is that I am forced to make some kind of decision, and set out on a new adventure with God, to take a new risk.
Sometimes I think I'm having a spiritual crisis when it's really only a natural human restlessness, a sense of unfulfilment. That comes from being both divine and human at the same time. We are infinite spirits in finite conditions. We can know God, yet we are confined in the limiting conditions of time and space. When Jesus talks about spirit and flesh, it is not about good against bad, it is about how humans live, belonging both to heaven and earth. The Christian Gospel is about a man who belonged to both heaven and earth, and who lived with the spirit of God. That spirit gave Him life. Now the spirit of Jesus gives us life, it is where we find life, it is where we find eternal life, even within the constraints of a human existence. That is our communion today, eternal life, the spirit of God, given to us, in our hands.
The human restlessness I have mentioned is to be welcomed, because the great attraction of our faith is that there is always more to learn, more to love, more risks to take for God. St Augustine said that 'If you understand Him, He is not God'. Or, many centuries later, from the English Hymnal, 'the love of God is broader than the measures of man's mind'. That's Father Faber, of the Oxford Movement and later of the London Oratory. He got it, why can't we? Do we really think we can manipulate the spirit of God? It is the Spirit which gives us life. It is a gift, or, rather, it is our inheritance, it is ours to keep, to nourish, to use in God's service. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Except perhaps one thing. I don't think God can be remotely interested in many of the things we classify as sins, but I can see one state of mind which might not work for God, and that is our self-contempt. Thinking I'm not good enough for this. Thinking I can never put right what's wrong. Thinking that I'll have to put up a pretence until the day I die, but actually I know that in my spiritual life I've never made the grade. To anyone in this church caught in that descending spiral of self-contempt, the Spirit gives now a new life in which we are forgiven and accepted, and in which we can flourish. As we sung in today's psalm, "The Lord will save those whose spirits are crushed". God likes us, as we are, now, with all faults, as they say of second hand electrical goods. God isn't into loving us but wishing we were someone else holier and better. He starts with us now, as we are, his spirit gives us eternal life, and our whole subsequent Christian life, wherever it takes us, becomes our natural response to that gift of eternal life.
This is so wonderful that we can get a bit obsessive and self-centred about it. Somerset Maugham said that 'no egoism is so insufferable as that of the Christian with regard to his soul'. A bit unfair, but he had a point. It's not just about my salvation. There's a wideness in God's mercy like the wideness of the sea. We make his love too narrow by false limits of our own. This is the Creator Spirit we're talking about, not my personal trainer. The Spirit of the Risen Christ gives life to us all as one, to churches, to households, wherever two or three are gathered together, the Spirit gives life. Not just life, but energy, a fighting spirit, to use the military metaphor of the great passage from Ephesians we read today. We put on the whole armour of God. Not our armour, our patchy defense mechanisms, the rusty chain mail in our dressing up boxes. This is God's shining armour we are given, and although the metaphor is a military one, the clothing list turns out to be truth, righteousness, peace, salvation, and the word of God. All these things we are given to us, as individuals and as a church. Take the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. The Spirit gives life. This undeserved gift not easy for us to accept, to accept that God likes me. It doesn't surprise us that many of the disciples drew back and no longer went about with Jesus. But twelve remained, because they recognised the Holy One of God, and so we remain too, inheritors not just of a spiritual crisis, but of the words of eternal life.