‘Go, make disciples of all the nations, baptize them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit’. A few years ago, I baptised a baby in church, his Mother was there with us, his Father on Zoom in Nigeria and the Godparents on Zoom in Ghana, nobody else in church, because Mum had only just arrived, fleeing home to bring their baby to safety. They were Christ’s disciples, and in asking to have their child baptized, they knew that the Lord was indeed with them, and their newly-born and newly-baptized baby, till the end of time.Today is Trinity Sunday and the gospel passage chosen is the end of Matthew’s Gospel. It is a glorious and moving conclusion to the Gospel and the beautiful conclusion to the immediacy of the incarnation by which it begibs. Matthew has started with the genealogy, showing that Jesus was descended from Abraham, and from David. He tells us of the Magi, pagans, coming from the east to pay the infant Jesus homage. Matthew ends the Gospel with the disciples worshipping Jesus, falling down before him, though with some hesitation or doubt. The true king of Israel, the Messiah has come, and he is indeed God and He is still immediate before them, but ascends to make His immediacy permanent, until the end of time in the same way as He was and is for the Baptism family on Zoom.The disciples encounter Jesus on a mountain, which reminds us of Moses who received God’s law on a mountain. It reminds us of Elijah, the greatest of those anarchic holy men of old, who encountered God on a mountain. But on this mountain, the disciples encounter Jesus, their friend and teacher, yet they fall down and worship him – there is the new law, a New Covenant, made on a mountain like the first, and kept not in fear of He who inhabits the Ark, but out of love for He who has ascended – the immediacy of the divine presence now in sacramental signs, here in flesh through faith.The Holy Spirit enables us to continue this act of worship, and our own humanity allows us to hesitate, to be uncertain. The Spirit is given us to make us holy and lead us into all truth. The Spirit unites us. The eleven disciples hesitated in their worship. It did not all quite make sense yet for them. Christianity doesn’t always make complete sense for us. There are parts of the mystery that we can’t understand yet. But we live it. Our lives, as the lives of those who are baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, are lives of faith, hope and charity. Our lives become, in a profound way, part of the divine life itself, part of the Trinity who famously was prefigured at Mamre as the three men taking the form of God went to visit Abraham and Sarah.We who have been made in the image and likeness of God, now start to live mystically in God. We love each other and love our neighbours – though not always very well we readily admit. We hesitate, like the Disciples. We have faith in the risen Christ who died for our salvation. And we, like the parents of the baby I baptized that day, have hope in Jesus, for he said ‘I am with you always; yes, to the end of time’.Christianity stands or falls by this proclamation of the closeness of God who is Triune Love. Christians proclaim the Father. Not a stern Victorian parent, but the one who knows and cares even for the sparrows, the one portrayed in the parable of the prodigal son as rushing towards his child and embracing him, the one Jesus tells us is perfect.We run from the God of Love by turning the world or nature or history itself into our god, seeing in him only the reflection of our gradual decay. But there is no world spirit, no impersonal spiritual realm that can save us. There is only the Holy Spirit, the one who is the personal searching, healing and transforming one, who even searches the depths of God. Immediate, and before us and with us, until the end of time, and loving us in a way that an impersonal spiritual realm never could.The doctrine of the Trinity should make us uncomfortable, of course; not because it is for the clever to speculate about, but because it is the most radical challenge ever issued to human beings. It’s an invitation to share in divine love, and hope and peace, and to allow ourselves to be lost in that to some extent.If God really is this love who is involved with our world and who has embraced us, then we have a choice: we must either in turn love this God and embrace all that he embraces — and then of course, we shall be crucified as the distance we have put between ourselves and God dies away in love — or we must be content to watch the world around us from a distance, imitating the god who does not and can never exist. We enter into a mystery of love, in which one day we will dance and sing and rejoice, with and in the God who is Father, Son and Holy Ghost, who calls us, loves us and saves us. To Him be the glory both now and unto the day of eternity.
In the upper room, after His death and resurrection, the disciples encounter the ongoing reality of the living Jesus, and the whole world changes – not just theirs, but ours as well. When someone we love dies, we begin to idolise them – I don’t mean that in a negative way, but we carve memories out of hem in our hearts and minds which become a little removed, over time, from day to day reality, as they are no longer sharing in that with us, and maybe after some time has passed, we remember them as whatever the memory becomes. But not so Jesus, not so our faith and not so for the Apostles, as He is very much alive and in front of them, and He is very much alive and in front of us, too, which is why we must continually reject idolising Him and keep on living with Him in the present time that He calls us to. Jesus is not a memory who fades away but a person who stands before us and says ‘peace be with you.’This is a peace that flows from the reality of what Jesus has accomplished for our sakes on the cross, and it is part of who he was, is and shall be forever – a sign of peace to a broken world. As He was broken on the cross, so we are broken by sin and find our healing in the healing and Ascension of His own body. And so it is a peace that speaks clearly to us and calls us to change. It is certainly not the peace that time brings, the slow healer, it’s a peace which is present, immediate and comes in the current encounter that we have with Him, and it stands or falls as we stand or fall before Him. ‘Peace be with you’ is not just the first thing the Risen Jesus says to His disciples: it is the second thing as well. Twice He bids them peace. Twice He makes is resurrected body, bearing its wounds, speak of peace.His first greeting of peace is followed by his showing them his wounded hands and side. The first peace is the peace that stops us being afraid that here is maybe a ghost, or a hallucination. We are reminded that, as Pilate says, ‘ecce homo’ – behold the man. We are surrounded by the stuff of death – tablets to keep away what might kill us, waves that might engulf us, people who might turn on us, governments who might wage war at us, health warnings on everything to remind us, calories counted on menus to put us off. We can control the environment we are in to some extent, but death is always with us in one form or another. But Jesus has shown us His hands and His side. He is marked by death, but He lives. Death silenced him on the cross, but now he speaks to each man and woman.We are brought this first greeting of peace by seeing His wounds, then. They show us that death is not the end and that He is not, therefore, dead. This does not mean that the guilt of the sin which had Him put to death is not upon us today – by no means, we still live in the world to reach paradise by amendment of life. But this peace is a healer, as His body, which has conquered death shows – life is no longer leading to death, but the revelation of what life is. Do not be afraid, be still, for in dying I have changed the meaning of your death, the Lord says to us.But there is more to our faith than a calming of fear. The calming merely prepares us for another gift, as Jesus again says “Peace be with you’, and breathes on his disciples: “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The Spirit is not given to us to calm our nerves, but to enliven and energise. “Those whose sins you forgive they are forgiven, those whose sins you retain they are retained.”This second gift of peace is not an answer to death so much as an entirely new sort of human life, moving according to the inspirations and energy of the divine life. It does not just make us recipients of forgiveness and mercy: it inserts the us into the ongoing mystery of Jesus, real and present in our world forgiving sin, healing wounds and preaching the mystery of the kingdom. “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” It has brought us here, now, to this place so that we can effectively tell the world that death is not the end, and that life is found in the most unlikely of places - and that it is not us as individuals who matter, for Christ did not say ‘peace to you John’ or ‘peace to you Jane’ – but peace be with you all. Christ’s peace also brings us freedom from the desperate worldly fight to be loudest, or best.Today we celebrate the full depth of the peace of Christ, the peace we are part of by belonging to each other in the Body of Christ. He, Our Lord, is not another memory from the past, handed on by a forgetful band of devotees. He is the present offer of grace to us by the Father in the Spirit. Peace be with you, he says to us today. Receive the Holy Spirit, so that through us the world will encounter the joy of forgiveness and hope which, one day, will give the world freedom.
I wonder if you can love badly? Certainly you can love in a way that another person does not understand, or care for, certainly you can love someone who does not want to love you back, and of course it’s easy to think of ‘love’ as an amorous advance and all the complex minefield around that rather than the love that God has for us and the love that we are expected to show to each other if we take His name as Christians. Love then, is not something we can be measured on (unless we choose to give none at all, or to disguise our machinations as love, which is probably worse. But we are used to hearing about love, and used to hearing this Gospel today - an excerpt from what St John tells us that Jesus said to his disciples just before he went out into the night to be arrested and crucified. We are so used to hearing it that it is easy for us to switch off, because we all think that we know it already. We think we know all about love, even when there are people who we do not love. So maybe we should hear it! Indeed if any passages in the Bible should trouble us, surely they are this passage and the reading that we heard just before it, from the first of St John’s letters.After all, in one form or another for nearly two thousand years, Christians have been telling each other and anybody else who would listen to them that it’s love that makes the world go round. And that we have a monopoly on divine love, that we know best how to love. But how much better is the world as a result of this? And how full of love are our churches? The first letter of St John tells us:Anyone who fails to love can never have known God, because God is love.And in this Sunday’s gospel reading, Jesus is saying:This is my commandment: Love one another, as I have loved you.Yet we are so accustomed to seeing not failures of love, but manipulations and deliberate distortions of love, which is the very opposite of love, even in Christians – in fact maybe it’s even more starkly clear in us - that we do not even bother to listen when we hear these words again. We just think ‘well, at least I’m not the parish gossip/bully/self server/whatever.‘Loving somebody’ means ‘caring for somebody’ (so ‘a man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends’), and ‘loving God’ means doing what God wants us to do. In other words, it means making the world around us aware of God’s presence, God’s power within us. And this is not quite such a difficult thing to do as it sounds and when we do it well, we create an attractional church that is comfortable and inviting, aware of its wounds, not pretending to be anything else, and one that we would want to join. And one that other people will want to join as well, because it’s completely authentic.When we read in today’s gospel that the Father ‘loves’ the Son, what this means is that he lives for the Son – that everything he is is for the Son and He is in the Son. And when we read that the Son ‘loves’ the people whom he has called to be his friends – and that includes you and me! – it means that he lives for us and is in us. And when he tells us to love each other as he loves us, that means that we are being called to live for each other. To be in a community with each other based and rooted in love. For love is only real, it only lasts, if it produces more love.So the commandment to us to love is a command to share in his work – his campaign to bring all human beings back into oneness and love with God. And this is a love stronger than death. When we say ‘Yes’ in our hearts to Christ’s call to help spread God’s love around, we are not being expected to do this relying on our own strength but by the power of God, the same power that raised Christ from the grave. And by the power of the greater thing that we become when we allow Him to dwell in us and remake our community.In fact, if ever we say ‘Yes’ to God, we are never really alone. For, as Jesus said to his disciples at his AscensionYou will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and then you will be my witnesses to the ends of the earth.This power of being a living witness makes us people of joy, of truth and of love. We are witnesses to love! And we bear witness by doing that which we are witness to. It’s easy, and joyful, and it should be fun!
Many years ago, gosh – it must be around thirty or so – I did a couple of wine tasting courses, Certificate and Higher Certificate, through the Wine and Spirit Education Trust (WSET). I guess I can honestly say that I am a certified wino! The courses included the whole process of wine making, from vine cultivation (viticulture) right through to harvesting and wine making (viniculture). I have forgotten the vast majority of what we covered , but I am still rather proficient at the wine tasting part of it all!A key part of viticulture is the pruning of the vine. It promotes heathy plant growth by reducing old growth on the vine, and this, in turn, encourages new wood to grow. Without pruning, the vine becomes a tangled mess of mostly older wood with few branches which can produce good fruit. Also, the denser the vine, the less air circulation is possible, leading to potential fungus attacks.In the gospel today, Jesus refers to Himself as the vine and His disciples (and us) as the branches. And God the Father is the gardener, or the viticulturist, ensuring the production of good harvests. In this analogy, Jesus, the vine, is the new Israel. Over the years, Israel had failed spectacularly and Jesus is now the true vine, the fruitful vine which never fails. And the fruit bearing branches, referred to, are the true believers who must remain attached to the vine (remain, or abide, in Jesus) in order to bear fruit, to proclaim the Good News and gather even more true believers.The reference to pruning back the fruit bearing branches is essentially the getting rid of other goals and ambitions which can cloud or block the growth of true faith. It can be painful, but those branches which stay with the vine, believers who remain in Christ Jesus, are willing to let go of unnecessary clutter and go on to thrive and bear much fruit – discipleship, witnessing, mission.Jesus does seem to be rather severe on those who are not true believers. ‘Whoever does not abide in Me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.’ Harsh words indeed. But if we look at the ‘bad’ branches against the ‘good’ branches, it clarifies what Jesus was getting at. Simple vine branches (which we will term bad branches) claim to be followers of Christ; they then fall away from Christ after making that first superficial commitment; but they can infect the ‘good’ branches by attempting to block the efforts of these good branches to spread the Word, stifling the good vines, preventing air circulation and encouraging possible fungus growth. But the fruitful branches (which we are terming good branches) are true believers, with staying power, who do bear fruit by living in union with Christ. These ‘good’ branches do sometimes need some pruning type of management; sometimes needing disciplining by Godto strengthen faith and commitment. But this nurturing is an essential part of the continued growth of good branches, true believers. Theologist Tom Wright succinctly writes: ‘The vine dresser is never closer to the vine, taking more thought over its long term health and productivity, than when he has the knife in his hand.’ We must never be afraid of God’s discipline; He has our long term well-being in mind at all times.Every fruit displays the character of its parent tree. Apples come from apple trees; oranges from orange trees; figs from fig trees; grapes from vines and so on. As true Christians, we should reflect the characteristics of Christ, His attitudes and actions, conduct etc. We should love one another as He loves us. We must remember that we will never look into the eyes of someone who is not loved by God and therefore we must treat each other as fellow children of God. This should be apparent in our actions and demeanour. As fruit is visible on the tree, so we should be visible in our discipleship. We are not to be secret agents, hiding our light under a bushel, but as fruit is for the benefit of others, so we should not be self-serving but be willing to serve and care for one another.In His words to the disciples Jesus refers to abiding in Him: ‘abide in me as I abide in you’. But how do we abide, or remain, in Christ in our day to day lives? Many commentators have offered up ways in which we can do this. Very importantly, we must remember that following Christ is a 24/7 thing – not just for Sunday mornings. We must remain in Him at all times. We can stick with a like-minded community but work to grow that community by branching out; we can grow our own prayer lives both in communion with each other and privately; we believe that Jesus is the Son of God and we receive Him as our Lord and Saviour; we continue to believe in the gospel; we obey the Word of the Lord; we meditate on His word and consider how it applies to us in any given situation; we really think about His word, mull it over, dwell on it; we connect with God through His word; we relate to each other, in love, as a community of believers. This is how we remain, or abide, in Christ, and as Jesus promises in today’s gospel, if we abide in Him, we can ask for whatever we wish and it will be done for us. If we live our lives in Christ Jesus, we can believe that our prayers will be answered.Another vital aspect of viticulture is what’s known as terroir, the combination of factors, including soil, climate, and environment, that gives a wine its distinctive character. God provides sunshine, rain, the right soil for good quality vine growing. He nurtures each and every tiny plant and blossom. In the parable of the sower, some seeds fall on stony ground, some fall in thorns, some on ground with very little soil and some in good soil. Terroir is the good soil, conducive for good strong and robust vine growing and the yielding of much fruit. What better way for God to be glorified than a wonderfully fruitful harvest, mature and ready for use. So it is with true believers who cultivate a right relationship with Himand begin to bear much fruit in their lives – living in Christ and proclaiming the Good News.The Lord wants FOLLOWERS, not mere fans.Lord, show us how to abide in you. Free us from trying to produce our own fruit, and help us to trust that you are at work and will work through us and in us. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.
