Preached at Christ Church, Worton
Readings – Acts 16. 16-34; Luke 17. 20-26
“I … will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them…”
Nicolas de Plattemontagne, Paul and Silas in Prison (1666). Hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts, Basel.
When I was in my mid-teens and just starting to get serious about my Christianity, I went to a week of prayer services near where I lived in Belfast, simply because I saw it advertised on a poster in a shop. It was held in a very conventional Anglican parish church, in an overwhelmingly Catholic area, but with a very definite mission revivalist atmosphere. Sometimes a few of the ladies danced in the aisles. On the first five nights, a small congregation of perhaps twenty or so, from all sections of a divided community, gathered to pray and hear God’s word preached. They seemed to be very sincere and warm-hearted and I really enjoyed it.
Then Friday night came, the culmination of the week’s events. This service had obviously been advertised more widely, and there were several hundred people there. A high proportion of the congregation were women in the sort of 55-to-75 age bracket.
At one point during that Friday service, a man got up saying that he had some words to pass on from the Lord. He spoke as if God was speaking to him down a sort of invisible telephone line, and he was just repeating God’s words. Even at the age of 15 or 16, this left me feeling very uncomfortable. Then he said, “God’s telling me there’s a lady here with a bad back, and she’s in a lot of pain with it” – I looked around the room at literally dozens of ladies who might plausibly be struggling with back pain – then he continued, “But God says to tell you everything’s alright, it’s going to get better soon.”
I never knew this man’s name or where he came from: perhaps he just liked being the centre of attention for five minutes on a Friday night. It reminded me a bit of how astrologers work. If you ever pick at a horoscope description you’ll find it’s full of fluff that could apply to anyone. Thankfully it didn’t put me off Christianity for life; in fact I think the cheap emotional manipulation involved was a useful lesson at a formative age.
Sometimes I really struggle with the readings that I have to preach on. That’s pretty normal. But what makes that a bit awkward today is that most preachers would these a really good set of readings to work with – the chains falling off Paul and Silas, and then one of the most famous parts of John’s Gospel, where Christ calls for unity and love.
But sometimes when I preach on miracle stories, my mind catapults back to that night in Belfast all those years ago. It’s not that I don’t believe that God sometimes answers prayers in miraculous ways—I know that He does. It’s just that this doesn’t happen on tap; sometimes prayers go unanswered, or seem to go unanswered. Perhaps that’s even for our own good; we might need to take the longer and harder road to glory. Beyond that, if there’s a market for miracles, then people will seek to supply it, with fake ones if they can’t supply real ones.
Meanwhile, Christ’s call for unity makes us all sigh with longing. It often seems like it would take a miracle for any group of Christians, no matter how small, to live in genuine unity. Churches are famous for falling out about every subject from the nature and purpose of Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross to changes to the washing up rota. Of course, we Christians are no better than anyone else, when it comes down to it. The normal run of human failings affects us too.
But there’s something more than that. Unity is a funny thing. Too much of it can be unhealthy. A group where nobody ever disagrees, where there are no fallings out or silly spats, is a group that is either hiding an awful lot or a group that is frightened of someone.
All this is why I struggled with these readings. In fact when we see a church that claims to ready access to miracles and perfect unity, we all know we’re not dealing with a church but with a cult. And if we were to go out into the wider community telling people that we were a church that could provide ready access to miracles and who were in perfect unity, then they wouldn’t believe us and would assume we had fallen under the spell of a cult.
Is that unsparing engagement with harsh realities all I can offer you this morning? No, there’s something much more hopeful here.
Did you know our Gospel reading this morning comprises the last words St John records Jesus saying as a free man? Immediately after this, He and the disciples go off to the Garden and Christ is arrested.
So, here are Christ’s last words to the Father in front of His closest followers: “I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”
One thing we can always do is to try to love.
When Christians disagree – we should disagree in love.
When we encounter people abusing the Church or Christ’s name to stroke their egos or to make a profit – then we should respond in love.
When we ourselves fail as Christians, as we often do – then we should learn how God’s love for us doesn’t depend on what we deserve.
At the beginning of His ministry, in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ commands His followers to love; and in today’s Gospel at the very end of that ministry, love is again at the centre.
And did that love change anything? Well, look at how the jailer reacts when he thinks the prisoners he was responsible for guarding have escaped. The punishment that would have awaited him was so brutal and horrific that he was prepared to kill himself to avoid it. The Roman Empire was a brutal system – it brought peace and prosperity to millions for centuries, had wonderful art and sophisticated thinking, supported trade and supported cultural diversity – but it was also built on cruelty and fear. It openly boasted of a sort of brutal power that even the nastiest régimes today try to hide when they use it.
The Wiltshire-based historian of the ancient world, Tom Holland, came back to the Christian Faith after having abandoned it as a teenager once he realised how much it had subverted the dominant value systems of the Roman Empire. He also argues that the supposedly secular society that has emerged in Western Europe and some other similar countries in recent decades is, much as it tries to escape it, still fundamentally a Christian one. It is not natural or obvious to treasure the weak, or seek to make all people equal, still less to love the enemy—that all comes from Christ, and His command to love.
And when you find it hard to love, then ask for help. Did you notice how this last prayer of Christ with his closest followers began? It was with, “I ask.” Ask the Father to supply what you lack.
Perhaps you may ask for miracles – but perhaps most sensibly for everyday miracles. Perhaps you might ask for unity – but not that of a cult. But most of all, we should pray for the gift of love, to be able to give and receive love in abundance. For if we have that, then everything else that matters will soon follow. Indeed, it may be that love is the greatest miracle that any of us ever witnesses.
Now to God the Father who reigns in heaven, to God the Son who leads us to heaven, to God the Holy Spirit who fills us with the love and peace of heaven, be all glory and majesty, dominion and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
Top image: Andy Warhol, The Last Supper (1986).
