glory – Grits and Grains

Today is the 7th Sunday of Easter, the 7th Sunday of the 50 day season of joy.

I just mention that because we always have to watch out for the number 7.
It is, if you like, our lucky number.
It is the number of completion and fulfilment.
It’s the days of the week,
the measure of our time,
the time of creation,
the span from start to finish.
It’s the number written into our rhythm of life –
the six day week, the day of rest, the gift of God.

So, we’ve had 7 Sundays inhabiting the Easter message,
letting the hope of resurrection work in our hearts and minds.

But the season isn’t quite over.
We are left with a question.
It is a question asked of the apostles, and by the apostles.
And it’s been left hanging for all who have followed them.

They gathered round Jesus and asked him:
“Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”

As far as we can see, they don’t get an answer.
They were asking him – are you the Messiah we were expecting?
Are you the one to restore the fortunes of Israel?

There is no answer because it’s the wrong question they’re asking.

The question is a reflection of one of the great temptations of human nature –
the tendency towards nostalgia and restoration.

The temptation is still with us.

We long for restoration.
We dream of returning to some imagined greatness,
some remembered certainty,
some lost golden age.

Nations do it.
Churches do it.
We do it ourselves.

There are men in white suits in today’s readings.
They catch the apostles watching Jesus disappear from sight.
They see their grief and their pining for the past,

and then they tell them to stop looking that way,
and they redirect the gaze of their longing

They redirect the gaze of their longing –
away from nostalgia,
away from heaven as escape,
back toward Jerusalem,
back into the world,
back into prayer,
back towards one another.

They stop staring into heaven.

They turn around.

And they walk back to Jerusalem.

A sabbath walk.
Day seven.

And Day Seven becomes Day One:
not completion as an ending,
but completion opening into a beginning.

Easter gives its people a new body clock,
a new sense of time,
a life no longer ordered by nostalgia for the past
but by longing for what God is yet to do.

The time of our lives.

And what do they do,
these people learning resurrection time?

They pray.

They return to Jerusalem,
and gather in an upstairs room.

Men and women together.
Mary.
The brothers of Jesus.
The Church before it knows what the Church will become.

And they pray.

They do not launch a strategy.
They do not reclaim power.
They do not “make Israel great again”.

They pray:
waiting not for the restoration of the past,
but for the coming of the kingdom of God.

This is Day One of the prayer of the Church,
not longing for the past glory,
but longing for a glory like no other glory we have known,
not longing for the past
but longing for the future.

Thy kingdom come,
that’s the way to pray.

When we introduce the Lord’s prayer,
we casually say
“as our Saviour has taught us,
so we pray”.

But let’s be definite.
This is the way Jesus taught his followers to pray. To pray for the kingdom to come,
on earth as it is in heaven.

So we could say in introducing our prayer:

this is the way we pray
because this is the way Jesus prayed,

looking to our Father in heaven,
giving him the power and glory
instead of seeing power and glory
in wealth, or celebrity, or control.

This is looking the other way.

Looking away from power as domination,
and discovering power as compassion.

Looking away from glory as status,
and discovering glory as love poured out.

Because when Jesus speaks about glory,
he does not mean celebrity,
spectacle,
or triumph.

In John’s Gospel,
Glory means the cross.

Glory is love poured out.
Glory is love that gives itself away
for the life of the world.

Glory is love that gives itself away for the life of the world.

And that is why our Collect today dares to hold together two words usually kept apart:

power
and compassion.

Heaven’s power is compassionate power.
Worldly power is anything but.

Risen, ascended Lord,
as we rejoice at your triumph,
fill your Church on earth with power and compassion …….

that’s the way to pray,
for the sake of the future,
for those who suffer
under the world as it is,
and under the ways we have learned to look at one another,
for those “estranged by sin”,
by the wrongs of the world,
for those estranged,
disconnected, alienated, turned inward, turned backward.

For their sake,
that they may find forgiveness,
that they may know peace

that’s why we pray,
It’s for their sake,
for the sake of the lost, the last and the least,
that the glory of heaven
may be seen on earth,
in the troughs of human experience,
in the valleys overshadowed by death.

And so this week,
in churches,
halls,
homes,
and quiet corners,
Christians will gather again,
just as they did in that upstairs room.

Not looking backward,
not staring into the sky,
but praying toward the future:

Thy kingdom come.

When we pray the Jesus way,
Jesus prays alongside us still:

for the world,
for the estranged, the wronged,
for peace,
for glory shaped like love.

Worship fires us. Worship hires us. This is what we see at the heart of our two readings today. (Isaiah 6:1-8 and Luke 5:1-11). This is a sermon for the 4th Sunday before Lent for a small church “in vacancy”.

The poetry of Mary Oliver is full of worship. Here are some of her lines:

Poems are not words, after all,
but fires for the cold,
ropes let down to the lost,
something as necessary as bread
in the pockets of the hungry.

Poems are not words, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as food in the pockets of the hungry.

There is poetry in the heart of worship – fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost. We repeat these lines of poetry in the heart of our worship. We call it the Sanctus. The poetry goes along these two lines:

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty,
the whole earth is full of his glory.

This is the song of the seraphim overheard by the prophet Isaiah in his vision of heaven when he was transported in worship. They are words which reverberate in our own worship. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty. The whole earth is full of his glory. This has become our song too.

In Mary Oliver’s words, they are fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the earth is full of his glory. This is the song of those Isaiah sees around the throne – the song of the seraphim.

Seraphim are the fiery ones. That is the meaning of seraphim. Their words are fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost. They are ropes we hang onto as we join Isaiah as he is transported in worship.

The whole earth is full of his glory. This is the faith of the heavenly host. It doesn’t mean that everything is hunky dory. Isaiah knows only too well his own lies and the lies of those around him. I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips. And that hasn’t changed over the centuries, has it? We say one thing and mean another. We mislead and are misled. Truth is distorted to our own ends. We, too, are a people of unclean lips living among a people of unclean lips.

In our gospel reading Simon Peter is transported to a similar sense of wonder and worship. Luke paints the scene well. Jesus is on the edge of the lake, with people on the edge.

Crowds are all around him. The only space he could find was by getting into the boat of one of the fishermen, one whose life was all at sea, a landless labourer on the lowest level of Roman occupations pushed to the edge by the taxes they had to pay for the right to fish and the right to sell their fish. Jesus put himself in the same boat as them.

Jesus told Simon Peter to put out a little from the shore – and there Jesus sat and taught the crowds on the shore. (Interestingly, he would have been on a lower lever to those he was teaching.)

Jesus then told Simon Peter to “put out into deep water, and there let down the nets for a catch”. They were astonished by how much they caught because they had been fishing all night and had caught nothing.

To deep water, far from the safe haven where everything is smooth sailing is where Jesus led Simon Peter, to where life is desperate, dangerous and difficult, the place we’re afraid to go to – and it was there that Simon Peter saw the glory of the Lord in the miraculous catch which would mean that he and his partners had something to take to market.

Both Simon Peter and Isaiah are gifted a vision of the glory of the Lord that fills the earth. Simon Peter’s reaction is similar to Isaiah’s. “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man.” Jesus answers as if to calm the storm arising in Simon Peter. “Don’t be afraid.” he tells Simon Peter. “From now on you will fish for people.” And from that moment they did, pulling their boats onto the shore. They left everything and followed Jesus.

For Isaiah it had been a burning coal from one of the fiery ones to his unclean lips which took away his guilt and opened his mouth to the Lord’s question, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” with his own words, “Here am I. Send me!”

Both recruits, Isaiah and Simon Peter were recruited in worship and their sense of the glory of the Lord that fills the whole earth. Neither recruit thought themselves worthy. One was a man of unclean lips, the other “a sinful man”. Neither was a strong candidate, neither had anything they needed to prove and neither was recruited on merit. Once again we see the rule of the kingdom of God which starts with the last and the least in the building of that kingdom – the very opposite to the general rules of every other kingdom.

And here are we. Here are we, caught up in worship, sharing the sense of God’s glory in spite of our unworthiness, clinging to the songlines from the heart of heaven through the amazing grace of God. Lines let down to the lost, as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty,
the whole earth is full of his glory.

And here we are. Here we are in what we call “a vacancy” waiting for someone who knows the earth is full of God’s glory to say to the Bishop “here am I, send me”, someone who will leave everything to follow Jesus to the Bridges Group.

And here we are. Here we are – possibly tiring in waiting. It is, after all, getting to be a long vacancy. Let us not lose heart. Our worship becomes our encouragement however deep the water in which we find ourselves. Let the live coal touch our lips and be the fire for our cold hearts so that we don’t become prophets of doom.

Even in the waiting, God’s glory is at work. It may seem like there is no answer, but His glory fills the earth, and He is already moving in ways we can’t always see.

Here we are, worshipping through the amazing grace of God in sight of the glory which fills the earth. Our worship opens our minds, our hearts and our mouths. Our worship prepares our next step beyond our unworthiness

Our worship calls us back to God’s glory. How shall we respond to that call? Is ours a “yes” to God, or a “no” to God? Peter typifies us. His call reminds us that God is always at work in the deep waters, in the quiet moments, in the challenging seasons preparing his people to fish for people by reaching out in love and serving in faith. How shall we respond? What is the “here am I” that God is waiting to hear from our heart.

Here we are.
Here we are,
a few of us,
too few of us
if we keep saying “No”,
enough of us
if our response is “Yes”,
all of us
growing older by the day.
Here we are
looking round for help.
Who’ll do this,
who’ll do that?

It’s easy to lose heart and to say “nobody will”. That is the language of doomsayers and the sound of bitter experience. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy and it’s the sound of people speaking for everybody. It’s not the sound of hope and not the sound of those who believe God’s glory is at work throughout the world in ways we can’t always see.

Here we are, without churchwardens. “Nobody wants to be churchwarden”. That is doomsaying and is without hope. When we say “Nobody wants to be ….” we are speaking for everybody. We can’t speak for everybody, only for ourselves. Somebody will be churchwarden. It’s just a case of waiting for one or two people to be caught up in the glory that fills the earth – for their “yes” to the call they hear in their sense of worship, and for their reassurance that their recruitment is not about their merit but about God’s love and glory.

Even in the waiting, God’s glory is at work. It may seem like there is no answer, but His glory fills the earth, and He is already moving in ways we can’t always see.

How will each of us respond to the call of the moment when we realise Holy, holy, holy is the Lord almighty and the whole earth is full of his glory. The call will be different for each of us.

What is the “Here am I” that God is waiting to hear from your heart?

Tag: glory

Thy Kingdom Come

Here Am I: Embracing God’s Call in Worship