Holman Hunt – Grits and Grains

A reflection for the 6th Sunday of Easter based on the readings for the day, Acts 16:9-15 and John 14:23-29.

I love preaching that brings Scripture to life—and that brings Scripture back to life, and I hope you do too. I say this every time as a reminder that when we open scripture together we are bringing it back to life. What matters today is that love comes home. In both our readings today, love comes home.

Hear the promise in John 14:23-29 as Jesus promises that both the Father and himself as Son will make their home with anyone who loves Jesus and obeys his teaching. Love comes home and makes a resurrection appearance.

In our reading from Acts (16:9-15) we begin to understand from Lydia how the Spirit of God opens our hearts for us to open our homes. Our heart is our home, our hearth is our home.

Paul and Silas met Lydia at Philippi. When he set out Paul was expecting to meet a man from Macedonia. Instead he meets a bunch of women.

Philippi was a Roman colony. She wasn’t from Philippi but was from a city called Thyatira. She wasn’t at home in Philippi. Her name emphasizes that. Lydia wouldn’t have been her real name. She was called Lydia because that’s where she was from, where her home far from Philippi was. She was from Thyatira which is in the Turkish province of Lydia. Hence Lydia.

Perhaps Lydia was on a business trip. She was a dealer in purple cloth. Purple cloth would have been in demand in a Roman city.

It was Cleopatra that made purple popular. Julius Caesar travelled to Egypt in 48BC and met Cleopatra. He saw how she loved purple, and embraced it himself, decreeing that only Caesars could wear togas dyed completely purple. It became the colour of imperial power for both the Roman and Byzantine empires. (I got that from the Jamaica Observer – something I’ve never referenced before!) So we begin to build a picture of Lydia as a successful businesswoman who would probably have been dealing with the court representatives of Caesar’s empire. Purple was reserved for royalty, priests and nobles. These are the people Lydia would have been dealing with.

Paul and his group met Lydia at a place of prayer by the river. The storyteller tells us it was outside the city gate. These are details to underline the fact that none of these people, Paul, Silas, Lydia (and perhaps her household), none of them were at home. This is wild praying. They were all travellers.

We don’t know whether Lydia was a Jew or a Gentile. And we don’t know whether that place by the river was a recognised place of prayer, or whether it became a place of prayer because people prayed there. What we do know is that Lydia puts herself in the place of listening Israel as she listened to Paul. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message. When she and the members of her household were baptised, she invited Paul and Silas to her home. She persuaded them to come and stay at her house. She was insistently hospitable. But she doesn’t just host the missionaries, she hosts the mission of God by taking love home.

When love comes home she turns our homes inside out. Lydia is a powerful woman, a successful woman. Instead of building her business empire she puts everything at the disposal of God’s mission for the sake of the world.

Holman Hunt paints the picture for us of love coming home, making a resurrection appearance.
It’s Jesus standing at the door and knocking (cf Revelation 3:20).
It is said that one of the reasons the Conclave elected Francis Pope in 2013 was because of a reflection on that passage when he suggested that when Jesus stands at the door and knocks, he’s not only wanting to come in and join us, he’s wanting us to come out to join him.
He calls us out of our comfort zones to embrace the “peripheries” of society in the world he is already loving and calling home.
When love comes home, she casts out fear, knocks down walls and rearranges the furniture of our minds.
Love turns our home inside out.

Holman Hunt’s image fits Lydia’s story perfectly. Her heart opens, and her home follows suit.

Scripture doesn’t usually give us the details of the jobs women did, but we’re told that Lydia was a dealer in purple cloth, the colour of empire, power and status.
I don’t know whether you’ve ever noticed but purple is the Church of England has adopted.
The signage and letterheads are all purple. The shirts our bishops wear are purple.
What does it mean when the church wears purple?
Are we signalling prestige? Or is it Lydia we recall?

Our new Pope, Leo XIV seems to suggest that the church should be more like a home than a palace.
Addressing those who no longer believe, no longer hope and no longer pray, and including those who are fed up with scandals, with misused power, with the silence of a Church that seems more like a palace than a home, he committed the church to being a home for the homeless where the weary find rest and refreshment.

He said that God doesn’t need soldiers. He needs brothers and sisters. We all know that it’s brothers and sisters that make a home.

Following that purple thread, are we then, when we wear purple, reminding ourselves that our calling, like Lydia’s, is to put everything – status, power, influence -at the service of love, to make love feel at home in our world? Purple was the colour Lydia laid down on the table of hospitality to welcome love home. She dealt in purple and traded it for the gospel.

In a recent speech on immigration Sir Keir Starmer suggested that we are “becoming a nation of strangers”. He’s got himself into a lot of trouble. But what if there is a grain of truth in what he says? It doesn’t mean we should pull up the drawbridge and tighten our controls. Our scriptures tell us that love will come home to those who love Jesus and love often comes in the form of a stranger. Paul thought he was going to meet a man from Macedonia. Instead he met someone stranger, Lydia, a dealer in purple, a worshipper, a listener. She opened her home to him and love came home to her.

Love comes home, and when it does, it never leaves things as they are but turns us inside out. It opens hearts, it opens homes, it opens the Church. It rearranges our priorities, flips our ideas of power and calls us to join Jesus outside the gate – by the river, in the wild places, wherever people are listening.

A sermon for St John’s Day for St Alban’s, Broadheath

candle_flame_01

Is there anyone here named John …… or Jonathon, or Joan, or Jean, or Jeanette, or Janet, or Ian or Joanne or Johnson, or Jones ……?

We light a candle to you today, because it is your name day – it is St John’s Day.

Do you know what the name means?

It’s from the Hebrew, Yohanan, which means “Yahweh is gracious”.

What a lovely name to carry. (I often wonder how our names shape our outlook and who we are.)

John is the one (and there could be several people rolled into one – but let’s not complicate things too much), John is the one who proclaims Jesus as the Word made flesh, the Light of the world, and who was “the disciple Jesus loved”. He was one of the sons of Zebedee, follower of Jesus, with Jesus at the Transfiguration, with Jesus at the Last Supper, with Jesus in his agony in the garden, with Jesus and his mother at the foot of the cross, with Jesus as a witness of the resurrection and was with Jesus in the church in the proclamation of his gospel.

There is no birth story in John’s gospel. There’s no Bethlehem, Nazareth, shepherds, wise men or baby Jesus. Simply and wonderfully John begins his gospel:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.

That is a birth story of a different kind.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us.

That’s a different way of telling the story of Jesus’ birth

hunt_light_of_the_world

One of our most favourite paintings is the painting by Holman Hunt of the Light of the World – which pictures Jesus standing at the door of our dark lives, knocking. Holman Hunt painted the picture – John gave us the picture: a picture of the light which shines in the darkness – a picture of hope, warmth and tenderness.

As John talks about the Light of the world he talks about seeing. Time and again there is the invitation in his gospel “Come and see”. While the people in Matthew’s gospel are divided as sheep and goats, in John’s gospel the division is between those who see and those who don’t see.

Those who see don’t just see with their eyes. They see with their hearts. John uses three different words for seeing. There’s the seeing with the eyes, as in John 20:1 when Mary Magdalen went to the tomb and SAW that the stone had been moved from the tomb. That was something she noticed, that she saw with her eyes.

A little later in that same chapter (John 20:4) Peter looks into the tomb and sees the linen wrappings there. John uses a different word for seeing – it’s a seeing with the mind as when we say “the penny dropped”. It began to dawn on Peter. He began to understand what had happened.

Then finally, just a few verses on in that chapter, 20:8, the other disciple, the one Jesus loved, went in the tomb. “He saw and believed”.

So John describes three ways of seeing – with eyes, with the mind and with the heart. That’s why we can all see the same thing and come to different conclusions. That’s why when we have different commitments to the same conclusions. We see a lot of things but barely take notice, we understand other things and just a few things we know by heart.

Specsavers doesn’t help.

I knew a man who did see but then became blind. And he was greatly troubled by John’s gospel with its language of light and sight. The world became dark to him – the darkness spread from eyes to mind, from mind to heart, but the darkness did not overcome him. There came a time when he started to see by heart. He called it WBS – “whole body seeing”. Imagine his joy when that darkness lifted.

Specsavers may help us the mistake of stripping in the kitchen (with all its sharp knives) instead of the sauna, or help us to make sure we are snogging the right person on the train platform, but however many pairs of glasses Specsavers give us they are not going to help us make sense or make love with the world.

What is our sight like? The eye tests we get at Specsavers are no measure for what John is talking about. We may be able to read all the letters on the bottom line. That doesn’t guarantee our understanding. There is so much we see that we don’t understand. There is so much that we see that is just prejudice (blind prejudice).

We may have excellent eyesight. We may have three degrees, be clever clever with all the things that we see with our minds, but until we see from our heart we will never be able to read the love that is between the lines.

John tells the story of the man born blind who was helped to see by Jesus. The incident caused a great deal of trouble. Jesus told the man who had been blind “I came into the world for judgement so that those who do not see may see, and those who do see may become blind.” To which, some of the Pharisees said “surely we are not blind, are we?”

But there are things that we don’t see aren’t there? For example, we tend not to see what is happening in the Jungle at Calais. And on the other hand, there are those who are so moved with compassion that they do see the suffering of others, as celebrated by the Christmas Number 1 by the Greenwich and Lewisham NHS Choir.

The Pharisees question is the wrong question. “Surely we are not blind, are we?” They don’t see, do they? The question that we should be asking is “How can we see?” or “how can we see by heart?”

John gives us an answer.

The disciples and Jesus had many meals together. They didn’t use tables and chairs – those of you who have holidayed in Turkey will have seen how people still eat – sat on cushions on the floor around a slightly raised table. John’s gospel refers to “reclining” at the table. In his account of the Last Supper

John 13:23: Now there was leaning on Jesus’ bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved. (KJV)

That’s where the disciple Jesus loved had his head, with his ear to Jesus’ heart – at the bosom of Jesus, so close he could hear the heart-beat, the whisper of Jesus in his ear: seeing by heart what Jesus also knew by heart because he too (1:18) is at the bosom of his father. NRSV translates that verse as “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.

The key to vision is being close to Jesus’s heart. The key to Jesus’ vision is that he is that close to his father’s heart.

The disciple who lay like this is not named by John. Some have said that it is John himself. It’s more likely that he chose to leave the identity open – so that all beloved disciples could read themselves into this story. John means us.

How can we see with the heart? The answer is by being close enough that we can hear Jesus’ heart-beat, close enough that we can see what makes him tick, close enough that we can feel the breath of his whisper on our skin.

That’s how we can see better. That is how we can see differently.

Or we could go to another gospel for an answer. We can go to the birth stories of Jesus, to the point of view of the crib, recognising God’s outlook from the vulnerability of a baby, and realising that we see our lives differently in the light of the light of the world, that we see others, even strangers and enemies in a new light, and that helps us to read the love between the lines that the world draws us to divide us.

Readings for the day: Exodus 33:7-11a, 1 John 1, John 21:19b-end

(The Greenwich and Lewisham NHS Choir singing “A Bridge Over You” – something that has been around for two years

https://youtu.be/ve1sevQpQLQ

Tag: Holman Hunt

Love comes home – picking up Lydia’s purple thread

Seeing differently, seeing by heart – St John’s Day