22 May Sermon for the 5th Sunday of Easter, Year C

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Sunday 18th May, 2025

One of the joys of these recent nights with their clear skies has been being able to gaze up at the stars and wonder – ‘is that a simple planet or it it a galaxy?’…. and realizing that my human brain is quite incapable of conceiving distances measured in light years!

Our God has created – and is still creating – all this!  … the same God whohas also created each one of us and is the ‘ground of our being’!  As Wesley’s hymn says, “ ‘t is mystery all.”

One morning last week as I was pondering these things, an old memory began to wiggle at the back of my mind, and I remembered that a long time ago I had written some notes as I had read a book: EVER PRESENT LORD by a Benedictine monk, Joseph Gerry. ‘Whatever became of those notes?’

Later that day I began to sort through a bag of files I hadn’t opened since  2017! – in the first file I opened, there were the notes! They began:

Look up on a clear night and what do you see? A random scattering of stars. A navigator can pick out a pattern that could enable him to steer a ship.

He goes on to talk about how a radiographer can look at an X-ray and identify a fractured bone or a shadow on a lung. We see what we are trained to see, he says, and much depends on what we are looking for. The pure in heart see the good in others. And when we see the good in others, we are catching a glimpse of God himself.

Today’s Gospel reading ends with Jesus giving his ‘New Commandment’: Love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. Easier said than done!!! – especially when we live at close quarters with each other, or have an irritating, or even annoying, neighbour or work colleague.

It’s easy to register the first words of the Commandment: Love one another and ignore the next sentence: Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.   “Just as I have loved you .”    How well have we allowed that statement to seep into who we are? How open to the truth that we are loved by God have we been? How aware are we of Christ’s love for us – his understanding of us, his acceptance of all our inadequacies and failures, our petty rebellions and judgementalism?

It’s in the context of the quality of his accepting love that we can be freed to do the work of accepting the truth of who we really are, warts, giftings and all… and it’s a life-time’s work, as I’m beginning to learn – but the truth is that we can only begin to accept and love the truth of our neighbour in as much as we can accept our own truth. Otherwise it’s our fantasy of them we are trying to love, not the real person, and the real person will never match up to out expectations, nor will we to theirs. … and a hugely important facet of the truth of our neighbour, however difficult we may find them, is that they are accepted and loved as much as we are. We are all ‘a work in progress’, and God knows that, and offers us the grace to work at it.

But back to Joseph Gerry’s observation: The pure in heart look for the good in others, and when we [NOT ‘THEY’] when we see the good in others, we catch a glimpse of God himself.

He goes on to quote a story from Gregory’s LIFE OF BENEDICT – the story of a priest who, when he was about to sit down to enjoy his Easter dinner, had the inspiration to go and seek out the old hermit who lived in the hills nearby and share his meal with him. “For this is Easter Day,” he said by way of explanation when he reached the hermit’s isolated cave – to which the hermit replied, “I know it is Easter Day because I have been granted to see you.” Joseph Gerry goes on, There can be an incarnated and beneficial presence in people who, in different ways, come into our own lives.

 It is so important and life-giving to train ourselves to be on the alert to the gift God is giving us in each fresh encounter. Just as navigators train themselves to read the stars and radiographers to read X-rays, so Jesus is encouraging us – commanding us even – to train ourselves to read his presence in each other, to give and receive the love which, when we begin to understand it properly, is the gift of  Christ, of God himself – as St John tells us: God is love. And the gift of love – of God himself – is given for us to pass on to others – and, importantly, to each other, and to receive it from each other.

Br. Stuart

Image: Photo by Shaira Dela Peña on Unsplash