11 May Sermon for the 6th Sunday of Easter, Year A
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69 years ago I was trudging wearily up the hill, on my way home from school. Down the hill, on his rickety old bicycle came the Rector. To my horror, he applied his squealy breaks and juddered to a halt beside me. “You’ll be Bobby Burns’s son.” I raised my cap – as one did in those days. “Yes sir.” “You should be in the confirmation class. Make sure you are in church on Sunday. 9.30!” – and off he went, leaving me speechless and terrified, so terrified that I persuaded my dad to take me to the 9.30 the following Sunday and was enrolled in the boys’ confirmation class. The course – 40 sessions – began the following week, taught by the junior curate.
I don’t remember a great deal about those 40 sessions except that a lot of them were about prayer, and that we were all given a card: prayers for the beginning of the day on one side and prayers before going to bed on the other side and encouraged to use it daily. The other encouragement was to take the collect for the week and try to learn it by heart – but, more important than learning it, was to think about it; try to see what it was saying so that we could say ‘Amen’ with integrity, and also to try to see how it might affect our approach to all we would be learning about the Christian life over the next year.
So – 69 years on, that’s a rather long introduction to what I had hoped would be a short sermon on today’s collect.
At each Eucharist and each Office we say ‘Amen’ to the collect. ‘Amen’ – ‘So be it’ – ‘I assent to this’.
Were the Church to take its ‘Amen’ to today’s collect and today’s readings seriously there would be a revolution in the institutional church. It would be turned up-side down and inside out. It would become unrecognisable…
And with it, WE could well be turned up -side down and inside out.
Let me remind you of the collect again:
God our redeemer, you have delivered us from the powers of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of your beloved Son – God our redeemer and our creator… it’s good to spend time pondering the question, ‘Who is God for me now?’ How has my perception of God developed over the years? The God who has given us life – who has created us, has also created the vastness of the Universe, and is still creating new galaxies…and yet, the Gospel reading tells us that his Spirit ‘abides with us, in us.’ Like a fish in water, St Paul tells the Athenians, ‘in him we live and move and have our being’.
The collect continues: ‘you have delivered us from the powers of darkness. What are these powers? Paul tentatively suggests to the Athenians that they are what cunningly deflect us in our response to God – he suggests that it might even be their interest in religion, the proliferation of their altars, their search for novelty in religions, that subtly keep them from the truth…….we might look at so much current church-life, even our own search for security and meaning, which sits uneasily beside what we read of Jesus in the gospels.
But then, VERY IMPORTANT: notice the tense: God HAS brought us into the kingdom of his beloved Son. God has already done something very significant. That is a profound statement. In one of our meal-time graces at the moment, we are praying to be brought nearer to the kingdom, but this collect is saying that we are already in it. How open are we to exploring this truth as a present reality? The collect is making a huge statement: God HAS delivered us; God HAS brought us into the kingdom, and we have assented to this by saying ‘Amen’ – so be it. I assent to the fact that God has already done something major. Now I have to keep assenting to it, asking for the grace to be ever more deeply open to it. Curious about the God who has called me, and curious about the kingdom into which he has brought me.
… and the word ‘kingdom’ – with all its associations. It’s good to look at some of those associations and sift out the ones contrary to what Jesus shows us of the nature of the sovereignty of love.
The collect goes on:
Grant, that as by his death he has recalled us to life. Again, the collect is affirming that God has done something hugely significant: ‘he has recalled us to life – and Jesus said, ‘I have come that you may have life and have it abundantly’. Now, here’s a bit of a challenge: how do we accept and use the amazing gift of life? How much do we miss of that ‘abundance’ because of the assumptions of our current materialistic culture? ‘Abundant life’ isn’t about exotic holidays or doing wild and fantastic things, but perhaps more about our capacity to throw ourselves wholeheartedly into whatever the present moment is presenting us with – however exciting or mundane it is. About the quality of life that comes when we realise something more of the divine mystery we are caught up in; that ‘in this moment’ the divine life, God-love, alive in us and working through us.
The collect continues: he has recalled us to life, so by his continual presence in us he may raise us to eternal joy.
‘His continual presence in us’ – the collect asks us: ‘is this assertion of Christ’s continual indwelling presence the basis of our faith? – the truth on which we base our life?— and if it isn’t, perhaps it suggests we need a fairly constant prayer for the grace to start over and over again to make it so. It’s good to check every so often on the quality and level of our joy – personal and collective – as we live through our day.
How deeply do we ponder and appreciate the amazing mystery we are caught up in? — something we find hard to do when we are feeling down or under the weather. Not easy! But we have said our ‘Amen’.
The collect reminds us that we need to take seriously the realities it affirms: Christ’s continuing and eternal presence in us – and in each other and amongst us– and to do that may well take us into some deep questioning of so much that we have assumed about the Christian faith, because the only language we have is inadequate in communicating the depth and reality of the Mystery we call God.
We have to use human imagery and metaphor because it is all we have and the danger we need always to be on our guard against is that we take these too literally and end up missing the point…God sent Jesus – his incarnate Word, not an image or a metaphor, but a real human life lived to try to communicate something of his nature and the nature of his so-called ‘kingdom’.
Ann Lewin’s little poem ‘Easter Morning’ has the Risen Christ saying to Mary Magdalen: Do not cling. Let me be bigger than your heart can hold. Rise with me to a larger vision.
Let’s take this week’s collect and pray it, ponder it for the coming week – try to ‘inwardly digest’ it. It’ll mean a lot of ‘starting again, over and over, but hopefully each time we do, it will help us to grow in the reality of being part of Christ’s mystical body, in the kingdom, alive with eternal life, being gifted with the abundance of life Jesus promises. Amen.
Br, Stuart
Pittman, Lauren Wright. Complete Joy, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=57075 [retrieved May 11, 2026]. Original source: Lauren Wright Pittman, http://www.lewpstudio.com/.