19 May Sermon for the 7th Sunday of Easter, Year A

The Community here at Mucknell is, as with any group, made up of diverse individuals with varying opinions on just about everything! As such, sermons posted on our website represent the ideas of the preachers who wrote and delivered them, not necessarily those of the entire Community.

Sunday 17th May 2026

There’s no doubt about it; the world is in a mess! Nothing new, but we are more aware than ever of the fragility of the global situation: struggles for power, the vast discrepancy between the crippling poverty of many, and the riches of the few, crumbling social and religious institutions, corruption in high paces and a lack of trust at all levels, not to mention anxiety about the still unknown fruits of the development of artificial intelligence. Times are a-changing. God has seen it all before! But, amidst all the gloomy news, there are glimpses emerging of a new order, a fresh epoch.

I would like to read you the end of a letter written by former Sr Judith when she was Superior of the Order of the Holy Paraclete. She wrote

‘…There can be little doubt that we all stand in fear and trembling on the edge of this new epoch. Christianity is being profoundly renewed. It is not a cheap renewal – there is death before life-giving resurrection, the despair before the leap of faith. Signs of renewal are evident, and I believe there is a heart-felt desire for a new simplicity of both contemplation and action. Pray that our communities will ever more become signposts of this new age, ever better equipped to meet the challenges of this new millennium.’

The renewal Mother Judith is talking about is not to be confused with an experience of freeing in the Spirit which is often referred to as ‘renewal’.  It may include it, but it mustn’t be identified with it.  She is talking about a radical return to Gospel values, to the experience of the primitive church, a church without privilege, a body of believers struggling to make sense of the Gospel in all the facets of life, rather than an institution of the establishment. Yet it isn’t as simple as that. We are social animals and we have been entrusted with an amazingly rich and precious heritage, much of which needs to be preserved in order to hand on to future generations…and yet in many cases it is the very struggle to preserve the heritage which is killing the life of the Church.

 ‘Seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto you.’ It’s not a simplistic, pious platitude. To ‘seek the kingdom’ involves a complete re-focussing, re-orientating of life and values such as we see in the lives of the disciples after Pentecost. 

The ‘leap of faith’ Sr Judith talks about isn’t something we can do just like ‘that’… just as a conker can’t become a majestic horse chestnut tree over-night. There is a whole inner process to be undertaken. So too with us: a process of inner healing and freeing, a process of learning and maturing, and a process of listening to and understanding the world and the signs of the times, and perhaps above all, a whole process of allowing our expectations to be transformed. It’s a lifetime’s work – as we see in the stories of the disciples. In today’s reading from Acts, they still hadn’t grasped the universal dimension of Jesus’s message: ‘…is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?’ and we know that, even after Pentecost, their vision and understanding had to keep on being enlarged and transformed.

At the end of UA Fanthorpe’s poem ‘Getting it across’, Jesus says of his disciples:

These Sancho Panzas must tread my Quixote life,

Dying ridiculous and undignified,

Flayed and stoned and crucified upside down.

These are the dear, the human, the dense, for whom

My message is, that might, had I not touched them,

Have died decent, respectable, upright deaths in bed.

I suspect that most of us would hope to die decent, respectable deaths, not flayed and stoned and crucified upside down. Yet that, or similar is what Jesus warns will be the cost of following him… ‘And your hearts will be full of joy, and that joy no one shall take from you. When that day comes, you will not ask me any questions.’ 

Might this mean: we won’t be asking ‘Why? –  because the Christ-life will already be what makes us tick. Our ‘Why?’ will have been answered: ‘Because I love you; I have died for you, and I am risen. You have already died and been raised to new life in me. The Father lives in me and I live in you and you live in me, and this is what the Father is asking of us?

Who knows? But what we do know is that we will never merit being in that state. We will only ever get there by God’s freely given grace, and perhaps that is the biggest lesson we Christians have to learn for the radical renewal of the Church to be possible. We want to be able to earn our way, but when we look at Jesus’ teaching, he simply says: ‘You can’t ever earn it. God’s lavish grace is free.’

Philip Yancey tells how, during a conference on comparative religions, experts from around the world debated what, if any, belief was unique to the Christian faith. What was Christianity’s unique contribution among world religions? The debate was floundering when C.S.Lewis wandered into the room and asked what they were discussing. ‘Oh, that’s easy,’ he said, ‘It’s grace.’

The others had to agree. The notion of God’s love coming to us free of charge, no strings attached, seems to go against every instinct of humanity. The Buddhist eight-fold path, the Hindu doctrine of Karma, the Jewish Covenant, the Muslim code of law  – each of them offers a way to earn approval. Only Christianity dares to make God’s love unconditional. We see it lived in Jesus. Others might need to see it lived in us.

‘As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world, and for their sake I sanctify myself, that they may be sanctified in the truth.’

We are being entrusted with the task of making real a fresh vision of God’s purposes – of tuning in to what God is doing and embracing it.

Back in the early 1970s, Br. Roger of Taizé wrote what he called ‘The Joyful News’:

The Risen Christ comes to quicken a festival in the innermost hearts of people. He is preparing for us a springtime of the Church; a Church devoid of the means of power, ready to share with all; a place of visible communion for all humanity. He is going to give us enough imagination and courage to open up ways of reconciliation. He is going to prepare us to give our life so that people may no-longer be victims of others.

50 years later, one can see how – though slowly – shoots of this ‘springtime’ are beginning to emerge. Bishop Hugh is encouraging us to be curious about what God is doing. 

I end with a prayer a friend sent me last week: it’s from ‘A diary of private prayer’ by John Baillie.

Give me an open mind, O God, a mind ready to receive and to welcome such new light of knowledge as it is thy will to reveal to me. 

Let not the past ever be so dear to me as to set a limit to the future.

Give me courage to change my mind when that is needed.

Let me be tolerant to the thoughts of others, and hospitable to such as may come to me through them. Amen.

Br Stuart