It seems appropriate on the day of our Annual Parish Church Meeting to reflect on this important passage from Acts which records how the life and mission of the early church went beyond being a Jewish messianic movement and spread to the Gentiles, the nations, the various ethnic people groups that were part of the enormous Roman Empire. We stand in the legacy of this seismic shift in the understanding of Peter and the early Apostles, this breaking down of religious boundaries, of deeply embedded holiness and social codes. We should not underestimate the enormity of this shift, how the Jewish identity of Jesus’ first apostles came to embrace other peoples as receiving the gift of salvation, without being required to also convert to Judaism, without being required to be circumcised and embrace the purity codes of the law of Moses. The reverberations of this shift would continue until Acts 15 when the crisis was resolved in the first Apostolic Council of the early church.
Our annual report reminds us of the central reason why St Barnabas is here – to promote the whole mission of the church – pastoral, evangelical, social and ecumenical. We are here to proclaim the same message that Peter spoke to Cornelius, the good news of peace, the reconciliation of humanity and restoration of creation through Jesus Christ who is Lord of all, that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name. At our essence St. Barnabas is here to extend this invitation to the people of Southfields; to say you too are welcome, you too are invited to receive this incredible gift of forgiveness of sins and new life in Jesus Christ.
We symbolise the entrance to that new life through the initiation of baptism. We continue to receive that new life every time we gather on a Sunday to listen to God’s word and receive the bread and wine in the Eucharist. We are here to learn together what it means to live the baptised life, to be renewed, healed, restored as those re-made in the image of God and adopted into God’s family as heirs of the Kingdom of God.
There is always a danger in church life that we get distracted from our core mission to extend, to offer the invitation of new life in Christ to others. Particularly around the time of our Annual Parish Church Meeting we are reminded of all the other demands placed upon a church like St Barnabas: our obligations, as a charity, to have independently examined financial accounts, to keep our buildings and halls in good order and repair, to comply with safeguarding, and other matters of good governance, to play our part in the wider deanery. The levels of administration and paperwork can at times feel daunting. They are all important and necessary; I am extremely grateful to all those on the PCC and beyond who serve in this capacity, but it is easy for all the practical and legal requirements of a parish to take over and for us to forget the heart of why we are here, why we exist.
We are here to learn and grow together in the baptised life, the repentance that leads to life. I want to offer two thoughts on the baptised life this morning.
The first is that the baptised life is life in the Spirit. Peter recounts how when he saw the Holy Spirit falling on the household of Cornelius, he remembered the words of Jesus, ‘John baptised with water, but you will be baptised with the Holy Spirit’. The baptised life is only possible in the power and regeneration of the Holy Spirit. As Jesus tells his disciples in the reading from John – ‘Little children, I am with you only a little longer, where I am going you cannot come’ – Jesus is no longer physically present with us; he has ascended to God, but he has not left us as orphans. He has given us the gift of the Holy Spirit, the living reality of God’s spirit with us, in us and among us.
When I first visited St Barnabas a year ago – incognito, as it were – the reading for morning prayer that morning was from Ezekiel 47: an incredible passage that describes a stream of water flowing from the temple, a stream that becomes a river, a river that enters stagnant waters so that the water becomes fresh again ‘where the river goes everything will live’, and huge numbers of fish are flourishing in the waters. There are trees growing on both sides of the banks, ‘whose leaves will not wither, nor their fruit fail, but they bear fresh fruit every month because the water flows from the sanctuary, and their fruit shall be for food and their leaves for healing’. It is an incredible passage, a powerful image, and one that I keep coming back to when I reflect on our life here at St Barnabas.
The image speaks essentially to the life of the Holy Spirit flowing when we gather here together around the altar which symbolises Christ’s sacrifice for us; it is an image of that life bearing fruit in our lives, of us becoming a people that can bring nourishment and healing to our wider community. It reminds me that the heart of the life of St Barnabas is in the Eucharist as we gather week by week to receive and grow in the forgiven life that Christ died to give us. The Holy Spirit is flowing from this ‘temple’ through our lives and bodies out into the wider community.
The second aspect of the baptised life, as the life lived in the Holy Spirit, is that it is a life where we are learning to love one another. The Holy Spirit is the in-between God, the one who brings about the koinonia, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, who binds us together in the love of God and the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. People will be attracted to Christ through the quality of our relationships here in this church, through our living out the love of Christ together, forgiving and bearing with and encouraging one another as we seek to follow Christ.
St Barnabas is not required to be a perfect people; we are called to be a forgiving and learning people, a people willing to be stretched and expanded, just like the early church. We need to keep remembering together why we are here, as it says at the beginning of our annual report: ‘we try to enable ordinary people to live out their faith as part of our parish community.’
Amen. So be it.
