Sermons

Although this Beatitude and my personal reflection focus on peacemakers, I was particularly curious to find out how many times ‘peace’ is mentioned in the Old and New Testaments.  According to AI there are 430 references in the King James Version, and 230 in the New International Version.

Here are some examples.  From the Old Testament, Isaiah (9.6) prophesied Jesus’s birth where he would be known as Prince of Peace.  In the New Testament, Luke (2.14), just after the birth of Christ, writes about the multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying: ‘Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favours.’  In John (14.27), between the Last Supper and praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus says to his disciples: ‘Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.  I do not give to you as the world gives.  Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.’

From the Prayer Book, there is the beautiful beginning of the famous blessing: ‘The peace of God, which passes all understanding.’  This chimes well with verse 10 of Psalm 46: ‘Be still, and know that I am God!’  There have been many times where I have sat still in a church where a combination of light, stonework and peace have made me realise that, yes, the peace of God truly does pass all understanding, and that is as it should be.

When looking at peace, AI also helpfully summarised two definitions: Hebrew (shalom) – with themes of completeness, welfare and wholeness; Greek (eirene): with themes of tranquillity, harmony and security.  In my reflection, I will be showing how completeness/wholeness and harmony feature as important themes in peace-making.  This conjures up in my mind a picture of peace being like a single beam of white light passing through a prism resulting in the spectrum of colours.

However, when it comes to ‘peace-making’ what I will be reflecting on is not the obvious widely accepted version.  Unlike a world leader I could mention, ‘bigly beautiful’ peace deals cannot be rushed.  It requires much hard preparation: for example, a long-lasting, meaningful peace in the international sense, will require great knowledge, understanding and appreciation of other cultures.  It also requires a sense of reality in that a proper peace is one of completeness and wholeness between countries.  Long-lasting and meaningful peace deals should take time to develop before agreement and perhaps even longer to get the buy-in of the citizens involved in order for them to last.

No, the version of peace-making I want to share with you is very much of a more fundamental and personal nature.  It considers what I feel should be the type of peace-making evident and expected in the Kingdom of Heaven.

A good way of looking at this for me is to begin considering how we approach each other at a Eucharist Service, and before Vanessa consecrates the bread and wine, when we exchange the peace with each other.  In most cases we share the peace by shaking hands, hugging someone close or waving in a welcoming way.

Some of you will remember the days before the Alternative Service Book took over from the Book of Common Prayer, where the peace was not shared in the physical sense.  Beforehand, it was up to the Priest, as a gateway between God our Father and the congregation, to share the Peace with the congregation by saying ‘The Peace of the Lord be always with you’ to which the response was ‘and also with you’.

So what do we do when making or sharing the Peace?  To me, when we share or make peace, we are being open, welcoming, receptive, accepting of others.  We do so with no pre-judgement.  So we should be sharing/making the peace with all.  By all, I am also including those who are poor in spirit, meek, merciful, pure in heart, who hunger & thirst for righteousness, who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness and who are reviled and persecuted on account of our Lord, as well as those who may see themselves, because they feel excluded from riches and prestige, as lost causes in the eyes of God.  In doing so, we are reassuring them that the Kingdom of God is open to them – they will become blessed.

In making such peace, we are reconciling ourselves, in terms of completeness, wholeness and harmony to each other and more importantly to God our Father.  The symbolism of doing this before Eucharist is strong.  When I take communion, I do so with everyone else, as a community, preparing ourselves to partake in this holy mystery, and we do so in peace not only with ourselves, but also with others and God.

One of my former priests once told me that if I had an unresolved issue with a friend or colleague, then I would not be totally at peace with myself.  Although that did not prevent me from taking communion, I have since realised that I may have missed being at harmony or feeling complete with myself.  This leads me onto what may be a self-evident observation: there have been instances in my friendships or working relationships where there has been an atmosphere which has prevented progress.  In order to make peace, I had to find a way through the impasse without losing any principles, and more often than not, I found that I needed to make the first move towards removing the stumbling block. Yes, my pride had to be swallowed, and that shows how difficult peace-making can be.  St James in his letter recognised this but also emphasised the importance of enduring the process to foster reconciliation by resolving conflicts and disputes without partiality.  And yet although difficult, in actively fostering reconciliation, peacemakers can reflect God our Father’s character which, in my mind, would fit in with them becoming Children of God.

So I pray that those of us who share Pax Christi, the Peace of Christ, sacrifice self-power, prestige and possession, in so doing reconcile ourselves to each other, to God our Father, and may be called the Children of God. Amen.

‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.’

Well, I know that’s not me, but who could it be?  And whoever they are, what are they doing there in Matthew 5, ranged together with all those down-and-out type folks: the poor in spirit, the bereaved, the meek, the hungry (literal or otherwise), and those lax permissive pushovers the merciful and those weakling cowards the peacemakers, and those inconvenient truth-tellers – people like John the Baptist – who offend the mighty at their peril?

Spot the odd beatitude out.

As Sue Chin pointed out last week, most of the beatitudes confront us with paradox, with unexpected reversal: where, afterall, is the blessing in being grief-stricken, or weak, or persecuted?  But, now we have to ask, where is the paradox in this beatitude?  It sounds perfectly conventional, even if it does set the bar rather high (out of reach, some might say).  ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.’  Who else would see God?

Well, guess what.  I’m going to try to persuade you that this is a beatitude of reversal like all the others, and that the pure in heart referred to here are … wait for it … children – primarily children, anyway, but possibly some other people as well, such as people with learning disabilities and people with serious mental illnesses – people who, like children, were exempt from observing Jewish law on the grounds that they could not distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil.

So, what has given me this harebrained idea (and it may be harebrained; I can’t promise you that it isn’t)?  My inspiration comes from a passage much later in Matthew’s gospel in which Jesus has some very interesting and, to me, bizarre things to say about children.

Some of this will sound very familiar.  In chapter 18 the disciples ask Jesus who will be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.  In answer, Jesus calls a child to him, places the child in the middle of their discussion, and says, ‘Truly, I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.  Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.’

So far so good; nothing out of the ordinary.  We are used to these verses, as all three of the synoptic gospels – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – include this incident.

But then, a few verses later, in a passage that’s only in Matthew, Jesus adds this strange detail: ‘Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones; for, I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven.’

I’ll read that bit again: ‘Take care that you do not despise one of these little ones; for, I tell you, in heaven their angels continually see the face of my Father in heaven.’

Really?

What the heck is Jesus talking about?  He’s referring here to two aspects of Jewish cosmology as it had come to be elaborated in his day.  First, with the phrase ‘their angels’, he is invoking the idea that every human being has an angelic celestial twin.  (You may not have noticed it, but this idea also appears in the Book of Acts [12.15]: when Peter’s friends suppose that he is in prison, they think it must be his angelic twin when he shows up knocking at their door).  Second, Jesus is alluding to an image of heaven as a vast, hierarchical royal court at which only the highest-ranking angels – the Angels of Presence – see God face to face in his inner throne room.

Now, I’m not asking you to accept this cosmology or the idea of angelic doubles.  And I have to leave it to you to work out what it might mean for you that Jesus probably did accept these things (they were part of the world in which he lived).  I simply want to highlight that this is indeed a radical reversal.  The last will be first.  Jesus is saying that children, and whoever else may be implied by the term ‘little ones’ – the people considered too simple to fulfil the law – already see God continuously by virtue of their existential connection to the highest-ranking angels in heaven.

So, here’s my argument so far.  My logic follows the classic formula of a syllogism: if a = b, and b = c, then a = c.  If the pure in heart see God, and seeing God is the privilege of the ‘little ones’, then the pure in heart must be these same ‘little ones’ – and by extension, those who are able to change and be like them, if any such there be.

Suddenly, the sixth beatitude looks a lot more like the others.  The lowly, excluded, and disdained are lifted up.

But this only raises another, even more difficult question: in what sense are the ‘little ones’ pure in heart, and how are we supposed to change and become like them?

To address this question, I’m going to ask you to find the pew sheet inside your Order of Service and turn it over to the back page.  Printed here, in three different forms, is the text of Deuteronomy 6.4-5.  In addition to a translation into English, I’ve given you the Hebrew and a transliteration into Roman alphabet, which I hope you can follow along as I read it out loud.  Please stand for this reading, if you are able.  These verses are the closest thing to a creed or a gospel proclamation that there is in Judaism, and during worship Jewish people normally stand to recite them.

She-ma  Yis-rah-el  Ah-do-nai  Eh-lo-hey-nu        Ah-do-nai  e-chad
Veh-ah-hav-tah       ayt-Adonai       Eh-lo-hey-kha
beh-khol le-vav-kha,
oo-veh-khol            naf-sheh-kha
oo-veh-khol            meh-o-deh-kha

Hear, O Israel: The Lord your God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.

Please be seated.

These verses from Deuteronomy are known universally among the Jewish people as the Shema, after the very first Hebrew word I just uttered.  Shema is an imperative verb; it calls Israel to ‘Hear!’, to listen up and reaffirm its community-defining trust in one sovereign deity.  If you visit a synagogue today you will hear the Shema beautifully chanted in Hebrew as a core element of daily morning and evening prayers and sabbath services.  It has been integral to Jewish public worship and personal piety for centuries.  Jewish writings from the first century after the life of Jesus tell us that, by that time, Jewish men considered it an obligation under Jewish law to recite the Shema at least twice a day: upon getting up every morning and before going to bed every night.  Because of this evidence, some scholars have suggested that this practice was already normative at the time of Jesus and would have been part of his daily life of prayer.  We don’t know for sure, but I like to think that it was.  (You know how the gospels sometimes mention that Jesus went off somewhere to pray by himself, and you wonder, so what was he praying?  I think the Shema gives us a clue.)  In any case, the gospels make it clear that Jesus regarded the commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might, as the greatest commandment of all.  And he correlated it with another that he said is like it: the commandment from Leviticus 19.18, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’

You can probably see where I’m going with this.  It seems to me that the whole of the Sermon on the Mount can be read as a commentary on the Shema and its corollary.  It is Jesus’s account of what it looks like – truly and fully – to obey the commandment to love the Lord your God with ALL your heart, and with ALL your soul, and with ALL your might – with your whole and undivided being, that is to say; or, put more concisely, with a pure heart: with a heart that is like refined salt unmixed with additives; with a heart that does not try to serve two masters; with a heart that seeks first the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness, trusting that enough of daily bread will follow; with a heart that enters by the narrow gate.  In all these ways, with all these images, Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount underscores the singleness of focus, the totality of being, the unity of purpose demanded by the Shema – a unity meant to mirror the unity of God.

From this we can infer why Jesus calls people who are poor in spirit, bereaved, or meek ‘blessed’ – which is to say, happy or fortunate.  It is because, unlike the rich and powerful, they have little to divide their hearts from loving God.  They have less to give up and find it easier to turn to God wholeheartedly; God is their only recourse.  As Sue put it, speaking of those who mourn, they are already ‘hollowed out of everything that does not really matter’, and their hearts are primed to become dwelling places for God.

But at the same time, Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount insists that love of God is inseparable from indiscriminate love of others.  The undivided heart, it seems, does not divide.  Like the sun and the rain, the undivided heart does not show partiality between friend and foe, just and unjust, rich and poor, noble and common, healthy and sick, righteous and sinner, clean and unclean, good and evil, but is open and vulnerable to all.

From this, finally, we can infer in what sense Jesus saw children as pure in heart and in what respect he wants us to emulate them.  Jesus saw children as pure in heart, not because they are credulous or capable of blind faith, but because they have not yet been drawn into the economies of status, and learned the structures of dualism, that create conflict and inequity.  To change and become like them is likewise to see humanity as one in the image of God – to see God face to face in one another.

Did Jesus idealize children in holding them up this way as blessed examples, living parables of what the kingdom is like?  Quite possibly.  Does that matter?  Probably not.  What matters is the parable in the beatitude: the kingdom of heaven happens when we approach others without judgment, when we love one another as Jesus loves us.

But to that I would also add this final thought: the kingdom of heaven happens when the undivided heart does not divide God but instead, in awful silence like Job, learns to see God in all things – in what seems evil as well as in what seems good.  It happens when the undivided heart confronts – quite literally comes face to face with and can still love – the one overwhelming God who, as it says in Isaiah 45, formed light and created darkness, who brings prosperity and creates disaster.

‘Hear O Israel, the Lord your God is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.’

Amen.

In Matthew’s gospel Jesus tells his disciples, ‘blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted’. Like most of these Beatitudes, we find ourselves confronted with paradox, for grief can feel more like a curse than a blessing, a time of desolation rather than comfort.

Pondering these words of Jesus in recent weeks, I’ve found myself drawn to understand this word ‘mourning’ more deeply. It’s a word which has largely fallen out of everyday usage, but to our ancestors ‘mourning’ held a particular meaning. Mourning was not so much the private pain of grief we might imagine today, but rather the sharing of deep sorrow in response to the loss of something cherished, or the wounding of someone beloved. Mourning involved the acknowledgement and honouring of loss.

To be human is to know loss in its many forms. I imagine every one of us here today can connect to personal loss – the loss of a loved one perhaps; or a home which was dear to us; a stage of life which has now passed; a relationship which could not last. At the same time, much of the grief we carry silently in our hearts these days is not personal. The world we knew in childhood is burning and melting before our eyes. I have no doubt that we feel this loss, privately, but I also sense that we are no longer sure how to acknowledge and honour the grief we feel in relation to the brokenness of the world. We lack the rites and rituals that would allow us to mourn these collective losses together. And in not mourning them together, we are denied the possibility of finding comfort in each other.

We live at a time which glorifies individual wellbeing and emotional growth. We can feel under enormous pressure to be seen to be feeling good and rising above our problems. This forces the vulnerability of sorrow into a private realm, sometimes coated with a mantle of shame. Men and women in my psychotherapy practice, routinely apologize for their tears, or for feeling sad.

The truth is that many of us carry decades of un-mourned loss, losses which were not acknowledged at the time, not validated or held within a wider containment of family, community or faith. Losses that were not honoured or comforted. And we also carry a sense of grief in relation to present losses that are all around us: the loss of community and in-person contact in an age increasingly dominated by digital media; the loss of moderation in our seasonal changes in a time of climate collapse; the extinction of species; the dismantling of truth as a shared currency, in the wake of disinformation. It can feel overwhelming. The temptation is to turn a blind eye to the unsettling feelings of grief, to double down into distraction. Of course, for when we confront the troubles of the world on our own, we cannot bear it. We need the comfort of each other. And this word ‘comfort’ simply means ‘to be strong together’ (com-fort). We have only to think of Jesus’ words from the cross to his mother and to his beloved disciple John: ‘Woman, behold your son’, He said to Mary, and to John ‘Behold your mother’. He knew that they would need the comfort of each other to bear the grief of His crucifixion and death.

The risk we take in not mourning our losses together is that over time our hearts have to close, to block out the pain. We become more cautious about opening to love again. Confronted with the experience of loss, dare we love each other wholeheartedly again, dare we care passionately about trees and wildlife lost to wildfires, and whole communities devastated by floods? In telling us that those who mourn are ‘blessed’, I wonder if Jesus is telling us that mourning our losses is one of the ways we remain open to loving each other and the world. Mourning, as the honouring and sharing of grief, is perhaps an act of protest that declares our refusal to live numb and disconnected lives. Grief, after all, is the measure of our capacity to love. It is through mourning that our hearts are opened to the reality and the enormity of our love for each other and for the world in all its fragile beauty.

Seeing this connection between these two deeply human capacities – our capacity to love and our capacity to mourn – I realise of course, that Jesus demonstrates both to us. At the tomb of his friend Lazarus, John tells us that ‘Jesus wept’ (John 11:35). Even though he knew He would raise Lazarus from the dead, He shared directly in the raw human grief of the moment. And here we begin to see that compassion for the suffering of others is related to our capacity to feel sorrow. We remember Christ’s commandment ‘love one another as I have loved you‘ (John 13:34). And His love is warm and tender, and willing to be vulnerable. Jesus models the capacity to mourn, not only for his own suffering, but for the troubles of the world. On the night before His crucifixion in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus tells his disciples, ‘My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death’ (Matthew 26:38). The cross was an act of total solidarity with the pain of the world, a gesture of infinite compassion and com–fort.

Far from being a source of private shame, Jesus’ sorrowing is revealed as an act of courage. It takes courage to mourn – courage and comfort. Perhaps this invitation to mourn the larger pain of the world together is what Jesus is pointing to when he says ‘blessed are those who mourn’. It’s not that being sad about the state of the world earns his blessing, but that by keeping our hearts open to love and to loss, we become aware of the blessing of God’s compassion and comfort which is ever-present in our midst. From beginning to end Jesus’ life is a testament to the nearness and availability of God. In Matthew’s account of the nativity, we learn that the promised messiah is to be called Emmanuel, meaning ‘God-with-us’.

If God is somehow participating in human suffering, instead of passively observing it at a distance, then our relationship to love and to loss is transformed. And ‘transformation’ is what lies at the very heart of Jesus’ ministry. In Matthew Chapter 4, we learn that following His forty days in the desert Jesus began to preach, saying ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’. This ‘repentance’ (what the Greeks called metanoia), points to a fundamental reorientation of the heart and mind towards an all-encompassing, all-penetrating God-centred world, what Matthew calls the ‘kingdom of heaven’. This kingdom of heaven, Jesus tells us, is ‘at hand’, meaning it is within reach, within us and around us. It’s just that we, clouded by our fears, preoccupations and priorities, fail to see what is right in front of our noses. Repentance is a matter of seeing through appearances to the realm of God’s love and compassion, which is the true substance and light of the world.

If we are to be transformed, we first have to turn away from conventional ways of seeing (this ‘turning around’ is what Jesus means by ‘repent’). In the society of Jesus’ day, blessedness had come to be regarded as a reward for adherence to religious laws and customs, expressed through outward signs of piety. Health, wealth and prosperity were regarded as signs of God’s blessing. We may recognise some uncomfortable parallels with our own age which celebrates fame, success and winning above all else.

Jesus professed a radical inversion of this narrow perspective, placing the interior condition of people’s hearts (which God alone can truly see) as the doorway to the kingdom of heaven. To be touched by the grace of God is not the privilege of successful or pious people, Jesus tells his disciples. Anyone can experience blessing. At any time. Anyone can enter into relationship with God. The doorway to experience the God-centred world, to enter the ‘kingdom of heaven’ which is ‘at hand’, Jesus tells us, is an open heart.

And mourning is one of the ways that our hearts break open.

At times, grief reduces us to our most naked self. We can feel estranged from the values and preoccupations of the world. We realise, often with painful clarity, what and who truly matters. If our hearts are to be a dwelling place for God, they need to be hollowed out of everything that does not really matter. Mourning involves a kind of defoliation in which we shed the canopy of personal identities and priorities we once thought essential. What remains is the bare soul. As a therapist, I have often sensed that there is a kind of transparency in those who mourn, a sheerness to their being which renders them more present and vivid. In mourning, it sems that it is not only our vulnerability which becomes more visible to others; it is our light. The light of what is most enduring and true in our lives – which must be love.

Reading Matthew’s Gospel account of the Beatitudes, and reflecting on my own experiences of loss, I begin to understand why Jesus might tell his disciples that those who mourn are blessed. I remember that grief is the measure of our capacity to love. How different our loving might be, if we were to heed Jesus’ words and honour those who mourn, comfort one another in our grief (both personal and collective), knowing that in the nakedness of loss, our hearts become more transparent to the presence of a God who is ‘with us’, now and always.

Sermon for 13 September 2026 from Rev’d Vanessa Elston (Isaiah 61.1-4 and Matthew 5.1-16)

I am delighted to be introducing a new series of lay sermons on the beatitudes.  Sue Chin, Krista Ovist, Ian Shaw and Ian Dunlop are all going to be sharing their reflections with you over the coming weeks.

At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus announces what we call the gospel.  Gospel means good news, something that we are going to want to hear, something we are going to delight in knowing, something fresh, something powerful.  Jesus begins his teaching with a series of pronouncements we call the beatitudes: Blessed are… Blessed are…  Blessed are… Jesus is inviting us to a different way of seeing the world, he is inviting us to a fundamentally different way of understanding who is truly fortunate, who is lucky, happy, or truly blessed.

Jesus begins his ministry, before we get to the Beatitudes, by announcing the availability of something he calls the Kingdom of Heaven, or the Kingdom of God as it is referred to in the other gospels.  Jesus is announcing a new state of affairs, he is saying there is a new government, like after the night of an election, a new day is dawning, the situation of humanity is changing, something new is breaking in, something is now arriving with the presence and ministry of Jesus.  The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.

A new world order is breaking into the old.  A new possibility that was always there but is now being manifested in a new way.  The Kingdom of God is breaking into the kingdom of this world.  The kingdom of this world is the sphere of power and influence given to humanity.  Right back at the beginning of the story of creation, God takes this tremendous risk, he gives humanity a huge amount of power and influence over his creation.  And this is the kingdom of this world that we now inhabit, it’s the rule of what the Bible calls this current age or epoch and, as we know all too well, it is a world dominated by conflict, often ruled by violence, selfishness and greed, what we call the zero-sum game, where my advancement, my gain, means your diminishment, your loss.  This is the world of realpolitick, where we need to be realistic about the threats that others pose to us.  The gospel is very realistic about the reality of this world; it acknowledges its harmful and destructive power.  To be a Christian is not to be naïve or simplistic, it’s actually to be deeply realistic about the state of human affairs.

The good news that Jesus announces is that another world is now breaking in, a world run on different rules, God’s rules, not those of fallen, sinful humanity.  He is saying that for those with open hearts and minds God’s power and activity is at work in new ways.  Jesus is the newly anointed king, he is one on whom God’s favour rests, the truly blessed one, and he has come to call people into his kingdom, into a different way of relating, a different way of living, a different way of being human.  He is presenting us with a choice.  Which kingdom we will belong to?  Which kingdom will we be citizens of?

To enter this kingdom, which is now at hand, within reach, all around us, we need to repent.  That word that Jesus starts his ministry with, metanoia, it literally means to change our minds, to turn around, to see our world differently.  For us in late modernity, soaked in a godless secular materialism that is all about human power, control, and autonomy, this is an immense challenge.  We are like the camel trying to go through the eye of the needle.  Something deep has to shift.  This transforming of our minds, our ability to see differently, is something we are going to be exploring in the following weeks.  It is a transformation that requires us to give up the illusion of autonomy and control and separateness.  It requires humility and honesty.  It requires an opening of our heart and mind.

Jesus is announcing those who are truly blessed in God’s kingdom: they are the poor in spirit; they are those who weep and mourn; those without worldly power and status; those who long for justice and fairness; those who practice mercy, kindness, forgiveness; those who long for God, who long for that inner transformation that might bring about true purity of motive; those who are willing to stand in the middle in order to make peace; and finally those who are willing to suffer in this age for the coming reality of God’s kingdom.  Those who live for the ultimate values of the kingdom rather than the short-term gain of wealth, fame, power and status.

It is a radical call; it inverts the values of this world.  To be blessed is to enter and participate in this kingdom now and the call is for now not later.  If we want to be truly blessed we should not delay.

The Greek word for blessed is makarios.  Makar was associated with the immortal Gods.  Kari means fate or death but with the negative prefix ma the word means being deathless, no longer subject to fate, or luck, or fortune in a worldly sense, a condition both inaccessible and longed for by mortals.  It was because of their immortality that the gods, the Makarioi, were considered the blessed ones. (Reference: Jim Forest, The Ladder of the Beatitudes, Orbis Books 1999, p. 20).*

Jesus is announcing a new understanding of makarios, because he is announcing a new path, a new way into eternal life, into a state where we are no longer just subject to fate or fortune as the world understands it, because he is inviting us into a relationship with God that never ends.  Jesus is inviting us into a sharing in the very life of God, the ultimate joy and bliss, without the fault lines of happenstance running through it.  There is no higher gift than to belong in God’s Kingdom.  There is no higher blessing than to participate in the communion of the Holy Trinity, in the love shared between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, even to the point of sharing in God’s immortality and being blessed with qualities that seem humanly impossible.

Ultimately the beatitudes are speaking to us of Christ himself because he is the one who is poor, who weeps, who embraces powerlessness before the violence of the Roman Empire, Christ hungers and thirsts, he is merciful, pure in heart, the true peacemaker, reconciler and ultimately suffers persecution for his message of another kingdom coming on earth.

The door to the Kingdom is Christ, to participate in the kingdom is to participate in Christ, to belong to Christ, to walk with Christ, to become a friend of Christ.  To live in the Kingdom is to learn a whole new way of relating to one another, a way of true reciprocity and mutuality, where we can begin to put one another first because we belong in God, we are no longer fearful and fighting for all we can get for ourselves.

As we begin this new series exploring this teaching, this new way of seeing and relating in our world, I am going to invite those who wish to stand with me and pray the prayer printed on the sheet in your pew sheet entitled ‘The Nine Beats Meditation’.  We do this as a sign that we want to participate more fully and deeply in the kingdom that Christ is inviting us into, this deeper transformation, this way of seeing and living that Christ wants to open to us, this door that Christ is inviting us to walk through.  If you want to live this out more fully, in this place of Southfields, please stand and pray this prayer with me.

*Since I preached this sermon, Krista has checked on the etymology for the Greek word makarios, which I came across in Jim Forest’s book The Ladder of the Beatitudes (1999). Thanks to her research we have discovered that this is a clever, but unfortunately incorrect, medieval folk etymology. It seems that Forest must have encountered it in his own reading and mistakenly took it at face value – and I, in turn, accepted it on his authority. I found it plausible because there is, indeed, a negative particle μή (mé) in Greek that means ‘not’, so I didn’t question that it could combine with a noun meaning ‘death’ to make a word meaning ‘without death’, or ‘immortal’. It turns out, however, that μή (mé) is never used in Greek as a negative prefix; instead, Greek always uses the letter alpha (a) as a negative prefix (which gives us all our Greek-based English words like amoral, atheist, atypical, etc.)

Interestingly, this folk etymology has a long history in Christian literature and goes back to the 12^th-century scholar Eustathius of Thessalonica. He first proposed it in his commentaries on the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. He understood from close study of these epics that the ancient Greeks regarded the gods as supremely happy because they were immortal, so he hypothesized that makarios might be a compound of μή (mé) and Kήρ (Kér), the singular form of Κῆρες (the Keres in Greek cosmology were a category of fate or death-dealing female spirits, rather like the Furies and Harpies). By this reasoning, Eustathius suggested that makarios literally means ‘not-death’. Today, however, most historical linguists think that makarios is built on a root makar of uncertain origin, possibly borrowed into ancient Greek from the language of an earlier population.

Apologies for a long explanation. I wanted to correct this technical error but also observe that Eustathius’s etymological invention was motivated by a real insight: the ancient Greeks did regard the gods as the Makarioi, the Blessed Ones, largely because they were understood to be immune to death.

The joy of Easter feels muted this year – news bulletins remind us, how could we forget, that people are being bereaved constantly and are living in fear of death and injury, starvation and arrest.

A significant proportion of the world’s population in the Middle East, in Ukraine, and in Africa, wherever there is warfare and totalitarian regimes, is in mourning: for lost family, lost homes and communities, lost hope for the future. But still Easter arrives with its promises of a new relationship with God, with Easter joy at humanity’s new status. But in the face of such danger and loss it is hard to recognise the new future. The disciples must have felt like this too in the time after the resurrection.

The disciples are huddled behind locked doors for fear of the Jews, but also because they are afraid about everything that has happened. Not only had they seen their Lord crucified, they were now being told that he had, indeed, risen from the dead, or at least that the tomb is empty.

The disciples are hiding. Perhaps in a sense they are also hiding from God, rather like Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden. Perhaps God has got a little too close.

The last thing they did before the arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane was to flee and deny knowing Christ, even though each of them had said they would be willing to die for Jesus.

They are still not willing to die for him, they are hiding and they are terrified. Mary Magdalene has told them first that someone has taken away his body and that she doesn’t know where they have put him, and then that she has seen the Lord, but this makes no sense to them either. It is into this context that the Risen Lord appears to them.

The first thing he says to them is “Peace be with you.”

Not why did you all run away, or where were you?

With great understatement, John tells us “Then were they glad when they saw the Lord!”

Not only are they delighted that he has risen from the dead, I think they are also relieved and delighted that they are forgiven, they are understood.

Jesus says “Peace be with you” again and then he gives them the great commission.

He says, “I send you” to a group of frightened men in a locked room, who have no understanding of what has happened to Jesus. There is no further training, no more preparation time, you’re ready now. Jesus says, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you”. It’s a bit like, pick up your bed and walk.

Then we get another little reminder of Genesis. How does God bring life into Adam when he is created from clay? He breathes on him. Only God the Creator can give life to something that is dead.

Because the disciples in that locked room are, in a sense, dead and lifeless.

They are dead in their denial of Jesus; they are dead in their sorrow and sin.

Jesus breathes on them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit”.

It’s worth noting here that in both Greek and Hebrew the word for God’s spirit can also mean breath or wind. So Jesus, who until a little while ago, was dead, breathes life, the Holy Spirit, back into the weak, frightened, failing disciples.

Jesus knows exactly what we need. He knew that the disciples needed to hear and see and touch, in this first appearance in the locked room he shows the disciples his hands and his side, to demonstrate that he is not a ghost but real and can be touched.

Thomas isn’t there and so when he is told what has happened he fears that the others have been seeing things, hallucinating; Thomas, forever known as “Doubting”, makes a perfectly reasonable statement that he wants to touch Jesus in the very spot where the nails went in so that he can be sure it’s the same Jesus – he’s not a ghost and he doesn’t just look like Jesus.

These are the same questions we all might have, are we seeing things, grief can do strange things to our minds. Is this wishful thinking? Jesus, when he appears to them again, once more reminds them with his “peace be with you” that they are forgiven and have received the Holy spirit, then immediately Christ knows what Thomas needs and offers him the chance to touch the place where the nails were in his hands and feel where the spear pierced his side.

I like to think that Thomas, in a split second, realises how crass his unbelief has been. Of course it is Jesus, who else could it be, who else would appear to them in a locked room, forgive them for abandoning him and breathe on them the Holy Spirit?

Without pause for thought, Thomas responds with the first full profession of faith in the divinity of the Risen Christ when he says simply, “My Lord and My God”.

Jesus knows what we need too.  He knows we need tangible links to that most precious body and blood broken for us to give us a new relationship with the Father. So, he has given us Holy Communion – a reminder each week as we gather together that Jesus is real.

We can touch and taste and receive him in the bread and the wine.

He speaks directly to us at the end of this encounter, he comes to us in our fearful, inadequate, failing state and says, “Peace be with you, as the Father has sent me, so I send you, receive the Holy Spirit, you are blessed because you believe in me”.

Each time we encounter Christ in the Eucharist he gives us the same blessing that his disciples received and the same great commission.

He sends us into the world with all its power games and cruelty, politics and suffering, its Gazas, its Ukraines, its holocausts and its abused children. He sends us back into the world to do his work and to witness to Him. Because no matter how ill-prepared we might think we are, however weak and fearful, He is with us always and He has overcome death for us and to make us part of a new creation. He walks alongside us, always.

Amen.

So, Lazarus…

The condition of Lazarus – a man called back to the land of the living after four days cold and dead in the tomb and beginning to stink – is a condition so unthinkable, we can’t stop thinking about it.

Of course, Lazarus is not the only person we meet in the New Testament who is said to have come back from the dead.  Matthew, Mark and Luke all claim that Jesus revived the young daughter of Jairus, a leader in the synagogue at Capernaum (Matthew 9.18-26; Mark 5.21-43; Luke 8.40-56).  In an incident unique to Luke, Jesus raises the nameless son of a nameless widow in another Galilean town called Nain (Luke 7.11-17).  And it’s not just Jesus who his credited with such miracles.  In the Book of Acts, Peter revives the disciple known as Dorcas or Tabitha (Acts 9, 36-43), while Paul – not to be outdone by Peter – reanimates poor Eutychus, who fell asleep and toppled out of a window while listening to Paul hold forth late into the night at Troas (Acts 20.7-12).  But Lazarus so eclipses all these others in our thinking that we hardly think of them at all.

Lazarus looms large in our imaginations, and the reason for this is not difficult to sniff out: it has everything to do, I think, with that bit about the stink.  The others were all fresh from their deaths and rose up lightly from sickness or injury, never having been interred, still visible under the sun.  But, rather like the Wicked Witch of the East, Lazarus isn’t merely dead; he’s really most sincerely dead and mouldering away in the windings of his grave clothes.  He is decomposing in the dark, and the scene of his summons forth from the tomb holds all the terror and fascination of a horror flick.  Depictions of this scene in ancient and medieval paintings look like story boards for the filming of Boris Karloff in The Mummy.

m
id-6th century mosaic from the Basilica of Saint Apollinare, Nuovo, Ravenna, Italy

early 14^th century fresco by Giotto in the Arena Chapel, Padua, Italy

Lazarus is that repellent yet irresistible paradox – the living dead, the undead, the waking, walking returnee from whatever lies beyond – and, naturally, we want him to be our shaman, someone who can tell us what it’s like on the other side, what he saw there, what secrets he learned that might help us and heal us in our mortal predicament.  But he disappoints.  In one of the loudest of all the Bible’s howling silences, Lazarus never says a word, and no one ever bothers to ask him anything.

Small wonder, then, that numerous poets and novelists have felt compelled to fill this silence and have given us literary visions of who – or what – Lazarus became after he returned from the grave.  And small wonder, too, that few of these visions are happy ones.

Take, for example, the short story entitled Lazarus by the Russian writer Leonid Andreyev, published in 1906.  Andreyev’s Lazarus is more like a shade escaped from the dusty underworld of Sheol than a living man.  He continues to bear the marks of incipient decay, in both his mind and his body, and becomes an object of aversion to others.  His empty gaze, especially, exerts a baleful influence, driving others to despair and madness until the Emperor Augustus has his eyes burnt out of his head with a red hot poker.  Blinded and outcast, he dies in the desert all alone.  It’s about as pessimistic as twentieth-century pessimism gets.

Yet a century later when the Canadian writer John Derhak published his thriller The Bones of Lazarus in 2012, the picture was no rosier.  Derhak’s Lazarus is an immortal zombie on a two-thousand-year-old mission to punish evil-doers by literally scaring them to death.  And recall also that great last stanza from the poem ‘Lady Lazarus’ by Sylvia Plath:

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

Science fiction fans will know that, in that genre, the name Lazarus almost always connotes something sinister.  ‘The Lazarus Effect’, ‘the Lazarus Project’, ‘the Lazarus Experiment’ – all these are names for immortality quests that go horribly awry.

The condition of Lazarus is so unthinkable, we can’t stop thinking about it.  And we can’t stop thinking about it, it seems, as something ghoulish – as something unholy, even – and thus as something it may have been reprehensible of Jesus to have inflicted on anyone, much less a beloved friend.  This last complaint is the thought that motivates yet another work of fiction – Richard Beard’s 2011 novel Lazarus is Dead.

Now, I value the Bible as a driver of art and literature very highly and I would wish none of this creative elaboration away, however depressing, macabre, satirical, or downright silly it gets.  But, probably, we are missing the gospel in John’s Gospel if Lazarus haunts us primarily as a figure of nightmarish dread.

No, I don’t mean that we are ignoring the obvious fact that the raising of Lazarus reprises the creation of Adam out of dust and breath and prefigures the resurrection of Jesus.  I think we all get that about this story; it’s too self-evident to require much comment and has clearly been less interesting to many people than wondering what it’s like to be dead and come back to this life.

I mean that we are missing the slightly less obvious fact that the story of Lazarus is also about baptism and that, if we have been baptized, then Lazarus is us.  The Gospel writer we call John was well versed in St Paul’s understanding of baptism as dying and rising with Christ and intended Lazarus to be a type or figure of the Christian initiate.  We don’t need Lazarus to speak; we know exactly what it’s like to be him – and that is, frankly, not much different from the way we were before we were baptized.  And yet.  And yet…something has changed.

Since Ash Wednesday, Vanessa has been reminding us that, historically, Lent was a journey towards baptism for new initiates and that, over time, as infant baptism became the norm, it evolved into a journey towards renewing our baptism for those of us already initiated.  But why do we need to do that?  Isn’t the sacrament of baptism a once-and-for-all rebirth, incorporating us forever into the Body of Christ?

Over the past four weeks, as we have read and wrestled with the Gospel of John in our Lent Discussion Group, I have come to see the Fourth Gospel as – among other things – a treatise in narrative form on baptism as initiation into the mystery religion of Jesus, the eternally creating Word of God.  And I have come to see the story of Lazarus of Bethany – his death and recalling to life – as a parable about baptism that helps me understand and, indeed, rejoice in the need for ongoing baptismal renewal.

For me, Lazarus has become a trope for the fact that we are composte – that we are composite relational beings, always undergoing processes of decomposition and re-composition in relation to myriad other things, – both internally and externally – but that to be baptized means that, in the midst of all this relational flux, Jesus is there – in our composition – and it is given to us to be constantly re-composed in relationship with him.

I am not the same person I was the day I was baptized at the age of 22 in 1984.  When I look back at that person, I barely recognize her.  I have died and come back to life several times since then.  I have been decomposed and recomposed by many changes – both visible and invisible.  All the cells in my body, I’m told, have been replaced, more than once.  I have been divorced and remarried.  For a period of twenty years, I ignored my baptism completely.  My parents have died.  I have gained twenty pounds.  I am planning to acquire a new nationality.

Who am I?

Some Christians have argued that in baptism we acquire a new identity, and that this new identity claims our allegiance ahead of all other identities we might have – as if these were all neatly compartmentalized and separable.  But this thing we call identity is fluid and composite at best.  We are not identical to any of the categories with which we are often asked to identify.  I am a human being, I am a daughter, a sister, a wife, I am of northern European descent, I am a Christian.  I can be described as all of these things – but I am identical to none of them.  They are all abstractions, after all, and I am wonderfully and fearfully particular, actual, weird and mysterious – especially to myself.  We are not even identical to our ourselves over time.

Like God, the Trinity, we are relational beings.  This is true not only of our bodies but also of our subjectivities.  We really do get under one another’s skins and into one another’s psyches.  The selves we experience are composed by and of the relations that make and remake us: our family members, our changing allies and opponents, the places and things that shape us.  Often, we become aware of how our behaviour and sense of self shifts from one context or set of relationships to another.  We feel that some relationships get us into trouble or prevent us from being who we want to be, while others seem to bring out our better capacities.  Some relationships re-compose us better than others.

The story of Lazarus is there, I think, always to remind us that, when we are decomposed by the changes and chances of life, Jesus is there too to recompose us – not to make us identical with him, but to call us into our own best proper glory.  To be baptized it to have chosen to be recomposed, again and again, in relationship with Jesus.  And this can save us – save us from despair, from error and wrongdoing, from cynicism, from captivity to the past; in short, from our sins.

Amen