Sermons

A spring of living water welling up to eternal life

At the heart of the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman, there stands a well. Not just any well, but Jacob’s Well, the well believed to have been created  by the Old Testament patriarch himself. The well (which still exists today in what we now know as the West Bank), is exceptionally deep.

In these biblical lands, the well is both the source of life itself, and also an imporant meeting place. And both of these aspects of wells tell us something about who Jesus is: Jesus is both a wellspring of life and a meeting place. A place of encounter, where we meet with God.

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Living as we do in a corner of northern Europe accustomed to plentiful rainfall, it can be hard to imagine just how significant wells are in the arid lands of the Middle East. We are blessed with surface water, in rivers, streams and lakes. In desert regions, water lies hidden beneath the surface in deep underground aquifers. In these concealed channels, sheltered from the merciless heat of the sun, water flows. And this is part of the desert’s magic: that out of what appears to be a barren landscape, there can spring surprising abundance.

I encountered this desert miracle last summer on a family trip to the arid plains of central Turkey. We were staying in a small village overlooking the sun-scorched landscape, visiting the early Christians rock churches with their astounding frescos. Early one morning, we decided to head down a dusty winding path towards a thin ribbon of green. Approaching the valley floor, the path entered a narrow tunnel of trees, alive with the sound of calling birds and crickets. Somewhere beneath the surface, water flowed. We stood there, speechless. And that’s when it happened. This moment I will never forget. A nightingale sang. A stream of crystal clear sound, poured into the desert. I wonder if those early Christians heard this same song and were also touched by its grace.  So as I read the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman, I remember this desert miracle. I imagine the possibility of this stream of life welling up also within me.

Now I have to confess to a particular fascination with the symbolism of the well. By profession I’m a psychotherapist, so you could say my field of experience is ‘well-being’. And this turns out to be more significant to our story than mere wordplay. In my  Southfields practice the question which underlies all my work is this: ‘what is the source of true and lasting wellbeing?’ I’m not interested in quick fixes, or ready-made solutions. I’m someone who searches for root causes. I’m interested in the source of our pain and struggles. And I’m also interested in locating the source of what makes each of us feel most fully alive and aligned with our own personal truth.

Over many years of my practice, I’ve come to understand that the answer to this question of ‘true and lasting wellbeing’ rarely lies in plain sight on the surface of our lives. It usually requires us to dig a little deeper, to ask (and to stay with) the big questions:

Who am I in my most authentic self?

What makes me feel most fully alive?

What does my heart most dearly long for?

Now I’m under no illusion that finding the answers to these questions may take a lifetime, but I do believe that we need to stay close to them, to live these questions – to love them even. For a question is like an opened channel. It allows truth to flow into our lives. Where we allow ourselves to be diverted or distracted from these deeper questions, the channel – the shaft of the well if you like  – becomes clogged, and we stand little chance of drawing up the fresh water of truth.

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So here in John chapter 4, we find Jesus arriving at the well, tired and thirsty, where he encounters a woman drawing water. It is a real meeting of opposites – of a Jew with a Samaritan, a man with a woman, the ‘chosen one’ and the ‘outcast’. If a bridge of trust and understanding can be found between these two, it can be found with anyone, anywhere. And this really touches me. Because in truth I have struggled to find an authentic connection – a meeting point – with the personhood of Jesus. I, an English woman living in the twenty first century, he a man of Jewish descent living in the middle east some two thousand years ago. So I’m curious to follow the conversation that transpires between Jesus and the Samaritan woman.

Given their many differences and the historical enmity between their peoples, not to mention the social mores forbidding unsupervised contact between a man and a woman, it comes as no surprise that the woman rebukes Jesus saying ‘How is it that you a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’, to which Jesus replies that if she but knew who it was that was asking her, she would have asked and he would have given her living water. Jesus goes on to say that the water he can give would become in her ‘a spring of living water welling up to eternal life’.

So what are we to make of the notion of Jesus as ‘a spring of living water welling up to eternal life’ within us?

At the heart of Jesus’ promise lies the implied contrast between the water of the well and the living water which is the gift of Jesus as the son of God. In the original Greek of John’s gospel, the word ‘living’ implies something that is moving, flowing, streaming – fresh. The fundamental quality of living water is that it remains close to the source and is continuously refreshed and replenished by the source. Living water exists in a permanent state of emergence and renewal.

Jesus is living water because he remains close to the source – to God. In fact, Jesus is so close to the source, that he is ‘at one’ with the source. So, to encounter Jesus, is to be nourished and replenished directly from the font of life itself – from God.

Now this spring of living water, Jesus tells the woman, is forever welling up (the Greek word for welling actually implies a ‘gushing’ of water, such is its abundance). This theme of abundance has been explored earlier in John’s Gospel with the story of Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding at Cana. Still, God as source, does not give himself to us ‘all at once’. He gives us just the exact amount of living water – the degree of truth, of challenge, and of love – that we can carry, that we (in the limitations of our humanity) can bear. In the Lord’s Prayer we say, ‘Give us this day our daily bread’. At communion, we sip from the cup. God – the source of all grace and truth – knows what we need, and what we can bear.

We can be assured that we will have ‘enough’ day by day. Enough love, enough hope, enough strength to endure difficult times, because the source of living water is never far away. In speaking of the living water welling up within us, John wants us to know that the outpouring of God takes place in us, and through us, and between us. What the life of Jesus shows us is that the living God is close by, right here in the wellspring of our lived experience and our encounters with each other.

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So what is it that our hearts most dearly long for? For what do we thirst? The answer to this will be as personal to you and to me as it’s possible to imagine.

In his conversation with the woman at the well, Jesus suggests that what we thirst for most deeply is ‘eternal life’. Now we tend to interpret this word ‘eternal’ as something that endures beyond death, something everlasting, but in its original conception, the Greek word for ‘eternal’ (menein) signals two other vital meanings, which relate not only to life after death, but to the quality and fullness of the life we are living right now.

• Firstly, the Greek word ‘eternal’ denotes something  abiding’, a word which holds the sense of a place (or a  relationship) in which we ‘abide’ – in which we rest, remain, or dwell, confident that here we will find the belonging, the truth and the love our hearts thirst for. Later in John’s gospel, we learn that this relationship with God’s abiding loveis mutual. In chapter 17, as Jesus is about to enter the Garden of Gethsemane, he says to his disciples, ‘Abide in me as I in you’. Could it be that God thirsts for us as deeply as we thirst for God?
• The second meaning of the original Greek word ‘eternal’ denotes something thatis sustained and sustaining. ‘Eternal life’ is life that nourishes us with food from heaven, with what we most need to find true, deep, and lasting wellbeing.

So what this story of Jesus’ meeting with the Samaritan woman suggests to me, is that the gift of ‘living water’ is to be found in an abiding, sustaining relationship of closeness and trust with the living source of the whole of creation – with God. And that the life and words of Jesus, conveyed in the Gospels, offer us an immediate and ever-present point of access to the wellspring itself.  There are other points of access (other wells), which lead us deep into the mystery of God:  prayer, contemplation and communion; beauty and wonder;  conversation and community; creativity and imagination; movement, laughter and play. Each person’s God-centred relationship is incomparable. Unique.

Through his encounter at the well, Jesus wants us to understand that eternal life is a living thing. If we are to dwell in its abiding grace, and be sustained by it, we need to tend it – to protect it, care for it, return to it often, learn from it, and cherish it. This responsibility to tend the wellspring within us, is beautifully articulated by the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, when she writes:

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.

And this perhaps is our primary responsibility – ‘to keep the channel open’ – to keep showing up at the meeting place with God (within us and between us); to rest and abide there; and so strengthen our faith that the living source is never far away, and will always give us what we need as we need it, and no more than we can bear.

Sue Chin

Preparing for this sermon has been challenging, but in a good way.  It has made me read the Gospel differently.  I normally internalise what I read, in a passive manner if you like.  For this sermon I have read the passage in a more proactive way, in particular highlighting those parts which have caused me to pause and contemplate on – which I would like to share with you today.  You will find that I do quote quite a bit from today’s Gospel.

What struck me immediately was the method and purpose of Nicodemus’ approach to Jesus.  We learn Nicodemus came to Jesus ‘by night’.  I was curious about the specific mention of ‘night’.  In particular, was Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews who had status, approaching Jesus at night because he was afraid of being spotted by the authorities?  The commentaries I have read have not disregarded this idea, but some have added the context of nighttime being a quiet time for Jewish teachers to study the scriptures.

In reading the rest of the passage, I notice how the focus of it changed to God’s purpose of sending Jesus, his only son, to live among us and ultimately to save us all.  I was particularly struck by how this was achieved through a clever interplay of questions initiated by Nicodemus – which were answered by Jesus.

When beginning to report the encounter, John mentions Nicodemus’ acknowledgment that, with the exception of Jesus, no-one can do signs – or miracles – without the presence of God.  In response, Jesus changes tack by saying that no-one can see the Kingdom of God without ‘being born from above’.  If the passage ended there, that would have been a cliff hanger.  What did Jesus mean by that phrase?  Commentators have said that ‘born from above’ can mean the same as ‘born again’ as both are translations of the Greek word ‘anothen’.  As I will come to later, to me, I understand this to refer to the sacrament of baptism.

Being keen to learn more, we read of Nicodemus replying to Jesus with two literal questions – how can you be born after growing old?  Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb to be born again.  To some outside observers who knew Jesus well, these may appear to be unnecessary questions.  However, taking into account that the society in which Nicodemus had status, and which was governed by literal laws, they were, in my opinion, good ones to raise as they were seeking greater clarification.

Jesus’s answer to Nicodemus is quite clear that to enter the Kingdom of God, people must have been born of water and Spirit – which happens to us under the sacrament of baptism – where we are baptised by water in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  He then goes on to clarify ‘What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit’.  Jesus then concludes this by showing what could be a logical outcome to this discourse – ‘you must be born from above’.  The passage could have ended there but it didn’t.

Jesus further enhances his answer by referencing the wind – although it can be heard, no one knows from where it comes or goes.  So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.  In the last mention of this name in this passage, Nicodemus then asks ‘how can these things be?’ – words to me which denote not a proud or arrogant man but rather someone who wants to get to the Truth.  Jesus replies by saying directly to Nicodemus – ‘Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?’

Thereafter, the rest of the passage is directed to all, that is not to a specific individual.  In acknowledging that people speak of what they know and ‘testify to what they have seen’, they do not receive the testimony Jesus is talking about.  To further emphasise the point, if the people had been told about earthly things and did not believe, how could they stretch their belief to heavenly things.  For people to see Jesus doing signs or miracles – the evidence would be in front of their eyes.  However, here he was outlining the difficulties of getting people to accept what they could not see without tangible evidence.

The last quarter of the passage (verses 13 – 17) becomes more concise yet specific in terms of Jesus’ role, mission and God’s purpose.  When reading this, I got the impression that here John is giving us in great clarity, messages about Jesus – and these help us better understand him in terms of his role and mission.  For example, John states that ‘no one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven to earth, that is the Son of Man’.  Furthermore, we are given the reassurance that ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.  To further emphasise the point, John says, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.

So I have shared with you some my reflections on today’s Gospel passage.  I am sure that you may have picked up on other aspects which have made you pause and think.

But if I had to highlight three takeaways they would be to:

• take Jesus’ phrases of being ‘born from above’ and ‘born of water and the Spirit’ as referring to the sacrament of baptism;

• understand God’s purpose for Jesus being sent down to earth, the result of Nicodemus’ probing has enabled those listening to the exchange and those who have subsequently read and heard the Gospel passage to be better informed and have a greater understanding of Jesus’ spiritual role and mission; and

• acknowledge the role that John’s Gospel plays in making clear Jesus’ role and mission on earth and the revelation of God’s purpose for his Son and how the world might be saved through him.

AMEN

Have you ever said the phrase ‘I give you my word’.  I have been reflecting on this phrase and what we mean by it.

When we say ‘I give you my word’ we are saying something very fundamental, something of supreme importance, because we are saying that we are a person to be trusted.  We are saying that our words will be matched by our actions, that what we have spoken will be done. We are essentially saying that we are a person who keeps their promises. 

Have you ever reflected how important our words are?  Have you ever reflected on what happens when people no longer keep their words?  On the impact of living in a society where we can no longer trust that people mean what they say?

When we think about ourselves, anyone with any length of experience in this life will know that in fact it is not easy to be a person who keeps their word, who stays true to their promises, their commitments.   Most of us will know that there are many times when we have not lived up to our words, when our actions have fallen short. 

In the garden of Eden the snake plants a seed of doubt into Eve’s mind about God’s word: ‘Did God actually say “You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?”  The snake’s words are a negative spin on what God had said to Adam previously.  Rather than the negative, the command is immensely positive: “You may surely eat of EVERY tree in the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die”.  So there is only one tree, out of many, many varieties, that they are not to eat from. 

We could say that God is setting a protective boundary, the kind of protective boundary that all good parents set around their children, when they know that that their children are not ready or prepared for certain experiences or ‘knowledge’. Perhaps at a later date, when they had grown in wisdom, Adam and Eve could have eaten of this tree, but in the story as it comes to us their desire to eat before the right time produces a catastrophic sense of alienation from God, each other and themselves, they are not ready for the knowledge of good and evil.

Christ goes into the wilderness to undo/overcome the disobedience of Adam and Eve. We cannot underestimate the intensity of the testing he undergoes at the end of his 40 days of fasting, the strength of the demonic power that is working to pull him off course, none of us could stand up under that temptation.

But Christ does.  And in doing so changes the destiny of all of us.

In the intensity of the testing Christ proves his faith, his trust in God.  He will not be diverted; corrupted or led astray.  His weapon against Satan is not some kind of miraculous power not available to us, his weapon is what is available to all of us, the words of God in the scriptures.  Three times Satan presents him with a corruption of his identity and mission, three times Christ quotes the scriptures.

What is happening in this moment?

Christ is showing us that humanity first and foremost was made to live in relationship to our creator and maker, a relationship based on trust.  Humanity was made to walk and talk with God in the garden.  We were not made as machines, as puppets, as mindless automatons, we are made with the capacity to choose, to walk away or draw near, we are made for relationship.

God wants to protect us from making wrong choices, choices that might harm us, but he won’t stop us from making those choices.  And we all make them.  And in God’s grace we can learn through them, even if this is at great cost to ourselves and others. 

When it says that we are made ‘to live from every word that comes from the mouth of God’ it is indicating that we are to live out of an active listening and hearing what God might be saying to us, we were made to live out of a living conversation, that we have the capacity to hear and respond to God, but first we need to draw near, to get close enough to hear, because God does not shout, God speaks and relates in intimacy, with those who are close to his heart beat.

We can only act on what we hear if we trust the one who is speaking.  If trust is broken you can’t really hear what a person is saying, because you don’t believe them.

The first step in re-establishing a broken relationship is to re-establish trust.  It’s why we have to say sorry, we have to admit we didn’t keep our word before the bonds of trust can be reestablished.  To be human is to learn to say sorry again and again.

God has never broken his word, but he still needs to re-gain our trust as we have become alienated and separated from him.   It is why Christ goes to the cross. At its most basic it is about restoring our trust and with that our capacity to hear and believe, that what God says might be true and trustworthy.  It is why St Paul speaks about salvation coming through the hearing of faith, our capacity to hear and trust has to be restored at the most fundamental level.

This Lent we are going to be turning to the gospel of John, on Sundays and on Tuesday evenings Lent study sessions.  Ian, Sue and Krista are going to be offering their reflections in a series of sermons.   The intention is that we might hear God speaking to us afresh.  Lent is all about regaining our capacity to listen, it is why we seek to create space in silence, in simplicity, in turning from distractions and noise to pay attention to what the Holy Spirit wants to say to us.

Perhaps the first step of faith is to actually believe that God might be wanting to speak to you?  Might have a word for you?   That God is seeking a relationship, a conversation with us.

Are we ready, are we close enough to hear what the Holy Spirit might be wanting to say?

One of the ways we might understand and approach Lent is as a pilgrimage, to know that in Lent we are being invited to undertake a journey of 40 days, a journey whose end is the joy of Easter Sunday.  It is important that we keep the destination in mind, we are journeying towards the cross and the resurrection of Christ, walking towards our own death and rebirth, our own baptism and the renewal of our baptismal vows, towards becoming Christian again in the renewal of the Holy Spirit.

We need to begin again each year, afresh.

Ash Wednesday marks this point where we begin again, we acknowledge our sin and brokenness, our need of God’s grace and forgiveness, our need for God to do within us what we cannot do ourselves.  This is the point of any discipline, any small concrete practice we might keep for Lent.  We do it in order to make a bit more space, a bit more room for the Holy Spirit within us, to open our hearts just that little bit more, so that we might receive just that little bit more of the love and grace of God.

Every year we need to make this journey, this pilgrimage.

Ash Wednesday is the moment when the prodigal son comes to his senses and decides to make the journey back to his Father.  Like him we acknowledge that we too have wandered far from home, like him we find ourselves in a strange land, we too are in exile, we too have spent all our resources, we are burnt out, run dry, empty and hungry.  We don’t want to go it alone anyone. We want to live in our Father’s house again.  We having nothing left to lose. 

What might encourage us to set out on our Lenten journey is the image of the Father watching and waiting for our return.  To imagine ourselves being embraced and kissed, tears flowing, being dressed in the finest robe, a ring put on our finger, shoes on our feet, that God is preparing a feast to celebrate our return.  We are not going to be slinking in unnoticed.

I wonder if we can imagine that this is what mercy looks like, this is what it means to return to God, to receive such a welcome?

There is another son in the story of course.  The older son who does not feel any of the joy of the Father at his brother’s return.  He wanted to see his selfish, reckless, feckless younger brother get punished, banished to the fields, to working with the hired hands, to ensure he would really know his unworthiness.

We all have something of the older son within us, the person who has worked hard and deserves more, is resentful, judgemental, and angry.  The story does not tell us what the older son had to do to be changed, to have his heart opened to mercy and forgiveness, but we could reflect that he too needs to go on a Lenten pilgrimage, he too needs a journey to grasp who his Father really is, the one he does not yet know despite always being with him, serving him day in and out, to grasp that all that Father has is already his, there is nothing to be earned, or proved.

This Lent we might reflect on who we are in the story, are we the prodigal son – wasted and burned out, or are we the angry, judgemental, resentful older son?  Or are there elements of both within us? How might we become more like the Father, full of compassion, waiting and watching for those on the road home.

As we come to the imposition of ashes to mark the beginning of our pilgrimage this Lent, I want to share these words which echo something of what I have been sharing:

‘On Ash Wednesday, we are marked with ashes and reminded that we are mortal. It is one of the few moments in the year when the Church refuses to soften her language. We are dust. We will die. That is not a threat. It is a fact.
There is something bracing about beginning there. Lent does not start with self-improvement or vague aspiration, it starts with truth.
That truth is not meant to crush us, it’s meant to free us from pretending. When we accept our limits, our need for grace becomes less abstract. We are not striving to be impressive before God. We are returning to him as creatures who depend on mercy.
Given another chance to begin.‘

Amen.

[Quoted from The Ember Post on Substack by someone who calls themselves ‘The Hopeful Ordinand’].

Homily given by Rev’d Vanessa Elston, Sunday 27 Oct 2025 (Psalm 84.1-7; Luke 18.9-14)

Christians often say that they find prayer difficult; it’s something they know they should do but often struggle with.  Sometimes I think we need to approach the topic from other angles, to come at prayer from a different route than the one normally taken, so prayer can be understood and experienced in new ways.  I want to offer two such reflections today.

One comes from the story that Jesus tells in Luke about the Pharisee and the tax collector, and the other comes from the Psalmist’s longing to enter the courts of the Lord in Psalm 84.  So, let’s start with Jesus’s parable.  Luke tells us the point of the story at the beginning; he really doesn’t want us to miss why Jesus told his story.

“He told this parable to some who trusted in themselves, that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt.”

I want to speak first about this huge danger in religion, in all religion, whatever its forms, practices, traditions and teachings, that Jesus is warning us about.  The great danger, the treacherous bog into which we can fall, is that of self-righteousness.  Being religious can quietly feed that inner voice: ‘I’m better than other people because I go to church, I give money to charity, I pray, I volunteer, I help others.’  We could all find ways of speaking those words that the Pharisee speaks.  Jesus is giving us a caricature, but if we’re honest all of us have these scripts within us; it is a subtle temptation.  We are seeking to be good Christians, to be faithful, diligent, but along with this something else starts to happen: we start to see ourselves as better than others.  It’s what happens when religion becomes moralism, a set of rules whereby I can tick the boxes and say, ‘well I’m doing that so I am OK’, and then we start looking down on other people, we start judging others, and this can then turn into contempt.  We can end up in that place that Jesus is parodying in the Pharisee.  It is also a massive turn-off for people outside the church.  Many people will not walk through the door of a church because they fear they will be judged by the people inside, they fear they might be regarded with contempt.

The Greek word for contempt appears a few other times in Luke, in Acts, and the apostle Paul’s letters. It’s very interesting when you look at where it appears.  The word is exoutheneó; it means to despise, to count as nothing, to cast something out as lacking any value, to treat it with utter contempt.  With regards to another human being, it is a complete dismissal of that person’s value and worth.  The word is used in Luke 23:11 to describe how Herod and his soldiers treated Jesus with contempt and mocked him.  In Acts 4:11 Peter says that Jesus is the stone which the Jewish religious leaders have rejected, set at nought.  Jesus was despised by both Romans and Jews, treated with contempt, regarded as worth nothing.  He knows what that feels like.

St Paul writes to the young church of Corinth, that still has not grasped the need for a radical overturning of human systems of worth and honour, and he uses that same word as we find in Luke for contempt: “God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God”(I Cor. 1.28-9).  It is hard for us to appreciate how deeply the early church turned the ancient world’s systems of values upside down.  Christianity was a religion where slaves, women and children, those that were regarded as nothing, of no worth, found value.  And the Roman empire, like all empires, was built on its sense of superiority and contempt, despising, treating as nothing, the millions it enslaved.  You can’t have an empire, a system of slavery, without this contempt, this despising, this dehumanizing of others.  The revolution that Christianity brought to this world was that every single human being has intrinsic value in the eyes of God.  We forget how deeply this has formed our own culture.  It has been enshrined in the language of human rights.

So how does this impact prayer, our dialogue with God.  I want to say that prayer begins with our inner dialogue, that before we speak to God it is what are we saying to ourselves that really matters, because this either opens the door into real, meaningful conversation with God or it makes it impossible.  If we are full of ourselves, our prayers just bounce off the ceiling.  Without a greater sense of humility we can’t pray.

What do I mean by humility?  Humility is the place of honesty, it’s the place where we shed our illusions, our fantasies, our unreality about who we really are, and what is going on.  This kind of honesty is not easy, it’s not easy to come to the place of truth about ourselves.  We need others to help us, those who really love us and can speak that truth to us.  And real prayer requires this kind of honesty, coming to a place of truer knowledge about ourselves.  Spiritual direction is when we allow another to accompany us on that journey into greater truth and self-knowledge.

There are two temptations for how human beings see themselves.  One is an unrealistic puffed-up vision, of how we are better than others, and the other is an inner contempt, or self-hatred, we despise ourselves.  This is the spiritual danger of the tax collector, his temptation, that we see no hope for ourselves, we sink into despair.

Humility is a place of being grounded, earthed, between these two extremes.  I know myself, I see my sins, my weaknesses, but I also know that I am valuable, that God does not abandon me, but in Christ has provided a path of grace and spiritual growth, the Holy Spirit to guide and lead me, and others in the church to encourage and support me.

So, prayer is this journey into greater honesty and grounding in God’s love and truth.

The other side of prayer is to get in touch with the deep longing we have for God, in the words of the Psalm, “my soul has a desire and longing to enter the courts of the Lord, my heart and my flesh rejoice in the living God.”  There is so much distraction in our culture to smother that longing.  I believe that the renewal of the church depends on us uncovering and discovering afresh our deep hunger for God, this existential longing.  To awaken to this spiritual hunger is the beginning of prayer.  God has placed this longing within each of us, like a magnet looking for north, like a worm coming up to the surface after it has rained.  Prayer is attending to this deeper longing, so that even though we might feel we are passing through a dry and barren place, the valley of Bacca, we find this spring, the bubbling up of a deeper source, that can sustain us, beyond our own strength.

So, prayer is honesty and true self knowledge, and prayer is the deeper desire of our hearts.  It is not something strange or foreign, but actually the truest coming home to ourselves and to God.

“Blessed are those whose strength is in you
in whose heart are the highways to Zion,
who going through the barren valley find there a spring,
and the early rains will clothe it with blessing.
They will go from strength to strength
and appear before God in Zion.”

Amen

First, a bit of contextualization: last Sunday was the beginning of FLOURISH, a three-month season of encouraging growth at St Barnabas, especially growth in financial giving and volunteering.  Jennie Allen offered a Reflection focused mainly on our financial situation, giving a clear and candid account of the fact that, despite good management of our halls as an income source, our bank accounts are not as healthy as they need to be to sustain us long-term.  If you missed it, a digest of the facts and thoughts Jennie shared can be found in the flyer ‘Help St Barnabas Flourish!’, and on the white screens at the back of the church near the font.  Please do take the time to read these materials.  You may be surprised by what you learn.  Did you know, for example, that there is no automatic trickle-down flow of resources from the national or diocesan levels of the Church of England to parishes like ours?  To the contrary, we are expected to cover all our own expenses, including the cost of paying our vicar a decent wage for her truly invaluable work.  This week, it falls to me to focus more on the kind of giving we call volunteering: the giving of our time and our talents.

I will warm to my subject with a brief account of some unusual goings on in the church last Sunday evening.

One of the many new growth sites Vanessa is busy cultivating here at St Barnabas is a fellowship group for older children who have already taken their first Communion or are preparing to do so.  Just now, all the children in this age group happen to be girls; and so, the aptly named ‘Girls’ Group’ has been born.  Currently, there are five members, and I don’t think anyone will mind if I name them.  The girls of the Girls’ Group are: Rose Petter, Olivia Dunlop, Peg Fell, and Mary and Clara Dunlop, and they meet with Vanessa one Sunday evening a month for snacks, activities, and faith-related conversation.

Last Sunday, for their most recent meeting, Vanessa asked me if I would come along and help her teach the girls about some of the special objects we keep inside the sacristy and maybe even let them have a go at robing up and running through the choreography of a liturgical procession.  So, after some refreshments in the vicarage kitchen, and an interesting discussion about the value of tradition, Vanessa and I led the girls into the church, admitted them past the imposing panel doors below the organ, whisked them through the choir vestry, and ushered them across the threshold of the inner sanctum, the sacristy itself.

We opened the safe so they could handle the chalice, the paten, and the ciborium and learn the words for these sacred communion vessels.  We explained what each of the different altar linens is for and showed them the vestments.  They found albs that fit them and put them on, and then everyone gathered around the thurible – the incense burner – to see how it works.  We taught them how to light the little coals, and everyone had a good poke and sniff at the incense granules in the incense boat.  Soon the fragrant smoke was billowing, and Mary boldly began working the chains that open and close the thurible and getting a bodily feel for how it swings.  ‘Just like a pendulum’, she said.  Olivia and Peg each claimed a lighted torch, Clara hefted the smaller brass cross, Rose took up the Gospel book, and off they all trooped, processing to the altar, just like on a Sunday.

They got to touch, and see, and smell holy things.  They were able to grab hold of them, feel the weight and volume of them, and move with them through holy spaces.  And they were genuinely – indeed, irrepressibly – eager and excited to approach holy things, keen to get familiar with the tangible means of worship, glimpse hidden things and probe the intimate recesses of this edifice, our church.  They wanted to be initiated into its mysteries.  ‘Show us the secrets!’ Clara exclaimed.  ‘Show us the secrets!’  So I showed them the aumbry – the little niche in the south wall of the Lady Chapel – where we keep some reserve sacrament, and they were delighted to draw back the little velvet curtain, insert the magically ornate key into the keyhole – just like Alice in Wonderland – and behold the beautiful – the best – ciborium inside, and the phials of holy oil.

The girls’ sense of wonder – and that plea, ‘Show us the secrets!’ – reveal, I suggest, that these young worshippers already have a well-developed sense that holiness is a bit like a Russian doll.  It has many layers, or nested scales.  Yes, this whole church is a holy place, set apart to be a house of God, a dedicated site at which God approaches us and we approach God, on a holy day, for a holy meal.  Yet, even within this holy place, there are spaces and things that are considered even more holy, more set apart.  And the deeper you go into the smaller and smaller spaces, the holier those spaces, and the things inside them, are supposed to be.

Now, this exercise with the Girls’ Group was more than just good Christian education; it was also an invitation to the girls to develop an interest in serving at the altar.  It was an effort to build our serving team and give it a future – maybe even nurture a future sacristan, if not for this church, then perhaps for other churches they may join when they are older.  And, so far, things look promising.  The girls were all willing and enthusiastic when Vanessa suggested we should plan a service for the near future at which they would all compose the serving team.

For many reasons, I found myself encouraged by the Girls’ Group.  The girls of St Barnabas are growing into confident young women unafraid to be seen and heard and certainly not intimidated by the unknown.  I was surprised and inspired to witness how they seem to be drawn to rather than put off by the Russian doll of holiness.

But, at the same time, our session in the sacristy made me contemplate – and not for the first time – how the Russian doll configuration of holiness can become an obstacle to the love of God, keeping some people at a distance from God and from their neighbours.  I was reminded that, at St Barnabas, there are many invisible thresholds analogous to the ones that lead into the sacristy and the Lady Chapel aumbry and that these thresholds may be inhibiting people from going deeper into the life of St Barnabas.

As Vanessa explained to the girls, we call the long centre aisle of a church the nave because there is a long history of likening the church to a ship – a navis, in Latin.  The pews seats are the main berths where most of us feel quite comfortable; we even have our favourite berths where we feel most at home.  This home space of the nave lies mainly between the dais and the doors, and some of us may seldom venture further than the loos beyond its limits.  As on a ship, in a church – even one’s home church – one can feel hemmed in by a lot of no-go areas: places restricted for crew or staff only, engine rooms for engineers who really know how things work and how to keep things running along smoothly, galleys for specialized crew who deal with the food, etc.  Most of the machinery of the ship – and the cost of running it – remain a mystery to many on board.

In small but big ways, everyone in the pew seats is surrounded by multiple invisible lines: the line between the nave and each mysterious little cabinet around its periphery; the line between the nave and the technology that serves it (the sound system, the lighting system, the internet); between the nave and the organ loft; between the nave and the church offices; between the nave and the halls storage cupboards; between the nave and the garden; or between the nave and the kitchens.  The mysteries that lie beyond those thresholds may seem utterly mundane compared to the consecrated communion vessels, the holy oils blessed by the Bishop, or the Blessed Sacrament itself, yet they can seem as untouchable as the holy of holies to those who feel uninitiated.

I wonder if any of you have ever wondered what’s on the other side of some of those lines but not known how to find out.  Have you been curious but felt intimidated by those lines?  Have you wanted to go deeper into these or other mysteries, to help out with something, but found no neighbour to guide you?

If so, if invisible thresholds are limiting the love of God for anyone at St Barnabas, Jesus wouldn’t like it.  He was a critic of holiness gone wrong, of holiness missing the point of itself, which is to enable the love of God, in both senses of this wonderfully ambiguous phrase: our yearning after God and God’s loving compassion for us.  The point of holiness is to let God dwell with us as our neighbour and to bring everyone into the neighbourhood of God.

If people at St Barnabas are not feeling enabled to volunteer because of invisible thresholds that inhibit them, I have to look to myself and ask what I should be doing to help usher them over those thresholds – as we sought to do with the Girls’ Group in the sacristy.  I have spent a number of years now – since 2018 when I joined St Barnabas – trying to cross such lines myself, working to overcome a strong and abiding sense of always being an outsider.  Have I been too preoccupied with my own progress across these thresholds and failed to notice and help others make the same transitions?  Have I, in short, been like the priest and the Levite in the parable of the Good Samaritan – so focused on what I need to know and do in order to play a part in the life of God’s house that I have passed by opportunities to show compassion for others struggling to go down that same road?  Perhaps, like the priest and the Levite, I have forgotten what the lawyer in Luke’s gospel knew and stated clearly to Jesus, in spite of himself: namely, that one indiscriminate act of compassion is enough to make even a Samaritan – a very byword for impurity – holy and fit to come into the presence of God.  Indeed, I think the story should be called the parable of the ‘Holy Samaritan’, a phrase which would have been an even more shocking oxymoron to the Judeans of Jesus’ day than ‘Good Samaritan’.

It is clear to me, at any rate, that it won’t do for me simply to exhort people to join rotas or volunteer to contribute in some way to the staging of one-off events – as if individuals could just elect to be more active all by themselves, without hands-on encouragement – encouragement of the kind we tried to give to the Girls’ Group last Sunday.  It seems to me that we would do well to develop and apply this model in many more of our volunteer areas.  People shouldn’t have to put up their hands in isolation, not really knowing what they’re getting themselves into, without mentors and co-learners.  Plans for such small groups are already brewing.  The St Barnabas Singers would be one.  A Holy Company of Greeters and Ushers would be another so that we could bring back the Offertory – a key moment in the liturgy and a channel of income we’ve bene missing for far too long now.  Another might be a Holy Company for Hospitality – a real cohort of cooks for community meals.  Another group might love the garden; another might be consecrated solely to the noble task of Table Erecting and Collapsing as necessary.  Your suggestions are welcome.  How you would like to love St Barnabas and keep it holy?

These things won’t grow up overnight, of course.  We’ll need to plant and compost them.  Meanwhile I do have a few tips you can implement on your own:

• Snoop: open those cupboards; find out where the loo roll is kept and the washing up liquid; poke around and be puzzled by what things are and why they’re there.
• Learn the name for something in the church: do you know what those high windows with the amber glass are called, for example?  Or what we call the space between the high altar and the dais?
• Or better yet, learn the name of a fellow worshipper in the church.  Tell them a bit of your story – even just a morsel of it – and ask them to tell you theirs.  I think getting to no one another, forging these little bonds, creates the molecules needed to build bigger collective action and projects.
• Ask someone to show you the secrets.

Which brings me back to the Girls’ Group – the real source of any wisdom here about the joy of being church.

When the girls learned that there is a basement below the high altar, they insisted on going down to see it.  Now, as anyone who’s been down there will know, there’s not much amongst all the clutter to inspire wonder, but they were especially drawn to the old safe in the wall – a real antique and that most delightful of enigmas: a sealed-up strong box the key to which has been lost.  I told them I have tried every key I could find (and there are heaps of them around here), but, alas, no luck.  This did not daunt them.  “I’m going to find it,” Clara declared.  So now, I assume, the search is on, impelled by visions of what truly awful things might lie inside that occult little vault.  I hope that Clara does find the key.  There may, in fact, be something interesting or important in there.  But I expect that, if one day we were finally able to open it, we would find that, as with the tomb on Easter morning, the secret we are after, the holy and living God, would not be in there.

The secret of the Russian doll of holiness is that the dolls never end.  You never get to an inner-most doll, a true doll that was hidden by all the others, a naked holiness tabernacled in a last inner sanctum. The love of God, in both senses, just keeps drawing you on, deeper and deeper into its irreducible, relational mystery.

May the love of God help us all to help each other help St Barnabas flourish!