When we come to Church to worship and praise God, one of the ways we do those things is by acclaiming his Son, Jesus Christ, as our Lord and Saviour. And it’s quite right that we should do that because that’s what Jesus is. But as we read the Gospels, it’s quite apparent that Jesus became our Lord and Saviour, that is, the Lord and Saviour of all people, after his earthly life and ministry were over. To all intents and purposes, Jesus says this himself. When a Canaanite woman asked him for mercy for her demon-possessed daughter, Jesus initial response was,

“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 

And later, when some Greeks approached Philip asking to see Jesus, Jesus’ response was to speak about his own glorification and death and he said,

“…I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”

And as we read in this morning’s Gospel, when Jesus sends out the twelve disciples to proclaim the Gospel, he sent them with this instruction; 

“Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 

The Great Commission to proclaim the Gospel to the world was something that Jesus entrusted to his disciples, but not during his own earthly life, that was something for them to do after he’d been lifted up. It was only then that all people would be drawn to Jesus so that the whole world could acclaim him as their Lord and Saviour. 

Obviously, as Jesus’ disciples in our own time and place we share in the work of proclaiming the Gospel today. It’s up to us and people like us, those who do acclaim Jesus as our Lord and Saviour, to carry out the Great Commission in the time and place in which we live. And it’s imperative that we do that. We must proclaim the Gospel and draw people to Jesus today if we want there to be people acclaiming Jesus as their Lord and Saviour in this place in the future. I’m sure we all know and understand that. But as well as bringing people to faith, new people to faith that is, we also have a duty to look for our own lost sheep too and to bring them back into the fold. I’m talking here, of course, about those who used to come to church but don’t now.

If we look around church this morning, I’m sure we can all think, very easily, of people who aren’t here, and who don’t come here anymore, but who did in the past. Some of those people don’t come to church now because of age or illness and that can’t be helped.

But I’m sure we can all think of people who used to come to church and who could very easily still be coming to church but don’t. And these are the people I mean when I speak about our lost sheep.

At the APCM last month, I spoke about the importance of building viable parish churches. I said that viability was about a number of things, including the size of a congregation and the financial health of a parish church. If we think about our lost sheep, it’s not hard to see how much more viable this church would be if those people were still coming here on a regular basis. So it’s important that we do encourage these people to come back to church. Having said that, I know it’s not easy to achieve. I must admit that since I became a vicar, I’ve found that I’m far less likely to get any kind of real explanation from someone about why they’ve stopped coming to church than I might have expected previously. So judging from my own experience, you might have more luck in that department when you speak to people about this. And I hope you do speak to people about why they don’t come to church anymore because it’s important that you do.

Judging from my own experience, when you ask people about why they’ve stopped coming to church, whilst people can be very inventive with their reasons, there are a few that are used time and time again: you don’t need to go to church to be a Christian; I wasn’t getting anything out of it; an argument with another member of the Church; the hypocrisy of other Church members. And it is almost invariably other people’s hypocrisy that’s given as the reason for someone not coming to church anymore. In fact, in over forty years as an adult member of the Church I only remember one person saying that they stopped going to Church because they thought they were a hypocrite! These are the reasons people use time and again for not coming to church, so how do we deal with them?

Let’s start with the ‘You don’t have to go to Church to be a Christian’ reason; or is it an excuse? Actually, there is a lot you could say to someone who uses this excuse, but I think one of the simplest and most succinct ways to counter this argument is to remind people that being a Christian is about modelling your own life on the teaching and example of Jesus Christ. People who use this excuse often say that means living a good life, and so it does. But following Jesus’ example also means going to Church to worship God because we know that Jesus himself habitually attended public worship. The Gospels tell us he did:

‘…he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day…’

And at his trial, Jesus himself spoke about his regular attendance at both the synagogue and the temple when he said,

“I have spoken openly to the world. I have always taught in synagogues and in the temple, where all Jews come together. I have said nothing in secret.”

So when someone says you don’t have to go to Church to be a Christian you can simply remind them that being a Christian means doing what Jesus said and did. And that does include going to Church because that’s where we gather with other people to worship God, and that’s something Jesus always did.

A lot of people though do seem to have a misunderstanding about what coming to church is about and that comes across in the ‘I wasn’t getting anything out of it’ excuse for not coming to church. Some people, many people perhaps, seem to think that the main purpose of coming to church is so that they can have a nice time and go home feeling good about themselves. And so, when that doesn’t happen, they’re not getting what they want, and expect, and so they stop going to church. Sometimes we can get that good feeling from coming to church and it’s nice if we can and when we do, but that isn’t what coming to church is really about. The main purpose of coming to church is to worship God and worship isn’t God’s gift to us, it’s our gift to him. So we don’t come to church to get something from God, we come to church to give something to God. And it’s only when we understand that, that we come to church to give rather than to receive, that we actually do begin to receive and get more from coming to church. So when someone uses this as an excuse for not coming to church, simply remind them that we come to church to give, to offer our worship to God, to give God thanks and praise for what he’s already given us. We shouldn’t come to simply ask for nor expecting to be given even more. 

And it’s really this understanding that we come to church to make an offering to God that holds the answer to those who stop coming to church because of the behaviour of other members of the Church, whether that’s because it’s caused an argument, or because people are upset and angry about the hypocrisy of other people in the Church.

Sometimes, when I hear these things being given as excuses for not coming to church, I’m reminded of the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector.

“Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’

 But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’”

When it come to our dealings with other people, I think we can all be far too much like the Pharisee in this parable, holier than thou, if there’s a problem, it’s the other person that’s at fault, they’re the hypocrite, not me, and so on. In fact, we ought to be much more like the tax collector, humble before God and accepting of our own sinfulness and our need of forgiveness. None of us are perfect and, as we ourselves are sinful and in need of forgiveness, so we should be more tolerant and forgiving of the faults and sins of others. That’s the first answer to those who stop coming to church because of the faults and actions of other people. But there’s another answer to this excuse too.

We come to church to make our offering to God in thanks for all he’s done for us, so why should we stop doing that because someone else is a hypocrite or has acted in an un-Christian way? Is what they’ve done or said God’s fault or theirs? It’s their fault surely, not God’s, so why should we stop coming to church to offer our gift to God because someone else is a sinner and a hypocrite? Of course, because the Church is the Body of Christ, a corporate body, what happens in the Church affects us all in some way. But on a personal level, coming to church to worship God in thanks for all he’s done for us is part of our own personal response to our own faith in God. So what have the sins and hypocrisy of others got to do with that? Why should the sins and hypocrisy of others damage our personal relationship with God? Why should the sins and hypocrisy of others cause us to stop giving thanks to God for all he’s done for us? And that is the answer to this excuse for not coming to church. The faults, the behaviour and hypocrisy of other Church members may be very annoying and upsetting, but what have other people’s faults and failings got to do with God’s love for us, personally, and our own love for him? We can damage that relationship easily enough through our own faults and failings, our own sins and hypocrisy, without letting other people’s problems do that for us.

People do use lots of excuses for not coming to church anymore, and on the whole, I think they very often are excuses and not reasons, but those I’ve spoken about are amongst the most common. Perhaps these are the most common excuse given for not coming to church because those who use them think they’re the hardest to argue with, but actually, they’re not, they’re very easy to counter. And so, when you meet people who used to come to church here but don’t now, perhaps you could raise the subject with them with confidence that you can counter their excuses for why they don’t come to church and their arguments about why they won’t come back to church, and we could bring at least some of our lost sheep back into the fold.

Amen.

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Propers for the 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Trinity 2) 18th June 2023

Entrance Antiphon
Lord, hear my voice when I call to you.
You are my help; do not cast me off, do not desert me, my Saviour God.

The Collect
Lord, you have taught us that all our doings without love are nothing worth:
send your Holy Spirit,
and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of love,
the true bond of peace and of all virtues,
without which whoever lives is counted dead before you.
Grant this for your only Son Jesus Christ’s sake,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

The Readings
Missal (St Mark’s)      
Exodus 19:2:6
Psalm 100:2-3, 5
Romans 5:6-11
Matthew 9:36-10:8

RCL (St Gabriel’s)       
Exodus 19:2:8
Psalm 100
Romans 5:1-8
Matthew 9:35-10:8

One of my favourite stories about Trinity Sunday, which we celebrate today, concerns a sermon, of sorts, that a priest once preached on this day many years ago. It seems, he climbed into the pulpit, crossed himself and began;

“The Trinity is a great mystery of the Christian faith – and I think we should leave it at that. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

And promptly left the pulpit, sermon finished!  

I don’t know whether that story’s true or apocryphal, but I do like it. I like it because I think it’s quite funny, and I like it because it does contain some truth. The Trinity, the uniquely Christian understanding that God is one and yet is, at one and the same time, three distinct persons, whom we call the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, is a great mystery. It’s an understanding of God that is very difficult to explain because how can something be three different things and yet, at the same time, be only one thing? We can express what we mean by the Trinity, and we do every Sunday when we say the Nicene Creed, but we can’t fully comprehend what such a God is like within God’s own self, we can’t understand the true nature of such a God, so how can we possibly explain it? So the Trinity is a mystery, something that’s difficult, if not impossible to fully understand or explain.

And it did take the Church a long time to come up with the understanding of the Trinity that we do have. We now regard the doctrine of the Trinity as one of the central and defining beliefs of our faith, but we don’t find the Trinity mentioned explicitly in Scripture. In fact, we don’t find it mentioned in any Christian writings until the end of the 2^nd Century, and it wasn’t formally defined until the 4^th Century, first in the Nicene Creed, that was agreed at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, and finally at the Council of Constantinople in 381 AD. So it took the Church almost 200 years to first speak of God as a Trinity, and another 200 years to finally agree on what they meant by that.

But having said that God isn’t spoken of as a Trinity in Scripture, the early Church did use Scripture as the basis for understanding God as Trinity because they saw many passages of Scripture as hinting at this understanding of God. For example, we see the Trinity hinted at right at the beginning of the Scriptures in the image of God before and during the act of creation.

‘The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light”, and there was light.’

So we see God, the creating Father, the Hoy Spirit of God and God’s Word, the Word that, in his Gospel, St John later identified as Jesus, the Word made flesh, the Son of God. The early Church also saw the Trinity hinted at in the visit of the three men to Abraham which we read about in Genesis 18;

‘And the Lord appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the door of his tent in the heat of the day. He lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, three men were standing in front of him.’ 

In the New Testament, they saw the Trinity hinted at in the language concerning the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and most especially they saw it in the baptismal formula in the Great Commission Jesus gave to the Church;

“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…”

We can see a hint of it in the story of Jesus’ own baptism where we hear the voice of the Father speaking about his Son, Jesus, and sending the Spirit to rest on him in the form of a dove;

‘And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”’

And we also find overtones of a Trinitarian understanding of God in one of the most well-known of all Christian prayers, The Grace, which comes from the end of St Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, and which we heard this morning:

‘The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.’

So the uniquely Christian understanding of God as Trinity is based on Scripture even if this understanding of God is never explicitly stated in Scripture. It comes from contemplation on Scripture but while that can help us to express in words what we mean by the Trinity, it perhaps isn’t so helpful in helping us to understand the nature of God as Trinity.

To understand what God as Trinity is really like, what God, as God in God’s own being, is and is like, we’d have to be able to share some experience of being like that ourselves and that‘s something we can’t do, because we’re not Trinitarian beings ourselves. But nevertheless, I think we can experience something of the nature of the Trinitarian God, if only in a small way, by thinking about that prayer we know as The Grace, and trying to live out what we pray for in The Grace. 

The first thing we ask for in the prayer is the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. We know that grace, in this sense, is the assistance that God gives us to help us on our way to salvation. Grace, if you like, is the gift, or gifts, that God gives us so that we can live as Christians in the world; it’s what we need to follow Christ’s example and teaching properly, in other words. We can all have this grace, but we pray specifically for the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and so what we’re praying for here is the ability to use God’s grace in the way that Jesus himself did. We’re  praying that we can use the grace that God gives us to take up our cross each and every day and follow Jesus along the way he followed and in the life that he led. And if we can use God’s grace in that way, we’ll be a little closer to being one with God and with Jesus, a little closer to fulfilling Jesus’ High Priestly prayer that his disciples,

“…may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us…”

We also pray in The Grace, for the love of God. We know that the love of God is a love that encompasses all things, not only all of us, not only those who have faith and try to do his will, but all people whoever they are, whatever they are, and wherever they are. And God’s love doesn’t only embrace all people; his love embraces the whole of creation. And this is the love that we’re asking for in The Grace. We’re asking to be able to love our neighbour as ourselves, whoever, whatever and wherever those neighbours may be, to love them whether they love us or not, whether they’re good or bad towards us. And we’re asking to be able to love God’s creation too, all of it and everything in it and to treat it and everything in it accordingly. And if we can have this love and show it then we know that we’ll be experiencing something of the nature of God because, as St John tells us, 

‘God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.’

Finally in The Grace, we pray for the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

On a number of occasions, St Paul speaks about the Spirit in terms of love. In his Letter to the Romans, for example, he says,

‘God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.’

And in his Letter to the Colossians he urges Christians, above all things, above all other virtues, to,

‘…put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.’ 

When we think about the Spirit in this way, it’s not surprising that the Holy Spirit has been called the ‘bond of love’ that binds together the Father and the Son. We find this understanding of the Spirit in the writings of St Augustine. This, for example, from On the Trinity;

‘The Holy Spirit also, whether we are to call Him that absolute love which joins together Father and Son, and joins us also from beneath, that so that is not unfitly said which is written, “God is love;”’

We might say then that the Holy Spirit is what binds the Trinity together in perfect communion. So when we pray for the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, we’re praying that we might be enabled to share in the love that’s shared between the Father and the Son, in and through the Holy Spirit. In other words, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, just like the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of the God the Father, enables us to share in the life of God. Of course, we can’t fully know, or understand what it means to live as God lives because we’re not Trinitarian by nature, so we can’t experience that existence fully, at least in this life. But we can perhaps catch just a glimpse of that life, in this life, through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.

When we pray The Grace, what we’re praying for, is that we might be able to share in the life of God as God is in God’s own being; we’re praying that we can share in the life of God as a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We might only be able to enjoy a hint of that life, in this life, but we can have that much of it. And we can have it for one very simple reason, because we can love. And it’s only a lack of love, and can only be a lack of love, that holds us back from it.

Amen.   

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Propers for Trinity Sunday 4th June 2023

Entrance Antiphon
Blessed be God the Father and his only begotten Son and the Holy Spirit,
for he has shown that he loves us.

The Collect
Almighty and everlasting God,
you have given us your servants grace,
by the confession of a true faith,
to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity,
and in the power of the divine majesty to worship the Unity:
keep us steadfast in this faith,
that we may evermore be defended from all adversities;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.

The Readings
Missal (St Mark’s)   
Exodus 34:4-6, 8-9
Psalm – Daniel 3:52-56
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
John 3:16-18

RCL (St Gabriel’s)       
Isaiah 40:12-17, 27-31
Psalm 8
2 Corinthians 13:11-13
Matthew 28:16-20