When I first started thinking about my sermon for this morning, I did think of perhaps starting by asking you to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ because today, the day of Pentecost, is, as I’m sure many of you will know, the day that many people regard as the Church’s birthday. We regard Pentecost as the Church’s birthday because the Day of Pentecost, was the day when the promised Holy Spirit was poured out on the disciples so that they could begin to carry out the Great Commission that Christ had given them to proclaim the Gospel to all nations. We hear about that in our first reading this morning as we read about the disciples speaking to people from many different nations, each in in their own language “about the marvels of God.”

The pouring out of the Spirit was something that God had promised through the prophets. As we read on a little further in Acts, we find Peter quoting the prophet Joel and saying,

“And in the last days it shall come to pass, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh…”

It was a promise reiterated by Jesus, and a promise fulfilled on the day of Pentecost. And if we think of the pouring out of the Spirit as a promised gift, given on the day the Church came into being, then, if you’ll forgive what might be seen as a certain irreverence, I think we can see the Spirit as the Church’s birthday present.

This present, this gift, is a very great gift indeed. It’s a gift given by God that enables us to share in the life of God. It’s a gift that reminds us of all that Jesus taught. It’s a gift that leads us into all truth and wisdom. It’s a gift that enables us to not only have the Church but to build up the Church in obedience to the Great Commission Christ gave us. It’s a gift that enables us to be the holy people we’re called to be and to live the lives that Christ called us to live. But do we actually use this great gift in these ways?

I think at times, and at many times, we treat this gift in the way that children treat the presents they receive at birthdays, or Christmas. They know the big day is coming because they’ve been told it is. They know they’re going to receive presents because they’ve been promised them. And, when the big day comes, they rush, full of anticipation and excitement to open their presents. They tear open the wrapping paper and boxes to see what they’ve been given. They look, wide eyed and perhaps even open mouthed in joy and amazement at the wonderful, and these days, often very expensive gifts they’ve received. And then they put them to one side and proceed to play with the wrapping paper and boxes and, what presents do get their attention are very often the far less eye catching and cheaper ones that they probably weren’t expecting. The gifts that, at Christmas, we call ‘stocking fillers’.   

I think we can be like this with the gift of the Holy Spirit because we don’t use it in the way we’re intended to and, in fact, we very often play with the wrappings, as it were. For example, the Spirit enables us to share in the life of God, and part of sharing in that life is made possible through our regular worship of God in church. But how many people belong to the ‘You don’t have to go to church to be a Christian’ brigade? The Spirit is a gift that reminds us of all that Jesus taught, but how many people argue about what Jesus taught, and distort what Jesus taught for their own ends by putting their own interpretation on Jesus’ words? Where is the truth and wisdom that the Spirit brings in arguments like this, or in the divisions that so diminish and hinder the Church from fulfilling its Great Commission? The Spirit is a gift that enables us to build up the Church, but what we see around us is a Church that’s increasingly divided, a Church that’s struggling in our own part of the world at least, to even survive, let alone being built up and growing. And where is the Spirit in the lives of Christians who constantly bicker and argue amongst themselves, who far from being the holy people they’re called to be, live lives that are all but indistinguishable from the lives of anyone else?

The Spirit is a gift in itself, but it’s a gift that brings gifts of its own. The Church recognises seven gifts of the Spirit, and they’re named by the prophet Isaiah,

‘There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord….’

The Church refers to these gifts as wisdom, the gift of knowing what the right and Godly thing to do in any given situation and doing it. Understanding, the gift of discerning God and God’s truth in all things. Counsel, the gift of being able to discern God’s will and help others to discern it too. Fortitude, the gift of courage and of being able to endure suffering for the sake of the Gospel.

Knowledge, the gift of being able to see things through God’s eyes and so to understand the greatness of God. Piety, the gift of recognising our need of God and our duty to worship him. And fear, fear of the Lord, the gift of being aware of the glory of God and of his ways and so having due reverence and respect for God and his ways. The gift of knowing this allows us to know what the right and Godly thing to do is, and so the gift of fear is the beginning of the first and greatest gift of the Spirit, wisdom.

These are the gifts of the Spirit. This is what we receive, or at least are offered, when we receive the gift of Holy Spirit. But whether we use these gifts or not, and the extent to which we use them is up to us. I use the Divine Office of the Roman Catholic Church for Morning and Evening Prayer, and in the second reading of the Office of Readings on Friday, which was from the writings of St Hilary of Poitiers, it was put this way,

‘… unless the human mind drinks in the gift of the Spirit by faith, it will have the nature for understanding God, but it will not have the light of knowledge. The  gift which is in Christ is one, yet offered, and offered fully, to all. Always available, it is given in proportion to each one’s will to receive it; it remains with each according to his will to grow in merit.’

So we’ve all received this great gift of the Spirit and it’s always available for us to use. But it’s up to us whether we use and how we use it. So how do we know that we are using it and using it correctly and fully?

As well as speaking about the gifts of the Spirit, Scripture also speaks about the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is what the Spirit produces when its gifts are put to use. So if we want to know if we are using the gifts the Spirit’s given us, we need only look to see if we can find the fruit of the Spirit in our lives.

St Paul speaks about the fruit of the Spirit in his Letter to the Galatians. 

‘…the fruit of the Spirit,’ he says, ‘is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control…’

When St Paul speaks about the fruit of the Spirit, he’s contrasting it with the works of the flesh which he’s mentioned earlier and which are,

‘…sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these.’

So, if we want to know whether or not we’re using the gift of the Spirit, we need to look at ourselves and see which of those two lists our lives most closely resemble. If our lives contain more of the works of the flesh than fruit of the Spirit, then we’re not using either the gift of the Spirit, nor the gifts the Spirit brings, well enough. If our lives contain more fruit of the Spirit than works of the flesh, we’re doing better, because we’re making more use of the Spirit and its gifts.

Something that’s quite noticeable though, in what St Pauls says here, is that although St Paul lists fifteen attributes as works of the flesh and suggests that there are more works of the flesh than just these, he doesn’t call the other nine attributes he lists the fruits of the Spirit; he calls them the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is singular, and this suggests that the gifts of the Spirit, which are themselves are contained in the gift of the one Spirit, combine to produce one fruit of the Spirit which is made up of all of these nine attributes. In other words, if we’re using the gifts of the Spirit and the gift of the Spirit properly, we’ll show all these things in our lives, no just one of them, or some of them. I hope we never fail to show at least some of them in our lives, but can we honestly say that we always show all of them?

The truth is that our lives are always a mixture of the works of the flesh and the fruit of the Spirit, but we need to do our best to make sure that there’s more fruit of the Spirit in our lives than works of the flesh. And the best way to make progress in making sure that is the case is by looking at the gifts of the Spirit and trying to make sure that we cultivate and use them in our lives.

Today, we celebrate the birth of the Church, and give thanks to God for the great gift he gave us to mark that day, the pouring out of Holy Spirit on his Church and, in due time, on us. So let’s make sure that we don’t treat this gift in the same way children so often treat the gifts they receive on birthdays and at Christmas. Instead, let’s show our thanks to God for this great gift by using it as he intended it to be used, to help us be the holy people we’re called to be and for the building up of the Church.

Amen. 

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Propers for Pentecost, 28th May 2023

Entrance Antiphon
The Spirit of the Lord fills the whole world.
It holds all things together and hears every word spoken by man, alleluia!

The Collect
God, who as at this time
taught the hearts of your faithful people by sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit:
grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgement in all things,
and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort;
through the merits of Christ Jesus our Saviour,
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)        
Acts 2:1-11
Psalm 104:1, 24, 29-31, 34
1 Corinthians 12:3-7, 12-13
John 20:19-23

RCL (St Gabriel’s)       
Acts 2:1-21
Psalm 104:26-37
1 Corinthians 12:3-13
John 20:19-23

This morning’s Gospel continues our reading of Jesus’ Farewell Discourse from St John’s Gospel. This is something we’ve been reading for the last few Sundays, and this morning, we hear the start of the last part of that discourse which, although it still forms part of the Farewell Discourse, is often given its own name or title, and that is, Jesus’ High Priestly Prayer.

As we go through this part of the Farewell Discourse, Jesus says a number of times that he’s praying but we know right from the outset, before he says that, that he is praying because we’re told in the first verse that Jesus “lifted up his eyes to heaven” which is a posture people adopted when praying that we read about a number of times in the Scriptures. And Jesus prays first for himself, then for his disciples, and we read part of that prayer this morning, and then finally, in a part of the prayer we don’t read this morning, he prays for those who will believe through the disciples, and in this part of the prayer Jesus is praying, among others, for us.

It’s not unusual to read of Jesus praying in the gospels but the first part of the prayer, I think, can seem a bit strange to us. For one thing, Jesus starts by praying for himself and that’s something we tend not to do isn’t it? We usually pray for others first and ourselves last, probably because we think to do things the other way round is self-centred, perhaps even un-Christian. And yet, in this prayer, Jesus does pray for himself first. But as he goes on, it becomes obvious why he does that. The prayer begins with the Father, but what Jesus then  prays for makes it quite clear why he comes next; it’s because what he says amounts to a statement of his own equality with the Father. And it’s all to do with glory.

All this talk of ‘glorification’ is another reason, I think, why this prayer can sound a bit strange to us. What is Jesus really saying amidst all this prayer for glorification and talk about glorification?

We know that to glorify someone is to say something good about them, and that’s essentially what glorification means in this prayer. Jesus starts by praying to the Father, that that the Father, his Father will,

“… glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you …”

What Jesus is praying for here is that, through his Passion, his death on the Cross, and his Resurrection, his own true identity as God’s Son will be revealed. And as Jesus is glorified by being revealed as God’s Son, he will glorify the Father because his words and works will be shown to have come from the Father.

Because Jesus’ words and works will be shown to have come from the Father, the Father will be glorified too, because his nature will be revealed in and through what Jesus has said and done. The Father’s love for us, his willingness, and desire, to forgive us our sins, his wish for us to be restored to that loving relationship with him that we were created for, and the Father’s wish for us to enter eternal life, will all be revealed through Jesus’ words and works. And to all intents and purposes, that’s what Jesus is saying when he says to the Father,

“I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do.”

So, in essence, Jesus is saying, ‘When I’m raised from the dead, I’ll be glorified because everyone will know who I am, and because they know who I am, you, my Father, will also be glorified because they’ll also know you. People will finally understand that I came from you, and so they’ll also realise that everything I said about you is true. And he then moves on to this great claim to equality with the Father;

“And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.”

Here, Jesus is praying that he will be restored to his rightful place at his Father’s side. He’s saying that this is where he came from, and this is where he will return to. He’s saying that he was in the beginning with the Father and the Spirit before creation began. He’s saying that he, like the Father and the Spirit, is from all eternity.

When we understand what Jesus is praying for and saying in the first part of this prayer, it isn’t such a great surprise that he comes first in the prayer. But Jesus prayer for glorification doesn’t end here. Later, when he prays for his disciples, he says,

“… I am glorified in them”.

When we understand what Jesus means when he speaks about his glorification by the Father and the mutual glorification of the Father and the Son, I think it’s quite obvious that when Jesus says he will be glorified in his disciples, he means that, just as the Father revealed the Son to the world through the Resurrection, and Jesus revealed the Father to the world through his words and works, the disciples will reveal Jesus, the Son, to the world through their words and works. And that is, in fact, what we’re called to do as disciples of Christ isn’t it. That’s the content of the Great Commission Jesus gave his Church, the mission we were reminded of in the Gospel reading just a few days ago on the Feast of the Ascension. Jesus’ call to his Church to,

“Go, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”

This how we glorify Jesus, how we reveal Jesus to the world. But have you ever stopped for a moment to consider just what a great and terrible commission this is? What an awesome and frightening commission this is?

We glorify Jesus by revealing him to the world, but what if we do something in his name, which doesn’t reveal Jesus to the world? What if we, as a Church, or as individual Christians, do something that Jesus has taught us not to do, or don’t do something he told us that we should do, what then? How are we glorifying Jesus in those cases? Who and what are we revealing to the world when we do things like this? Aren’t we, in fact, dishonouring Jesus when we do these things?

We know that some terrible things have happened in the Church, and in churches. We know that there have been some terrible crimes committed by Church people. We also know that there have been attempts to cover-up and hide these crimes. But these things haven’t only been crimes against their human victims, they’ve also been crimes against Jesus because we are called to glorify him by revealing him to the world. What have those who’ve committed these crimes revealed to the world? They are called Christians, people who model themselves on Jesus Christ. What then, have the things they’ve done revealed to the world about Jesus? Have they glorified him, or dishonoured him? And in all the apologies the Church and its people have made, have we ever heard anyone from the Church say ‘This is not what Jesus Christ taught. What has happened here has nothing to do with Jesus Christ and we also ask his forgiveness for dragging his name and the name of his Church through the mud and the mire.’ You may have heard someone say that, but I don’t ever recall hearing it.

But we in the Church, we who call ourselves Christians, can dishonour Jesus in so many ways. We do it through our petty squabbling. We do it through our jockeying for position, lusting after a position in the Church that gives us some authority, and then using, though abusing might be a better word for it, that authority to get our own way. We do it through our ‘empire building’ wanting multiple positions in a church so we can be in charge of everything. We do it through forming cliques so that we can keep hold of the reins of power and keep down, or even force out those we disagree with or simply don’t like. And how many people have left the Church because they’ve been misused and abused by other members of the Church? I come across people like that all the time, people who tell me that they used to go to this church or that but stopped going because of an argument with another member of the church.

Sometimes they’ve stopped going to church because of the hypocrisy of another member, or members, of the church, the way they were behaving. On the other hand, some of those people have stopped going to church because they’ve been taken to task for their own inappropriate and un-Christian behaviour. This is something Jesus told us we should do, but how many people are too proud to accept or admit that they’ve been in the wrong and, when they’re told that they are, or have been, get on their high horse and simply stop going to church? Often playing the victim into the bargain?

We know all these things go on in the Church and in churches but does any of this glorify Jesus, or does it all dishonour him? And if we, who are called to glorify Jesus, dishonour him, how can we reveal him to the world? If we call ourselves Christians, people who are Christ-like, and we’re petty, and proud, and malicious, and arrogant, and stubborn, isn’t there a danger that’s what the people who we’re called to bring to know Jesus will think of him too? We don’t like to be called hypocrites but, when we do things like this, it’s for the best that we are. Better that people know we’re being hypocrites than for them to think that Jesus himself was like this.

In this morning’s reading from the First Letter of St Peter, we’re told that when we suffer for Christ’s sake, the spirit of glory rests on us. It doesn’t rest on us if we suffer for doing wrong, but it does when we suffer for being a Christian. So, when we glorify Jesus through our obedience to him, he glorifies us in the Spirit; we’re glorified because we’re revealed to the world as his disciples. So let’s be glorified in the way Christians should be glorified. Not by trying to glorify ourselves, but by glorifying Christ, so that he will glorify us. That will mean suffering for Christ in some ways, and one of those ways is certain to be through accepting that we have to be a little more humble than we’d like to be; by not insisting on having our own way, by not wanting to be in charge and having the final say in everything we’re involved in, and by accepting that sometimes we are wrong and other people are allowed to point that out to us without it causing an argument, or causing us to go into a sulk and refusing to do anything in the church again, or to throw a hissy fit and stop going to church completely. And if people aren’t happy about that then, I’m sorry, but it’s all part and parcel of being a Christian. It’s part and parcel of what it means to reveal Jesus to the world, and to glorify him in the world because isn’t this exactly what Jesus told us to do when he said,

“If anyone would be my disciple, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me”?

Amen.

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Propers for the 7th Sunday of Easter, 21st May 2023

Entrance Antiphon
Lord, hear my voice when I call to you.
My heart has prompted me to seek your face;
I seek it, Lord; do not hide it from me, alleluia!

The Collect
O God the King of glory,
you have exalted your only Son Jesus Christ,
with great triumph to your kingdom in heaven:
we beseech you, leave us not comfortless,
but send your Holy Spirit to strengthen us,
and exalt us to the place where our Saviour Christ is gone before,
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)      
Acts 1:12-14
Psalm 27:1, 4, 7-8
1 Peter 4:13-16
John 17:1-11

RCL (St Gabriel’s)         
Acts 1:6-14
Psalm 68:1-10, 32-35
1 Peter 4:12-14, 5:6-11
John 17:1-11

If you were to ask a Christian, any Christian, ‘Do you love Jesus?’, the answer would almost certainly be, ‘Yes’. In fact, it would be a surprise if the answer was anything other than yes. But if you were to ask, ‘Do you keep his commandments?’, and they were to answer honestly, I think the answer, at best, would be, ’I do my best’. We know that’s the honest answer because we all know that sometimes we do keep Jesus’ commandments and sometimes we don’t; and we know we don’t. And yet, in this morning’s Gospel, Jesus says that the one who loves him will keep his commandments. So how can we say we love Jesus when we know that we don’t do what he says those who love him will do?

In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus links love of him with reception of the Holy Spirit, and that’s understandable. Jesus says that those who love him will keep his commandments and, if we read on a little further in St John’s Gospel, Jesus goes on to say,

“… the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.”

So the Holy Spirit reminds us of what we need to do to love Jesus. And, as Christians, we believe that we have received the Holy Spirit, so we can’t plead ignorance about this. We know what Jesus said, we know what we need to do to love him, so why do we so often fail to do what Jesus told us we need to do?

In this morning’s reading from the First Letter of St Peter, the Apostle urges us to live ‘a good life in Christ’ so that anyone who slanders us may ‘be proved wrong’. But we know that  the vast majority of criticism levelled at Christians is for their hypocrisy, for not practicing what they preach. Christians are criticised for speaking about what the good life in Christ is, but not living that life themselves. They’re criticised for proclaiming Christ’s commandments but not keeping those commandments. We might not like being accused of hypocrisy, but we can’t deny that we do sometimes fail, if not often fail, to keep Jesus’ commandments. And if we do deny that, or are ever tempted to deny it, we can soon put ourselves straight by recalling those words from the First Letter of St John;

If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.

Jesus’ word is in us because we have received the Holy Spirit, and to sin is to fail to keep Jesus’ commandments which the Spirit reminds us of; and yet we are all sinners. So what do we mean when we say we love Jesus?

I’m sure most, if not all of us, will know the saying, ‘You always hurt the one you love’. That is often true in life generally, and it’s just as true in our Christian lives too. In his Letter to the Ephesians, St Paul tells us something of what living the good life in Christ entails and among the things he says, he gives a warning not to ‘grieve the Holy Spirit of God.’ The word we translate as ‘grieve’ can also mean to cause pain, distress or sorrow. So we could translate this as do not hurt the Holy Spirit of God. And what does grieve, or hurt, the Holy Spirit is sin. What hurts the Holy Spirit is not living the good life in Christ; the Holy Spirit is hurt when we don’t keep Jesus’ commandments. And if we hurt the Holy Spirit then we must surely also hurt the Father who sent the Spirit to us, and the Son whose words the Spirit was sent to remind us of. And so, in grieving the Spirit through not keeping the commandments, we hurt the one we love, Jesus, who gave us the commandments.

If we think about why and how we hurt Jesus, it’s not too hard to see we do that in the same way and for the same reasons that we hurt the ones we love in general. We hurt the ones we love because we don’t listen to them. We don’t do what they want us to do because we want to do what we want to do. Sometimes, of course, what they want us to do isn’t the right thing to do, and then we’re right not to do that. But how often do we do our own thing for purely selfish reasons? How often do we hurt the ones we love by not listening to them and not doing what they want us to do simply because we want to do what we want to do, regardless of whether we’re right or not? And how often do we hurt Jesus because we don’t listen to either him or the Spirit for the same reason, simply because we want to do what we want to do rather than do what the Spirit is calling us to do and what Jesus’ commandments tell us we should do?

Life, as we all know, can be hard and stressful at times. Life can make us irritable, impatient and angry and because of that, life can lead us to acting in ways that hurt the ones we love.

How often, for example, have we had a bad day, perhaps at work, and we’ve come home and been irritable and impatient with our family or friends? How aften have we taken out our anger on our family and friends by being angry with them, and for no fault of theirs?

We do these things to our loved ones, and hurt them, very often simply because they are the ones we love, and because they are, they’re the ones who are there when we’re being irritable and impatient and angry. But when we do these things to others, we do them to Jesus too.

In speaking of the good life in Christ, in his Letter to the Ephesians, St Paul says,

I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

But we can be selfish, we can be irritable and impatient and angry with others and so, when we are these things and do these things, we don’t show humility, gentleness and patience. We don’t bear with one another in love, and we the lose the bond of peace. And we don’t only lose the bond of peace  between us, our neighbours, and our loved ones, we lose that bond between ourselves and the Spirit, ourselves and Jesus, and between ourselves and God. We lose that because we stop living the good life in Christ by failing to keep his commandments, the words of the Father than he was sent to speak to us and which the Father sent the Holy Spirit to remind us of. We grieve the Holy Spirit of God and we hurt Jesus, the one we claim to love above all others. 

Perhaps, to some extent at least, we can’t help having these feelings and emotions because they are part and parcel of being human. Indeed, we actually see these things in Jesus himself. We see them in his arguments with the Pharisees, and other religious leaders of the day. We see them in his exasperation at people’s hardness of heart, slowness of understanding and lack of faith. We see them in his cleansing of the temple. But in Jesus, these feelings and emotions were very targeted, they were aimed at the people who were hard of heart and slow of understanding and lacking in faith. They were aimed at those who were at least resisting, if not actually obstructing or rejecting the Gospel and the kingdom of God.

And in Jesus these feelings and emotions had a purpose, they were meant to admonish, certainly, but also to teach and to draw people to faith. With us, on the other hand, these feelings and emotions, whilst they may be caused by the same hardness of heart and slowness of understanding and lack of faith that gave rise to them in Jesus, whilst they may be caused by the evil and un-Godliness of the world, when we give vent to them, we tend to just blow our top at whoever happens to be around us at the time. We often take a scattergun approach, there’s no focus or point to our explosion of irritability, impatience and anger, we’re simply letting off steam, having a rant and rave about whatever we’re unhappy about at the time and if our loved ones happen to be the ones around at the time and we hurt them by what we do and say, that’s just too bad. We might not mean to do that, but they know what we’re like; they’ll get over it.

We might not be able to help ourselves at times because we are only human after all, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do anything about hurting those we love, or anybody else if it comes to that. If we blow our top about something and somebody gets hurt in the process, we can always say, ‘I’m sorry, please forgive me.’ can’t we? But how often are we willing to do that? How often are we willing to accept our faults and failings, to own up to them and to the consequences of our words and actions and ask for forgiveness from those we’ve hurt by them? That’s what we should do, as Christians, and not only with our neighbours and our loved ones, but with God too.

When we hurt others, we grieve the Spirit, we hurt Jesus and damage our relationship with God too. We do these things and fail to show our love of God and Jesus, but they always love us so we can always restore our relationship with them simply by being honest about our sins, the times when we don’t keep Jesus’ commandments, confessing them, and asking for God’s forgiveness. If we’re willing and able to do that then, as those words of St John remind us, we will be forgiven and restored to righteousness, to a right relationship with God.

It would be nice to be able to say that we love Jesus and show it by always keeping his commandments, but it’s more truthful to say that we try to love Jesus to the best of our ability by trying to keep his commandments to the same extent. But let’s make sure that we do try to do these things to the best of our ability and to be honest, and humble enough to confess our failures and ask for forgiveness when our best isn’t quite good enough.

Amen.  

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Propers for the 6th Sunday of Easter, 14th May 2023

Entrance Antiphon
Speak out with a voice of joy;
let it be heard to the ends of the earth:
the Lord has set his people free, alleluia!

The Collect
God our redeemer,
you have delivered us from the power of darkness,
and brought us into the kingdom of your Son:
grant, that as by his death he has recalled us to life,
so by his continual presence in us he may raise us to eternal joy;
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)       
Acts 8:5-8, 14-17
Psalm 66:1-7, 16, 20
1 Peter 3:15-18
John 14:15-21

RCL (St Gabriel’s)         
Acts 17:22-31
Psalm 66:7-18
1 Peter 3:13-22
John 14:15-21