As I’m sure you’ll have noticed that, during the Easter season, our usual cycle of Sunday readings changes in that, instead of an Old Testament reading, we have a reading from the Acts of the Apostles, and the reading after the psalm is always taken from the Book of Revelation. And there’s a very good reason for that. After Jesus’ Resurrection and Ascension, his ministry and mission passed to the Church, to the Apostles initially, and so during the Easter season we read about the acts of the Apostles, what they did in the very early days of the Church. And we read from the Book of Revelation because this book contains revelations that were given to the book’s author, John, for the benefit of some of the early churches. As we read this morning,

“I, Jesus, have sent my angel to testify to you about these things for the churches.”

And during the Easter season, we also move away from the Gospel of the year and read from John; readings that are very much concerned with Jesus’ teaching the disciples and through them, passing on that teaching to the Church.

And so, as our readings during the Easter season are so concerned with the Church, this morning I want to speak to you about the Church, and in particular, about something we profess to believe about the Church week by week in the Creed, and yet something that’s caused so much argument and division in the Church; our profession that we believe the Church to be one, holy, catholic and apostolic.

First of all, what do we mean when we say the Church is ‘one’? As we look at the Church, as it exists in the world, what we see is a Church that’s very far from one don’t we? I’m not sure of the latest figures but in the year 2000, it was reckoned that there were about 140 different denominations of the Church and, if all the independent groups and congregations were taken into account, perhaps as many as 34,000 different Churches in the world. Most of these divisions have come about because people in the Church have argued and fallen out with other people in the Church they once belonged to and so, either the Church has split into different denominations, such as happened between the Orthodox East and the Catholic West in the 11^th Century, and at the Reformation during the 16^th Century, or individual Christians have set up their own Churches, which is where the small, independent congregations come from. So how can the Church be one?

Well, we have to start by saying that there is only one Church, should only be one Church and can only be one Church because it’s Jesus Christ’s Church. He called the Church into being and he only called one Church into being. And, as we heard in this morning’s Gospel, Jesus intended the Church to be one, and prayed to the Father that it might be one.

“I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.”

And it’s clear from Jesus’ words in this morning’s Gospel that the source of this ‘oneness’, this unity, is love because his prayer to the Father continues,

“I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”

So there is only one Church because Jesus only called one Church into being and the Church he called into being is founded on love. The Church Fathers, the Church leaders who came after the Apostles, believed division in the Church to be the worst of all sins because it is always caused by a failure of Christians to love one another. I think they were right. And so I think we can say that the Church is one where there is love between Christians and conversely, that where Christians fail to love one another, we step away from the one Church that Jesus called into being and that’s shown in the fractured, divided Church we see in the world.

But Jesus prayed that the love between Christians should be the same as the love between himself and the Father. So, in addition to loving one another, to be part of the one Church Jesus called into being we have to love God too. And that’s where the holiness of the Church comes in.

I’ve spoken before about holiness, and I’ve said that most people seem to equate holiness with moral or spiritual perfection, but that’s not what holiness is. Holiness is simply about dedication to God. So the Church is holy where it’s dedicated to God and that means where the Church’s people are dedicated to God.

The Church is holy where it’s people love God and live according to his commandments. We know that above all, we’re called to love one another and so we could sum up both the holiness, and the oneness, of the Church up by saying that the Church is both holy and one where the Church’s people follow the great commandment to love God with all their heart and soul and mind and to love their neighbour as themselves. And conversely, that where the Church’s people don’t love God, the Church falls from holiness and that’s most often shown in that failure of the Church’s people to love one another that leads to division and disunity; to a loss of oneness. 

That brings us to what we mean by the catholic Church. This is perhaps the most controversial of all the four marks of the Church, as these things are known, in which we profess our belief in the Creed. We have to start by saying that nowhere in the New Testament is the Church described as catholic. So unlike the other marks of the Church, we can’t base our understanding of its catholicity directly on the Scriptures. What we have to do is to look at the earliest reference to the catholic Church to see what it meant then, and the earliest reference we have to the catholic Church is in the writings of St Ignatius of Antioch.

St Ignatius is thought to have been born in about 35AD, so shortly after the birth of the Church, and he was a convert to Christianity and possibly a disciple of the Apostle, St John. He’s thought to have succeeded St Peter as the bishop of Antioch and he was sent to Rome, where he was martyred  around the year 107AD. On his way to Rome, Ignatius wrote a number of letters to various Churches he’d visited including one to the Church in Smyrna, in modern day Turkey. And in that letter we read this:

Where the bishop is to be seen, there let all his people be; just as where Jesus Christ is present, we have the catholic Church.

That doesn’t tell us very much about what Ignatius meant by the ‘catholic Church’ but if we read Ignatius’ letters as a whole, we find that, for Ignatius,  the catholic Church, the Church where Jesus Christ is present, had a three-fold order of bishops, presbyters and deacons; that it included all Christian communities under episcopal oversight, that is, all communities who recognised the authority of their bishop; that it celebrated the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, and Ignatius denounces in the strongest terms all those who deny that the bread and wine of the Eucharist is truly the Body and Blood of Christ;

that it adhered to orthodox teaching and faith, that it practiced charity, in other words, it’s people loved one another, and that it adhered to the Scriptures, though at this time we’re not certain just what the Christian Scriptures were. I’m sure many of you will have heard that the word ‘catholic’ means ‘universal’  but more accurately it means something like ‘in general’ or ‘according to the whole’ So what Ignatius seems to mean by the ‘catholic Church’, the Church where Jesus Christ is present which, I think by definition must also be the one, holy Church, is the Church that’s made up of all those Christian communities who believe in and adhere to, all these things that the Church as a whole, holds sacred, believes in and practices. Which is a very different understanding to the one held by those who say that, because the word ‘catholic’ means universal’, anyone who claims to be part of the one, holy, catholic Church does, regardless of what they believe and do.

Finally we come to the fourth mark of the Church, the apostolic Church. Again, this is something we don’t find in the New Testament. And, yet again, the first reference to the apostolic Church is something we find in the letters of St Ignatius of Antioch, this time in his Letter to the Church at Tralles, another Church that was in modern day Turkey, in which Ignatius writes,

In apostolic fashion, I send the church my greeting in all the fullness of God, and wish her every happiness.

The term apostolic is hardly ever used, anywhere, in anything other than a Christian context and so it’s something that is very much a Christian idea. And in Ignatius’ and in early Christian writings generally, it has one of two meanings; it can either mean ‘like the Apostles’ or ‘directly linked to the Apostles’.  So the apostolic Church is the Church that, through its beliefs and practices, is in continuity with the Church of the Apostles, the one, holy, catholic Church that Jesus called into being.

Now, whilst we don’t find this in Scripture, we have to take what the Church Fathers say very seriously because people like Ignatius of Antioch were the second generation of Christians and Church leaders; they were taught by the Apostles themselves and so we have to assume that what they wrote, especially in these very early days of the Church, was what they were told by those who were taught by Jesus himself.

Unfortunately, the idea of apostolicity has become another source of disagreement and division in the Church because it’s become bogged down in arguments about the ‘Apostolic Succession’, the idea that the apostolic Church is one in which the bishops can trace a direct line of succession back to the Apostles. But apostolicity is a much broader and deeper concept than simply that. It’s about the faith and the whole life of the Church and its people. The apostolic Church is the Church that believes and does what the Apostles believed and did. And so, a Church that doesn’t believe what the Apostles believed and doesn’t do what the Apostles did, can’t be an apostolic Church.

If we think about these marks of the Church seriously, it’s not too hard to see that they’re complimentary and that we can’t really have any of them if we don’t have all of them. If we want to be part of the one Church that Jesus called into being we have to love one another. We will love one another if we’re dedicated to God and to obeying that great commandment to love him and love our neighbour as ourselves. Then we’ll be part of the holy Church. If we love God and each other, we’ll be far less likely to be the cause of or even part of that greatest of all sins, division and disunity in the Church; we’ll be able to remain in the main part of the Body of Christ which is the catholic Church. And if we can be like the Apostles, holding to the faith they received from Jesus and following the example they received from Jesus and passed on to those who came after them, we’ll be part of the apostolic Church.

In the Creed, Sunday by Sunday, we say we believe that the Church is one, holy, catholic and apostolic. This is what it means to say that; it only remains to live it out.

Amen.  

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The Propers for the 7th Sunday of Easter can be viewed here. 

Have you ever stopped and taken a few moments to consider just what a horrible place the world seems to be coming? By that, I mean just how really  horrible people seem to be coming towards one another? Just think about it for a moment now. It can’t have escaped many people’s notice that, at the moment, there are two high profile libel cases going on; cases which have resulted from celebrities insulting one another in public. I’m sure we’ve probably all noticed too that we now have politicians who seem to be less interested in making good policies than in also trading insults and looking for scandal about one another, less concerned with political campaigning than in smear campaigning. Then, of course, we have the woke brigade with their cancel culture, a group which, to all intents and purposes, are setting out to ostracise anyone doesn’t share their views; not only to treat anyone who doesn’t agree with them as an outcast themselves, but to bully others in to doing the same. And this is to say nothing of what’s happening in Ukraine at the moment.

As we look at the world we live in, and especially the increasingly belligerent,  intolerant, and even malevolent way that people treat each other, it would be very easy to despair of the world and its people. But then, every so often, something comes along to give us some hope that perhaps things are not quite so bad as they might seem because not everybody is so bad as people can often seem to be. And I came across just such a thing during the last week.

I came across it speaking to a bereaved family in preparation for a funeral, and I found it in the story of their parents. Mum, whose funeral I’d been asked to take, was born in Germany in the 1920s and she’d lived the whole of her teenaged years during the Second World War. During that war she’d seen her hometown of Hamburg virtually destroyed by allied air raids, and over 200,000 of her fellow Hamburgers (and yes, that is what they’re called) killed or wounded in those air raids. Nevertheless, after the war, she moved to England and came to live in Oldham where she met her husband to be. He was Ukrainian. He’d also lived through the Second World war and had also seen some terrible things, including the cold-blooded murder of some members of his family by German soldiers. And as I listened to this story I thought just what a really rather wonderful story it was. Not in terms of their wartime experiences , but in terms of how these two people were able to put those things behind them and rebuild their lives.

At a human level, it’s the story of a young German girl coming to live in a country whose armed forces had destroyed her hometown and killed and wounded so many of its citizens, her fellow citizens, and of a man meeting, falling in love with, and marrying a young woman whose compatriots had murdered some of his family. It’s a wonderful story of forgiveness and reconciliation. It’s a story of two people who were able to let go of the past and go on with their lives, and because of that, to find love and happiness with and amongst people who’d once been their deadly enemies.

I think this is such a wonderful story because it shows us just what can happen between people. It shows what can happen if people are willing to let go of the past and look to the future. It shows what can happen if people are willing to accept others for what they are, rather than to blame them for what’s gone before and for what their ancestors did. It shows what can happen if people are willing to accept others for what they are rather than insisting that others think and speak and act as they do. But this isn’t just a story about what can happen between people if they can do these things, it’s a story about what did happen between two people when they did do these things and so it’s a story that’s full of hope. And it’s a story that should resonate with us, as Christians, because we’re called to be people who do these things. We’re called to be people who don’t keep score of wrongs or harbour grudges. We’re called to be people who are forgiving and who always look for reconciliation between people. And we’re called to be people who love others, no matter who or what they are.

Unfortunately though, and as I’m sure we all know, people who call themselves ‘Christians’ don’t always act like this, in the way they should. We know that’s true, and we can’t even say it’s something that’s happened in more recent times. We might think that people have become more horrible and intolerant in recent years, and are becoming increasingly so, but this has been a problem in the Church from it’s very earliest years.

In the reading from the Act of the Apostles at St Mark’s this morning (which was the reading from Acts at St Gabriel’s on Wednesday morning too), we read about a dispute between the party known as the ‘Judaisers’ and Ss Paul and Barnabas. The Judaisers were a group of early Christians who thought that the Jewish law had to be enforced and that no one could be saved, and by extension be part of the Church, unless they obeyed the law. But Paul and Barnabas, who’d actually done the work of evangelising the new Gentile converts to Christianity, were having none of this and so, in the end, the problem was taken to the apostles in the Jerusalem Church.

As we read;

…some men came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved.” And after Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to the apostles and the elders about this question.

And in the end, and after ‘much debate’ the Church decided that Gentile converts to Christianity shouldn’t have to obey the law of Moses. They decided that, as God had clearly given the Holy Spirit to the Gentiles when they hadn’t been keeping the law, they, the human element of the Church, it’s people, had no right to insist that they must keep it.

If we boil this argument down to its essence, what is it but an argument about the kind of things that I’ve spoken about this morning? What is it but an argument caused by intolerance of people’s differences and belligerence based on that intolerance ? We keep the law and you don’t, so we’re right and you’re wrong. God gave the law to us not to you, so we’re his people and you’re not. If you want to be part of our Church, you have to do what we do and do what we say. And what was the Judaisers attempt to exclude people from the Church unless they did what they told them to do other than a 1^st Century version of a cancel culture?

But in the end it was the Church who put an end to this argument. It was the Church who showed tolerance of those who didn’t keep the law of Moses, and we have to remember that at this time the Church was simply a group within Judaism. It was the Church who showed tolerance to those non-Jews who wanted to come to the Lord Jesus and follow him. It was the Church who was willing to put the past distinction between Jew and Gentile behind them and look to the future. It was the Church who wanted to reconcile these two peoples and bring them together, in mutual love, into a marriage, the marriage of Christ and his Church.

When I say though, that it was the Church who put an end to this argument, what I really mean is that the Church put an and to this specific argument that we read about in the Acts of the Apostles because, as we all know, these arguments still go on and still plague the Church today and sadly, it’s the Church herself, through her people, who causes and perpetuates them.

We all know these arguments and we’ve all heard them; are you Catholic or a Protestant? Are you High Church or Low Church? Are you in favour of women priests or against them? 

And if you’re not in agreement with the one asking the question you’re quite likely to find yourself ostracised, sent to Coventry, cancelled, because of it. When I first came to this diocese, for example, at the first Deanery Synod meeting I went to, I was introduced by another priest to one of his Deanery Synod reps. I offered my hand in friendship, as people usually do, and in response I got a rather cold stare and then the person in question turned to the other priest and said, ‘Before I shake his hand, is he one of us or one of the other lot?’ With that, I put my hand down. I looked at the other priest, he looked at me, the other person looked at both of us in turn and then turned his back on me. I really don’t know what that was all about because I don’t know what he meant by the ‘other lot’. But if that’s how his lot treat people in the Church who don’t agree with them in some way, I rather hope I am one of the ‘other lot’ because I really wouldn’t want to be part of any lot who treated other people in such an appalling way.

It’s very sad that things like this go on in the Church and between people who call themselves ‘Christians’ but it does. It shouldn’t though. The story I heard a few days ago about that German lady and her Ukrainian husband is a story about how things should be, and could be, if only people could be willing to let go of the past and to be more tolerant of each other and their differences. I said it was a story of hope, not because it’s a story about what can happen but because it’s a story of what did happen between two people. This is the hope that the Church is called to bring to the world. The hope that there is a better way, the hope that people can let go of the past and look to the future, the hope that people can be tolerant of each other and of our differences, the hope that people can be reconciled to one another through mutual forgiveness of past wrongs, the hope that people can live together in mutual love. That’s the hope we’re called to give the world but it’s a hope we can’t give to the world unless we can do those things ourselves and show those things in our own lives.

The world might be coming a horrible place filled with people who are quite happy to be horrible towards one another, but we’re not called to be like that, and we don’t have to be. We are in the world, but we’re called to be not of the world. So let’s give the world some hope by doing all we can to not be part of the horrible way that so many people in the world treat one another.

Amen.  

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The Propers for the 6th Sunday of Easter can be viewed here.

Many, if not all of you will have heard of the Norfolk village of Little Walsingham. Even if you’ve never visited the village, you may have heard of it because it’s a famous place of Christian pilgrimage. And if you haven’t heard of it for that reason, you’ll at least have heard or read about Walsingham in the Sunday notices in church or online when I’ve advertised our own parish pilgrimage to Walsingham.

Walsingham is the site of the most famous Marian shrine in England. It’s roots go back to the year 1061 and so it’s been a place of pilgrimage, in one form or another, for almost 1,000 years. Over those years, Walsingham has changed a great deal and many times. The Shrine began as a simple wooden house which was later incorporated into a larger stone building that was built to protect the original wooden house from the elements. Over the years the stone building was enlarged and eventually became a great Abbey that flourished until the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII when it was closed and eventually, demolished. After that Walsingham fell into relative obscurity until pilgrimage there was revived by the vicar of Walsingham in 1922. The present Shrine Church was consecrated in 1938 but there have been many changes in Walsingham since then. I first went to Walsingham in 1993 and whilst the Shrine Church itself hasn’t changed since then, the grounds that surround it and the village of Little Walsingham itself certainly have, and those changes have affected pilgrimage to Walsingham. 

During the past week, I spent a few days in the East of England and, as I was in that part of the country, I visited Walsingham for a few hours. During my time there I chatted to a few of the villagers and one of the things we spoke about was the way things have changed in Walsingham over the years. We spoke about the fact that there’s no longer a Post Office in the village; about the number of shops and pubs that have closed; the number of tea shops and restaurants that have closed, and about the number of places offering accommodation that have closed. And there’s no doubt that some of these changes have had an adverse effect on pilgrimage to the Shrine.

One of the biggest events of the pilgrimage season in Walsingham is the National Pilgrimage that takes place in May each year. This year, because of the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations, the National Pilgrimage took place on the first Monday in May rather than the last, as it traditionally does. Amongst the people I spoke to in Walsingham about this year’s National Pilgrimage, was the landlord of one of the only two remaining pubs in the village.

He told me how much he’d been looking forward to this year’s National Pilgrimage. He thought that, after two years of Covid restrictions, there would be a big turnout this year. But, in the event, he said it was very quiet and very disappointing. The information he was given by the Shrine, was that only about 500 people came to Walsingham for the National Pilgrimage this year. You might think that 500 people for a church service is good; but when I tell you that for the first National Pilgrimage I went to in 1994, the congregation was about 5,000, I think you’ll understand how things have changed, and not for the better. One of the main reasons for this seems to be that because of the loss of guest accommodation in the village. A lot of people have stopped going to the National Pilgrimage because, for a lot of people, Walsingham is too far to go for just a few hours, and for those who are willing to make the National Pilgrimage a day trip, staying around for a few drinks is out of the question, which for a pub landlord is very disappointing indeed.

One of the things that pilgrims to Walsingham have often said to me over the years is that going to Walsingham is like stepping back in time to a much quieter and slower way of life. In many ways that’s true, but that doesn’t mean that Walsingham has never changed. It has changed, many times over the years, and it continues to change as the years go by. It’s changed for the better over the years, and it’s changed for the worse over the years. But then, we can’t really expect anything else can we because life itself is like that isn’t it?

Change is part and parcel of human life. We all change as we go through life, sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. As we grow up, we tend to improve in terms of our physical and mental abilities, we can do more and do things better than we once could and, hopefully at least, we become more mature in our attitudes and wiser in our words and actions. But as we grow older, some of the changes we go through are not so good. Our physical abilities decline, what we could do in our teens and twenties, even our thirties, we probably can’t do in or past our forties or fifties. And as we grow older we tend to lose some of our mental sharpness too. Even if we’re spared such a terrible disease as dementia, we probably find it harder to learn new things as we get older than we did in our younger days.

And we don’t just change physically, the circumstances of our lives change too. Most of us live with our families when we’re young. Then, as we get older, we move away from home; we go to university, we get our own home, we get married, have children of our own who, in their turn, also move on and go their own way in life. And we change from being in education to being in employment. Most of us change jobs during our working life too.

Then we change from working to being retired. And the world we live in changes and when it does, that affects and changes our lives too.

So we live in a constant state of change throughout our lives. And then there’s that final change that we all have to go through at the end of our earthly lives, that change from life to death. But I say that this is the final change of our earthly lives, and not simply the final change, quite deliberately, because as Christians we believe that this change from life to death isn’t the final change we have to go through. We believe that after our earthly lives have come to an end, we still haven’t come to the end of change. There’s still one more change that we have to go through before we can come to the end of change and that’s the change from death to eternal life.

Quite what that change will be like, we don’t know. The Scriptures do give us some clues but perhaps one of the reasons we find it so hard to imagine what eternal life will be like is because it will be a life without change. It will be a life that is unimaginably better than the life we have and know during our time on earth, even in the best of times we’ve ever known. As St Paul says in his First Letter to the Corinthians,

“What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”

But we have a saying don’t we, that ‘All good things must come to an end’? But eternal life with God will be better than any good thing we’ve ever known or can even imagine, and it won’t come to an end, ever.

It will be a life in which we live in the love that Jesus commanded his disciples to have for one another. I hope we all know what it is to love and be loved; I hope we all know how good that is and how good it feels. One of the problems with earthly love though is that, sometimes, it isn’t returned; the one we love doesn’t love us. Sometimes too, earthly love comes to an end. And we know how these things feel; they hurt, very deeply. But the kind of love that Jesus spoke about is always mutual, it’s always given and returned, and it never comes to an end.

One of the most painful changes we can go through in life is to lose someone we love, whether that’s because our love and relationship with them has come to an end, or when we’re parted by death. Again, that’s a pain I’m sure we all know and it’s one of the worst pains and changes we can go through in life. But once we’ve changed from death to eternal life with God, this is a pain and a change that we’ll never have to go through again. As this morning’s reading from the Book of Revelation tells us:

“Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.  He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.”

The life that God promises to those who have faith in him is a life beyond our imagination. It’s a life better than the best times we’ve ever known on earth and a life in which those good times never come to an end because nothing ever changes, so there can never be any bad times, or even less good times. But of course, a promise is only as trustworthy as the one who makes it. So a very big part of our faith in God is that God himself is faithful, that God himself is unchanging and will keep his promise. I think this is something that’s summed up very well in the words of a hymn that we very often sing at funerals, during what is a time of great change during our earthly lives:

Change and decay in all around I see.
O Thou who changest not,
Abide with me. 

God promises to abide with us, always, but in return he asks us to abide with him. God promises to accept us if we can accept the way of life he showed us through his Son, Jesus Christ. One of the things that can make it so difficult for us to do that though is the changeability of human life; it can be difficult to abide with God, to be faithful to him and his Son, in the face of the bad things and through the bad times of human life. But we have God’s promise that he will abide with us through those bad times and if we can just bear with the bad things in life and abide with him through those times, he promises us a life in which there are no bad times, ever. A life good beyond our wildest dreams and a life in which nothing will ever change to take those good things away from us.

Amen. 

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The Propers for the 5th Sunday of Easter can be viewed here.