Sermon is transcribed from the video.
Good morning everybody. I want to start out by underlining some things. if you turn back to the Gospel reading that we just had – “for God so loved the world that he gave his only son so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but have eternal life.”
That’s really the bottom line, that really is the fullness of the word of God to us because it lays out for us God’s purposes of God’s love and God’s plan for eternity.
It’s all right there so if you really have that in your heart, if you really know that at that deepest place within you, it’s like it’s like holding the Holy Grail in your hand. Now the idea of the Holy Grail is a fascinating one because it of course refers to the chalice from which Jesus drank and they shared at that first celebration at Passover that we now call our communion, our Eucharist, our Mass. It’s been the object of search for a long time.
In Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb, Jesus was buried after the crucifixion. Joseph caught a ship for the farthest point of the British Empire which was at that time Britannia, and he took with him everything he could find that pertained to the life and the death Jesus. One of those things was the chalice and that’s how it got to England. But where, of course, we don’t know, and I imagine we’ll never find it.
It doesn’t matter because the Chalice itself is really not the point anymore just like the temple on the hill on the holy mount in Jerusalem is not the point anymore. The point now of course is Jesus Christ who is the temple and who bears in him the life, the wine, the bread all of the things that matter in an eternal sense, he now bears and brings to us. So there’s been a great transformation in the understanding of those things.
The idea is that Jesus brings with him the coming of the new age. You remember three weeks ago when we had as our gospel lesson the reality of Jesus being declared God’s chosen and he ushered in the new age. The old age had passed away. The new age of God’s presence right here amongst us was born and now we live in such a way as we know that Jesus lives among us, is in us. and we drink from his holy grail every Sunday. if we have that understanding about what God has done for us that we just reiterated in those lessons, those verses from the gospel, we have it, we have we have the Holy Grail, we have eternity in the fullness of life.
But what if we are honest with ourselves and look into our lives and what if we have this sense that I am empty in places where I should be filled, and I lack a dedication to life in places where I should be reaching out to others. What if I feel that way and actually realize that it is true? What I want to say to you is despair, not because life is not something that happens immediately. It’s a journey, it’s a voyage you know and also this has been written about over and over again in all the great literature – Homer’s Voyage to Ithaca and certainly the Jews themselves in in fleeing Egypt and going to the promised land that was given to them.
It’s all about the journey. It isn’t the goal that is important but for us in living our lives here on this earth right now in these bodies that we have, it’s about the journey. It’s about getting there and so the extent to which we are caught up in the spirit of the age the Zeitgeist of what it means to be alive in the world, and we respond to that rather than the knowledge of eternity. It makes a difference on how our lives go because we know plenty of people who are (and maybe we sometimes feel this way ourselves) without any vision of that and have empty lives.
I know so many people who have what you would call empty lives. It doesn’t mean that they’re not filled with the things of life on Earth; it means they’re not filled with the things of God for eternity. What is more important you have to ask yourself. What is the matter with me why am I allowing myself to be caught up in this “Spirit of the air” is the way Paul put it, the spirit of things of the earth rather than the things of God. It’s a mystery, but if we set out for ourselves as a destination coming to this point where I do live fully in the presence of God and that is my commitment to myself to the people around me to the world and to God, then you know it will come true because what God has promised always happens and so what we’re promised in in the lessons today is that if we if we look up to Christ for all those things in our lives that might distract us from the purposes that God has laid out for us we’re saved. So it’s a matter of choosing this day whom we will serve. There are so many wonderful biblical references to the idea of choosing our directions of where we take ourselves in our lives
If we come to a situation where something bad has happened, rather than looking inside we usually blame God that things didn’t work out. But that’s the Old Testament way. There was no secondary causation. Everything was because God caused it to happen. We would not say that’s quite as true today. We would say that my own ego gets in the way of God’s plan within me and that’s why things don’t work out and that would be right (but that’s a story for another day).
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only son so that anyone who believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” “Perish” which means that you don’t have life. If you consider that your spiritual existence ends when you die that’s pretty scary! We’re not faced with that though because if you really take into your heart and accept the voyage that is before us here we’ve begun. I know in my head that this is true. The voyage is from there to here it’s not a long Voyage but it takes a long way to cross that desert. The idea is that if I come to know in my heart these things are true, then I am truly transformed into the degree to which that comes to pass. But I have to seek it. I have to make a decision to do what I want my life to be about and if I do that then I’m on my way, the voyage is underway, the ship has left the dock, the train has left the station, the plane is off the ground whatever mode of transportation you associate this with works because it’s a matter of being underway in one’s life to undertake a new life, to undertake a new direction to become something that I already am, already am the child of God/ I just want to start living like it. I just want to start living in a way so that the presence of God in me, that God’s gone to all this trouble to send Jesus here for this purpose will not be so far as my life is concerned wasted time.
I want this time this time that I spent in this body on this Earth with you all and my family and the people around me and all the people I know I want that time to be spent in the sure and certain knowledge that I belong to God and I am the child of God and that Jesus loves me and if I will really live that out in my life oh my goodness it makes such a difference.
I’ll give you a little example. I remember one time being a priest at a funeral. It was a large funeral. We went to this funeral home and there must have been 500 people there. It was a terrible tragedy that had brought this about and everyone was very upset and crying and there was heartache everywhere and great anxiety.
I’m telling you the story but it’s not about me it’s about what God can do in us went into that room with all those people who were crying and filled with anxiety and anger with God. I was at peace, I was not anxious, I was not caught up in that Spirit of the air to which the scripture refers today. I want to tell you that you could feel the anxiety level in that room start to go down in the presence of one person who was not anxious who was not filled with fear who was certain about the presence of God in the midst of all of this. The anxiety in that room began to go down and you could feel it.
It’s the same way when we carry with us that power and presence of Christ of which all the lessons are speaking today. Carrying that with us into the world reduces the sense of futility and fear and anxiety and the people all around us. I guarantee it and if you want to try it you will be amazed. If you have people in your family, in your community, people that you know who are filled with fear and a and a sense of deadness in life and that their life is not coming to anything and has no meaning; If you know all of that is not true and you know that life does have meaning and a destiny and a purpose and a way to get there and you live that out and you carry that with you where you go, it transforms to people around you that is the power of the Holy Spirit at work. It is true. “God so loved the world that he gave his only son that everyone who believe in him should not perish but have eternal life” and that begins right now.
It’s part of the journey. It begins now. The journey goes on and that is our destiny and our purpose in life and so that’s what that’s what the spirit lays before us this day. That is the good news of this Sunday morning.