The Fourth Sunday after Easter
“My dear brothers and sisters humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you.”
I hope that the majority of you were, as I was yesterday morning, seated before a screen watching the coronation of HM King Charles. Whether you were shoving as many crown shaped lavender cookies and cups of tea into your mouth as I was at 8:00am is beside the point, but I do hope you did or will watch it.
Partly, of course, because it’s an historic moment for us as subjects, for many a once-in-a-lifetime event, partly also because it was an incredible public witness to the Gospel. Unflinchingly Christian, super-super Anglican, and thoroughly weird yet beautiful and dignified in that way that all Anglican worship should rightly be. But also, and perhaps chiefly, because it was a service that despite what someone might think from looking at it, placed God at the very beating-heart centre of everything.
Some of the things that proclaim this we gloss over fairly easily or miss. The King, for example, enters in certain robes which he wears until the time of the anointing with oil, just prior to the actual coronation. It was a deeply moving moment when the clergy strip him of all those ornate garments and the King stands before an audience of countless millions in nothing more than what looks like a white night shirt.
From there he is enclosed by screens and the anointing – the moment that we understand God to be setting the monarch apart for service, just as Zadok the Priest anointed Solomon with oil to set him apart as King – this act happens in secret. When the screens are taken away, we see the King in this plain white shirt kneeling before the altar, stripped down to nothing fancy, a recognition that he is a poor sinner in need of God’s redeeming, just as we are. It’s a pivotal moment in the coronation that reminds us that underneath the furs, the gold-cloth, and the crown is a man like us, that his authority and all that he stewards is a gift of God and not his by right.
From there the King is, in some sense, built back up. New and different robes are placed upon him, he receives the symbols of his kingship – the orb, the sceptre, the sword, etc – all items that are given to him and placed upon him by whom? The church, God. However much it may look like one individual is being held aloft over our heads, that his life possesses some inherent value that ours does not, this is all to show us that what he is, and what he has, and what he does – is God’s to bestow, to give, and to do, not Charles’. At another point in the service amidst all of the gold, the pomp and ceremony, a Bishop hands him a Bible and says, “To keep you ever mindful of the law and the Gospel of God as the Rule for the whole life and Government of Christian Princes, receive this book, the most valuable thing that the world affords.”
That is – everything flows from this Word. All power on earth is subject to and comes from this Word. It’s a funny part of the service – in the midst of the pomp of the world we are reminded that the thing of greatest value is not what is being worn but what is being heard – the Word of God.
I bring this up because it’s timely, of course, and something over which nerds like me can dweeb out on, but I bring it up because our readings today and this season are – in a similar way to what I’ve just described – about a stripping down and a building up.
As I said last week we’re in a time in the church year when we are looking forward to something, waiting for something to happen and to arrive, because Jesus’ work at Easter doesn’t end on the Sunday morning because he has yet to ascend and still yet to send the Spirit.
The Gospel for last week, today, and next week are all from Jesus’ farewell discourse – his final words to his disciples before his crucifixion – and are really about pain. Last week he said that they would face something akin to the pain of labour, of birthing, today he mentions the fact that he will soon be leaving the disciples (to ascend to the Father), essentially telling us that we too will be broken down at times by the world, by our suffering and by pain. But that God, as we heard last week, is always working to turn our pain into joy. God doesn’t want to see us stripped down to nothing, but built back up into something new.
Today he tells the disciples, “Very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away.” Or, it is for your good that you will suffer this pain. The idea of suffering anything for any reason or in any way is abhorrent to much of the world today; it’s impossible for many to imagine how suffering might be redemptive, how pain might lead to growth. And part of the reason for this is that we hang on to the things of this world like grim death – we hang on to our health as if it is all that ultimately matters, to our lives, to our wealth, to our identities – as if any of this ultimately matters, as if any of it ultimately defines us.
The disciples clung to Jesus and part of the confusion at this point in his life was that they couldn’t break themselves of that clinging. Unless he was to ascend to the Father, to leave them, he would always be for them just a friend, just a teacher, just a healer. The deep confusion and pain of losing him is for their good because if he doesn’t go he cannot send the Holy Spirit, the spirit that will tell us all that Christ wants us to know, that will comfort us, that will be God within us, the spirit that enables us to be built up as new creations, new and transformed people, not remembering the former pains but rejoicing in the life that Jesus’ resurrection has enabled us to live now.
Sometimes we need to be broken, sometimes we need to be stripped down to those white night shirts, brought to nothing so that all that was part of our old selves might go, so that we can be built up as new people, different people made possible by God coming to dwell in us. For addicts this often begins after you hit rock-bottom, for us it often begins when we are brought to that place that forces us to recognize that without God, without Jesus’ sacrifice, without the Holy Spirit dwelling in us – we’ve got nothing.
We’re entering a time of growth right now, our minds and activity being directed towards our gardens and the natural world. Next week we celebrate Rogation Sunday, a day when we bless our gardens and our fields for planting, it’s no accident that this occurs near to Ascension and Pentecost. St. James, always concerned with practical things in the spiritual life, tells us in the Epistle today that we ought to be quick to listen and slow to anger, that we have work to do to cast our immorality and evil - a solemn reminder of our calling as Jesus’ followers to work the soil of our own hearts to ready them, as St. James says, “to humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you.”
