The Third Sunday after Easter
“So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.”
Well, there was perhaps a lot of very boring television watched this week as millions upon millions of people stayed glued to a live video-feed of a chimney, waiting to see whether it would billow black or white smoke upon the non-election or election of a new Pope.
It’s always an interesting time when a Pope is being elected because it’s one of the few moments when the Church, faith, and religion in general is not only paid attention to in a positive way by the news media, but so many people who are not ‘churched’ take part in the watching, the speculation, the excitement of it. Since that day, I’m already seeing videos of now-Pope Leo XIV at baseball games when he was still a cardinal, jokes and memes about him being from Chicago, and generally a pretty positive response to it all.
And it’s neat that for a brief period the public becomes genuinely interested in some of the strange rituals, clothing, and customs of the Church – specifically those around the secretive Conclave and various liturgical celebrations. For everyone, I suppose, but specifically for Christians it might bring up thoughts or ponderings or questions about what the church actually is; what does it even mean to be Pope, Cardinal, Bishop, Priest, etc? We don’t make quite as big of a deal of the election of our ecclesial leaders, but nonetheless – why the hubbub in any tradition, why the fanfare, the vote, and the secrecy?
We tend to think about The Church as either being this place here, physically, or we think perhaps about the Diocese or the national Church or the Catholic – Universal – church, or perhaps we hold to the idea that the church is really just the people, and – as some sadly argue - the structures, liturgies, books, clothing, the fussing is all just superfluous tat that gets in the way of what we’re really meant to be doing.
Just after the turn of the millennium in the Church of England, in response to years of continual decline in church attendance, the church supported the founding and growth of something called Fresh Expressions, which was a movement that viewed things like what we’re doing right now as the barrier to church growth. If we want to grow, they surmised, it’s not people that need to change, it’s the church, we need to take the church out of the walls, emphasize new expressions or ways of doing church: skaters not coming to church? Start a skate park church; people at the gym on Sunday morning? No problem, Gym Church. Golfers skipping the Lord’s Day? Hold church at the golf club and bless their clubs.
Since then, time and again, such initiatives have not yielded the fruit the founders had hoped; numbers in 2022 in many places are lower than they were before Fresh Expressions, and many of those expressions have since become defunct. Yet – in what is being hailed as a quiet revival – churches in the UK saw the third year of consecutive growth with 2024 boasted some of the most well attended Christmas services in years, and notably, the growth is happening in places where, Sunday by Sunday, they do precisely what we are doing right now: liturgy, books, tat and all.
The Church is in a certain sense ‘the people’, but specifically the church is the people as the body of Christ, as the fellowship of believers. We remember the Apostle Paul’s words about the church being the body of Christ as though we are all fingers and toes and knees of a body of which Jesus Christ is the head and we are called to function towards the well-being and health of this body not just for the sake of Christ but for the sake of one another.
I’ve been going to the gym lately (in case you weren’t able to tell…) and there you learn all about how the health of one part of the body impacts another; however strong some muscle may be to carry or move a certain amount of weight it’s only as good as the strength of the joint that needs to bend to move it. My hands and grip often give out on certain things before my arms or shoulders do – total health of the body, even that of the church, depends on the total health of its members.
When Peter in his Epistle today speaks to us about those things from which we need to abstain and fight against, it may at first might seem to us – and certainly to those outside the church – as yet more Christian moralism, do-this-don’t-do-that. But Peter, as Paul did, knew what it means for one part of the body to be weak – how a easily the body can crumple under a weight if even just a knee is out of sorts, so to speak – how hard a struggle it can be to grow spiritually if we’re struggling with things that hinder that spiritual growth, and he knew that these things which “wage war against the soul” are things that make us, as members of the body, weak.
He is concerned about us individually, but so too about the whole body of Christ, this is why he urges us to conduct ourselves honourably among the Gentiles, “so that, though they malign you as evildoers, they may see your honourable deeds and glorify God when he comes to judge.” This reminds us of what Paul said in First and Second Corinthians about the importance of not being obstacles to what God is doing through us; not to behave in ways that cause people to find fault with our ministry. God is constantly trying to use us to reach others and to share the good news, so we are called to live and behave in such a way that no one can say “you preach one thing, but I see you doing another,” and we discredit God’s work in us.
To that end we prayed last Sunday that we might walk in Christ’s footsteps and model our lives and our living after his life; there is no better way to preach the good news and witness to the power of the resurrection, the Gospel, or the power of Christ in our lives than to live like him, love like him, forgive like him. Live in such a way, Peter is saying in the Epistle, so that when they accuse you or malign you it’s only a judgement on themselves, and your good works, your patience, forgiveness, forebearance and your faith can even lead them out of their darkness.
The collect today prays that all of us who are “admitted into the fellowship of Christ’s religion […] may forsake those things that are contrary to [our] profession [as Christians, members of the body]” Two important things are said here: the first that our being Christian is a profession, an active and not passive thing, something we are but something we do. If someone is a person who repairs shoes they don’t say “I cobbler” or “I do cobblery”, but “I am a cobbler”; likewise, a Doctor doesn’t tell people “I doctor” or “I do doctoring”, but “I am a Doctor”, and implicit in being a cobbler or a doctor is the doing of fixing shoes and healing bodies. If our profession is to be Christians then there is both a being that thing and a doing that thing - a living out of our faith.
And the second important thing is that Christ’s religion is a fellowship – the church, to go back to the beginning, is a fellowship of those who are in the profession of Christ.
The Church, then, is not ‘the people’, the church is Christ, and the people are part of Christ as members of His body. And so in the Gospel today when Jesus, to a group of confused and sad disciples, is trying to make sense of the fact that he will be with them for a time and then gone again, he says that for a time they will suffer sadness and grief but that joy will then eclipse that grief like how a newborn child eclipses the pain of childbirth. He tells them, “I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice,” and soon he will tell them that he will be with them always, even to the end of the age.
By this Jesus doesn’t just mean during the 40 days after Easter, and nor does he mean they will see him again only when he returns at the end of time, but he is filling them with hope for how he will be known and seen in His church and as His church, seen and known in this fellowship, the body.
The day will come when indeed we will see him again, but we’re woefully mistaken if we think he’s not to be known or encountered until then, because of course we meet Him all the time: we meet him here every Sunday, we meet him when we hear or read the Word, when we pray, and at the altar rail.
“Your pain will turn in to joy” he tells the Disciples, but that isn’t some end-time promise, it’s not just some promise of what will happen in the Kingdom of God, it’s a promise of what his presence in us when we receive his body and blood - his presence in our midst right now - makes possible: that your sorrow and my sorrow can today, through his presence with us and in us, through our faith in him, be transformed into joy and that joy build up and strengthen us as members of His body and in our profession as ministers of Christ’s religion and heralds of the Good News of the Gospel.
Amen
