Readings: Revelation 1:4b-8, John 18:33-37
Let
us pray: Keep your church alert, Holy
Spirit, ready to hear when you are calling, and when you challenge us. Keep us hopeful, Holy Spirit, knowing that
Christ will come again. Rouse our
spirits, Jesus Christ, that whenever you come to the door and knock you may
find us awake , ready to admit and serve you.
Stir up O God, the wills of your faithful people… through Jesus Christ
our Lord. Amen.
Over the years, I
have struggled with this question: ‘What
Christ may come?’
Is it the Christ
of my Sunday School years – soft and reliable and easy enough to in my back
pack to pull out when guidance was needed.
Or is it the
Christ of others – either the easily dismissed because I could smell the
hypocrisy from miles away or the elusive just occasionally glimpsed in the
lives of those who believed or the scary that called but would mean giving me
up if I succumbed!
Or is it the
Christ of my journey now – who stirs me up, breaks me down, centres me, sends
me flying, with whom I share doubts and laughter and tears, of whom I know as
truth and as promise and as love. The Christ that walks with me, challenges me
to grow and disturbs the very fibre of my being, who enables me to be at peace
in uncertainty and hopeful in a broken world despite all evidence to the contrary. That is my Christ who has come. The Christ of my journey and of my
destination.
What of you? What of other Christians in the world? It is neither my right nor my desire to force
any statements of faith out of you right now – although, as we heard here last
Sunday, affirming and expressing your understanding of ‘What Christ has come?’
is something that can only feed our understanding of whose it is that we are.
But what I do want
to ask you is ‘In what ways does your Christ stir you up – and are you willing
to be stirred.
(For Knox: This morning at Opoho we had ‘stir-up
Sunday’ where we mixed up a Christmas
pudding and heard the collect used in the Anglican prayer book for this day –
which includes the words: Stir up, O Lord, the wills of your faithful people….)
Jesus was
certainly stirring when he faced Pilate – and there was a small indication that
Pilate was willing to engage in that conversation. You can hear the slightly searching
questions:
‘Are you the king
of the Jews’
‘I don’t know what
they think? Just answer the question’
Are you or aren’t
you?’ You can hear the frustration
too. In his own way he was really trying
to figure this guy out.
What was this
truth that Jesus knew and that he, Pilate, couldn’t grab hold of?
But the answer was
too ‘out there’ for Pilate, beyond his vision, his experience. In a way he refused to be stirred up.
My kingdom is not
from this world says Jesus – um what?. The authority given comes not from
people but from God. Uh. The kingdom
sought is not of the people but of God and love and compassion the
hallmarks. Aw come on I am one of the
most powerful people around and if I was to show the slightest weakness – it’d
be all over. Yeah, no!
He could not
envisage the kingdom that Jesus spoke of.
But this why we are here is it not?
In some way we each of us catch glimpses of God’s kingdom - can see that
vision of a world ruled by love and compassion, a place of peace and justice
and grace, the hope that Jesus was born into this world to fulfil.
And when we lift
our eyes to that vision, does it stir us up, engage us, encourage us to
continue on the journey to know Jesus more deeply and to live out the way of
Jesus in our lives. Does the fact that
you can believe in the promise of the kingdom to come help us to live well into
the Christ that has come in the now?
Does it hold back the wave of despair at the awful stuff that is
happening in the world, at the frustration of inaction and the pounding of the
cynical world? Does it give us hope for
the journey and trust in the destination.
I hope so.
A story – of
journey and destination.[1]
[1] A Blessing to
Follow by Tom Gordon from A Blessing to
Follow: Contemporary parables for living p.265
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