Christianity isn’t supposed to be an indoor activity
Sermon on Rogation Sunday, the Sixth Sunday of Easter, at the Church of the Holy Trinity, Llandudno in the Ministry Area of Bro Tudno
The Ministry Area’s order of service with the lections, including a poem in addition to the First Reading and the Holy Gospel, can be found here.
Christianity isn’t supposed to be an indoor activity.
If this were 1321, instead of 2021, we would leave church this morning in a procession, to walk the bounds of the parish and to bless its fields — the crops and the tender new growth that we hoped would grow and ripen, to be ready come the harvest.
That Rogation procession was a traditional activity on this, the Sixth Sunday of Easter, as though the accumulated energy of Eastertide and Resurrection was being gathered up in the congregation’s arms, to be scattered across those fields that promised nourishment, those still fragile buds and blooms that needed new life’s blessing.
Christianity isn’t supposed to be an indoor activity.
If this were the 1320s, we might on our procession have bumped into Dafydd ap Gwilym, the leading Welsh-language poet of the late Middle Ages, and the among the finest of his epoch in the whole of Europe.
His poem this morning is a golden daydream. It’s May and he’s outdoors, lying in a glade, the hazel branches a canopy above him, birdsong around him; and, in that place and in that moment, it is as though the whole of creation becomes a sort of chapel — the sunlight on the leaves a golden ceiling, the parts of priest and choir played by the thrush and the nightingale, nature’s abundance a sort of wafer, creation’s music rising upwards a sort of elevated chalice, the whole world awake as though everything was alive through and animated by the new life of the resurrected Body of Christ.
Christianity isn’t supposed to be an indoor activity.
In our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, Peter has left the Jerusalem, has left the company of the other Apostles, and he has travelled north to Caesarea. He’s gone outdoors, so to speak.
He’s spending time with a man called Cornelius and his family. He’s spending time, for the first time, with people who didn’t know Jesus the Galilean preacher, with people who hadn’t beheld Jesus the crucified Messiah from the foot of the Cross, with people who weren’t there in the garden or by the lake or on the road to Emmaus to meet the resurrected Christ.
But Cornelius and his family are people who want to hear the Good News, people whose hearts are yearning for faith and hope and love. There are hints that Peter wasn’t expecting this openness, this desire, this fertile ground; but here it is, and Peter brings Baptism and blessing and grace.
Christianity isn’t supposed to be an indoor activity.
In our Gospel passage, Jesus is speaking to his disciples in the confines of the Upper Room on the night of the Last Supper. He is speaking to those he has held close during his ministry of preaching and healing in Galilee, those he has taught and encouraged and corrected, those who call him rabbi, teacher.
And to those disciples on this fateful evening, at this turning point, at this coming-of-age moment, he says to them, “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” “Abide in my love.”
Servants no longer, but friends.
Held close no longer as disciples following their teacher, but sent out, set free, as trusted friends, to abide in God’s love.
Christianity isn’t supposed to be an indoor activity.
Holiness can become stuck indoors. We can lock it down within our own understanding; we can expect to encounter the holy, the sacred, only in familiar rituals, within these walls, in what we recognise as Church or have come to think of as God’s ways.
Holiness can become stuck indoors. But the Spirit moves and sends and saves everywhere. The whole of Creation, the whole of the world around us, has its source and its measure and its destiny in God. Created in God’s nature, all of nature anticipates its restoration by God’s grace. Built into everything and everyone is that Cornelius-like yearning for faith and hope and love.
Christianity isn’t supposed to be an indoor activity. So take time this week, like Peter, to be surprised, to be delighted, by the image and likeness of God shining out in somebody you know or somebody you meet.
Christianity isn’t supposed to be an indoor activity. So take time this week, like the poet, to bask in the worship and praise offered to God, raised up to God, by all of teeming Creation — the glories of the natural world and complexities of human invention.
Christianity isn’t supposed to be an indoor activity. So take time this week to walk the boundaries of your life, to give thanks for all that is fruitful, to pray in hope for all that will be; and not to know, to receive, to yearn for, but to abide in God’s love, as Christ’s friends, each step of the way.
