Fourth Sunday of Easter, 25 April 2021
Lectionary Readings for the Fourth Sunday of Easter
Acts 4: 5-12
The next day their rulers, elders, and scribes assembled in Jerusalem, with Annas the high priest, Caiaphas, John, and Alexander, and all who were of the high-priestly family. When they had made the prisoners stand in their midst, they inquired, ‘By what power or by what name did you do this?’ Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, ‘Rulers of the people and elders, if we are questioned today because of a good deed done to someone who was sick and are asked how this man has been
healed, let it be known to all of you, and to all the people of Israel, that this man is standing before you in good health by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead. This Jesus is “the stone that was rejected by you, the builders; it has become the cornerstone.” There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved.’
John 10: 11-18
‘I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away—and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.’
Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Easter
Time is not like a river. Or, if this image is of any use at all, time is like a meandering, looping-back-upon-itself kind of river, with endless tributaries, small creeks and rivulets that seem to branch off into nowhere, that sometimes peter out quickly, contributing, seemingly, to nothing. Time is not like a straight river, then. Time doesn’t go in a line. And even if you could say that time flows, is ever-flowing (like the line in the great Isaac Watts hymn Time like an ever-rolling stream bears all its sons away—-the main point of which is true, that we are all going to be carried off to heaven in due course) I just want to make the point that time does not flow evenly, steadily, predictably. It backs up sometimes; it may seem stagnant. And then a storm breaks forth from the skies and the torrent of water rushes past and the river is transformed into something we don’t recognise. Like time, and events. If you think about this subject of waiting, and what our expectations have been—-we may need to reconsider all of them. We have spent a long time waiting to be relieved of our restrictions—-this plague that has affected the whole known world has surely got to have an end sometime, just as it had a beginning that we can date and assign to the calendar, and measure from. But this time of waiting is not proving to be like that.
Proceeding in a line, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Clear, and straight.
When will it end?
Even while vaccinations are making their way slowly through the world, and enabling certain parts of life to resume some semblance of normality, for some people, other parts of our interconnected world are facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions, such as the 1 billion 40 million person nation of India, and it is not clear when this phase of this period is going to end, for them or for us.
Waiting is difficult. Especially if you feel that you are only reasonably waiting for something that you are entitled to have, that you used to have, that you should have had restored to you already.
Like the nature of time itself, our present experience of waiting is going to be, I think, extended, unpredictable, perceived as short, or long, or taking certain turns that lead to unexpected places. This does not have to seem like a bleak prospect; but I think it is going to require an adjustment in how we look at it. Because if time is not like a river, in the ways I just described, so life is not like a river. Straight, even, and predictable.
Look at the Gospel of John. This book is not a biography of Jesus. It has no clear beginning or middle, though it does have an end. An apparent end, that is not the end. The chronology is not exact; in fact, it is at odds with the other three Gospels. Many scholars have spent lifetimes struggling to harmonize the four Gospels and make them have an exact correspondence, time-wise. They have not succeeded!
John’s language is abstract, mystical, highly symbolic—-anything but a clear current running smoothly in its course. Jesus works miracles that John speaks of as signs of Jesus’s future glory. After the prologue—-In the beginning was the Word—-the first sign at Cana—-water into wine—-is mirrored in the second sign at Cana: the raising of the royal official’s son from death, the end of chapter four. There are certain themes that run throughout the book, but no clear demarcations of chronology. John uses the occasions of the principal feasts of the Jewish people to launch discourses on the nature of Jesus and the God from whom he came. These themes are immense: light and darkness, seeing and not seeing, humiliation and glory, life and death. They are all for us.
The passage we are set this evening uses the language of the care of a shepherd, and what it means to know those for whom one cares. Jesus knows us as we do not even know ourselves. The one who knows, loves, and cares for his flock so well must bring all those outside the flock into it, so that he can include them, also. It is the destiny of Jesus’s flock to be made up of all those also who have not known or have not seen or have not believed. Jesus will bring them in, in Jesus’s—God’s—own time. God entrusts this enormous power to Jesus, because God knows how willingly Jesus will give up his very life for all those given over to his care. This is the extent of such a life-giving love as Jesus had for us.
Jesus died to bring all the world in, not only to safeguard his initial small struggling flock. Because Jesus made this choice, to lay down his life, the world is saved. We have already all been gathered in.
This great good news helps us through every time of our lives—-good times, bad times, times of waiting, times of deferred longing for what we hope is surely yet to come.
Life is not like a river running smoothly to its end. Our lives are of extraordinary variety: full of delights, surprises, unexpected prospects, twists and turnings, deviations, roads not taken. At every moment there are opportunities both to reflect and to choose. But if we know whose we are, then we know who we are—God’s beloved children, created to be, intended to be, channels of God’s grace to all the world. And this certainty will carry us through all the changes and chances of life.
A life that didn’t run straight was that of John Newton, who was born in 1725. Newton’s mother was a devout nonconformist who brought her son up in the Christian faith, but she died of tuberculosis a few months before John’s seventh birthday. When Newton was 18, he was impressed into Naval service, not the career his father, or he, had in mind. He tried to desert, but was caught, and so endured a harsh flogging of eight dozen lashes in front of the entire crew of 350 sailors. After such a humiliation, he contemplated murdering the captain and then committing suicide. He later transferred to a slave ship, where he was so little liked by crew and captain that he was left in what is now Sierra Leone, where he was imprisoned by a slave dealer and mistreated by the slave dealer’s wife, a princess of the Sherbro tribe. In 1748, (Newton was still only 23), he was rescued by a sea captain who had been asked by Newton's father to search for him. On the return voyage to England the ship encountered a terrible storm, and, in despair of his life, John began to pray. It was the beginning—only the beginning—of a spiritual conversion. Because even after this experience he could not be said to have followed this turning to its logical end. He made three voyages as a captain of slave ships. At the age of 29, he had a severe stroke. But he continued to invest in the slave trade. He became a tax collector in the Port of Liverpool. But he began to study Hebrew, Greek, and Syriac, and became well known as an evangelical lay minister. Newton applied to be a Church of England priest in 1757, when he was 32, but it was seven more years before he was accepted. At last he was given a living in Olney, Buckinghamshire, by a wealthy and influential patron. Another supplemented his income. John became known as a preacher of great gifts, a pastor of great sensitivity and compassion, and a writer of hymns. He wrote the hymn, Amazing Grace.
But it wasn’t until 1788, 34 years after he had retired from the slave trade, that he at last broke his long silence on the subject of slavery with the publication of Thoughts Upon the Slave Trade, in which he described the inhuman conditions of the slave ships during the Middle Passage. He had copies sent to every MP, and the pamphlet sold so well that it immediately required reprinting. Newton advised William Wilberforce, leader of the Parliamentary campaign to abolish the African slave trade, when Wilberforce came to see him at St. Mary Woolnoth, Newton’s parish for the last 28 years of his life. Newton counselled Wilberforce, who was contemplating leaving politics, to remain, and serve God where you are. Newton lived to see the passage of the Slave Trade Act in 1807 before his death that same year.
Of all the lives I can think of, especially of those in this Anglican communion, his ran a course of the most astonishing divergences…. If John’s Gospel, or any of the Gospels, speak to us at all, they speak this truth:
that every river, every life, flows ultimately into the boundless fullness that is God. God is our destination and our destiny. No matter from what distant part we come, how wide of any channel we have kept, we will, each one, find our way back to the source and the end of all. This truth is both our hope and our sure certainty. Jesus has already done what was ever necessary to bring us back within the fold of his love and care; he will accompany us along every turning of the path toward home. So will our lives, in God’s time, reach their endpoint. And all the waiting that this time asks of us God’s love will redeem.
Amen.
The Revd Dana English
St. John the Baptist Holland Road, London
April 25th, 2021