Sermon for Eucharist for Peace – 6th October 2024
When I was a parish priest in Sussex, not far from here, we had a number of Ukrainian families staying in the village and wonderfully, some of them made the village church their spiritual home while they were here in the UK.
I remember particularly our celebration of Easter – we were rejoicing that Christ was risen, that Christ has conquered and now his life and glory fill us – and we were simultaneously remembering that the husbands and fathers of the Ukrainian families who were worshipping with us were fighting a war and living in the midst of fear and fatality.
There was a terrible tension between our joyous proclamation of new life, and the reality of life in war-torn Ukraine. The tension continues still – and over 2 years on there is war not only in Ukraine but in the middle east as well.
We see this same tension in today’s Gospel passage where Jesus is offering his disciples the pledge and the promise of peace, and reassuring them not to be afraid, when he knows also that he is about to be killed – that the ruler of this world is coming for him – and that darkness and death loom large.
We live, as Christians, with one foot dancing in the glorious kingdom of Christ, and the other foot weighed down with mud in the well-trodden battlefields of this world – and we are called to keep the faith. To be sorrowful yet always rejoicing; as dying, and yet, see we are alive.
One of the Ukrainian children who came regularly to our Sunday worship in my old parish used to spend a lot of time drawing during the service and as he was leaving with his family one day he stopped to show me his latest picture. He had drawn on his paper a big multi-coloured rainbow – at one end of the rainbow he had drawn the war, represented by little stick figures pointing guns at each other – and at the other end of the rainbow, he had drawn a picture of himself and his father holding hands, with the family dog at their feet. This child knew what it was to live courageously in two worlds; to hope against hope, and to trust that in the midst of darkness, despair and death, Christ had conquered.
The liturgy of Christian Baptism reminds us also that we live in two worlds. “Christ claims you for his own, receive the sign of his cross” says the priest – and yet in the very next lines of the Baptism liturgy, the whole congregation take up the battle cry: “fight valiantly as a disciple of Christ, against sin, the world, and the devil, and remain faithful to Christ to the end of your life.” Even in Baptism, perhaps most particularly in Baptism, there is no escape from the tension. Christ has conquered, and yet here we are watching and waiting for a better world.
Our first reading this evening from the prophet Micah gives us a vision of that newworld. A world so in tune with the spirit of God, a people surrendered so utterly to God’s loving purposes, that swords and spears have become redundant, and all the people walk in the name of the Lord. We are not there yet, that world seems a long way off. But nevertheless the vision of a kingdom ruled by peace and justice, and by love and grace, has been set before us – and it’s a vision that exists as a golden thread throughout the scriptures – from the paradise Garden of Eden to the heavenly city. It is the world that Jesus has inaugurated – and sometimes, even now, we see the its golden thread catching the light – and we know that we live in the redeemed world even as we live in a world of sin and sorrow.
One of the ways that God’s people have coped with this tension, through the ages, is to remember what God has already started, what God has already done. They remember the times when God has triumphed over evil. The times when God has redeemed a situation that seemed hopeless and made out of it a way forward. The times when God has surprised his people. The times when God has supplied for his people water and food and love and mercy, when they were most in need and at their wits end.
Remembering God’s mercy in the past, helps us to trust in God’s mercy for the future – even when what we see and hear about the state of the world seems to imply that God has no mercy. We are to remain faithful, despite what the world tells us. We are to remember God’s mercy.
That is probably too big an ask for those who are living daily with merciless conflict, but it is something that we can do for them and with them. Let it be our prayer.
In today’s Gospel Jesus offered his disciples the gift of peace in the coming of the Holy Spirit – the same spirit that is present in every celebration of the Eucharist, the seal of God’s promise made in Jesus Christ – the promise that a way has been made through, the promise that a rainbow has been drawn – from war to peace, from sorrow to joy, from death to life.
May we hold fast to that promise, for ourselves, and for all those who cannot trust in it at the moment.
The little Ukrainian boy who drew the rainbow picture – and so beautifully embodied the spirit of hope and peace, used to come up each week to take communion. Instead of saying Amen like the grown ups – he always used to say ‘thank you’ – not to the person giving him communion – but to God.
He remembered God’s promise, week by week, day by day – even as he confronted the devastating realities of war and conflict, longing for a better world.