Easter 6 2024

 

Easter 6 2024

 

Abide, abide, abide… You can’t miss that word in today’s Gospel reading. It follows on from last week’s Gospel reading when Jesus compared God’s people to a vine. If you remove the branches from the main stem, the vine can’t bear fruit, and the branches will die. They need to “abide in the vine” so that the sap can run through them.  

 

Abiding might not sound like the most exciting word in the dictionary. It is literally static, about staying put, about a God who is just there, about us just being there with him.  But often just being there for someone is the most important thing we can do, and that others can do for us. When we are going through tough times, it’s the people who are there for us, noticing how we are, keeping step with us, waiting with us, who are most helpful, not the ones determined to fix us or save us or find solutions.  But abiding is just as important in happy times too.

 

Abiding is the essence of friendship.  You don’t go for a coffee with a friend armed with an agenda to work through – that would make it a business meeting. You probably don’t have any particular outcome in mind. It’s just about being together, abiding with one another.

 

In the very first story in the Bible, the story of Creation we meet a God who just wants to be with his creation, and in particular with the man and woman he has made. He comes looking for them in the garden as he strolls around in the cool of the evening, enjoying the world he’s made. He doesn’t seem to have any particular job for them. He just wants to be with them. He calls out “where are you?”, but there is no answer, because they are hiding from him, ashamed because they’ve eaten from the one tree he has told them not to. It’s a moment of deep tragedy, as that easy sense of “abiding” is lost. God’s commitment to them and love for them never alters, but from then on, it’s as if their relationship with him is changed. They can never quite trust that God really wants to be with them. Why would he, when they have let him down?

 

The disciples Jesus is speaking to in the passage we heard are about to illustrate that pattern perfectly. This passage comes from Jesus’ long conversation with them on the night before he dies, at his Last Supper with them. Soon he will be arrested and tried and crucified. And far from abiding with him, they will all run away, but of course three days later they will discover that their desertion isn’t the end of the story, that he is still with them, that his abiding friendship for them hasn’t been destroyed and never can be. We may wander off. We may hide. We may try to cut ourselves off from God, but God never cuts himself off from us.

 

The first reading too, is about abiding. It’s part of a much longer story, and probably doesn’t make much sense unless you know the context. It’s from the Acts of the Apostles, the stories of the early Church as it formed in the months and years after the Ascension of Jesus. A man from Caesarea has sent messengers to Peter, one of the early leaders of the church, asking him to come to visit him and tell him about Jesus. The problem is that the man, Cornelius, is a Roman, and not just a Roman, but a Roman Centurion, part of the occupying army, and, of course, he is a Gentile, not a Jew. He sounds like a good egg. He prays and he gives generously to the poor, but he hasn’t been brought up to observe the Jewish laws around things like food. If Peter goes to visit him, what will he be confronted with? What if Cornelius offers him a bacon butty when he gets there? What if there are statues of other gods in the house. Romans normally had an array of household deities in domestic shrines and there’s no indication that Cornelius didn’t.

 

But just before the summons to Cornelius comes Peter has had a vision, a vision of a great sheet of animals being lowered down from heaven, every one of which the Jewish law said was unclean. In his vision, though, God tells him to kill and eat them. Peter is disgusted at the thought, and proceeds to try to tell God that he can’t because God has forbidden him to…To which God replies that as he is God, that’s really up to him, isn’t it…?

 

The vision is a challenge to Peter, but also a reassurance. Maybe God’s love is broader than he has imagined? Emboldened by this thought, he sets off for Cornelius’ house. He thinks he’s taking God to them. He’s excited to start them off on their journey of faith.  God is already there. He’s barely opened his mouth to explain the basics of the faith to them, when the assembled household are all filled with the Holy Spirit, just as Peter and his fellow disciples were on the Day of Pentecost. Whatever reservations he has had melt away, and Peter not only spends that day with them but several more. He abides with them, with all the cultural challenges that brings, because he sees that God abides with them too.

 

These are readings which challenge us to consider abiding in all its forms. Who do we abide with, stick to, commit ourselves to? Who do we struggle to abide with, to be around? We sometimes say “I can’t abide so and so. They really irritate me” – we reject any connection with them. Why is that? What does it tell us about them, but more importantly what might it tell us about ourselves?

How do we feel about “abiding” generally? Do we have itchy feet, a restless sense that we always want to be somewhere else, or are we content to be where we are and look for God within it? It’s appropriate that it’s today that we receive the record produced by the Sevenoaks Decorative and Fine Arts Society today of our church. This building, and all it contains is itself a testimony to centuries of “abiding”, of people who committed themselves to maintaining this building as a place of prayer and peace, and to finding God in the community of those who shared Seal Church with them, abiding with one another, with all the challenges that can bring.

 

But most of all, it seems to me, these readings ask us to think about the God who abides with us, and invites us to abide with him, because that’s what the Bible tells us he wants. He starts out trying to abide with his people in the Garden of Eden, goes on to wander the world with them, abiding with as they get into and out of slavery in Egypt and assorted other disasters. He abides with them when they let him down. He abides with them through the words of his prophets, calling them back to him. Finally, and for Christians most perfectly, he abides with us in Jesus, who “became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth”.

 

In him we see God where God always wanted to be, not a distant monarch, not a terrifying judge, not just a provider of things, a fixer of things, but a friend who walks with us on our journey, just being there, a companion, who broke bread with his disciples and is found in the bread we break together too, someone who calls us into a community of abiding, enduring, lasting love.

Amen