Sermon for the 3rd Sunday of Easter

Sunday 26th April 2009

Preached by Rev Paul Hewitt

“That’s how the fight started!

When I got home last night, my wife demanded that I take her someplace expensive, so I took her to the Petrol Station...and that’s how the fight started...

I tried to talk my wife into buying a six-pack of Carlsberg. Instead she bought a jar of cold cream for £14.95. I told her the beer would make her look better at night than the cold cream...and that’s how the fight started...

My wife and I were sitting at a table at my school reunion, and I kept staring at a drunken lady swigging her drink as she sat alone at a nearby table. My wife asked, “Do you know her?” “Yes”, I sighed, “she’s an old girlfriend. I understand she took to drinking right after we split up those many years ago and I hear she hasn’t been sober since.” “My goodness”, says my wife, “Who would think a person could go on celebrating that long?”

...and that’s how the fight started...”

We’re often so ready to say the wrong words and do the wrong thing, and start a fight! We’re often so quick to say and do, before our brains get into gear! In fact we’re so obsessed with saying and doing that we’ve no time to ‘stand and stare’. It seems to go against our nature, as if there’s something wrong with saying or doing nothing!

We’re back to our Eucharist this morning, this the fourth Sunday of the month. Easter Day was only two weeks away, and the Eucharist is to sustain us physically and spiritually in order to say and to do God’s work. That’s its purpose.

A parishioner sent me an email a while ago about her little daughter playing in the back garden, and I said at the time that I would definitely use it sometime, and this is the time. I’ll quote it directly, “Isabella was playing with her imaginary friends in the garden this afternoon. She was giving out Communion from a bucket of water. Each ‘friend’ got a good splash of water, along with the message, ‘The body of Christ to keep you busy!’”

That’s exactly it! We’re here to be sustained, so that we can leave from here refreshed and ready to be busy! This is what we have learned to do throughout our Christian journey.

The situation, however, in our Gospel reading was very different. Jesus had just met the two on the road to Emmaus and then broke bread with them that evening, but he ‘disappeared from their sight’. (I love that story about Emmaus). The two asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”

They got up and returned at once to Jerusalem where they found the eleven and those with them. The eleven had been instructed, you remember, to go to Jerusalem and there you will see him. So, what were they actually doing? They were doing nothing; they were waiting.

We fill our days with saying and doing and we’ve no time left just to wait on him. There is a time to wait on God and a time to work for God.

Fay Inchfawn was a pen name for a lady called Mrs Elizabeth Rebecca Ward, born in England in 1880 and died as recently as 1978. She was known as a writer of gentle spiritual verse, always mixing the mundane with the spiritual. She writes of the days when life seems a losing contest with a thousand little things that she has to accomplish in the day. And then, however, even in the busyness, she lays aside her work to be for a moment with God.

“With leisured feet and idle hands, I sat.

I, foolish, fussy, blind as any bat,

Sat down to listen and to learn. And lo,

My thousand tasks were done the better so.”

The quiet times we sit and wait on God can never be wasted times; for it’s in these times when we lay aside life’s tasks that we are strengthened for the very tasks we lay aside!

Or, if you like, if you’re too busy to pray, you’re too busy!

I have a cousin in Dublin who attends a meditation class which is based on the writings of John Main, a Benedictine monk, called “Word into Silence”. It is a work to encourage people to truly ‘turn aside’ - not to avoid or escape from life, but to discover through meditation the deepest centre of our being, to encounter the Spirit of Jesus dwelling within.

The first four words on ‘How to meditate’ are “Sit down. Sit still...”

When was the last time you really sat down and waited on God? There is a time to wait on God and a time to work for God.

I know that there are some grave concerns and financial worries within our Church family. We are all facing difficult times and I don’t know whether the recent budget has helped us or not. Our concerns may even stretch beyond financial ones.

We can be concerned about things and we can fret. We can dig deeper. But the perhaps at the moment, without panicking, the best thing we can do is to stop! To sit and pray, before we get up and do, and be busy all over again!