Pilgrimage

23rd July 2006, Contemporary Worship

1. I am sometimes asked if there was a moment of coming to faith.

2. Not everyone has the Damascus Road

3. Between School and University -- Greyhound Bus Experience. Existentialism, loneliness and sliced bread.

a. Kindliness

b. Clear mindedness

c. Outward looking

4. Too often when we think of such a moment we are thinking of a moment of completion.

5. It is, overwhelmingly, just a beginning.

6. Those of you who have given your lives to God will have a memory of it as a moment of completeness and simplicity.

7. You will also be aware that most of us spend most of the rest of our lives wrestling with, or running away from, the implications of that moment.

8. Our cautious, selfish natural selves do not give in easily, because it is a dangerous thing to fall into the hands of the living God, and because joining the followers of the Carpenter of Nazareth is not a safe or easy thing for organised and pampered middle class people like ourselves.

9. We are on a journey, away from our culture, away from our selfish and natural selves, and that is why we need a church.

10. Ekklesia = congregation, assembly, band -- ones called together and called away.

11. Our reading describes what an ekklesia should be:

a. hearts to be encouraged and united in love

b. have the knowledge of God's mystery, that is, Christ himself

c. rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving

12. We need each other's support on the journey. We cannot conceivably make this journey from birth to death, from conversion to completion on our own.

a. When we are young, or young in faith, we need love, teaching, examples, and a safe place to find out about ourselves, our faith and our world.

b. When we are adults, we need love, and a place where we can bring adult problems, adult doubts, test out and refine adult ambitions and plans, to see if they are faithful and Christian, a place to reset our spiritual and moral compass each week.

c. When we are old we need love, and people who will listen when we are thankful for the gifts and graciousness or God, or when we are anxious about the future, or full of regrets, or need help to be hopeful in the face of our mortality.

13. So, we need a church for out journey -- only the most fortunate and the most robust will find what they need just coming to hand. We need to seek it in a community of faith. But what kind?

14. It is sometimes said that an institution or community takes on the personality of the person in charge. I think there is a lot of truth in that, and sometimes feel that you have not really tracked down the person in charge until you have found the person whose personality permeates the institution.

15. It is not however, a thought which should bring any ease of mind to Christian leaders, or which should be too much in the thinking of those seeking a new vicar for St Andrew's.

16. This is a double edged teaching for a Church, because the person in charge, and the personality of this group should be Jesus Christ.

17. This too is a journey. A group does not easily or quickly take on that humanity, which is so much greater and more human than our own. We see it fitfully, and sometimes, perhaps, miss it altogether. We may pride ourselves on our maturity and tolerance as a community, but by this measure we know that we are still in the earliest stages of our journey.

18. So, this is a Pilgrim's tale.

19. As individuals and as a group we are on a journey, supporting one another, and trying to grow in faith and hope and love.

20. As individuals, it is a pilgrimage to fulfil, in part, the commitment and the clarity that was with us at conversion, or that haunts us from some other times of clarity in the face of God.

21. As a church, we are on a pilgrimage to become Christlike, to make visible in our share life, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, which is the hidden life that draws us here, and binds us together.