5th Sunday of Easter

As we make our way through the Sundays of Easter – this is the fifth – reading each week in the Acts of the Apostles the story of the Early Church, there’s a parallel between the journey we are making and the one our ancestors in the faith made two thousand years ago. Both we and they began with the great events of the Resurrection, but as the weeks pass for us and the years passed for them, the challenge became and becomes one of how to live out the implications of the Resurrection in the midst of daily life. Jesus’ final words to his disciples were about going out into the world to proclaim the Good News to the ends of the earth. But what that meant and how it was to be done were not at all clear in the beginning. Thinking of it this week, in fact, I was reminded, of all things, of the First World War. Not that I remember it, but I have read many times how, as it began in the summer of 1914, the general expectation was that it would be over by Christmas. But as Christmas came and went and Easter gave way to the summer of 1915, people began to realise that it was going to be a much longer haul than they had thought. And something similar happened in those early days of the Church. In the beginning, many expected the Second Coming of Christ to happen any day. But as time passed, it began to dawn on them that this, too, was going to take longer than they had thought. As Paul says today to the people of Antioch, ‘We all have to experience many hardships before we enter the kingdom of God.’ And so, as the initial Easter experience passed for those ancestors of ours, just as it has passed for us again this year, both they and we were and are forced to confront the enormous but generally mundane task of building up the Church in the world. And central to this two thousand years ago was St Paul.

Today’s first reading from Acts describes the end of what we know as Paul’s first missionary journey. It had started, as it ended, in Antioch in the year 45AD and had taken Paul and Barnabas on a four-year-long expedition through what we know today as Turkey and which included a visit to Cyprus. Paul, in fact made three missionary journeys which took him all over the Mediterranean. The second took him from Turkey into Greece and the third, by a very roundabout route, ended up in Rome, where Paul was executed by beheading in the year 67AD, twenty two years after he had begun his first journey and thirty one years after his conversion that famous day on the road to Damascus. On his way to Rome he spent time in Malta and during his stay in Rome may, in 63 AD, have travelled as far west as Spain, landing at Tarragona south of Barcelona next to the well-known holiday resort of Salou. Not that it was a holiday resort then of course. And what Paul did on these journeys was what we heard about in that first reading. He established small christian communities, encouraging them by letters and further visits over the years, and, most importantly for our reflection today, he set up structures which would support and sustain the life of those communities. What exactly these structures were is not entirely clear and continues to be disputed among experts today. We heard just now how he appointed elders but it would be a mistake to think that elders here means the same thing as it does today in the Church of Scotland for example. The Greek word was presbyter. That’s why I live in a presbytery and our friends across the road at St Kentigern’s are presbyterians, but whether they were bishops, priests, deacons in the modern sense we will never really know. There are all kinds of theories about it, including the theory that many more women were involved than today and that they have been airbrushed out of the story by later generations. But leaving all that aside, what I invite you to recognize today is that, right from the very beginning, Paul and others saw the need for structures of some kind.

And that, I think, is important for us at a time when many in the Church are rejecting traditional structures. ‘I can be a Christian or a spiritual person without going to Church’ is something we hear a lot nowadays. And, of course, there is some truth in this. Structures can be cumbersome and restrictive and the modern tendency to reject them exists far beyond the limits of the Church. From the major Political Parties down to the local youth club, fewer and fewer people are joining organisations of any kind. But the fact that, right from the beginning, St Paul himself felt it necessary to set up structures and appoint people to positions of leadership and responsibility tells us something too. And what it tells us, I suggest, is that we can only become truly effective bearers of Good News to others and witnesses to Jesus in the world in partnership with other people. What we can do together is far greater than what any of us can do as individuals and it’s because of that that the Church exists at all. We can feed the hungry more effectively together than we can on our own; witness this afternoon’s homeless lunch. We can reach out to the poor abroad better together than we can individually; witness the parish fairtrade stall available this weekend after Mass. And for all this to happen, we need structures. We need to know who is doing what. We need leaders and organisers and people who will do the day-to-day stuff that otherwise would not be done. And we need all this, not just at a local level, but at diocesan level, at national level and at international level, so that the claim that ‘I can be a Christian without a Church,’ which effectively means ‘on my own, privately,’ is deeply flawed. It sounds good, but it is actually an illusion.

Having said that, however, not all structures are good. They exist to facilitate, not block the living of the Gospel. We need leaders, but they don’t need to live in palaces or lord it over us. Any group of people needs rules and regulations to govern their life together, but they must never become ends in themselves. In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives a us a new commandment: we are to love one another the way he has loved us. Pray this weekend that the Church will develop for our time structures which enable this to happen rather than prevent it.

BIDDING PRAYERS

We begin our prayer today by holding up before God all those who hold positions of leadership and responsibility within the Churches. We pray, especially, for Pope Benedict and for all who work within the Vatican at whatever level. We pray that God will lead them beyond personal ambition or the desire for power so that they can exercise their leadership in a spirit of service and humility……………....Lord hear us

And we pray, too, for our own bishop, John Cunningham. We pray that God will give him the wisdom and courage he needs at this time to be a leader in our diocese. We pray, in particular, that he will be a deeply faith-filled and profoundly hopeful man who is not afraid to face up to difficult issues and take radical and far-reaching decisions at a time when the future is unclear and when many in the Church are paralized by anxiety about the future……………………………………..Lord hear us

Within our parishes, many lay men and women exercise leadership and responsibility in a whole variety of ways. And so we ask God to guide them and protect them from the kind of wordly ambition and desire for power which, even in small ways, can corrupt us and undermine the value of what we do. It is at its most destructive when we don’t even recognize it, and so we ask God to open our eyes to see any sign of it in ourselves or in our parish…………………..Lord hear us

There are many people in Kilmarnock who claim to be followers of Jesus. Sadly, we are divided and split up into different Christian denominations. We pray, however, that the Churches in our town will learn to work together more and more in response to Jesus command in today’s Gospel to love one another as he has loved us. We pray in particular that we will work together to reach out to all in the town who are poor or in need so that we can be for the people of Kilmarnock a living sign of Jesus’ presence in the world………………….Lord hear us

This weekend, the children of the parish who have been preparing for Confirmation and First Communion since last year start coming to celebrate these two great sacraments. And so we pray for them, that what they do will take deep root in their lives and and bear rich fruit in the future. We pray, too, for ourselves, that, as a parish, we will never fail the young who come to us in search of God……………………..Lord hear us

And we pray, finally, for all those who were elected this week to positions of power whether in the Scottish Parliament or in local government. We ask God to move deeply in them so that they, too, may exercise the power they have been given in a spirit of service and humility. We pray, too, for those who failed to be elected or who lost power, that they will have the wisdom they need to accept what has happened and get on with their lives…………….Lord hear us