Eighth Sunday after Trinity

Ephesians 4.1-16; John 6.24-35

As you may have noticed, those who constructed the lectionary have got bored with St. Mark's gospel and have taken a detour for these few weeks into St. John's gospel. This gospel as I'm sure you are aware is quite unlike the other three. You could say and many do that it is more 'spiritual'. I'm not sure what people mean by that exactly because different people seem to define 'sprirituality' differently. But there's a lot of Jesus praying in St. John's gospel, whole chapters in fact, and because of that, much more seems to come through of his relationship with his heavenly Father. And so we tap into something of Jesus's own spiritual life. Because of that we seem to move out of the ordinary, every day course of things to something with much more depth. That's not to say that St. John's gospel is any less couched in daily happenings. The detail with which St. John describes things that happen, no less that the other gospel writers gives us cause to believe that these things really did happen. I suppose the modern parallel would be High Definition tv. St. John loses nothing in the sharpness and reality with which he describes events even though what comes across more than in the other gospels is the spiritual aspect of those events. So in St. John's gospel you could say we are seeing Jesus in 'high definition' compared to the other gospels. And that has been why this gospel, more than the others I think it's true to say, has had a greater impact on peoples' lives, many more of them moving nearer to God on reading it. So, this is serious stuff. It's for grown ups.

Over recent months at St. Andrew's we've put a great deal more effort into working with the children that come here week by week both to church and in the school. The work with children at St. Andrew's has always been of a very high quality and high standard, it's just that we've invested rather more time and resources recently so that they have the opportunity of expressing what God means to them in our worship in a bigger way. It's had quite an impact both on themselves and on us adults especially. Most people have been delighted and moved, one way and another by the work the children have been doing and by the worship that they lead. It's been terrific. And it's strange how adults are really moved by anything that the children do, either here in church or in school. I've often wondered why the children have such an impact. I suspect it's because as much as anything they remind we adults of our childhood, they remind us of our long lost innocence, and there'll be all sorts of emotions that come along with that. I've noticed that adults in church seem to respond much better to simple, child-like things than to what you might call 'grown up' things. And I think that's because many adults, mature though they are in years, despite coming to church for many years, never actually mature in the faith or in their spirituality. It shows in different ways especially in our life together as the Church. And that's a pity. And it's not what God wants.

No matter how much we yearn for our childhood, St. Paul reminds us, as he does today in his letter to the Ephesians that God calls us to maturity in the faith. He says 'The gifts he gave were..... to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, TO MATURITY, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must NO LONGER BE CHILDREN......But speaking the truth in love, we must GROW UP in every way into him who is the head, into Christ....' St. John shows us the 'full stature of Christ' as St. Paul puts it and St. Paul says it's like Christ that we should grow up to be.

Now you may say that Jesus said we must accept the Kingdom like little children and when speaking of children he said that the Kingdom of God was theirs. Yes, that's true. But what he meant for us was that we are to accept the Kingdom as children accept things, usually with wonder, awe, curiosity and faith. Children trust, far more than adults and its that trust that Jesus asks us to have. But having done that we are to grow in the faith, we are to grow in our spirituality and grow in our spirituality just as we do bodily and psychologically.

And it will show in what we do - 'the work of God' as St. John calls it. 'Then they said to him, 'Master, what must we do to perform the works of God?' Jesus answered them, 'This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.' It's as simple as that. Just believe. But its simplicity is its difficulty too. To see and understand what the work of God is that Jesus is talking about we need look no further than the Sermon on the Mount. There isn't time this morning to read through it but when you get home read it in St. Matthew's gospel from the beginning of chapter 5 and then ask yourself how far your thinking, belief and behaviour correspond to what Jesus says there. For the closer you get to that the more mature in the faith you can call yourself.

And that's just the outward expression of what's going in inwardly in that relationship with the Father. How mature is that? How much faith do we actually put in God. How does our faith measure against that of Jesus because St. Paul says that Jesus is the measure. And this is grown up stuff. It's what we hope our children, given the opportunity we are giving them, will eventually aspire to. And it's what we all should aspire to, without exception. There isn't one of us that is exempt from growing to maturity in Christ. None of us is exempt from 'putting away childish things' as St. Paul said elsewhere and growing in faith. And so when we see the children doing things in church, yes we should be delighted by them and our hearts should be warmed by them but at the same time we adults need to ask ourselves how far we have moved on from those childish things. We need to ask ourselves if we have grown at all.

And if we haven't it's never too late, never too late to begin to have more faith, never too late to believe, to trust that bit more what for instance we read in the Sermon on the Mount and in other places in the Bible. For note what Jesus says right at the end of that Sermon in Matthew 7.24ff - He who hears these words of mine and ACTS on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. That's the sort of faith we are to mature into as followers of Jesus. It's that sort of faith we are to teach the children about so that they too might grow into it and themselves be part of a build up the body of Christ for theirs and the next generation after them.

So as St. Paul says, let us no longer be chidren, tossed to and fro and blwon about by every wind of doctrine, by people's trickery, by their craftiness and deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.