Lord, to whom can we go?

 August 25 2024: Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18, Ephesians 6:10-20 and John 6:56-69

Marc Anderson, an American entrepreneur, wrote an essay on artificial intelligence in which he said this: ‘I am here to bring good news: AI will not destroy the world, and in fact may save it’. [The Guardian Magazine, 24 August 2024: why we should fear AI by Yuval Noah Harari]

Those words may well leap out of us: good news and salvation.

The stuff of hope and healing, justice and joy shifting from the realm of creator to the creation’s creation. 

Image from Y N Harari's webpage for Nexus

For many of us, AI is the impact of Chat GPT and concerns about how to assess essays; or perhaps the worry of a takeover of humanly imaginative endeavours, leaving us with the mundane tasks we’d hoped to jettison. 

Rather than seeing AI development as a risk that we should fear, Anderson  regards it as ‘a moral obligation that we have to ourselves… to our future.’

Others sound a more cautionary note. 

For example, in his book Nexus the historian Yuval Noah Harari looks at the flow of information from the stone age, through the Bible to early modern history to today’s rise in popularism. As he examines the relationship between information and truth, he addresses the choices we face when confronted with non-human intelligence. 

How will digital empires impact on our freedom and security he asks? Can we find a hopeful middle ground rooted in shared humanity?

We have always faced such choices: about freedom and agency, power and “powers”. Today’s readings offer wisdom and insight into where we are to find good news and the hope of salvation.

The book of Joshua follows on from Moses’ parting words and begins to trace the history of God’s people as they settled in the promised land. Part of the story includes the mistakes that were made; the things that led to a time of exile - for example worshipping other gods, failing to show compassion and mercy to the vulnerable, seeking human rather than divine rule, exploitation rather than justice. 

All this is told with the benefit of hindsight. We glimpse one moment when mistakes are named and faithfulness to God is restored.

The challenges and difficulties of present circumstances are named. The promises, which may have faded from memory, are recalled. The bigger story of freedom and protection is retold. 

Remembrance leads to recommitment. Reverence of God leads to service of others. 

Faithfulness overtime relies on such moments of renewal: acknowledging what’s gone wrong, recalling moments of blessing with hope, and being intentional about our own priorities or actions - in worship and compassion.

That movement is not always easy. 

Last week we were immersed in reflecting on the living bread - and our need to be fed. We recognised that this bread gets inside us and changes us. Yet today, we are confronted by a critical moment of choice.

‘This teaching is difficult, who can accept it?’ says one of those who were following and learning from Jesus. In response, Jesus continues to hold out the promise of his words which give spirit and life. He continues to hold out the promise of his very self.

He also looks around him and asks his own question: ‘Do you also wish to go away?’  Do you go, holding on to the offence; or do you want to choose life this day?

Peter’s response is equally direct and from the heart:  ‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.’ 

It is a choice which comes from relationship - just as Joshua and the people recommitted out of their remembrance of being beloved. Peter speaks out of being fed and made whole, forgiven and challenged, taught and embraced. He speaks out of being known and loved. 

We know that Peter will still run into misunderstandings; his ego will sometimes get in the way, his boldness will tip into denial. Yet he will also grow in faith - he will run to the empty tomb. He will be recalled, by name, to love and service by his crucified and risen Lord.

In this moment, though, he longs for and reaches out for the intimacy of continuing and deepening relationship with Jesus: of being fed by enriched bread, the bread of life.  

In him we glimpse something of the process of faith and faithfulness. Peter continues: ‘We have to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.’  His commitment is rooted in relationship - in abiding in Jesus. He has come to believe as trust grows mingled with knowledge and experience. 

Moment by moment we are invited to live as God’s beloved, forgiven, healed and restored children. We are reminded that God has already chosen us, loves us. And therefore we are invited to choose God’s love in return. By the power of the Spirit, we continue to abide in this love.

Such choosing and abiding is a gift: individually and collectively. This teaching, this commitment, is hard but also life-giving.  

This is good news and salvation: hope and healing, justice and joy offered by creation’s creator.  Offered as Jesus places himself in human hands - reconciling the world to Godself as he is lifted up on the cross.

Good news and salvation is offered to us as we take the body of Christ into our hands; being fed by the bread of life, so that our lives might reflect his love.  We eat and live. Sustained in times of strength and weakness. Serving others out of that same well-spring of limitless love; using our influence, time, resources to bring life to others.

So we come back to the choices we make about our freedom and agency, power and the powers of the world. Our freedom is a great gift of God to creation yet we are so often pulled in different directions; our hearts divided over the desires and opportunities we should pursue. 

In Ephesians, those struggles are named - including the external influences and forces at work in the world. Perhaps we might add the technological to the cosmic powers we have to confront.  How do we seek after truth rather than controlling information; or respond with caution to tech that we do not understand, for the sake of our moral obligation to creation?

In response we hear of the ‘armour of God’: a visual and memorable shorthand for what God already provides for us as we navigate our world; day by day we choose to be clothed in them.  These are things which enable us to hold onto the hope of our shared humanity: reshaping our imagination; being creative with grace; seeking freedom rather than exploitation. 

The list begins with truth - the life and love of God revealed in Jesus and at work in us through the power of the Spirit. We are invited to a life not of self-righteousness but one built on right relations; we are to take as shoes whatever makes for walking in ways of peace. All that protects us - the good news of salvation - is obtained in Jesus' life, death and resurrection. To whom can we go? He has the words of life!

The sword is of the Spirit, the word of God: the daily choice of choosing life and hope, joy and peace, justice and compassion.  The creator’s gift of salvation to creation - mediated by human lives. As we remember God’s saving acts at this Eucharist, proclaiming the mystery of the gospel, may our faith and faithfulness be renewed in worship and service. 

© Julie Gittoes 2024

You need to eat something

 August 18th, Trinity 12: Proverbs 9:1-7, Ephesians 5:15-20 and John 6:51-58

How often have we heard the phrase: “You need to eat something!” Off the back of nerves or grief; as we’re recovering from illness; before going to school or as we prepare to head out. 

We need to eat. 

Returning from holiday means re-adjusting to meals for one after precious time eating with or cooking with my sister. 

That need to eat is primal and functional - whether we eat to live or live to eat. It can be full of delight - tables set and wine poured - savouring conversation as well as flavours. 

Sister Corita: Enriched Bread via Pintrest

But that need to eat can also be disrupted - satisfying cravings or a means of control; the compulsions of speed or convenience; illness, stress, cost of living, eeking out what we have; being so caught up in things, we forget; patiently holding a spoon to the lips of a loved one. 

We need to eat to live. But though we eat, we will die.

Today, as at every Eucharist, we are invited to eat, to share in ordinary food which carries an extraordinary promise: that we will come alive, live more fully.

We hear bread breaking and smell the wine. We are invited to touch and taste and see.  The one who is the living bread promises life in him, promises to raise us up, promises eternal life. 

In a world where advertisers and influencers shape what we should eat, what we should crave, even the basic stuff of bread is repackaged and marketed to us at every price point.

This was something that Sister Corita Kent - a member of a progressive and creative order in Los Angeles - cottoned onto in the 1960s. She used pop art made famous by Andy Wahol and others to speak about the love of God. She took on the bold colours and messaging of ad agencies and offered life.

In one screen print, she presents an image of the familiar circles of thin wafers we share under the slogan  Enriched Bread: these fragments feeding us and building up our bodies.

In another piece, she says God’s not dead he’s bread. She dares to offer social commentary informed by faith - inviting us to see and to act, to be bodies fed by the Body of Christ called into loving service. 

Alongside that bold  invitation to know the living bread she writes: they say the poor have it hard but the hardest thing they have is us. To share in enriched bread is to soften our hearts and strengthen our resolve.

One of her most striking pisces takes us to the heart of today’s gospel and the shock and strangeness of Jesus’s words. Sr Coria’s print says:

When I hear bread breaking I see something else; it seems almost as though God never meant us to do anything else. So beautiful a sound, the crust breaks up like manna and falls all over everything and then we eat; bread gets inside humans.

We understand the way food gets inside us - the processes of digestion and nourishment. The way in which the bread of life gets inside humans is something we place our trust in without having to define the manner how.

In a recent interview (the "Late Show", here) the musician Nick Cave offers something of a way into this space of worship and remembering. In confronting the truth of grief and what he calls our mortal value, he finds something more joyful and hopeful. 

He talks about the way in which music gets inside of us as a 'sacred act' - something which not only binds us together but which has the capacity to 'change hearts and minds'. Music reaches the core and helps us become more human.

No wonder then that in Ephesians we hear of the emphasis on song and making melody together as an expression of our life together in Christ. Music expressing our thanks to God for that there is in the name of Jesus, but also opening us up to share in that ongoing Spirit-led drama of living.

To live with care and wisdom, to move beyond naïvity, immaturity, indifference or the waywardness of our unchecked hearts and desires. To find, as one commentator on Proverbs puts it, an invitation to 'grow up, rather than down' [Ellen Davies' commentary], in our moral stature.

Cave names the risk of 'wrapping ourselves around' our hurts and griefs, the danger of turning ourselves away from the world; of becoming hardened to it. Instead we are part of it - to know that the world is full of people who have lost things, but towards it and see and seek the beauty not the cruelty. To find joy out of the devastation. 

Perhaps the urgency and boldness of Jesus’ words as he talks about who he is comes from knowing how much we need the life-giving, life-sustaining food that he offers. God’s word of love becomes flesh in him - knowing precisely the precariousness of life of which Cave speaks. 

Jesus carries the grief and tears, fears and hopes, in his own body. Our remembering of him is a re-membering of who we are. We come to his table, stretching out our hands to receive the bread he offers. We come to the cross, carrying the burdens and longings, seeing it through the light of his resurrection. Glimpsing the possibility of being fully human, the promise of a joy that frees us. 

The musical fruit of Cave’s  journey, of the small kindnesses that go beyond words when life falls apart, is the album Wild God. He describes it as a ‘warm embrace’: as vulnerable and fragile as we are; as vulnerable and fragile as the bread that gets inside us.

Bread breaks and gets inside humans.  It reminds us that hospitality is our core social value - not as a matter of correct etiquette but as an unconditional imperative to all.  

It challenges the hardness of our hearts and reframes all that we have - all authority and resource, all energy and influence, every fibre of our being and every gesture, word and silence around loving service. 

Or as Cave puts it to a father in one of his Red Hand File letters: such hopefulness - such hospitality - is far from neutral. It can ‘lay waste to cynicism, each redemptive or loving act as small as you like. Reading to your little boy or showing him a thing you love or singing him a song or putting on his shoes’. 

Bread breaks. Bread gets inside us.

Jesus gives himself for love of the world;  and invites us still to sit and eat. To gather around one table; to share one food; coaxing us to be fed with life. 

Whoever eats this bread will live because of me, he says. He is our bread. Here we are invited to eat something. To discover who God is. To be reminded who we are. To be grounded and restored; to find insight and be enriched. To eat and live. 

© Julie Gittoes 2024

Our origin story

 Sunday 7 July, Trinity 6:  Ezekiel 2:1-5, 2 Corinthians 12:2-10, Mark 6:1-13

Is this not...

Margaret the shopkeeper’s daughter?

Gordon the minister’s son?

Is this not...

David the stockbroker’s son?

Theresa the vicar’s daughter?

Keir the toolmaker’s son?

And they took offence at them.

Whatever their background, our politicians face judgement and scrutiny over where they come from. We are interested in their stories of origin, if you like. 

Does it make them trustworthy and relatable or a good role model? Will it shape their policy decisions or inform how they govern?

Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer from The Evening Standard

At one end of the spectrum, Rishi Sunak was mocked for naming Sky TV as something he had to do without as a child; at the other Angela Rayner faced hostile comments about being a single parent, living in council housing and working in care. 

Some take offence at them; others find inspiration.

Our own origin stories shape our attitudes and character; our priorities and commitments. Being a plumber’s daughter has perhaps shaped my vicar-ing more than anything else - watching my dad deal with emergencies, irregular hours, chatting over a cuppa, knowing his patch and having a pint in the pub. 

Perhaps you’ve been told: remember who you are and where you come from. Do we hear it with a sense of pride and dignity or as a put down that keeps us in our place. 

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus goes home. He’d got a reputation: calming storms, healing the sick, telling stories, earning the trust of those who followed him. 

Now it’s his friends and neighbours who hear him teach. They are amazed by his wisdom. Astounded by what he says, by what he does. He’s got authority. He’s the local lad made good. 

But that doesn’t last long. 

They take umbrage. They know whose son he is. They know his trade. Aren’t his siblings still around. Who the heck does he think he is?

They take offence at him. 

And that suspicion became a limiting factor: a lack of trust sucked out the oxygen of hope. Most of them were unable to see beyond the familiar; didn’t think God could transform lives through a person they knew. There were some though who took that imaginative leap - whose curiosity and embrace brought healing.

There were a few people who allowed Mary’s son to be seen: to see the fullness of God’s love in his wisdom and authority. A love that allowed them to be fully themselves - not defined by upbringing or status, background or age. 

If we can grow beyond the stories people tell about us - the burdensome assumptions or shortcuts - then we can dare to offer that same space and encouragement to others; nurturing them so that their roots and rootedness can lead to flourishing and fruitfulness. To untangle the stories we tell about ourselves and others demands patience, kindness and wisdom. 

The late evangelist and writer Rachel Held Evans describes this as spiritual maturity - a habit of ‘sorting fact from fiction (or, more precisely, truth from untruth), and embracing those stories that move us toward wholeness while rejecting or reinterpreting those that do harm.’

It takes humility. It might hurt. It does heal. 

God chooses to dwell with us as Mary’s son. His origin story is well known - scandalous, humble, puzzling, familiar. The one who speaks of love, compassion, justice and hospitality; who casts our fears and reassures doubts. The one who leads us more deeply into truth; who enlarges our hearts and extends our horizons so that we too can serve others, rekindle hope and bring compassion a little closer. 

In a sense, the refrain ‘remember who you are and where you come from’ becomes a more powerful origin story than we can dare imagine. Remember we are God’s children - bearing God’s likeness in the frailty of our bodies; bearing God’s love in our hearts. 

We can’t outgrow that story or leave it behind. But too often the world with its dazzling prizes and competition for resources reduces us to the pull of selfish desires or market forces. 

In response, God loves us and loves us to the end. Jesus may have been rejected by some who knew him too well, but that does not stop him extending that circle of invitation and blessing. 

He does that by instructing others to share that work with him. He sends the disciples out in pairs - with simplicity, trusting in God and in the kindness of strangers. They are to accept what they need rather than seeking personal gain; staying where they’re made welcome, moving on if not. They are to follow Jesus and trust his authority. 

Jesus had spoken in parables about God’s word being like seed - scattered with generosity, germinating and taking root unseen, but bringing forth a harvest or making space to shelter others in hospitality. The message they share points to Jesus but also to a new way of life; to the reign of God with justice and compassion, creativity and peace. Hope and change flows from this spirit of repentance - turning or returning to God’s ways.

Strangers become friends on this journey. Following in the way of Jesus, the disciples take on the responsibility of authority. But it is authority that does not coerce or oppress Rather it is authority exercised as the fellow traveller, the guest, the servant of others; the one committed to the well-being of the other; the one gesturing towards healing, wholeness and hope. 

Such a pattern or practice is in stark contrast to the ways in which authority can be misused, exploited or abused. The church - both in our institutional life and in the life of individuals - is not immune from that. Our commitment to safeguarding helps us become a safer church - aware of our own biases, noticing things which may cause concern, being responsible and accountable.

When he writes to the church in Corinth, Paul distinguishes between true and false claims to authority. Just as the disciples relied on the authority of Jesus, so Paul reminds his hearers authority flows from God, whose love is made perfect in human weakness in Jesus and the ongoing work of the Spirit. 

Such authority within the church has one purpose: building one another up, so that we can grow together into the full maturity of being human in Jesus. He mentions his own challenges to emphasise that it is God who is the source of strength and comfort in all that we experience. Within the limits of our humanity we can know grace to strengthen us in our service, to inspire us with compassion and creativity and to give us courage in the challenges we face.

Ezekiel too needed courage as he prepares to speak the word of the Lord to a stubborn and rebellious people. He moves them towards a vision of hope and restoration - encouraging them to reorder their lives according to God’s ways of justice, mercy and peace. Sometimes hope flows from the kind of tough love that Ezekiel expressed. 

A change of government always brings with it change: of language, ministers, policies, supported by our civil servants. We pray for all those in public office - that service may indeed bring hope as our new PM puts it. We are to untangle the stories we hear so that truth might also build trust, as the political editor, the late Charles Reiss, put it.

But we also rest on the assurance that we do remember where we come from - those in this church and in our wider community. We are children of God, yet we sometimes find ourselves in exile from the kind of social life God desires for us. May our repentance, our turning to God in Jesus, enable us to seek the welfare of our city. 

© Julie Gittoes 2024

Overflow of life

 Sunday, 30th June: Wisdom 1:13-15, 2:23-24, 2 Corinthians 8:7-end and Mark 5:21-end

God does not delight in the death of the living.

Bold and hopeful words from the Book of Wisdom: God creates that living things might exist.

The created order is drawn into this pattern of generativity - of creativity - that is wholesome: good, healthy, virtuous, fruitful.

Part of what it is to me made in the image and likeness of God is to carry within us this light of hope; this desire of wholeness; the longing of immortality.

Such gifts given freely in love - an act of divine creativity without compulsion. 

Envy crept into the world: a fear of scarcity and lack; selfishness shaping our desires; what we want rather than what others need.

In the world as we know it, our hearts can be turned inwards towards, away from others and God. And yet, we know that the first impulse of light and love is there. 

In commandments shaping and guiding our loves: to honour and bless, to seek what is just and merciful, beautiful and true.

When hearts turned away from commandments, prophets called us back, helping us reimagine a more whole and wholesome future.

When hearts turned away from love, God’s word dwelt among us: loving us in flesh of our flesh.

Image from the catacombs in Rome

In today’s gospel reading, Jesus is radiating this love in ways which raise up and restore; bringing healing and wholeness; taking the sting of death and restoring life. 

We know what it's like to be in the midst of a crowd: at stations  and festivals, in stadiums and marches, watching the Euros or dancing at the Eras tour.

Today Jesus encounters two children of God: two daughters - one who’d been suffering for as long as the other had been alive; one facing death barely as life had begun. 

Twelve long and yet fleeting years.

The father of the young girl is a person of power and influence, he falls at Jesus’ feet, laying all his authority and anxiety before him. He pleads for health and life. 

The older woman has no such public status. She is marginalised and invisible - crouching near the ground, she creeps along amidst the moving feet of the crowd. 

Like many perimenopausal women, she’d sought out medical advice to no avail; she’d spent her money on possible cures and treatments, yet the symptoms and bleeding would not stop. 

She had heard of Jesus: a healer, a teacher; a story-teller.

Amidst the robes, sandals and dust she reached out and touched the hem of his garment. The smallest gesture, a fragment of fabric.

Then she felt the moment that her flow of blood stopped.

He too felt it. Felt the flow of power from him towards another. 

That moment of intense and intentional longing was not just another body in the crowd. He sees her. He raises her up. 

Her healing is holistic: she is made whole and restored to social life and belonging; she is able to tell the whole truth of her life, her body, her shame, her hope. She becomes a witness to that movement of God’s love in him; he praises her faith. 

Perhaps now she can take - or retake - her place community. Healing does not restore to her youthfulness and fertility; but it does restore her to that place of wise elder; to a life that is generative in the care and support she gives to others, to the memories of faith she carries.

How must Jairus have felt as he watched this moment of disruption, or interruption? Watching not as the man of authority but as the anxious parent. 

How must he have felt when the news reached him that the journey was now in vain; hope of healing lost to him. He need not trouble this teacher.

Jesus though invites him to move from fear to trust. He invites him to step aside from the competition and wailing, from the crowds and mocking laughter. 

In him is made real the words of Wisdom: God does not delight in the death of the living. She is not dead, he says, but asleep.

That same power that flowed to stem a flow of love now flows to restore the breath of life. Talitha cum. 

He takes her hand. He invites her to get up. She stands and walks. 

Jesus is the one who brings the radiating energy of life and love; who moves fear to faith; who builds trust and restores hope. This healing is an invitation into the wholesome life of generativity. 

Such generativity - such a life giving move - is directed to the needs of others. For Paul, as he proclaims the good news of Jesus who brings life out of death, who breaks the bonds of the grave, this means attending to those in need, on the margins.

For him the grace of God brings unity, a reconciling love. A love that extends across difference and disagreement in practical support. In his case across Jewish and Gentile communities. 

The wholesome death-defying life that he commends is about generosity in the face of affliction. The only competition is an eagerness to give - abundance and need are in a reciprocal relationship: no one having too little or too much.

We too should be eager to share in this overflow of life. 

© Julie Gittoes 2024

A tiny sprig, a lofty cedar

Sunday, 16 June - Trinity 3: Ezekiel 17:22-end, 2 Corinthians 5:6-17 and Mark 4:26-34

At the heart of our church yard is a cedar of lebanon. 

It has been rooted there since sometime in the 18th century - apparently one of a number planted by the botanist Peter Collinson - a Quaker who traded in textiles and shared knowledge of science and horticulture. 

Our remaining cedar is a striking tree - with its dramatic silhouette and evergreen leaves. 

The cedar in St Mary's Churchyard from 'find a grave' website

A cedar’s imposing stature is said to represent strength and resilience. The prophet Ezekiel uses it in a vision of God’s desire to restore a community, to bring healing out of despair and new life out of devastation. 

It is through this metaphor that Ezekeiel speaks of God’s faithfulness - not only to the ancient covenant with Abraham, Sarah and their descendants, but also the promise of blessing to all nations. 

A tiny sprig becomes a lofty cedar. 

Such a tree provides shelter to winged creatures of every kind; a promise of the inclusivity of God’s promise to restore and protect; a sign of the universality of God’s love for creation. 

Cedars offer shelter - they point to survival and renewal, blessing and fruitfulness. The safety of those aromatic branches is a sign of God’s life-giving grace to all the earth. 

God takes something small and brings from it hope and the power to restore. God reverses all our assumptions about power. Whether in the face of personal loss or collective worry, Ezekiel reminds of God’s enduring love. 

No wonder then that Jesus picks up this image of how tiny shoots or tiny seeds become places of hospitality. Hope and renewal, protection and blessing start with what looks insignificant. They grow into living places - home to all sorts of life. 

The stories that Jessu tells are intended to stretch our imaginations - prompting questions and opening up our hearts to God's ways with the world; ways of blessing and justice, safety and renewal;  to what in shorthand we call the ‘kingdom of God’. 

Today, he doesn’t just speak of seeds, trees and birds; but also a sleeping gardener and the life giving mystery of soil.  There’s something curious about the way Jesus tells that first story.

Whether you have an allotment, garden, window box - or even some cress seeds on tissue paper - gardeners and growers keep a watchful eye on their plants: weeding and watering, pruning and protecting from hungry caterpillars.

The gardener in the parabel scatters the seed - and then sleeps. The seeds are hidden in the soil - as the earth produces of itself the ripening grain to be harvested.  

The gardener trusts the soil and seeds to the mysterious cycle of weather and seasons. It might sound counter intuitive and even frustrating - especially when June feels quite untypical, and a million miles away from the heatwave of a couple of years ago.

But remember, Jesus is leading out imaginations into thinking about God’s ways: reminding us of the working of grace and love under the surface of things; the hidden, fruitful process of bringing forth life. 

Oftentimes it feels as if we are living in between the time of planting and the harvest: so much uncertainty surrounding the impact of our plans, hoding onto our own expansive hopes; nurturing the potential and planting the seeds of ideas. Beginning. And waiting. Trusting in the long haul that love will build up, restore and strengthen us - individually and together. Not just for the sake of the church - but a kingdom of justice and mercy. 

Our lives and our hopes, our work and our desires so often seem to be skating along the surface of the unknown; dancing on the edge of mystery; trusting, if not sleeping!

We plant our prayers and our plans like seeds. Sometimes we have to allow them the space to germinate; trusting others with next steps; faithfully waiting on God’s care, on God’s will to restore and bless. 

This first parable tips into an echo of Ezekiel’s vision: this time a seed rather than a sprig, a bush rather than a tree. But still, smallness is growing into a place of shelter for birds of all kinds. 

We are taken from the realm of the majestic cedar into that of an unruly, fast spreading plant of the sort often dreaded by gardeners - perhaps like the inability to contain mint for instance.  The mustard plant might not have the structural splendour of a cedar, and yet Jesus uses it to say something about God’s kingdom. 

Perhaps part of what Jesus is reminding us is of the importance of the small and seemingly insignificant - the potential of those tiny seeds, the fragility of the sprigs of new life. 

What does it say about the life of the kingdom if it is like a mustard plant: not something that we can control from the centre, but something which runs through our community, threaded through our lives?  What seems to count in God’s economy - or God’s household - are those places of blessing and safety, connection and hospitality. 

Perhaps Jesus is pointing to himself too. He comes to dwell amongst us - God’s word of love in human flesh. Born like us. Living amidst the tensions of power and worldly empires. Growing up to be indiscriminate in his friendships and conversations - a woman at a well, a tax collector in a tree; at dinner with leaders and out on the lake with fishermen. 

He includes us too: the retiree and self-employed, the manager and carer, journalist and doctor, the musician and scientist, the baker and the administrator, the volunteer and community leader, the student and the teacher, the writer and the gardener.

It really is the case that the working out of God’s ways of love runs through our lives too. We are invited to sleep and rest in God’s care - but also to welcome others into this network of inclusion. Sheltering and welcoming those seeking rest and peace, the curious and the sceptical; the lonely and the extravert; attracting rather than blocking, offering hospitality not demanding productivity. 

Such a vision wreaks havoc with strategic plans and the priorities we thought we had decided on. This isn’t a work of our own effort - though it demands our careful attention; this isn’t about reducing people to data - though it is about noticing what we and others need, and where our dreams of blessing lead. 

This is perhaps why Paul reminds the Corinthians to walk by faith and not by sight, persuading others out of love of the Lord rather than boasting in himself. 

He reminds us that it is the love of God which urges us on - like a seed dying in the ground bringing forth life, Jesus died for all that we might live.  That changes how we are to see each other - no longer from the point of view of human judgements and prejudices but as new creations. 

We are new creations. We share in the slow and mysterious life of God’s kingdom - of welcome and blessing, of safety and hospitality, of what is justice and merciful, reflecting God’s loving kindness. 

Sometimes there will be fallow periods - and times of rejoicing. Sometimes we have to rest and wait - like the gardener taking a nap! There will be small things that surprise us with the life they bring. there will be clamouring birds finding space alongside us. 

This is good news, but also challenging news: for us to trust the mysterious working of God’s love among us; for us to seek God in the small things, embracing the unexpected things; planting the sprigs or sheltering in the branches of a cedar. 

We are invited to live within this countercultural kingdom - we are invited to the fruit of the harvest, sharing bread and wine and blessing, those signs of Jesus’ presence with us. We are notice the Spirit creating and renewing, prompting and disrupting….

© Julie Gittoes 2024