Sermon by the Reverend Katie Richardson 12Th July 2015

Sermon by the Reverend Katie Richardson 12th July 2015

Readings: Amos 7:7-15 and Eph 1:3-14

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.

It’s been a wonderful few weeks, a time of great blessing - since my ordination as deacon - the day on which we also celebrated with thanksgiving the life of St John Baptist - the life, that is, of both the saint and the worshipping Body of Christ here in this place. So I have chosen to reflect this morning on the nature of blessing, drawing on our readings from Ephesians and Amos, rather than on the Gospel reading about the death of John Baptist.

That passage from Ephesians we have just heard epitomises what many, indeed I suspect all of us ordained this Petertide are feeling. Some of us new Deacons from Cuddesdon met yesterday in Bath Abbey for the wedding of one of our friends. We were able to compare notes. For all of us, the sense of blessing received - from the Holy Spirit, from the Bishop, from our people - in my case from all of you - has been akin to sheer joy - joy that will sustain us as we are sent out into the Church and into the world to serve in the name and pattern of Christ. We are charged with a Christ-shaped ministry that we hope and pray will, through the grace of God, bring blessing to others as we are blessed by them.

All of that is in my mind as I hear this joyous passage from Ephesians this morning. But Paul’s words have also dislodged a more distant memory - of a little chorus sung in childhood - I wonder if you know it? If you do, please join in. It goes like this:

Count your blessings, name them one by one

Count your blessings, see what God has done

Count your blessings, name them one by one

And it will surprise you what the Lord has done.

The message is, of course, that we are much blessed by a God of great goodness, whose generosity goes beyond anything we might expect, even beyond our own realisation at times. If we count up all the good things we have, we shall be surprised at how many there are in our lives.

The memory is dislodged because Paul’s words are also a song about blessing - not a little chorus, but a great hymn of praise. The Commentary I consulted felt these verses should have been set to great music long before now. So there’s a challenge, Anthony! This passage is one big breathless shout of joy and thanksgiving, such as wenew deacons are feeling. In the Greek, this shout runs on from phrase to phrase in just one great long sentence. It’s as if Paul is so excited and so aware of God’s graciousness that he can barely pause for breath. He wants to leave us in no doubt that God has lavished on us the riches of His grace - He has given us the best that He can possible give us. God has sent us the ultimate blessing - the Blessing of all blessings - His Beloved, His son, Jesus Christ.

That God should be gracious is not of course news to Paul. The Hebrew Scriptures, that would have been so well known to him and his Jewish contemporaries, are full of examples of the graciousness of God - graciousness shown to a chosen people, despite their rejection of His Law, and their failure to keep His statutes. In the chapters just before our Old Testament reading this morning, the Lord repeatedly swears that he will not revoke the punishment due ‘for three transgressions and for four’. But then he hears the voice of Amos: ‘O Lord God, forgive, I beg you! How can Jacob stand? He is so small!’ - and the Lord relents and says to Amos, ‘It shall not be.’

And so, instead of sending locusts and fire to punish Israel, God sets a plumb line in the midst of his people. This plumb line won’t spare them the desolation to come, but it will offer them a way out. It will show them how to live an upright life and so guide them back into right relationship with God. For us, looking back on these words with Christian eyes, we can see them as prophecy; as referring not literally to a piece of string with a lump of lead on the end, or even metaphorically to the Jewish Law, but prophetically to a person. For us, it is Christ who is the plumb line. Although for the people of Israel the plumb line seemed a mixed blessing, we can see that it is the ultimate blessing, the Blessing of all Blessings that is Christ.

Mixed blessing or ultimate blessing? It depends how we view it; how deeply into circumstances we can see; whether or not Christ is within our vision

The implication of the little chorus we sang is, I think, that God always showers us with good things. A dear friend of mine used to count her blessings, that is all the goodthings in her life, as a spiritual discipline if she felt down in the dumps. She could always convince herself that God was good to her and that after all she had much to thank and praise Him for. I say she counted the good things, because I think that is what she did - although I was not privy to her calculations. But I now wonder, in the light of our readings, if that was indeed the best approach. If God has blest us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places - that is, if the ultimate blessing is Christ himself, can we not expect that blessings which derive from Him might bear his shape?

This week marked the 10th anniversary of the 7/7 London bombings, and we have been reminded in newspaper and on screen of the raw pain that is still being carried by individuals caught up in the horror, and by families of the 52 victims who lost their lives. You may have heard the speech given by young Emma Craig at the Hyde Park memorial service. Ten years ago she was just a few days short of her 15th birthday, and was travelling by tube to a London law firm for work experience when the bomb went off. The trauma will mark her for life. As she said this week in her memorial speech at Hyde Park: "Sometimes I feel people are so hell-bent on making a point about terrorism not breaking us, that they forget about the people caught up in it.” For some, she said, the experience had given them a new reason for living. But she felt broken by it. Her honesty has earned her much respect.

There are stories from other survivors of wonderful things that have come out of 7/7, things that might perhaps be described as blessings, although they seem to me to be blessings of a different order. Although the pain of memory and of loss of her legs is etched all over the face of survivor Gill Hicks, photographed for a newspaper this week as she was reunited with PC Maxwell, one of her rescuers, it is plain for anyone to see that an indissoluble bond now exists between these two persons - we might say, a bond of love, born of pain and bloodshed. Tracy Russell from the London Ambulance service also helped to save the life of Gill Hicks, and the two now share deep friendship. Tracy is godmother to Gill’s daughter; she ‘takes strength and comfort’ from her friendship with Gill, and feels that this friendship lives on beyond the two women themselves as their two daughters play together. And there are further similar stories you will have seen in the recent TV coverage.

Horrific experience, brokenness, pain and bloodshed that nevertheless can give rise to indissoluble bonds of love and grow new relationship - does this not sound familiar to Christian ears? Are these not Christ-shaped themes? If Christ is the one who carries in his person every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, if He himself is the Blessing of all blessings, should we be surprised if some blessings we receive are Christ-shaped ? - that, rather than being always joyous, blessings may sometimes bear the marks of pain and suffering?

I do not mean to say that something terrible, such as the 7/7 bombings, is a blessing in itself. Even to say that something terrible has given rise to a blessing needs not to be misinterpreted. In no way can the violence and horror of those bombings be balanced out in some way, or worse still be made alright, by saying that good has come out of it. Surely we cannot say that such atrocities are part of God’s plan for the fullness of time. What I think we can say, however, is that our God has the power to bring blessing out of anything - anything at all, even the horror of the 7/7 bombings, even the ‘three transgressions and four’ of the people of Israel in the time of Amos, even out of the horror, shame and utter brokenness of the Son of God upon a Cross. Emma Craig need feel no shame; as Christians we would I think want to say that there is One who stands beside her who knows what it is to be broken - upon a cross.

So, as we count our blessings, and name them one by one, let us remember that, as Paul says, it is in Christ that God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. We need to look for Christ-shaped blessings. They could be hidden anywhere within the history of our lives; not just in the good bits, in the joyous occasions and the happy feelings, but also quite possibly - although notnecessarily - within the painful experiences. If something within these experiences bears the hallmarks of Christ, (be it the sharing by a Christ-like person of the burden of pain, or the relief of being truly understood by another in our pain, or the joy of new friendship born out of bloodshed), then these painful experiences too, by the grace of God, may become a source of new blessing to us - in time.

We new deacons know that we are to serve in the name and pattern of Christ. We are charged with a Christ-shaped ministry. Because of that shape, our ministry cannot be simply joyous all through. This week, as I shadowed Gary at a funeral for the first time as a deacon, I began to see the pain that we are also called to walk alongside in the name of Christ. And yet I felt sheer joy in the privilege of being alongside, clearly marked out by my new clerical clothing as a representative of Christ. We are all called as Christians to such ministry. We are all blessed by God in Christ. That mixture of joy and pain is a Christ-shaped blessing; it is a mixture present in the life of every Christian, every human being, every one of us here. Let us take noteof it as we count our blessings.

Let us pray

Lord God, the maker of all, as we bow down in praise this day, make us attentive to your voice - and do not test us beyond our enduring; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.