Sermon for 24th January 2021,
Sunday during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity
Jon. 3: 1-5, 10; Ps. 25:4-5, 6-7, 8-9; 1 Cor. 7:29-31; Mk 1: 14-20 †
Good morning; [as has already been said] my name is Fr Louis Johnson, and I’m the assistant curate with the team parish of St Luke in the City, an Anglican parish that shares this part of Liverpool City centre with the church community of St Vincent de Paul, and I’d like to begin today by saying a huge thank you to your community for asking someone from our team to come and speak to you on this Sunday during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity – it is a real privilege and pleasure to be here with you this morning. When the invitation was extended, and I was given the set readings for today, I was offered the choice to speak on them, or on the theme of Christian unity, and to possibly change the Old Testament reading or Psalm if I wanted to; however, I’m a great believer in playing the hand that’s dealt, so I said was happy to go with the readings as set, but I thought I would see if the theme of Christian unity could be drawn in somehow too – after all, God’s living word of scripture is seemingly able to speak into, and read, any given situation, and so it proved in this case.
Our readings today speak of repentance, of turning away: Jesus says ‘repent, and believe in the good news.’ (Mk 1.15); Jonah proclaims God’s warning to the city of Nineveh, so the citizens repent, and mourn; St Paul writes to the early Church in Corinth of repentance as a radical reorientation of their ways of living and attitudes; and the psalmist repents of sin and transgression in a heartfelt prayer to God for guidance. Yet the readings also speak of calling, of a turning away from something, but also of a turning towards something else, towards change, towards transformation: Jesus calls Andrew, Simon Peter, James and John from their work, their friends, their families, their lives, calls them to be disciples, and to become apostles, those sent out to carry the Good News; Nineveh turns towards God’s mercy, forgiveness, grace, and the gift of new life; the Corinthians are urged to turn towards the future of their new life in Christ, to step out onto the road of the journey of transformation, the same paths of truth, the Way, that the psalmist prays to be led upon.
So, one question that could follow from this is whether, in this scripture, we hear a call to think about the things that we might need to turn away from to help us turn towards and follow Jesus in the Way. And whilst the things we might turn from are not necessarily our work, friends, and families, perhaps we can hear a call to turn away from the things that hold us back, those fears that can imprison us as individuals and communities: our fixed ideas, our preconceptions, presumptions, and prejudices, those things that, it seems, we can sometimes cling onto for security – because to turn away from hiding in our fears of others means turning towards others – and that can feel risky. But what happens when we turn towards others, when we reach out, when we risk encounter with others? God reaches out and encounters us, in relationship, the dynamic relationship of divine community in the Holy Trinity guiding us towards the path of truth through dynamic relationship with one another.
I think a good example of this is a project that unites the church communities of St Vincent de Paul and St Luke in the City, namely, the foodbank which is hosted in this building on Tuesdays, and at St Bride’s on Thursdays. This coming February, it will be five years since I started volunteering with what is now called Micah Liverpool foodbank – and I remember my first day there vividly – the experience blew my mind and changed my world, and what began as a Lenten discipline for 2016 is something that I still do – and, in truth, this is not because I think that I am helping people – in all honesty, it’s more that being involved with the foodbank helps me – because I discovered that a foodbank is about more than food and drink, as important as these things are: it is about being part of a community, in which everyone helps each other by providing a place to be alongside and with one another, friend, stranger, neighbour, a space in which we encounter each other, and in which God encounters us. Because we are all hungry and thirsty, and we are all nourished through the gifts of welcome and friendship, through relationships, gifts given and accepted freely, gifts that make manifest the living presence of God’s love. And perhaps Micah Liverpool foodbank is a good example of what can happen when church communities work together, when we turn away from looking inwards, at ourselves, and turn towards the world, to see where the Gospel, the Good News, is already emerging, where the Kingdom is already at work, looking outwards towards others, and listening for the voice of God calling us, in the present, from our past, and into the future, into God’s future, as we are all changed, transformed, into our true identity, our unity, in the one Body, in Christ.
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