5th Sunday of Easter - Year C

6th May 2007

The Revd. Martin Jackson,
Vicar of St. Cuthbert's

Acts 11.1-18;
Revelation 21.1-6;
John 13.31-35


Jesus’ words which you’ve just heard in today’s Gospel reading:

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

And then there are those words you heard in our second reading:

I… saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God…

It’s the vision of the Kingdom which God promises us - God in his holiness. But the words of Jesus remind us that being a Christian is more than believing in a heaven which might be caricatured as “pie in the sky when you die.” It’s about recognising the reality of the vision and the difference that the Christian hope makes now. We believe with St. John in his wonderful Revelation that there is a hope of a new heaven and a new earth. And we live out the reality of our calling by acting on the new commandment of Jesus: “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” The vision of holiness goes together - inseparably - with the life we lead now.

As most of you know, I was in Rome during March for a course organised by the Anglican Centre in that city. As the friend I went with said, the course itself exceeded expectation. It was well worth it for the insights it gave us on the specialist subject of Benedictine Spirituality - what we can learn from the Rule of St. Benedict, and how the provision he made for the monks who followed him in the early 6th Century is relevant to us in the lives ordinary Christians lead 1500 years later. But in many ways the real value was in the experiences we hadn’t paid for in the course fee: the other people who were doing the course - including participants from Australia (Roman Catholic lay women), the United States (Anglican and Lutheran clergy), England (we felt quite a minority), Uganda (a Diocesan Secretary) and the Congo (one of their bishops); the people we happened to meet - at an audience with the Pope (me and 6,000 other people!) I found myself sitting next to a former Franciscan friar whom I first met nearly 30 years ago, and another priest I bump into from time to time who happened to be a friend of the friend I was travelling with; and of course the sheer sense of the place - a wonderful city, and staying in the Casa del Clero we rubbed shoulders with Vatican officials, bishops and clergy from many nations.

One of the places I’d wanted to go back to was the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere. I’d visited it briefly in the early 1990s. It’s in a poor neighbourhood of Rome, and as I recall the square that Sunday morning 14 years ago was pretty well deserted except for a few lads kicking a football around - sometimes against the wall of the church, which itself didn’t look very exceptional from the outside. Its doors were rather large and forbidding, but I’d pushed one open and was hit by what I can only describe as a wave of beauty. The place had been packed, it was full of colour and the singing was a wall of wonderful sound. A bit, perhaps, like what St. John in his Revelation seems to be describing as he speaks of the vision of the new Jerusalem? The most disappointing thing about that experience was that the service was almost over - the vision passed. But I was left with the sense of what had seemed so unpromising, a bit shabby, and poor on the outside - and the riches contained within. I wanted to go back, so I was delighted to find that participants in my course had an opportunity to meet someone from the community which maintains the life of the church and then to join them for worship one evening.

What I didn’t know on my previous visit to Rome is that the church has become the headquarters of the Sant’Egidio Community - a lay movement which began in the 1970s and now has 20,000 members in countries around the world, 5,000 of them in Rome itself. This isn’t an organisation whose activities you join in simply when you feel like it. Every evening its members come together for prayer, and the prayer is only one of the manifestations of the faith which motivates them. In fact the evening before our formal meeting we’d already encountered the Community in another expression of its work. We’d gone out to eat at a restaurant called Gli Amici, “The Friends.” The food was excellent, the wine was reasonable in quality and price, and I’d recommend it highly. But what you soon realised was that this was a rather special restaurant. The waiters might have struck the casual visitor as just a bit different from others. And the menu told you why… As it put it, the staff were people with disabilities - together with their volunteer friends from the Sant’Egidio Community. But apart from that… it was all quite unexceptional. There were no compromises over standards, no artificially low prices, no sense that this was a churchy enterprise put on in a seedy church hall. It was just another restaurant. But one where people who otherwise wouldn’t have had the chance were given dignity in the service they could offer to paying guests. People were earning a living, who otherwise might have been thought not capable. And everyone was having a good time.

That’s just one of the many things the Sant’Egidio Community does… A few years ago the Community got into the news when it brokered a settlement which finally brought peace to Mozambique after years of civil war in that country. High level diplomacy had failed. But members of the community which had begun on the streets of Rome trying to provide food and warmth for homeless people had simply gone out of their way to befriend the leaders of the warring parties. Then they invited them to Rome, not to be put up as official delegations in expensive hotels but to stay in the homes of ordinary members of the community. They provided simple hospitality, won their trust, and people talked until they agreed to stop fighting. It’s a remarkable story. And it only worked, I think, because its members are so unassuming. The community’s leader was an 18 year old student when he started the movement. The man we met had grown middle-aged along with him in over 30 years of community membership. We asked him what he did, and he said he was a Professor in one of Rome’s universities - but during the late afternoon and evening he manned their switchboard as his particular contribution… though he also gave us an hour of his time, translated for us in the service we attended, and on the way to the church stepped aside to help a homeless person on the street. When it was time for Vespers, the ancient church simply filled up, mainly with young people. And before they meet for prayer - which is mostly sung both beautifully and spontaneously - many of the community are involved in the soup kitchens of Rome. Service of the poor goes along with worship and prayer. It’s seen most clearly when - on Christmas Day - the Community clears the pews out of the church to make way for tables on which they provide Christmas lunch for the needy.

As it happens I received the latest newsletter from the Sant’Egidio Community just yesterday. It starts by speaking of signs of Resurrection in a world where there are many crosses still standing. And then, unsensationally, it reports the signing of a peace agreement in the Ivory Coast for which the Community has most recently worked and prayed. I wonder how many of us even knew about the violence and civil strife in that West African country, let alone the vision and determination of these people who had worked to bring it to an end.

We live in a country with a lot of news coverage, but it’s coverage of only a limited range. While acres of newsprint obsess about whether Prince Harry might serve with the armed forces in Iraq, we lose our perspective on the blighting of millions of lives in that country - not to mention all those wars and places of need which simply go unreported. Perhaps someone needs to remind the Prince that the thing so far he has achieved of real value is to work in his gap year with AIDS orphans in Lesotho: he could do far more by keeping the plight of that forgotten country in people’s minds than by toting a gun around Basra while under the protection of the SAS. And it’s not just the elite who have got priorities wrong: I was struck by the coverage of the earthquake in Kent last week, in which a few chimney pots fell down and a car was damaged by a collapsing garden wall - “small earthquake in South East England,” the headline might have read; “nobody at all hurt.” All credit to the local Salvation Army who don’t seem to have been at all stretched by the needs of those evacuated from their homes. But you can’t help but be amused by the person said to be in shock at being roused from her bed at 8.20a.m.!

Where are the real needs beyond our self-obsessing and selfishness? Who are the people who really need our concern in a society so caught up in the cult of celebrity? The glorious vision of St. John the Divine is of “a new heaven and a new earth.” The two go together. We are called to holiness - but that goes with meeting people in their need. It’s not a task for other people. It starts simply as, where and when we put faith into practice in our daily lives. But it demands some vision too – to recognise that God is a God of life and love who is not tied down by our rules and expectations. That’s how we are to understand our Gospel reading today. Jesus spoke to his disciples as fellow-Jews, who knew there were 613 commandments for them to live by. He must have had that in mind when he spoke of adding to the commandments: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

Love like Jesus, and we’ll know the extent of that love which searches us out, which acknowledges our frailty and failings, which brings us forgiveness and challenges our stubborness, which goes finally even to the Cross for people who cannot comprehend that this is God’s way. This is the love which breaks the bounds of expectation. And it is this love – more than any set of rules, more than great knowledge of the scriptures or theology – this love which declares that we are Jesus’ disciples.