wfn.org | ACNS3484 Sermon preached at the Anglican Communion Office,

["Anglican Communion News Service" <acnslist@anglicancommunion.org>]

ACNS 3484     |     ACO     |	  19 JUNE 2003 

Sermon preached at the Anglican Communion Office, London

by the Revd Terrie Robinson

Corpus Christi Eucharist

On Corpus Christi, as the Church remembers with thanksgiving the institution
of Holy Communion, it's a good time to remind ourselves that within our
Christian vocation there is a call to community, a sharing of one bread, one
cup, and to see how that fits with the world as it is. That call to
community, that call to sharing at the deepest level, seems to stand in stark
contrast to a world that is fractured and fragmented. A world that finds it
difficult to share. It seems to be a phenomenon of our time and our place,
for example, that whilst our hearts may bleed for people who, through no
decision-making of their own, become caught up in war or state-sponsored
brutality, by the time even just a fraction of these same people come to our
shores seeking sanctuary, they seem to metamorphose in our minds into
freeloaders and scroungers who threaten our very existence. Something
somewhere along the line of how we process information goes wrong. Somehow,
somewhere along that line o!
f communication which extends from a broken situation at one end to where it
impacts directly on our lives, the passion and the compassion are lost.
Communication fails, community fails.

John's Gospel is full of miscommunications. It's a feature of John's Gospel
that people have difficulty communicating. Jesus has difficulty in
communicating with the people around him; he offers his truths through
stories and metaphors, but by the time they reach his listeners, the depth
and the meaning have been lost on the way. When Jesus says "Destroy this
temple and I will raise it again in three days" he's talking about his body,
not a building. He's talking about the pain and the suffering of the Cross
and then the rebuilding, the new life of the resurrection - all of which was
to come. But Jesus' words are lost on his hearers who wonder what on earth
he's on about because, after all, it took 46 years to build the temple - if
it were destroyed, how could Jesus possibly build it up again in three days?
The poetry and the pain and the ultimate joy of Jesus' meaning are lost. They
don't find a home in his hearers' consciousness.

Elsewhere in John's Gospel, Jesus uses a metaphor about entering a sheepfold
and he leaves his listeners baffled - "they did not understand what he was
telling them," writes John. When Nicodemus visits Jesus at night and Jesus
talks about being reborn in order to see the kingdom of God, Nicodemus wants
to take him literally, "surely a man couldn't enter his mother's womb for a
second time to be born!". The meaning of Jesus' message is lost. The
communication fails. In fact, the whole of John's Gospel revolves around a
failed communication - John introduces it in the opening verses of chapter 1:
"The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it."

It's almost as if Jesus speaks in an alien language, and the pain of it, the
power of it, the passion of it, the ultimate joy of it, don't reach the ones
with whom he is trying to communicate. Maybe God is speaking to us - with
pain, with power, with passion, in the people who hope to find safety and
sanctuary in our country, people running from danger, from killing, torture,
rape. Last year the top five nationalities who visited the Refugee Council's
'One Stop' services around the country were from Iraq, Somalia, Iran, Turkey
and Zimbabwe - all countries with difficult human rights records or
widespread civil unrest. Maybe God is speaking to us in these people who turn
to us, but it's so much easier to believe the tabloid headlines and assume
they're all bogus. So the communication fails. Community fails.

This week is Refugee Week and once again the organisations which promote this
week are spending a great deal of energy trying to overturn some of the myths
and misinformation which surround the whole issue of refugees and
asylum-seeking in this country. Our work is to listen to them, to understand
what we're hearing and make some effort to discern the truth. Because the
trouble is, if God is speaking to us and we're not hearing him; if God is
speaking to us through families torn apart and set on the run by civil
conflict, or through the hundreds of unaccompanied refugee children who reach
our shores, or through the desperate young men who hide in container lorries
out of a deep desire to survive and flourish, if God is speaking through the
running and the scared and we're not understanding his meaning; if
communication fails and the pain and the passion and the holding out of
possibilities are lost on us, then nothing changes and the world just remains
fragmented. If we acce!
pt to live with the miscommunication, then we accept to live with the
brokenness. Community fails.

But that's not our Christian vocation. As Christian people, we're not called
to accept and live with brokenness. We share one bread, we share one cup.
John's Gospel may well be full of miscommunications and misunderstood
metaphors, and people who are puzzled and baffled by what Jesus is trying to
communicate, but it's also a Gospel of great faith, faith in Jesus Christ as
revealer of God, a God who calls us into a community which recognises the
pain and feels the passion, a community which moves forward with the
possibilities that God holds out to us.

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