1 Corinthians 12.1-11, John 2.1-11
The Second Sunday of Epiphany, 19 January 2025
in The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, Austwick, Clapham
What does ‘the church’ mean to you? Or let me put it a better way, if you were asked by someone who had never been to church, to tell them what ‘the church’ is…. what would you say?
I think we’d all say something a bit different, but equally true.
We might think of ‘church’ as a place, or as a people: ‘church’ can be, for us, both a building and a gathering; it can be four special walls and a fellowship. And it can be here in the local as well as being right across the world.
If you take a look in our Visitors Book from time to time you’ll realise just how special this building is to those who come in through the week.
For some it’s their first and maybe only visit, and they comment on how peaceful it is, how calming, how well looked after, and how beautiful. It’s good to reflect how, for some visitors who may live in very packed conditions in busy concrete urban places, that beauty and that calm are rare and special things, which can be truly healing.
Other occasional visitors are returning to a place which they will always find special, maybe because they were married here; living away now, some couples return each year or even once a decade, perhaps on an anniversary, to celebrate and give thanks: drawn back to the place and the important memories it holds.
For we who come more often, it can be all those things – a place of calm and beauty, a place of recollection of special and important occasions, pivotal in our lives.
For you it may also the time out of the everyday to pray, to sing, to come to the rail to refresh your faith in God and life… and in each other.
Because for some of us another important thing about ‘church’ is the people. It’s the company. It’s the fellowship. We come to church to meet, greet, catch up, and – maybe – build up, and be built up by, each other.
The Church is of course, active in many ways in the outside world.
The evangelist J. John, who is also a ‘Reverend’, tells of the time he tried to explain to a fellow-passenger on a long-haul flight just what it is that he does….
I sat next to this lady on an aeroplane at Heathrow airport (he says) and I said, ‘Hello’, and she said, ‘Hello’. Then I said to her, ‘Where are you going?’ and she said, ‘I’m going to Singapore’. And she said to me, ‘Where are you going?’ and I said, ‘I’m going to Australia’.
I said, ‘What do you do?’ and she told me; then she said to me, ‘What do you do?’ and I said, ‘Well….’
‘… I work for a global enterprise.’
She said, ‘Do you?’
I said, ‘Yes I do.’ I said, ‘We’ve got outlets in nearly every country of the world.’
She said, ‘Have you?’
I said, ‘Yes we have.’ I said, ‘We’ve got hospitals and hospices and homeless shelters,’ I said, ‘We do marriage work, we’ve got orphanages, we’ve got feeding programmes, educational programmes.’ I said, ‘We do all sorts of justice and reconciliation things’. I said, ‘Basically, we look after people from birth to death, and we deal in the area of behavioural alteration.’
She went, ‘Wow!’ And it was so loud, her ‘Wow!’, loads of people turned round and looked at us.
She said, ‘What’s it called?’
I said, ‘It’s called the church … have you heard of it?’ [2]
There’s no doubt that the church in this country and overseas plays a very large part in bringing help and relief to society’s poorest and struggling. When I say ‘the church’ I mean the people – working together, inspired by the gospel of love, to serve others as Christ serves us.
This is one thing to celebrate in this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. This week we’re invited to consider our identity as the church, to celebrate our strengths, to repent of our corporate wrongdoings, and to commit ourselves to overcoming our divisions and reshaping our ways to meet the challenges of this generation where over half the population now describe themselves as ‘non-religious’ but a high proportion still nevertheless believe in God and express an interest in spirituality. Like the visitors who come through these doors. [3]
But note that Jesus’s mission was not to establish a religious institution which runs welfare organisations. To use J. John’s words, Jesus ‘deal[s] in the area of behavioural alteration’. He does want us to see that change is possible in the world; he does want us to play our part in making that change; but he needs us to understand that such change starts right here, in our hearts.
You don’t have to sign up for membership, or pass doctrinal tests or look or act or eat a certain way to be part of Jesus’s movement. You just have to embrace Jesus’ teaching and his life as the means through which you can become more fully human.
This calling, this life, we share with each other, and with everyone who gathers for worship in whatever place of worship anywhere in the world today.
If we use the story of the marriage feast at Cana in Galilee to help us, we might say, in conclusion, that:
- The Church is the servants who do what Christ asks.
- The Church is the vessels through which Christ works his miracles.
- The Church is the water Christ turns into wine.
Notes
[1] A rewrite of The global enterprise with a different set of values, preached in Somerset, 2016.
[2] J. John, How To Explain What You Do, When You’re A Pastor, YouTube,Trinity Broadcasting Network interview, 13 Nov 2014.
[3] Hattie Williams, ’No religion’ is the new norm, survey of White British finds, Church Times, 22 January 2016.
