One Cross for a Divided Church: Sermon Preached on 21st July 2024 (Eighth Sunday After Trinity)

Preached at Holy Cross, Seend and St Peter’s, Poulshot

Ephesians 2. 11-22; Mark 6. 30-34, 53-56

“Christ … that he might reconcile both unto God in one body by the cross…came and preached peace to you which were afar off, and to them that were nigh.”

The Church should be like one big family. We all agree with that, don’t we? It sounds very sweet and wholesome—until we remember what our own families are actually like in practice, and until we remember how we ourselves sometimes behave within them. As we all know, members of families don’t always see eye-to-eye on everything and they can sometimes fall out and start rowing. Don’t get me wrong—families are great. I wouldn’t be without mine. But they aren’t perfect.

This morning’s epistle reading, from Ephesians, is written to a church that is clearly, like many families, struggling with divisions. There are two factions here—one Jewish, and very clear that followers of Jesus Christ should, like good Jews, be circumcised; the other faction come from Gentile backgrounds, and cannot see why circumcision should be required for those of true faith in Christ. In fact, although this has traditionally been thought of as a letter to the Church in the city of Ephesus, no specific city or congregation is named in the text, and it may have been a more general letter to churches at a time when the number of Christians from non-Jewish backgrounds was growing rapidly, and tensions were rising.

From our perspective, circumcision seems like an arcane reason for a church to be divided, but pause and think about it for a moment, and it soon becomes obvious that it is rooted in issues that still cause deep divisions today’s Church – one is identity; the other is whether Christians are called to engage with the world to transform it, or instead to maintain our purity as a people set apart from the world. These are precisely the reasons why we’ve ended up so divided over women’s ordination, or same-sex marriage. Most of us are also terribly sure that only our side of those debates really understands what Jesus Christ taught us.

What Paul does in this passage is to remind his readers that their faith is not about them getting rewards for being right, but about what Christ has done for them. It is Christ who, then and now, brought and brings us near to God; coming close to God is not something we achieve by our own efforts. It is Christ who has – hopefully! – brought down the divisions between us. It is through Christ that these two factions had have access to the Father in one Spirit—and that holds for the various factions of the Church in our own time.

Members of both factions, Paul reminds them, are fellow citizens of God’s kingdom and, more than that, members of God’s household. This is quite a remarkable statement – we are members of God’s household! What a contrast with the cults of the ancient world with their gods who treated human beings, as playthings, with casual cruelty.

Yet, while God is the head of this great, boundary-breaking, household, its members remain human, with the normal run of human failings, including the tendency to fall out with other family members. So, it is also important to remember how Christ brought us together in one family—and that is through the Cross. The Cross encapsulates the inability of human beings to live as God intended by their own efforts. At the first Good Friday, the idea that we could build heaven on Earth if only God told us directly what to do was put to death along with Christ.

More than that, while the Cross seemed to represent the defeat of Christ’s mission, it was in fact the means of His victory. This paradox, that cosmic victory was won through Christ enduring defeat by the standards of the world, lies at the heart of the Christian faith.

It is at the foot of the Cross that all of us – Jews and Gentiles, radicals and reactionaries – must meet the reality of our own sinfulness, and pray that God will receive us “not weighing our merits, but pardoning our offences”, as the Prayer of Oblation which I will say after we receive Holy Communion this morning puts it.

How does all this fit with this morning’s Gospel reading? It is a very odd choice by those who set the lectionary. It comprises two short passages from the sixth chapter of St Mark’s Gospel, omitting a large section in between. The first thing I do before preaching in situations like this is to check what has been left out: in this case, it’s two of the most famous of all the miracle stories – the Feeding of the Five Thousand, and Christ walking on water. What are the lectionary compilers playing at here?

I think what they’re doing is trying to capture a mood that is so characteristic of and important to Mark’s Gospel, one that’s reminiscent of our own times. It is most clearly felt in the frenzy of the crowds in trying to get close to Jesus, who is clearly a major local celebrity in Galilee. In this morning’s reading, Jesus tries to take the disciples to a deserted place to rest, but the crowds work out His plan and get there first. Jesus, exhausted but full of compassion, heals them. After a trip to the other side of the lake, Jesus and his companions are mobbed by desperate people the second they step off their boat.

Another aspect of this passage that reminds me of our times is the way the masses are described as “sheep without a shepherd”. It seems obvious to me that the old order, the secular progressive order that began to emerge in the late 1700s but truly came to dominance in the 1960s, is crumbling. For better or for worse, this was the cultural scaffolding that Westerners of the last few generations, including me, used to make sense of the world. In 2024, however, it is clear that ever more people don’t accept that rationalist, technocratic, account of how our human nature and how society should work, and are no longer willing to defer to the campaigners and experts who tell them they to.

Yet while the old order is crumbling, there is nothing yet fit to replace it. So people are doing what they have always done throughout history when old orders collapse—they’re turning to tribalism and to strongmen. Yet, these strongmen are also, to put it mildly, idols with clay feet and they are likely to represent a passing phase. What will emerge as the next stable political and cultural order is still hidden in the mists of the emerging future.

What should the Church do in these times? Some would like it to take a lead. But, I don’t think it’s capable of that, not in our society. Mostly people don’t care what the Church thinks while it is itself bitterly divided about the same issues that divide the rest of society. People also know the Church has often failed to live up to its own high ideals. But one thing they rarely know is that an honest acknowledgement the inevitable failure of all human schemes and institutions lies at the heart of Christianity.

So any appeal to people of our own time must be made in great humility—and it must be made through the Cross and what it represents. That is where we turn back to our epistle reading. For not only is it the Cross that unites Christians as members of God’s household when we are divided, but it is at the Cross that we find the kernel of our Faith.

It is in contemplation of the Cross that we come understand that our ideas and beliefs are so often empty distractions from God’s true purposes for us. It is only when we understand that we are empty that God can fill us. It is when we survey the Cross that we understand that we are unable to save ourselves, and so give ourselves completelyto Christ, who is the one who has been calling us towards Himself all along.

That is what unites the Christian family across all its factions and fractiousness—our common need for the salvation won for us by the crucified shepherd, at whose feet all our divisions must be buried.

Now glory and honour be to the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the Father who made us, the Son who redeemed us, the Spirit who sustains us, this day and forevermore. Amen.

Top image—the rood screen at St Mary’s, Amersham. I am uncertain of the exact date but strongly suspect it was part of Edward Drake’s restoration of the church in 1890.