Invited by God

Anyone who seeks to say that God exists and that they have something to say about God, or even for God, is walking a very fine line between insanity and megalomania: religions have fallen foul to both and still do.

With that in mind, how can I stand before you as a priest, a person who is meant to be a sign of God in the world? Am I mad or a psychopath?

And yet I stand here, and you are here too......

The most important thing I can say to you, is that I do, because of a sense that life is a mystery. That mystery of my existence and of yours isn’t easily located in all the other narratives that I hear and have heard through my life, about creation, purpose and meaning, or lack of it. Science and humanism offer us much, but not that. There’s a mystery at the heart of me that’s profoundly invitational – by which I mean, it invites me to believe that my existence isn’t just a matter of flesh and blood. And this mystery can be explored through the medium of poetry, art, music, the created world and through encounter with other humans. Most of all I find it makes most sense in this strange thing called Church or Christian community:

a gathering of people seeking to make meaning of their lives, in conversation with Jesus Christ and wisdom traditions

Jesus’ life and teaching are a profound exploration of the mystery of weakness, vulnerability, suffering and death. It neither solves any of them, nor explains them away, but Jesus invites us to believe that they are doorways to something else – to a deeper level of encounter, to a more profound expression of love, and to a more solid  experience of hope. And listening to the voice of Jesus, the true shepherd, means listening to a voice we can trust, a voice that opens doors rather than closes them.

A Christian community becomes more Christ-like when it is faithful to an honest and deep engagement with that voice. In order to listen we have to learn to be prayerful, to be contemplative, to be disciplined, to be silent. The answers we get can often surprise us, because the voice is a voice of otherness: a truth we have not generated ourselves, a purity that comes from elsewhere, a truth that is liberating and demanding.

Which is why for me Christian community should be profoundly invitational – come and see, come and explore, come and question, come and imagine, come and encounter!

I’ve tried to inspire those who have come to this church and still do with the power of that message – to know oneself to be invited and therefore to invite others. As though each of us got a personal letter from God this morning which landed on our doorstep. Which is why one of the things that makes me most frustrated is when we exclude, through all sorts of actions and decisions, or because of what we don’t do. I would like all people to experience the extraordinary invitation that God has given us in Christ Jesus – to be invited, welcome and rejoiced over: you are accepted, as you are, not a better version of yourself, but as you are.

If we’re going to be invitational, then there's a chain of actions that follow from the invitation. We have to be genuinely open to ‘the other’ – ‘the other’ in ourselves as much as ‘the other’ who is the stranger. We have to make friends with our dark or shadow sides, as much as we have to make friends with the stranger at the door: to see the good in what our shadows have to offer. We have to be willing to receive and to be open to new truths and most of all we have to be willing to suffer – to share in the pains and wounds of those who we sit alongside.  Opening ourselves to others means opening ourselves to a whole lot of stuff we’d perhaps rather avoid. That is a form of sacrifice, but also a gift, for as we learn to touch each other's wounds, then we learn as well to share in each other's joys. 

So one of the things that I hope and pray continues to happen here, is that the door remains wide open: the physical door of this building, but also just as importantly, the door of our hearts.