Wonders and Signs: Seeing The Church For What It Is

 Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, the Fourth Sunday of Easter, 26 April, 2025.  Readings for this Sunday:  Acts 2:42-47; Psalm 23; 1 Peter 2:19-25; John 10:1-10

“Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles.”  (Acts 2.43)

Coming back to the pulpit after two Sundays’ vacation after Easter makes me feel a little like Thomas the Disciple in John’s gospel, wandering in and going “Hey guys, anything happen while I was away?”

Joy and I had a very pleasant and restful vacation and now I’m back and there is still just as much work as when I left:  meetings, grant applications, diocesan paperwork, and all the usual business.   Ask any of our devoted wardens, our staff and lay ministers, or our volunteers, and they will all agree that doing church is time-consuming and often tiring.

Sometimes, to be honest, it can all be a little ridiculous.   You often here the term “churchland” to refer to the petty conflcts, squabbles, and displays of ego that can arise in any community or organization.   People will look at each other, chuckle, and say something like “that’s churchland for you”.  And, lest you think this is anything new, may I refer you to St Paul’s complaints to the Corinthian Christians?  Church is as church was, a grouping of sinful and imperfect people following Jesus as best we can.

I wonder, sometimes, if our experiences of the daily and weekly grind of church, or even the negative and sometimes harmful moments of our church life, can dull us to the beautiful and amazing things that God can do,  and does, do in our midst.   In our first reading from Acts, which describes the very first days of the church in Jerusalem following the miracle of Pentecost, we hear that ““Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles” (Acts 2.43).

Now we might say that that was then, the miracles of that mass appearance of the Holy Spirit — the tongues of fire, the speaking of many languages, the preaching that led to three thousand becoming believers in one day — was a one time, formative experience, a spiritual Big Bang.  Well, yes, in a sense.  Jesus did tell his friends to go out and preach, and he did promise them that the Holy Spirit would guide them and equip them, and that is waht we see in Acts.   But, if we think that there was an age of miracles, and then God and the Holy Spirit left us alone, then I think we are missing out on the best part of church.

In her book Why Gather? The Hope and Promise of the Church, Canon Martha Tatarnic challenges us to be confident that God is working in the Church, that Jesus is with us, and that the Spirit is empowering and leading us.    When is the last time you looked around All Saints and felt awe at the “many wonders and signs being done here”?   I hope it was recently, because I see wonders and signs all the time.  Let me give you some examples.

Just before Easter, at our Community Dinner, we seated over a hundred guests.  In fact, we had to put out extra tables.   Our volunteers, some of them otherwise unaffiliated with All Sants, came through as they always do.   We didn’t run out of food.   People left satisfied.    Over Holy Week and Easter, over two hundred people came through our doors to worship and to meet the risen Christ.     People come through our doors on Thursdays for CO3 because we offer them a respite from violence, cold and poverty.

I see wonders and signs whenever I look over at our hardworking tech team and think of what they make happen.    Just before Easter, I visited a parishioner in hospital.  She hasn’t attended in years for health reasons, but our livestream keeps her connected with our worship and preaching.  Likewise, I think of the lady in ICU at the end of her life;  her daughter held a tablet so she could watch the service, she heard her name in the prayers of the people, closed her eyes, smiled, and went home to our Lord.  These things happen because faithful and generous parishioners invested in our technology.  To me these things all fall in the “wonders and signs” category. 

If our first reading encourages us to be excited again about what God is doing in the life of our church, it also encourages us to think about the purpose of the church.  Acts tells us that the early church prayed together, ate together, and supported one another, to the point where “they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need”.  Now I suspect that my friends in the Stewardship Committee would not want to go out on a limb and urg us to do the same, but it is worth asking why the earliest believers would go so far as to sell all they had and live in such generosity,

As I’ve said before, the ancient world was a place of huge inequalities, where most people lived in poverty at or just above the subsistence level.   For these first believers in Jerusalem, they also lived as a conquered part of an empire dedicated to the ruthless anv violent extraction of taxes and resources.  What the Spirit created in this first church community was the opposite of empire, a real glimpse of the kingdom of God on earth.    In the Beatitudes, Jesus says that “Blessed are the poor, for yours is the kingdom of God” (Lk 6:20).   

The church then and now is that outpost of the kingdom of God that, in true Beatitude fashion, overturns the hierarchical values of empire.  Those empire values persist today in all sorts of ways:

fear of the outsider, turning housing into wealth and demonizing the homeless, celebrations of technology and violence that negate our common humanity .. the list, sadly, goes on.   The church then and now, if the church is worth its salt, is the place where the values of the kingdom of heaven are lived in common.   

In our gospel reading today we heard Jesus, somewhat confusingly, refer to himself both as the shepherd and the gate, but both metaphors have the same meaning, in that they both point to Jesus as the one who keeps the sheep safe.   When I’ve heard this gospel preached, it’s often to say that we are the sheep, which is true, but I wonder if we shouldn’t also think of the church as the sheepfold.    The church after all is, or should be, a safe place where all are welcomed and valued, and where the values of the kingdom of God are lived out.    To find such a church, indeed, to be part of such a church, should surely cause awe, wonder, and joy in an increasingly dark and uncertain world.  So my friends, let us see and  treasure the work that God is doing here at All Saints, in our regional ministry, and in the church at large.

He Finds Us Wherever We Are On The Blue Orb: A Homily For Easter Sunday

Preached at All Saints Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, on April 5th, Easter Sunday.  Readings: Jeremiah  31:1-6, Acts 10:34-43, John 20:1-8

Jesus said to her, "Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?

I often try to begin a homily by trying to connect scripture with something happening in the world, but today I’m going to go outside the world.  Sometime tomorrow, on Easter Monday, the four human beings aboard the Artemis spacecraft will travel around the moon.   They will transit the moon’s dark side, the hemisphere that is forever turned away from the sun.  During this time the astronauts will be cut off from radio contact with earth, and as they travel around the moon, they may beat the record of Apollo 13 as travelleing the furthest away from Earth as anyone has ever been.  

Now I confess that like most preachers, I love a good metaphor, and as a child who was allowed to stay up and watch the moon landing, I’m a sucker for a space metaphor.   Last night at our Vigil service, Father Gordon spoke of the risen Jesus coming into the light.  The return of Artemis from the dark side of the moon, coming back into the sun’s light and regaining contact with home, can be one way of helping us understand the miracle of Easter Sunday.

After all, both the Easter story and the Artemis journey involve a large rock, on the far side of which is darkness and the unknown, and when it is rolled aside, or orbited, there is the return to light and reconnection.   It’s a tempting metaphor, but when we consider it, the differences are greater than the similarities, and those differences may help us understand Easter the better.

I’m not an engineer, but I’ve known enough of them to know that they are never happy until the unexpected and the possibility of failure are reduced as much as is humanly possible.  Mistakes are analyzed and improvements are made; think of the Challenger and the catastrophic failure of the O-rings.  The Artemis may well be the most over-engineered machine in human history.  It’s trajectory and the time of it’s return from the dark side of the sun will have been calculated to the second.   Countless hours will have been spent designing and planning to reduce risk and uncertainty.

The Resurrection of Jesus, however, is the triumph of the unexpected and the impossible over what humans then and now know to be real.   Jews believed that Elijah and Moses were taken up into heaven, but no one had been raised from the dead, unless you count Lazarus whom Jesus had raised. 

The chief priests worried that the body might be stolen and rumours of Jesus’ return might be spread, but they did not expect resurrection.  The disciples, scattered and demoralized, had not expected it.   As Fleming Rutledge puts it, they had seen their beloved master mocked, beaten, and “pinned up to die like an insect, an object of utmost contempt and public disgust”.   When Mary goes to the tomb in John’s gospel, she takes no expectations with her.  There is only her grief and her immense sorrow.

Ask anyone who has grieved, and they will tell you that death is terribly real.  If you’ve been with a loved one at the time of death, you will recall the moment that they were truly gone, and only the cooling shell was left.  I recall the moment I poured the ashes of my wife Kay into her favourite lake.   There was a brief swirl of dust on the surface of the water, and then nothing to say she was ever there.  Death is real.  Grief is real.  Absence is real.

If Easter is to be understood as the return of Jesus to life, then it will be rejected by anyone who values reason, evidence, and proof.  I’ve known many churchgoers, and some preachers, shy away from the actual resurrection because it seems so unbelievable.   It’s far easier to say that the disciples experienced some renewal of hope, some spiritual sense of communion with Jesus, than it is to say that the Jesus rose from the dead, stood before them, spoke to them, and comforted them.  I love John’s gospel for it’s account of the resurrection.   The focus is firmly on one person, Mary, and the terrible reality of her grief.   Several times she is described as “weeping”.   Jesus sees the weeping Mary and knows her, whereas she mistakes him for the gardener.   Perhaps her eyes were dim with tears, and certainly, to see her friend alive is the last thing she is expecting.   After all, no one in the gospels really understands what we understand, that Jesus has defeated death.  

We don’t know how Jesus speaks her name, “Mary” , though I like to imagine it is with affection, as one speaks to a friend.  And while his refusal to let her hold onto him is mysterious, there is a definite connection between the two.   I heard it said that Jesus may well long to hold her, but knows he can’t.  It’s a comforting thought.  But more comforting, I think, is the promise that Jesus’ return from the dead has created a new kinship and new connection to God:  “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”  So as is always the case with John’s gospel, there is deep theology, but there is also very personal and human relationship between the divine and the human.

Let me finish by returning briefly to our friends on Artemis.  On their way towards the moon, they discovered something that a previous generation of astronauts discovered.    The entire blue orb of the Earth in their capsule windows, a sight not seen by humans for many years.  As I listened to the NASA feed, I heard the crew speak in awe and humility of how the sight of earth reminded them of their common humanity and kinship with all the people back home.  In that moment of technological and scientifc achievement, they had what might be described as a mystical experience.

John’s gospel of course begins witb a similar cosmic mysticism.  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.  He was with God from the beginning, through him all things were made”.  This “mighty word” as the hymn puts it can defeat sin and death, but still find the time to appear to and comfort his friend Mary.  Jesus has the time to do this, because all time is his, and as a shepherd, he will always seek out his own.

So if it comforts you, give yourself permission to think of yourself as Mary, with all of your burdens, whatever pains or sorrow yor loneliness you may carry.  You are just one human amidst the billions who live on that blue orb, and yet you are known to Jesus.  He is with you, as he is with you.   He calls you brother, sister, friend.  He is light, and he is love.   Death cannot hold him back, and death cannot keep you from him.  This Easter Sunday, as he does every day,  wherever we may be on the blue orb of the Earth that he created, Jesus comes to each of us,  as Saviour, brother, and friend, and he will always be with us, in the land of the living.

 

What We Need to Know on Good Friday

 Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 3 April, 2026.  Texts: Isaiah 52:13-53; Psalm 22; Hebrews 4:14-16,5:7-9, John 18:1-19:42.  

Some of you will perhaps have watched the recent installation of Sarah Mullally as the new Archbishop of Canterbury.  Or, to use her full title, the Most Reverend and Right Honourable Dame Sarah Mullally, Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and 106th Archbishop of Canterbury.

I was amused at the time of her installation when one journalist said she was the first woman Archbishop in 1400 years, as if before that there had been other women archbishops.   Another journalist didn’t mention her by name, but mentioned the name of her husband, as if if it was enough to describe her as a wife and a woman.  

In fact, the new Archbishop is supremely accomplished.  Before she was ordained in 2001, she was the government’s Chief Nursing Officer for England, and she was the first woman to be the Bishop of London, in which role she was quite successful.  But, on March 25th, during her installation service, none of this mattered.

At the start of the service, when she performed the ritual knocking on the outside door of the cathedral with her crozier, she was received by a group of schoolchildren.  The ceremony began with them asking: 

“Who are you and why do you request entry?”

The Archbishop says

“I am Sarah, a servant of Jesus Christ, and I come as one seeking the grace of God, to travel with you in his service together.

The Children say

“Why have you been sent to us?”

The Archbishop says “I am sent as Archbishop to serve you, to proclaim the love of Christ and with you to worship and love him with heart and soul, mind and strength.”

The Children say “How do you come among us and with what confidence?”

The Archbishop says “I come knowing nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified, and in weakness and fear and in much trembling.”

Our own Bishop Andrew, who was there, said recently that there was no mention of her resume or of her earthly knowledge or achievements.   In that moment, what mattered was that she was Sarah, a servant of Christ and of his church, and all that she needs to know and profess is Jesus Christ and him crucified.

Those words are the same words that Paul used when he presents his credentials to the church in Corinth.  In his first letter to that church, Paul writes that “I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and Him crucified”.  For Paul the message of the cross was all that mattered.   In a world which worshipped power and wisdom, the message of the cross spoke of abundant love poured out for all.    Likewise the work of the Spirit, the gift to all who keep the cross in their hearts, is a gift which gives us access to what Paul calls “the mind of Christ”, the infinite reservoir of love and humility which allowed the lord of the starfields to become the servant of our sinful humanity.

My friends, today we come to see and to cherish Jesus Christ and him crucified.    We come to the cross at a time when so many in our world are attracted to visions of arrogance, power, and cruelty.   We come to the cross amidst calls for detentions,  deportations, deprivations of status and citizenship.   

We come to the cross to see the powers and lies of the world exposed as the vain and threadbare things they are.  Where some would worship golden statues and surging markets and  planet-eating technology, we come to a God who breaks them by means of the offering of his broken body, given for all humanity.

The man on the cross, that rejected messiah, that beaten prisoner, that suffering servant, takes the powers of the world and exposes them as the dead and deadly things they are, and in doing so, he ushers in a second creation, one of freedom, love, and dignity for all the beloved children of God.

Beloved, this place we have to come to may be as bleak as its name, Golgotha, the place of the Skull, but it is the cradle of a new world.  Today we learn all that we need to know, Jesus Christ, and him crucified.