St Martin's & St Paul's
Parish Canterbury
Parish Canterbury
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It took 45 minutes last Sunday for the Archbishops and Bishops of the Anglican Communion to process into the Cathedral. Sitting with the local clergy in the north east transept I was fascinated by our double vision of the advancing ranks in red and white, with here and there a purple cassock or a black orthodox robe or a vivid national colour, for we saw them on a huge screen as they entered the Cathedral and then again through the entrance to the transept as they drew level with our position. Looking at them, one could not but be reminded of two things about the Communion; it is very extensive and it is very international. We will have another experience of that today as we welcome the Archbishop of Korea at St. Martin's and the Bishop of Kumasi at St. Paul's.
The sermon was given by a Sri Lankan Bishop with a beautiful voice. He began with a good joke about the four great religions of his country: Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Cricket. As he moved on he engaged beautifully and brilliantly with the realities facing the Conference and he focussed on the Gospel which last Sunday concerned Matthew's account of Jesus' parable of the wheat and the tares. He said that it was thankful that the Master - God - was prepared to wait and let the wheat and the tares grow side by side, for he said, we might well otherwise all be uprooted.
Matthew lays great emphasis on the division of the worthy and the unworthy - the salvation of the one and the destruction of the other, and he rather likes the expression "weeping and gnashing of teeth" whatever that means. But here he also gives us Jesus' simple and powerful images of what the Kingdom of God actually means to people: the mustard seed, starting small but growing great; the treasure in the field, the merchant and the fine pearl, the net full of good and bad fish. Which one of these touches you most, makes you think that God's kingdom is a desirable reality, something to be sought for at all costs, something worth more than everything we have?
There are many ways of reading the Bible of course, but there is one way that is useful in narratives like this, full of pictures. Take just one of those pictures and think of it: the seed growing into a tree and sheltering the birds in its branches. Look at a tree and say to yourself, this is an image of the Kingdom of God. Let your eye travel all over the tree in reality, or in your mind, and see what that tells you. In this way let the Kingdom of God, in the images of Jesus, take possession of your mind and your heart.
Amen.
