Sunday 10 May 2026 | The Rev'd Clare Barrie
Psalm 66:8-20, John 14:15-21
May I speak in the name of God, Creator, Redeemer and Giver of Life. Amen.
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Like last Sunday, we are still dwelling in that long arc of Jesus’ farewell discourse in John’s gospel – we are eavesdropping on the Last Supper. Judas has already gone out into the night on his mission of betrayal. Soon, Jesus and his disciples will leave for an evening walk to Gethsemane. But for now, everyone is sitting around the table and listening, while Jesus talks with his followers about the life of faith they will live in the future, when he’s no longer with them.
This reading comes at a time in the church year when we are beginning to turn from the events we remember in Holy Week and at Easter, and look towards Pentecost. The Christian story is coming closer and closer to where we live, in the here and now – our faith is lived out in that future time Jesus describes…
And we are the ones he speaks of: ‘Those who love me will keep my word, and God will love them and we will come to them and make our home with them.’ This whole passage hinges on us loving God and loving one another. What are we to make of this… What does this love look like? What did Jesus mean?
Someone once said: “God is a verb not a noun.” It’s not a perfect statement, but it affirms something very important and Christian about our relationship to God. Namely, although it’s good for us to wrestle with these things, God cannot be finally reduced to an idea or a formula that we can agree with intellectually. Instead, we come to know God as a flow of living relationships, a trinity, a dynamic aliveness that we can enter, taste, breathe within, and let flow through us.
“God is love,” Jesus told his disciples on that lamplit evening, “and whoever abides in love abides in God and God abides in him or her.” Too often, we miss what that means because we tend to romanticise the word ‘love.’ But ‘love’ in the gospel sense is a much more varied thing. Ron Rolheiser suggests re-writing the text this way: “God is community – family – parish – friendship – hospitality – and whoever abides in these abides in God and God abides in him or her.”
God is a trinity, a flow of relationships among persons. If this is true, then the realities of dealing with each other in a community like this, whether we’re at the dinner-table, over a bottle of wine or a coffee, texting each other, or in a parish council meeting, when we’re sharing or laughing or disagreeing or doing the dishes together, the simple giving and receiving of hospitality, sharing about our lives, are not secular experiences but the very stuff of church, of faith, the place where the life of God flows among and through us. This is the dance of God’s life. This <here> is where God will make God’s home amongst us.
You’ll have the sense already, I hope, that this dynamic interweaving thing we’re part of involves both a gathering in and a sending out. This is certainly the dynamic of our eucharist, which always begins with our being gathered and ends with our being sent into the world. In fact, the more Catholic term for the eucharist is ‘the mass’ – a term which comes from the old Latin words of dismissal, which translate as something like ‘Go, it is the sending’. God’s energy, God’s abiding, God’s love, draws us in and then ripples out into our broken world, a world that feels increasingly fragmented, lonely, anxious and divided – sharing, reaching out, naming injustice, offering helping, caring hands and living the gospel.
The life of God is a flow of relationships to be experienced in community, family, parish, friendship, and hospitality. When we live inside of these relationships, God lives inside of us and we live inside of God.
This has huge consequences for how we should understand religious experience: in coming to know God, the reality of the dinner-table cannot be separated from the discussions of a theology classroom; the spiritual practice of hospitality in our liturgy and in our homes and our favourite pub or cafe is as important as – and informs – our intellectual understanding of faith; and gathering with others to worship and serve in community is dynamically linked with time we spend in personal prayer.
The most insidious heresies that block us from properly knowing God are not those of formal dogma, but those of our culture of individualism that teach us that we are self-sufficient, that we can curate our lives entirely for ourselves, and that we can have God without needing each other. The pressure of our culture is intense – it forms us to think of ourselves as individuals, consumers, competitors, rather than as people who belong to one another.
But God in Christ is to be found and known in community – and only in opening our lives in gracious hospitality will we ever understand that. Very simply, it is in a community like this that we experience the presence of the Advocate, the Holy Spirit. This is where Jesus promises that God will come, and together they will make their home with us.
“This is the Spirit of truth,’ Jesus tells us, ‘and you know the Spirit because the Spirit abides with you and will be in you.” This sounds extraordinarily abstract, but in reality, this abiding of the Spirit, this interweaving of our lives, yours and mine and Christ’s, is very concrete – sometimes messy and uncertain, and sometimes glorious. Remember Rolheiser’s words: “God is community – parish – friendship – hospitality – and whoever abides in these abides in God and God abides in him or her.”
There is no abstract St Luke’s, no abstract ‘church’ somewhere else that doesn’t need you – there is just us, showing up for each other each week as best we can. Our hands and feet, our shared voices in prayer and dishwashing and discussion and budgeting and sharing and laughter.
This is where God abides. This is where the Spirit makes her home. We are holy ground.
Amen.