God's phone number

Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Easter

What do you do if you’re leaving a place that you’ve called home for such a long time? Clearly, there’s packing to be done, the place to be tidied for the next person in your lodgings, and then there are your friends.

These aren’t just acquaintances we’re talking about here. Not the people you talk with about the weather in the street whom you never get to know. These are your friends and you want to stay in touch with them. What do you do? Surely you give them the contact details of your new address.

[PAUSE]

This is why, as He approaches His crucifixion, we see the disciples clamouring around Jesus wanting to know where He is going and wanting to come too. We see hear them ask for things that will give them assurance that all will be well.

As yet, they don’t really know that the events of the next few days aren’t the end but the beginning.

They are not yet ready for the Resurrection.

And yet, Our Lord hands them His contact details anyway.

“ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.”

Strange contact details!

[PAUSE]

This is the point. These will not be the contact details that we’re used to in our age of email and tweet. The contact that Our Lord gives us is Himself in the coming of the Holy Ghost. Our contact is prayer and the phone number is the Name of Christ Himself. We ask in His name to receive what God is willing to give us.

All we have to do to be in contact with Our Lord Jesus, our Friend, Our Lover, Our Master, Our King, Our Judge, is to pray in His Name and we are in direct contact with Him.
We can, of course, get the wrong number, though.

[PAUSE]

Just by sticking the phrase “in Jesus’ Name” onto a prayer is not a guarantee that we’ve prayed in the Name of Our Lord. What if we’ve got the phone number wrong and prayed in the Name of a different Jesus- it’s a common name! Perhaps we pray in the Name of a Jesus who is a figment of our imagination. After all, there are so many people who pray only to a Baby Jesus lying in the manger and forget the entirety of His Incarnation, not just a well-rehearsed Nativity Play. There are so many who pray to a Jesus who will accept them for who they are no matter what they do, a Jesus who will accept their own idea of what’s right and wrong and who will sanction their behaviour because it is done in His Name.

They do not have Our Lord’s contact details. The do not pray in His Name.

[PAUSE]

Prayer takes a great deal of effort to do well. It is something we must struggle at and fail at and get frustrated at, because we are engaged upon our search for the real Lord Jesus. We are to pray in His Name, which means that we have to be ruled by His law, find good what He calls good, reject what He calls bad, and repent of all that we do wrong in His eyes. His morality is not the same as those of our society around us. Indeed, If Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever, then all His followers must abide by the same morality if they are to know Him, and through Him, the Father.
The Church has a whole compendium of prayers for us to use because they are shaped by the relationship which Our Lord has with the saints. It’s why we have Liturgy so that we don’t follow too much the devices and desires of our own hearts that we might otherwise do through always only using our own prayers. Our Lord is clear:

At that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not unto you, that I will pray the Father for you: For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God. I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.

God will hear each and everyone who truly believes in Him and this God is the One in Whom we shout out our Faith in the words of the Creeds. If we believe, then we must show that we believe not just by saying the words but by living out what they mean, following them to their conclusions and suffering the scorn of the world for following the True Jesus and not the straw man that it tries to palm us off with.

[PAUSE]

We know how to contact God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost. If we’ve forgotten His number, then we just need to find His address book. It’s called the Church and His number is written in the lives of the saints.