At the end of a rather memorable service, we all departed, smiling, and bemused by an unexpected and unprecedented visitor.  Sometimes the Holy Spirit does a very similar thing. He works in ways we don’t expect, sometimes don’t like, often find uncomfortable, outside our predetermined, even permitted, conceptions of how he should work.

Tune in to hear guest preacher, Grant Norsworthy - More Than Music Mentor and Grammy-nominated producer of The Blessing Aotearoa - speak at our Lifestreams service on 12 May 2024.

All we do, we must do in love, because he first loved us. Love should be the fuel that drives us.

I like – well, don’t like - but tend to agree with the reading of this gospel that the warning about God’s pruning activity is not an idea we can apply to others (and it is always so much easier to apply sermons to other people than to ourselves!) but a message to all.

No matter how pious we may feel we are, no matter how theological we think we are, no matter how ‘good’ we act, none of that is a substitute for love.

We are called to cling to Christ so He can work through us to do good in our community and world.

The belief that Jesus rose from the dead with a physical body has been well debated over the years…

We decided the equivalent to Palm Sunday today would be a Santa parade…

Well, we have today two Greeks, or at least two people with Greek names, Philip and my namesake, Andrew. Philip has an encounter with ‘some Greeks’, who say "Sir, we wish to see Jesus."

A slight but important tangent is that these are Greeks, and therefore signify that Jesus’ reign and rule, locally felt in Jerusalem as he rode in on his donkey, will be felt in the entire world. 

Frustratingly, however, we do not get to read about them seeing Jesus. Philip tells Andrew and together they go to tell Jesus, but we are not told if the Greek-speaking enquirers saw Jesus in person. Instead, Jesus takes the occasion to speak about what is about to happen to him, and invites us to be a part of it.

Here are some numbers for you.

438.

That was roughly the number of people I was talking to at Medbury School on Tuesday – all their students, most of their staff, where we celebrated their Harvest service. The boys and their families had provided non-perishable food, which was stacked neatly on the stage; the choristers sang a song in which they named many fruits and vegetables, and we were warm, and we were sheltered, especially important that day, as only a few hours earlier hail, thunder and lightning had passed its way through suburb of Fendalton.

438.

That’s also the number of people who have used the emergency housing provided by the City Mission in the last year. That is, people who otherwise had nowhere else to live, had no roof over their heads, had not shelter, had no protection from the elements or from those who would do them harm. There are many complex reasons why people need to access emergency accommodation, and it is not always by choice.

But 438 of them did.

Jesus offers bread, and the Bread of life.