Trinity 2
Sermon preached by the Revd Anna Matthews
I got back from retreat on Wednesday last week. The retreat centre is in North Wales, and one day while there I drove the few miles to St Winefride’s Well. This is in Holywell, where, since the seventh century, water has been flowing through a holy well. Legend has it that it sprang up when the aforementioned St Winefride, dedicated to a life of chastity and prayer, spurned the advances of a young prince, who promptly chopped off her head in his rage at being rejected. Where her head fell, a spring of water gushed forth. (Legend also reports that Winefride’s uncle, St Beuno, who gives his name to the retreat centre I go to, restored her to life and that she lived a holy life consecrated to God until her death fifteen years later.)
Anyway, the well has been a site of Christian pilgrimage and of healing since the seventh century. I visited on the Friday of the week before last, at the same time as a family from Liverpool: a grandfather, his son, and two grandsons. The well is open for bathing: pilgrims can go in, seeking Winefride’s intercession, asking God for healing, praying for restoration. The grandad went straight in, together with one of the grandsons. The other grandson hovered by the steps, shivering, clinging on to the side as his brother and grandfather shouted encouragement. ‘You’ve just got to get in!’ they told him. But he held back. I took my sandals off and stood on the top step, the cold water up to my ankles. I felt a certain affinity with the still-dry grandson. Paddling on the edge was fine for me.
I thought about the Liverpudlian family later, when I went back to the retreat centre. All week long it had felt as though Jesus was offering me living water, mine for the asking. But could I ask? I reasoned my way to it, I willed myself to it. But something in me held back: a fear, I think, of living so openly to the God who opens himself to us.
I went back to the well on the Sunday, by which time the outside temperature in North Wales had halved, to a not very balmy 14 degrees. And this time I went in, all the way in, completely submerged. It felt immersive and freeing. And very, very cold. In my rather literal-minded way, this was my response to Jesus’ invitation: a willingness to be all in, whatever that might mean, and wherever that might lead.
A day later I was, spiritually, back a bit closer to the steps, wondering if I hadn’t been a bit over-enthusiastic in my response, whether in fact it was really very sensible. And I don’t think I was wrong to recognise that going all in might have some implications. In today’s Gospel Jesus is greeted by someone who says to him ‘I will follow you wherever you go’ and says to her, essentially, ‘well, it’s not that easy’ – ‘the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head’, so if you follow me, you are following in a way that will lead you to be without home in this world, dependent entirely on others. Are you up for that? To another whom Jesus calls to follow him and who says yes, but first let me go and bury my father, Jesus tells him to let the dead bury their own dead. And yes, that would have sounded as harsh then as it does now: the Jewish Law didn’t specifically command children to attend to the burial of their parents, but it was understood as part of the tradition, and piety, and custom that they would do so. Jesus is saying that following him will lead to a reconfiguring of what we understand by kinship and even what we understand to be the will of God. And to the third who says ‘I will follow, Lord, but first let me say farewell to those at my home’ Jesus says that there’s no room for hesitation. He’s drawing on the bit of the story of Elijah and Elisha that we heard as our Old Testament reading today. Elijah lets Elisha go and say farewell to his parents: Jesus expects even more.
And the whole Gospel reading – indeed the whole chunk of chapters of Luke that we’ll be reading over the coming weeks – is set within the context provided by the opening verse of today’s Gospel: ‘When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem.’ This marks a significant shift in Luke’s Gospel, from the Galilean ministry to Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, to the passion and resurrection and ascension. Isaiah had prophesied that the Suffering Servant would ‘set his face like flint’ in the face of opposition, resolute in the task God had laid on him. Jesus, here, is set on the path that must unfold, even in the face of the opposition prefigured in the rejection of the Samaritans, and which will end with crowds who clamour for his blood. And Jesus goes ‘to be taken up’ (or lifted up): this is a journey that will end in his being lifted up on the cross, but then afterwards being lifted up to heaven in the ascension, as he returns to the Father.
This is the journey Jesus invites us to follow him on. It is a journey into the very heart of God, to sharing in the life of the Trinity, in the delight of the Son in the Father and the Father in the Son in the power of the Spirit. But it is a journey that will also encompass opposition, rejection, and a turning upside down of our whole lives. So that the whole of us can share in his saving work, Jesus asks us to follow him whole-heartedly. Faith can’t just be something for Sundays, or for parts of our lives. And I think it’s worth thinking about where some of our hesitations lie: like the characters in the Gospel reading today, what comes next after ‘I will follow you, but…’? I will follow you but please don’t ask me to look at my bank statements to show where my treasure really is, or my diary to reveal my true priorities? I will follow you but there are some habits or parts of my life that I will keep to myself? I will follow you but first I want to fulfil my own goals, or I will follow you but I can’t believe you want to include those parts of me that I keep hidden through fear or vulnerability or shame, and I’m afraid of what it might mean to open them up to your light.
We all have hesitations, the bit we fill in after ‘I will follow you, but…’ But the one who sets his face to go to Jerusalem does not hesitate. He is set on the journey that will lead him, and us, back to the Father. He is all in, wholly given to seeking and finding and restoring us, lifting us up with him until he lives in us and we in him.
The invitation is there for us all: to open our lives to the one whose life is already so opened to ours. You don’t need to plunge yourself into a freezing well: if you’ve been baptized, you have already done that. And if you haven’t, come and chat to me afterwards. You just need to respond: to fill in the bit that comes after ‘but…’ and give it to him. Jesus’ call isn’t meant to be a demand that discourages or a stick to beat ourselves with. It’s rather an invitation to respond to the one who gives everything for us, so that we can be wholly his, lifted up in him to the Father, no ifs, no buts, just ‘yes’.