Sermon:30th May 21

In-between-ness and Reconnection

Gospel Reading: John 3: 1-21

In The Christian Community the sermon can be delivered by one of the servers. On Sunday the sermon was delivered by Alan Potter.

Dear Community of Christians,

In this conversation between two high masters who recognise each other, we hear of the cycle of births occurring firstly out of water – from the womb into earthly life and secondly out of what we have learned during life of the spirit as a spiritual womb, so as to be born well into the spiritual world. A great cycle from spirit to flesh, again to spirit and so on.

In the conversation the word power is used six times as Nicodemus, the teacher of Israel grows stage by stage in his understanding of repeated earth lives. This growth happens in the ‘in-betweeness’, the interval of space which both separates him from and connects him to the Christ.

Do we not live in a culture of ‘in-between-ness’, which is both personal and communal? The old forms and traditions are no longer certainties, fewer jobs are for life, science is no longer as steady an authority, traditional religious forms seem weakened, understanding friendships can seem preciously fewer and our personal and collective identities less stable.

In their place do we not live in our increasing individuality in a growing isolation and loneliness and with an increasing longing for connection? In a state of ‘in-between-ness’, a diminishing of the past can seem to overshadow a slowly growing awareness of a new future.

Rudolf Steiner described in 1912 a path of reconnection to this great archetype ‘The Son of Man, who is in heaven’. That the Christ’s soul body grows in the accumulated Wonder of human beings on earth – Wonder for all we encounter, which reveals the spirit’s actions manifesting in life. A child’s laugh, a songbird, bees on blossoms in the sunshine.

Secondly, that the Christ’s life-forces body is created out of the gathering presence of human compassion and love from each person for our fellow beings, opening our hearts ever more.

Thirdly, through the presence of human conscience acting for the good of others, for the good of the earth, the Christ’s resurrected body of the earth is built.

We seem to have spent our last year on one hand in a weakened state of connection and a heightened isolation of Self, yet we have been free in our manner of responding to this.

​The experience of the unfolding flame of the self of the other in the light and wind of Whitsun calls for a new community of authentic connectedness, that through our small daily windows of wonder, our open-hearted listening compassion and our acting as our conscience prompts us, a new world is beginning where we begin to see that in doing what is true, our deeds may act in the will of God in the great and small cycles of life.

Alan Potter

Pentecost by Titian; c.1545 AD