The Liturgical calendar gives us three great periods of waiting; Advent, when we are waiting for a birth, Lent when we are waiting for a death and the new life which that death triggered, and then this period (less acclaimed) between Ascension and Pentecost, when we are awaiting the gift of the Holy Spirit!

Each of these, as well as being a times of waiting, are times of responding, and in this season, the response is to the call to go out and build the church!  For the disciples, that was a call to start afresh and build the ‘new’ church, which had been triggered by the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ himself. 

In the reading from the Acts of the Apostles, we hear off Matthias being called to replace Judas as the twelfth Apostle, and in the Gospel, we hear Jesus own call, through prayer, that the disciples may be made holy and equipped to build His Church!

But for us, it is a call to continue to ‘build; on the legacy of empowerment, which we have inherited through the generations!

Chapters 13-17 of St John’s Gospel are taken up with what we often call the ‘final discourses’ – it takes place during the last supper, and it is a long discussion that Jesus has with his disciples, though he, himself does most of the talking!

Although this discourse only appears in the fourth Gospel, it contains some of Jesus most profound teaching.  It reminds us of how important it is to take on board that Jesus was both fully God and fully human.  Yet, despite this, at the last supper, there is no doubt that the fulness of God in Jesus, was coming into conflict with the fulness of being human within him!  At the last supper, the ‘fully human’ Jesus’ was a desperate man – living his final full day on earth, and about to submit to the most hideous and cruel death!

That discourse comes to a culmination in what we call the ‘High Priestly Prayer’ of Jesus, part of which we heard this morning.  It is a prayer of intercession for that ‘New Church’, the ‘Christian Church’ that is to come into being after Jesus’ death and resurrection, and it is by far the longest prayer attributed to the lips of Jesus anywhere in the New Testament!

In this passage, Jesus makes it very clear that he is radically different – the extreme love which he is about to demonstrate is more radical and far reaching than any love, which had ever been demonstrated before! But he went even further, in reminding the disciples that if they are truly to be his followers, then they also need to be different and to be radical!

Throughout two Millenia, God has been calling men and women to be different – to rebel from the way of the world!  

There are all sorts of ways to be radical, and there are all sorts of ways to follow Jesus, and if I was to start to list them here, this could be a very long sermon, so I am going to leave you to use your imaginations!

But if the church in our land is to thrive (or maybe I should go as far as as to say ‘survive’), then God needs men and women today who are prepared to be different, to rebel from the way of the world and to live radically!

In Germany, during the World War 2, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a gentle intellectual, and a pacifist, came to the conclusion that his faith demanded more of him.  His faith would not allow him to sit back and ignore what was happening. I’m sure you know his story: he joined the Resistance and became part of a plot to assassinate Hitler – not in spite of his Christian faith, but because of it.  The plot failed, and Bonhoeffer was arrested and executed a few days before the war ended.

His book, Letters and Papers from Prison is a modern Christian classic.  From his prison cell he wrote to a friend that Christianity doesn’t shield us from life but “plunges us into all the dimensions of life.” He went on, “During the last year or so I have come to appreciate the worldliness of Christianity. . . . I thought I could acquire faith by trying to live a holy life. . . . later I discovered that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to believe”.

To sum up, then, how do those who belong to Jesus, as a community of Christians, manage the calling to be different and yet involved?  There are two ways of being different: one is to focus on drawing boundaries between us and them, and that's the route to sectarian withdrawal. 

The other way to be different is to focus not on the boundaries but on the centre.  That is, on Jesus!  The stronger our commitment to that centre the greater can be our openness to others.  The more that from that centre we live out what it means to belong to Jesus, the more others will be drawn to the attraction and the challenge they can see in the way of Jesus as we live it. 

Similarly, our involvement with others can be sustained from our belonging to Jesus.  We must avoid the risk of simply ‘falling in’ with the values and objectives of the world!  As Jesus so often reminded his audiences – the ways of God and the ways of the world are very different!

St Teresa of Avila was a young Spanish woman in the mid 16^th Century, another, who gave up her worldly life to follow Christ!  She wrote this famous prayer:

Christ has no body now on earth but ours;

no hands but ours; no feet but ours.

Ours are the eyes through which

the compassion of Christ must look out on the world.

Ours are the feet with which he is to go about doing good.

Ours are the hands with which he is to bless His people.

Jesus asked a lot of his disciples, which is why he prayed for them.  He asks a lot of us, but that's exactly why he prays for us, too, and why we need to pray for each other!