22nd Sunday Year B

22nd Sunday Year B – Reach Out

Take a look around you. Go on, take a few minutes or at least seconds to look around you now. You are probably sat in your usual place, here in church. The place where you always sit or at least try to sit and you probably have those same people, those same faces beside you, either side, in front and behind. You have probably nodded your Hellos and wished them peace umpteen times.

Now – Stop and think, as I was asked to do this past week, “Who is not here? Who is missing? Who, since the pandemic lockdowns eased, has not come back to church?”

So many of us within my own group, struggled to name even one person and yet we know that before the pandemic we were averaging around the hundred-mark for each weekend mass, slightly more on Sunday than Saturday and now, today, we are averaging around fifty!

Where have they gone? I ask, not in any sort of accusatory way but in a worried way. We have lost half of our congregation and need to be able to reach out to them now and to tell them that it is alright to come back to church. It is good to come and rejoin our family here in St John’s. It is safe and secure to do so, here probably more than most other places of worship. Come back. You are missed. You are wanted. You are needed.

I wonder how many of us leave church after mass at weekends or at any other time and feel great; feel fresh, rejuvenated, alive, alert, full of joy, happy and wanting to reach out to others and to share in all of these feelings? Wanting to reach out and share a smile, a word of comfort and support, to simply stand and chat if we are still afraid or unsure about shaking hands or hugging.

If we are to show God’s love for us, alive in us and willing and able to share with others, then we have to do something with it. We have to reach out. We have to initiate some sort, some form, of action that lets other people know who we are, where we are coming from and what we are about: that lets them know we have been touched by God’s love.

How do we show people that we love them, that God loves them? We reach out to them. We speak to them. We invite them in to our space. We welcome them in. We include them. We share with them. We offer time and space and anything that they might need to them, often simply a listening ear, a friendly hand  or a shoulder to lean or to cry on.

We show our love for them because all of these words are just replacements for the word, Love. And by showing that we love them, we are showing that God loves them. We are showing God’s love for me, for us, is alive and well and strong. And we are showing that what is coming out of us is clean, is strong, is pure, is true, is honest, is God-like.

We cannot wrap ourselves up in some form of cocoon and lock ourselves away from the world, although lots of us probably feel that  is what has been forced upon us over the last eighteen months. We are the Church, the people of God. We are family and community. We are the congregation of St John’s and at this time, we are incomplete.

I would ask each and every person here to think, to think really hard and see if you can recall just one person who you used to see here, who is now absent. If we each did that and if we each reached out to that missing person and invited them back, encouraged them, supported them and even accompanied them back to church, we could double our family attending here in St John’s.

If we each did that and found that the person we were seeking was feeling alone, unsure, trapped, isolated or unwell, we could reach out as the St John’s family to them and let them know that they are loved, they are missed and that we can then offer some form of spiritual, physical, mental or emotional care for them.

Again we would be gaining knowledge of who and where our congregation is and then be able to take action to offer love and support to them wherever they are, whatever space they might be in.

For evil to flourish all that is necessary is for good men to do nothing, I said or quoted last week. And the same can be said for how a parish lives, survives, flourishes or the opposite, dies, weakens, stumbles. What has to come out of us, each one of us, is the will, put into action, that reaches out and offers the love of God that we encounter in church and within our lives to all those we meet when we come out of church.

Look at those Christians: see how they love one another. See how they care for each other. See how they seek each other out to make sure they are each okay. Let those Christians be us, be you, be me.

Let the things that come out of us reflect the love of God within us. “Reach out and touch, somebody’s hand. Make this world a better place, if you can.”