Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Seventh Sunday of Easter 2026

Behind a very solid door, away to my left, is St Faith’s Chapel. It is a special place, one of my predecessors called it ‘the praying heart of the Abbey’.[i] It’s long and narrow, much higher than it is wide—dark, solemn. Over the altar, a thirteenth century painting of St Faith stops you in your tracks. She floats above you, in deep shades of red and green—mysterious, poised and authoritative. You need to look closely, but by her feet, you can find a small, painted Benedictine monk. He is praying. And the words of his prayer are written out, rising towards the saint:

From the burden of my sore transgressions, sweet Virgin, deliver me, make my peace with Christ and blot out my iniquity.[ii]

‘From the burden of my sore transgressions, deliver me’. For hundreds of years the Abbey has been a home for prayer like that. A home for holy dread, a home for the fearful and the anxious. Churches serve those of us who know that we are less than we should be. Here we can admit that we fall short, need mercy. Of course, we welcome people who come here in joy and thanksgiving, but we most serve those who come upset and worried and leave little notes asking for prayers: ‘For my mum, who has cancer’, ‘For peace’, ‘For John who is having an operation today’. ‘Pray for me, I have lost my job’. Even, sometimes, very simple prayers that just say, ‘Help me’. 

I sometimes wonder, when I am in this extraordinary building at night, when it is quiet, whether there are still echoes, high up in the roof of music sung long ago, or of all those prayers: ‘From the burden of my sore transgressions, deliver me’. Help. Forgive. Deliver. R.S. Thomas once wrote about the sea beating wave after wave on the shore and of God, who, ever, awake, lets our prayers break on him for days, years, for eternity. Help. Forgive. Deliver.[iii] 

Those voices and this need are part of our faith. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian murdered by the Nazis once suggested that the people who really look for God are

those who are troubled in soul, who know themselves to be poor and imperfect…

That is why that monk has prayed his prayer to St Faith, through the Black Death, the Reformation and the collapse of Anglican worship during the English Civil War. He has prayed on, in days when Samuel Johnson and then Charles Dickens were buried nearby and bombs fell on the Abbey in 1941. On and on, over and over, ‘deliver me, make my peace with Christ’.

He is not wrong. Many of us feel that longing. I go to meetings where people tell me how difficult life is, how complex our politics has become, how strained our public life. We see in a mirror dimly, run the race set before us, confess our sins, and we pray for the Kingdom that is still to come. We know who we are and how far we have to go.

But, but… this is not the only story we have. There is more to say, other words to use. This is the seventh Sunday of Easter. For seven Sundays we have begun our worship with acclamation—Alleluia, Christ is Risen. Seven Sundays of proclaiming victory over death. That is Seven Sundays with an answer for our longing and an antidote to fear. It is not all bad news. This morning we need to fix in our minds on that truth and ask what it means to be an Easter people.

The gospel is both longing and glory. The gospel is Jesus Christ—not just my humanity, but his. Not me, but him. And it is quite a story. We heard it this morning. We heard Jesus talking about glory. Not longing and need, but glory. Scripture keeps telling us that the character, the identity of Jesus Christ is glory. I could keep us here a very long time piling up the quotations:

We have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son. (John 1: 14)

The light of the gospel of the glory of Christ. (2 Corinthians 4: 4)

How great are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. (Colossians 1: 27)

And—as we heard this morning,

Jesus looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you.’

To know Christ is to know glory. Glory is the gospel.

The reading from John this morning was rich and dense. Jesus was praying. It is important to know that. It wasn’t a speech we heard, it was prayer. It began,

[Jesus] looked up to heaven and said, ‘Father, the hour has come.’ John 17: 1

‘The hour has come’. We are at the last Supper. The shadow of the cross falls over everything that Jesus says. This is crisis. The worst, the very worst that we can do and be is staring him in the face—agony, humiliation, desertion and death. Jesus is speaking in his need and longing, but he is still talking about glory. In fact, he is telling us that there is glory precisely in the things we find so hard. Darkness falls on Calvary as Christ dies on the cross. But, if you can only see it, there is also a terrible brilliance as the love and presence of God burns there. This is not just humiliation; this is more than desertion. God is there. So, there is glory as Jesus finishes the work he was given to do. Jesus gives glory to the Father and gives glory to us by showing us the Father.

You see we do have another story to tell, and it is all about glory. It is a story about Christ, and it is a story about us. That is what the prayer of Jesus is all about. He prays that we will know glory—prays that we will see it and share it.

We come here, some of us, in need or uncertainty. We come knowing we need to be changed, need hope, need wisdom, need love. We need what God alone can do for us. Christianity is never faith in what I can say, or what you can do. It is not my effort, or your plans for the future. It is not something we can turn into a project. Jesus is absolutely explicit that the disciples are given a glory that God has first given to the Son.

So, on this Seventh Sunday we see what we never thought to see. In a world of fear and anger, where possibility was pushed away out of fear, Jesus was put to death. The people who routinely say ‘No, not now, not here, not for us’ believed they had silenced hope and locked love and forgiveness away. Jesus was dead. Yet, that power over love and life was never theirs. They chose the dark, but what they got was the glory of the cross.

We bump into difficulty. Again, and again there are setbacks and the story seems to be chaos and unpredictability. The news is depressing, there is no community, there is just competition because there will always be winners and losers. Crisis makes the rules, the market must decide, even power has no choice. There are no possibilities. It is the way it works. You can hear that same presiding noise even in scripture. There is no alternative it says. At the grave of Lazarus, for example, the faithful do not want to take away the stone, because there will be a stench. It is the way it works; it is the way it always works. It is the same voice we hear when Christ is told it is ‘not lawful’, or it is not in ‘the tradition’. The woman caught in the act of adultery ‘must be stoned to death’. It is the triumph of the inevitable over the possible, the certainty that there can be no Sabbath morning. It is the fixed, the final, routine without possibility, life without hope. It is death and its dominion.

And it is not the last word. Christ is risen. The gospel is a gospel of glory and Easter is a new creation. Today we must be clear—there is glory and there will be glory. There is a future. There is possibility. We have a story. It is not just longing. It always began and always ends in glory.