Sernon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Fourteenth Sunday after Trinity 2026

I recently picked up a book with the intriguing title Self-Help from the Middle Ages.

How could a priest at Westminster Abbey resist?

Its author, Dr Peter Jones, is a British medieval historian who, as a young academic, moved to teach history at a small university in Siberia. He loved it at first, but the long winters and isolation gradually took their toll. He wondered what was wrong. Why, surrounded by work he loved and people he respected, did he feel so numb?

Seeking some wisdom, he turned to the material he knew best: medieval pastoral handbooks.

These books were written to help priests offer comfort and counsel to their parishioners who came for confession. Jones expected them to be moralistic and judgemental. Instead, he found them surprisingly perceptive about things like depression, anxiety, grief and temptation. They were also quirky: full of poems, maps, bits from medical textbooks, and snippets of saints' lives. And lists, lots of lists: the twelve steps of pride, the five kinds of tears, the six signs of envy.

What struck Dr Jones most, however, was the vision of the human person which lay behind them. Many of us instinctively think of wellbeing, morality, and even faith as largely private matters. My life is my business. My religion is private. The medieval handbook writers assumed something rather different: There are no solo Christians. We belong to one another.

A similar assumption runs through all our readings this morning. But before we say anything about belonging and community, we need to begin with God.

The central verse in today's readings comes at the end of the lesson from Ezekiel:

"I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that they turn from their ways and live."

God desires life. Even when people are doing deeply hurtful things to each other or themselves, God doesn’t just give up on us. He doesn’t cancel us. He wants us to choose life and to thrive. And so he sends people to remind us of this.

Ezekiel the prophet is one of these. He was speaking to a community who were living through the aftermath of catastrophe. Jerusalem has fallen, and the nation has collapsed. The elite has been carried into exile in Babylon. And in the midst of all that loss and trauma, there was a temptation to shrug and give up. To stop caring about injustice, to grow complacent about worship, to think what we do doesn’t matter. But God refuses that kind of fatalism.

In this situation God calls Ezekiel to be a watchman. A watchman on the ancient city wall keeps lookout for approaching danger and sounds the alarm when an army is coming. Ezekiel is called to do this for his community: to help people see dangers they might otherwise ignore, unjust patterns or habits that have become normal, ways of living together that slowly erode the common good. His concern is not with individual failings but with the ways a whole community can drift from God and God’s purposes. So he asks what threatens our common life together as God’s people. Where has the fabric torn and needs repair?

Part of Ezekiel's task is to call people to mutual responsibility for the life of the community. He speaks uncomfortable truths.  God’s warning is an expression of love, a refusal of indifference. They are called back to relationship with God and each other: "Turn, then, and live."

After all, it is often easier to just ignore problems, but we all know that does not always make them go away.

Anyone who works with historic buildings such as the Abbey knows that serious problems rarely begin dramatically. More often they start with something small: a leak, a crack, a poor repair carried out decades earlier. Left unattended, they widen. The difficult task is noticing cracks before greater damage follows and repairing them. Or even better, to be proactive even before cracks start.

Every community must ask itself where are the cracks appearing? Which voices are we ignoring or becoming defensive about instead of listening to so we can change? Are there people whose needs, voices or vulnerabilities we have stopped noticing? How can we love God and our neighbour in this time and place more truly?

As Saint Paul writes in Romans, love fulfils the law. Love is the thread which holds the fabric together. “Owe no one anything,” he says, “except to love one another.” For, he reminds them, "Love does no wrong to a neighbour."

If Ezekiel asks what threatens a community's life, and Paul reminds us that love is central to building and sustaining community, then Matthew in our Gospel asks what we do when damage has already been done? When trust has frayed, when words have been spoken that cannot be unsaid, relationships have broken down, and holes have appeared in the fabric of communal life – what then?

That is the question Jesus addresses.

He is concerned with the health of the new communities of disciples. Even the earliest followers of Jesus clearly experienced competition, tensions, failures and conflict. In Matthew, Jesus imagines a conflict between members of the disciples and sets out a careful process: first a private conversation, then the involvement of a few trusted others, and finally the wider community if reconciliation cannot be achieved.

He does not advocate for avoidance, nor for scapegoating, nor blanket condemnation, but the difficult work of rebuilding relationships.

It is worth remembering where Matthew places these words: right after Jesus has just told the parable of the lost sheep. The concern is thus how to seek those who are becoming lost to the community. Instead of gossiping about someone, you go to them. Instead of writing them off, you seek them out. Instead of retreating into silence, you risk the difficult conversation, where appropriate. The goal is not pretending that nothing has happened. It is creating a community truthful enough to confront harm and protect the vulnerable, and seek accountability, and loving enough to work towards healing and maybe restoration of fellowship – wherever that remains possible.

And it may not always be possible, as Jesus acknowledges.

And yet : God desires life.

Nowhere do we see this more clearly than in Jesus Christ himself.

For the remarkable thing about the Christian faith is that God never asks us to do anything that he has not first done himself.

Rather, God never asks us to do anything he has not first done himself.

When human beings became estranged from God and from one another, God does not stand at a distance and simply issue instructions. In Christ he enters the brokenness of human life itself to heal us.

He enters a world marked by conflict, betrayal, rejection and violence. He enters the torn fabric and he repairs it.

At the cross we see God taking on our pain and brokenness, taking upon himself the wounds of the world he loves. For God refuses to abandon his world. The cross is the ultimate declaration that God desires life and in Jesus pours out himself so that we might live and flourish.

Jesus' final promise in our Gospel today is this:

"Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them."

These words are not just for very small congregations to take heart. They are for all of us to take heart when we need to remember God is with us, as we undertake the difficult work of becoming a community shaped and sustained by God’s love.

The promise has never been that we will get everything right. But that God will not leave us alone to mend our fractured lives or repair our struggling communities on our own. He comes among us in Christ, opening up again the possibility of communion with God and one another.

I began with the book Self-Help from the Middle Ages. In truth, the medieval writers were not especially interested in self-help. They believed that we all need companions, guides, truth-tellers and communities so that we can flourish in our faith. And we all need others to remind us that God is present in and among us.

For God's desire, yesterday, today and always, is that we should turn and live.