Sermon for Seventh Sunday of Easter

17^th May 2026

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart  be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

‘Sixty years of hurt: start dreaming of England’s World Cup glory’ ran the story in ‘The guardian’ a few months ago. And like the first of the swifts returning to the eaves of church that first mention of glory soon began to multiply . Supporters, players, sports journalists;  they’re all now encouraging us to hope for the ‘glory’ of England winning the world cup, and then , as we all know,  it’ll all end on a hot Sunday night in July with penalties, probably against Germany,  and those dreams of glory will fade away, until the next big competition.  But whereas the glory that comes with winning the world cup is limited to a small number of players and their supporters, and is a glory which excludes you if you’re not supporting the winning team, because my teams glory means your team’s bitter disappointment, the glory Jesus offers in today’s readings is for everyone, because it’s limitless, loving  and totally and absolutely inclusive.

We all hope for a glorious summer in other ways as well, and some of the glories that we’re looking forward to take us much closer to the glory that Jesus is talking about in today’s readings than England winning the world cup.   This morning lots of us have come to hear Emma and William’s banns being read and we know that their wedding day will be glorious in lots of ways, the weather will be glorious, the service will be glorious, but the greatest glory will be the glory that we can all experience when we are in the presence of love.  The glory of a wedding day is the glory that we can all enjoy when two people share their love for one another with the world, and in today’s readings Jesus shows us the most perfect and glorious expression of love imaginable, the love which God has for all Creation; the love God has for each and everyone of us, however unloved we may feel, or however tough life may seem, which is the love today’s readings tell us is here for all of us.

Earlier this week we celebrated Ascension Day, the festival which celebrates the moment when Jesus ascends into heaven. Our reading from Acts tells us what happens in that moment.  In front of you is a painting by Peter Rogers showing his interpretation of the Ascension.  Jesus ascends in a cone of golden light shaped rather like the World Cup we thought about earlier, angels surrounded by tongues of fire on his right and Mary and the other disciples gazing heavenward on his left.  This is something greater than any form of human glory, sporting or otherwise, this is a glory which is as limitless as the sky towards which Jesus is rising,  a glory which is loving and inclusive. It’s glory as spectacle and wonder, suggested by Peter Rogers in all those golds and reds against the swirling darkness of the night.  We might get the impression from today’s reading from Acts that God’s glory is something remote and far away, something shared by Jesus and God, but far removed from life here on earth.  But the angels in their white robes in Acts know differently. ‘Why do you stand looking up towards heaven?’ they ask the disciples, and us.  In Peter Rogers’s painting they’re looking right at us, as if challenging us to act. Their message is that neither we nor the disciples can just stand wondering at the glory we’re witnessing; we’ve got work to do. We’ve got to stop staring into space and get on with it! And that work is to enable everyone we meet to share in the glory of God as it’s been revealed to us through the person of Jesus.  And we do this as Jesus does it, through loving one another and the world around us….

The first thing the apostles do after seeing Jesus depart is pray…prayer is the very first act in the Acts of the Apostles.  Through their prayer they enter a relationship with God through Jesus, even though he’s no longer with them physically.  They trust in his presence and in the truth of their ongoing relationship with him through prayer.  Through prayer they discover that they can share in His glory even though they’re still earthbound. Jesus tells us that God’s ‘glory’ is all about love, and when we pray for others it’s that love which we’re expressing.  Perhaps that’s what the angels on Jesus’s right in the painting are challenging us to do-to let ourselves share in the glory of love by allowing ourselves by praying for and loving others.

We have to work out how to discover his ‘glory’ for ourselves in the lives we lead here and now. Prayer, as the apostles discover, helps, because it brings us into God’s presence…but Peter and John together take us even further in our understanding of glory.

Peter tells us that the spirit of glory is the spirit of God, and that this spirit of glory is something we can all experience as believers, particularly when we feel we’re being persecuted. For Peter the experience of God’s glory is very human; he tells us that God’s glory is expressed through God’s readiness to restore, support and strengthen us, whatever tribulations we experience.  To Peter glory isn’t about awe and spectacle, but about experiencing loving and supportive relationships with one another, he tells us that it’s through these God’s glory finds its true expression. 

We see this sense of glory as being expressed through loving relationships in John’s Gospel. Here the relationship is that between Jesus and God, with us included. Rather amazingly John invites us to be a third party in Jesus’s conversation with God His Father.  We’re present with him as he prays ‘Father the hour has come’. This is a very inclusive form of glory, one which welcomes us to be witnesses to the love God Jesus share for all creation. I think we can sense that when Jesus prays to God and says ‘Glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you’ he isn’t thinking of glory as power or earthly majesty; we sense the love that is at the heart of this relationship, a love which is for everything that exists.  ‘Glory’ it seems to me here is the boundless love of God for all creation, a love that he shares with His  Son Jesus and with all of us. 

God’s love is truly glorious because of its infinite capacity to reach out to everyone and everything. John’s account of Jesus’s prayer makes clear how liberating this knowledge of God’s glory is for all who trust and believe in him. The Gospel tells us that central to this sense of liberation is the assurance that we don’t have to die to experience eternal life because, as Jesus makes clear, the glory of eternal life is something we can experience now-it is Jesus says, ‘to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.’  This is a form of glory which says we can have life and have it abundantly now and every day- knowing God through Jesus is to share in a boundless love which is the glory of all creation. 

For a long time, human beings acted as if the glories of creation existed for us to exploit and abuse.  David Attenborough’s 100^th birthday last week reminded us of all of how infinitely precious and glorious the natural world is, and the glory that Jesus talks of here compels us to acknowledge that we belong to the whole of creation and that understanding this is integral to living a life which is about participation in this glory rather than its exploitation.

This summer’s sporting glories may or may not include England winning the World Cup or Emma Raducanu winning Wimbledon.  Those will be glories for us to gaze on from a distance; the trophies and fame represent  an earthbound glory for which we can only be spectators.  But our readings today tell us that God’s glory is everywhere; it’s in the love we have for one another and in the beauty of the natural world.  We don’t have to wait to experience God’s glory at some unknown time in the future; we can experience it in the here and now.  We can discover it through prayer, through the Bible and through loving relationships with one another, such as we’ll be celebrating at Emma and William’s wedding later this summer.  Today’s readings tell us that God’s glory is limitless and totally inclusive and that it’s for all creation, for all of us and forever. And not only is this a glory that we can all share in if we’re prepared to allow and trust that we are one with all creation and with God Father, Son and Holy Spirit., it also comes without the heartbreak of losing on penalties on a hot evening in July!

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen.