As with many Addresses from our 10.00 services, they do lose something in being written down! For those who were not in church, you need to know that I spent the entire time sitting in my favourite rocking chair, knitting!

Do you know what it is yet? A hat! Interesting idea. Someone said a scarf. A jumper! You must be joking.

Well, those of you who have bibles near you might like to find our first reading. It wasn’t from the gospel of John. Don’t get confused by that. It’s not John’s gospel, it’s the first letter of John. Somebody here, I’m sure, will be able to recount all the epistles in their order? No! Well you’ll either have to keep going through it or just use the index. The reference is on the Sunday Sheet. The answer to the question is all included in the reading.

So what am I knitting? “It’s not yet being revealed.” (1 John 3. 1 – 3)

What does that mean? What is it that has not been revealed yet? It probably means that I don’t know what I’m knitting yet. Because it hasn’t been explained, revealed. If we could use another word for “revealed” we might use the word “shown”. What we are becoming hasn’t been shown yet.

But what will we be like? It’s the next bit of that same reading: we’ll be like Him.

So whatever I am knitting, when it is revealed, to carry on the analogy, it will be right. When we come face to face with Jesus, we will be like Him.

There was a child who wanted to play football. So he went out into the driveway of the house with his football and started kicking the football against the garage door. He decided that to score a goal he had to hit the handle of the garage door; that if you hit the handle of the garage door that was a goal. He scored lots of goals. But then, as he got a bit tired, his aim started going off a bit. So he said to himself: if I clip the handle of the garage door, if I manage to just hit the handle of the door a little bit, then I’ll call it a goal.

To begin with he had to really really hit the garage door handle full on for it to be a goal. But as he got more tired he changed the rules and said, “If it clips the door handle” and then “If it hits near the door handle, then I’ll call it a goal”.

He changed the rules to suit his own needs. But he’s by himself, he’s playing the game on his own, he can make the rules up as he goes along. There’s no-one there to challenge him to stay within the original rules. But, on his own, it all seems fine to him.

Some people think that being a Christian’s like that; that you don’t have to be part of a group or of a church, or of a gathering of people seeking to follow Jesus. And I would say that that’s a bit like playing football in your drive. If you’re a Christian on your own, without being part of wider Christian community, you can make the rules up as you go along. You can massage them to your own advantage. It’s as if you can say; “Today I don’t feel like loving my neighbour, so I won’t. I’m sure I’ve read somewhere in the bible that it says that on the third Tuesday of the month, it’s alright not to love your neighbour.” And actually … that’s not on.

You can’t pick and choose your rules. And, to push to point a bit further, we might argue that playing football in the drive isn’t really playing football. When you join a team and you’ve got ten other people in your team and you’re playing against another team of eleven people, and you’ve got assistant referees on the touchlines and a referee in the middle all making sure you stick to the rules, then you’re really playing football. It adds a completely different dimension to what playing football is all about.

It’s all very well kicking a ball around and having fun and calling it football. But there is more to football than that. And when you get out onto a pitch with other people and another team, with someone else to make sure you don’t change the rules when you want to, then another dimension to your football is added.

And that’s what Christian communities – churches – are for, partly. We are called to belong to a community partly to make sure that we hold on to all the rules and partly to be part of something bigger. For churches, Christian communities, for better or for worse are actually a glimpse of heaven.

After all, have you ever met anyone who says “When I get to heaven I hope there’s nobody else there. I want to be in heaven on my own. I want to do heaven without anybody else.”

It’s one of those things that’s slightly weird. Those people who argue that you can be fully Christian without any reference to a Christian community, without reference to a faithful gathering for prayer and worship and breaking of bread, without reference to anyone else, but still expect, when they die, to meet up with all sorts of people. They want to do their faith on earth on their own without reference to community, but are expecting that when they go on to the other side, a community will be there to welcome them and embrace them.

They want to have their cake and they want to eat it. But I’m not convinced it’s as simple as that. I’m not sure you can have it both ways. Either Jesus is calling us into community, or he is not. Either a Christian life is to be lived within the company of others, or it is not. I can’t help wondering whether those who declare “I’m going to be a Christian on my own on earth, but in heaven everyone’s going to be there to meet me” are singing a song that does not exist.

Church has its faults. Christian communities are not perfect. But there is something holy and wholesome about community. It is into a community that Jesus gathered his disciples. It is out of these gatherings that the early church grew. It is to these churches that Paul (and others) wrote letters. And it is in these churches – these gathered communities of people seeking to live Christian lives – where other people are offered a glimpse of what is to be revealed. Because of our Christian communities (and sometimes, let’s be honest, despite our Christian communities) a corner of the kingdom of heaven is pulled back and we are seen for what we are: the communion of saints, which we celebrate today.

Amen.