A Sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on May 12, 2024 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: John 17: 6-19

I want to tell you why today’s gospel is especially significant for Sara and Isha on their baptism day because it identifies the heart of what baptism is about.

The entry of the United States into the Second World War led to the transportation of large numbers of American troops to Europe for long periods, and thus the separation of wives and girlfriends from their sweethearts. This is the backdrop to the 1952 Jo Stafford ballad that begins, ‘See the pyramids along the Nile/Watch the sun rise on a tropic isle/Just remember, darling, all the while/You belong to me.’ Here lies the power of the song: it contrasts exotic locations in Old Algiers and the African jungle and stylish transport on a silver plane with the deep stability of the beloved saying, ‘You always have a home in my heart.’ It was the first song by a female solo singer to top the charts, and it’s subsequently been covered by practically everybody, from Ringo Starr to Bob Dylan.

At first glance the notion of belonging sounds like a motherhood-and-apple-pie concept. It’s warm and fuzzy and it’s hard to think of anyone that could be against it. But consider the edge to the Jo Stafford song. She’s apparently saying, ‘Wherever you roam, in North Africa, the Tropics or the jungle, remember I’m loving and thinking about you.’ But more subtly, she’s saying, ‘Don’t you go chasing after anyone else.’ There’s a line in the middle of the song where she says, ‘Just remember when a dream appears/You belong to me.’ Belonging means not confusing a dream with a reality: the song’s saying, ‘I’m your reality, and don’t you forget it.’ So belonging isn’t just a fuzzy warm notion: it’s about loyalty and identity and the way directing them to one place means not confusing them with dreams that stray elsewhere.

Those with a deep sense of belonging get this on a primal level. I remember as a curate in Wallsend on Tyneside going to see woman in her 80s whose name was Ann. Ann took it upon herself to tell me all about the town, going back to being the end of Hadrian’s Wall right up to its long association with shipbuilding through the Swan Hunter yard. But at the end she sprung a surprise. ‘Of course, I don’t belong Wallsend,’ she announced. ‘Oh no. I moved here 60 years ago. But I don’t belong here. I grew up in Blyth,’ she said, decisively, referring to a similarly sized town on the Northumberland coast, 15 miles to the north. I was bemused. She’d lived in Wallsend for 60 years, but she was adamant she didn’t belong there. She still kept a fierce sense of identity and loyalty to a town 15 miles away where she hadn’t lived since she was a girl.

That’s how belonging works. Whether it’s football teams, universities or countries, your sense of belonging is sharpened by contrast with the ones to which you don’t belong. A cartoon shows a man on a desert island with only two buildings. ‘What’s that one?’ asks a visitor, pointing to the building on the left. ‘That’s the church I go to,’ says the lonely island dweller. ‘And how about that one?’ says the visitor, pointing to the similarly sized building to the right. The island dweller replies, ‘That’s the church I wouldn’t be seen dead in.’

This puts us in touch with what one author calls ‘the shadow side of belonging.’ Some kinds of belonging offer collective affirmation in the face of a projected enemy. One researcher into why people join the Taliban found recruitment isn’t driven by ideological fervour. Members aren’t seeking a religious paradise or ideologically pure society. They’re looking for acceptance, respect, and shared meaning. They put up with rigid and exclusive practices out of a desperate need to belong. Extremist groups recruit by making outcasts feel socially included and empowered. As the Bengali poet and philosopher Rabindrath Tagore observes, ‘Take us away from our natural surroundings, from the fullness of our communal life, with all its living associations of beauty and love and social obligations, and you’ll be able to turn us into so many fragments of a machine.’ One child soldier who ended up in Tanzania, Zambia and Libya speaks of how, despite the atrocities he witnessed, he experienced love and attention, and felt appreciated and special. But he recognises, while he felt connected, respected, and empowered, he was being turned into a monster.

Meanwhile another researcher contradicts the common claim that drugs are the cause of many social problems. He says, ‘Drug addiction has almost nothing to do with drugs.’ He maintains that drugs take hold in the absence of what he calls ‘competing reinforcers.’ These competing reinforcers include family bonds, a sense of community and place, connection to the earth, rewarding work, economic prospects, a voice in politics or culture, and some kind of spiritual quest. Only in the absence of these, do people become vulnerable to socially and physically destructive forms of escape; escape from the pain of isolation or the pain of not belonging. That drug-use can then undermine whole communities. But it begins with the isolation of social alienation, of lacking voice, meaning, opportunity and connection.1

When Jesus is giving his four-chapter-long Farewell Discourses at the Last Supper in John’s gospel, he’s facing a situation analogous to that of Jo Stafford singing ‘See the pyramids along the Nile’ to her GI sweetheart. Jesus is about to go away, and his question is, Will the disciples continue to find their identity and place their loyalty in me? John chapter 17 is known as the High Priestly Prayer, because Jesus isn’t speaking to the disciples, but instead addressing his heavenly Father while the disciples listen. This is made especially poignant not just because it’s an insight into the inner conversation of the Trinity, but because frequently Jesus is speaking to the Father about the disciples. It’s like the disciples are overhearing a dialogue between the Son and the Father about themselves. The surprising thing is how complimentary Jesus is in this long prayer about the disciples, given they’re just about to betray, deny and desert him. It seems there’s something beyond their fecklessness: and that’s their true belonging in him.

Towards the end of today’s passage Jesus twice, in a short space of time, says some very significant words. ‘They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.’ To understand these words, you need to bear in mind two things. First, for the writer of John’s gospel, the ‘world’ always has two meanings. On a superficial level, it means what it always means – this earth, everyone who lives in it, indeed existence itself. But for John, it often has a subtler meaning. It’s John’s vocabulary for talking about how creation has gone astray from God’s purposes, and has sought an identity and purpose elsewhere. And it’s in this sense we recall the second thing to bear in mind. In the prologue to John’s gospel that we always read at Christmas at the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols, we read the words, ‘He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.’ See how there we get this same double sense of the word ‘world’: ‘world’ as the whole of creation, and ‘world’ as people, structures and assumptions living a story outside the gracious mercy of God.

With this background we can see the power as well as the poignancy of Jesus’ words, ‘They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.’ See first of all the tragedy of those words. God in infinite love created the world in all its myriad complexity, variety and beauty. And yet rather than freely and gladly accept its purpose, to respond in glad and grateful companionship with God, the world in great part looked elsewhere, found an alternative story, sought a different identity, inhabited another form of belonging. Stay a moment with the dismay, the injustice, the distress of that. God made a magnificent banquet – but the world breezed out and got a takeaway instead. Now perceive what it meant for Jesus to enter that world, a world created for this very moment, for the encounter between Jesus and those God had ordained to be in relationship with Jesus – and yet a world that had become in so many respects a hostile environment for him. Next, ponder Jesus’ drawing around himself a group of disciples, who by their association with him experienced, both during and after his time among them, the hostile environment he underwent. And once we’ve put these three things together – the rejection of God’s purpose, the hostility to Jesus in person, and the disciples’ experience of this same opposition – we arrive at the true context in which we’re to read these words. And that is, what it feels like to feel isolated, abandoned and alone on this earth.

You can face almost anything in life if you have a deep sense of trust, respect and understanding with those alongside you. But if you lack any sense of solidarity, then the simplest task or most undemanding challenge can feel beyond you. We’re reading these words on the Sunday after Ascension. It’s the most poignant Sunday of the year. For 51 Sundays of the year, we reflect on God being with us, embodied in Christ and present by the power of the Holy Spirit. But this one Sunday of the year we feel the chill of isolation: Jesus has ascended to his Father, and promised the Spirit, but Pentecost is still a week away and we get a shiver of being utterly alone, with Jesus gone and the Spirit not yet come. Who are we? Where do we find our belonging? Where do we find a meaningful story to live by, a narrative that makes sense of our lives and the world around us and the universe beyond and events that turn out as we wouldn’t have chosen? Are we like that child soldier who allows himself to be turned into a monster because he so desperately needs a sense of solidarity, affirmation, respect, connection, empowerment?

If right now you’re feeling isolated and alone; if you’re sensing you’re different, that you don’t seem to fit in with any story that makes sense; if you’re realising you’re not the person others suppose you to be, that your identity is more complex, that your future is less clear; that it seems, in Jesus’ words, you don’t belong to this world; then listen to Jesus speaking to you, directly to you, right here, right now: ‘Come to me. Come to this altar. Sit yourself at the table of the Last Supper, and eat. The world doesn’t know who you truly are. Don’t be anxious about the world: it’ll never understand. You aren’t at all sure who you really are. Don’t worry: I know you better than you know yourself. You may search in vain for belonging. You may look back and feel you’ve been searching a long time – maybe always. Don’t despair. I dwelt here 33 years and I never found a sense of belonging either. But that doesn’t mean your life is in vain. There’s one thing that matters more than anything now and will matter more than anything forever. You may wander among the pyramids along the Nile and the marketplace in old Algiers and never find it. But eventually it will find you, and when it does it will never leave you. It’s only four words, but it’s the most important thing you’ll ever know. You belong to me.’

1 The material in these two paragraphs is drawn from Kim Samuel, On Belonging: Finding Connection in an Age of Isolation (New York: Abrams 2022).