What brought you here? That was the question Paul Smedley, a member of the clergy team, asked the congregation of St John’s recently. Rebecca Paul was very clear in her response:  she comes for the people. She loves coming because she really appreciates the warmth and the welcome she receives when she’s here.

I was put in mind of that when I reflected on the famous verse from John’s Gospel which is set for the Fourth Sunday of Easter: I am come that they might have life, and have it abundantly!  (John 10.10)  It comes in the middle of a long passage about sheep; sheep as a metaphor for those who follow Jesus. But also, more counterintuitively, Jesus as the gate of the sheepfold through which sheep pass, inwards for safety and outwards for nourishment.

In that context I fell to wondering what abundant life looks like, and what might help create abundant life, as promised in the Gospel?

The other reading for the Fourth Sunday of Easter is a quite discouraging section of the Acts of the Apostles, in which the early church is described in glowing terms:

• Many were baptized and were added to the community. 42They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. (Acts 2: 41,42)

Discouraging because of the idealised picture it paints of the early church. It feels a far cry from most of the churches I know!  But there are links between abundant life and the practice of the church, as described here – the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of the bread and the prayers.

The two readings together led me to think that there are three factors essential for abundant life.

First: worship – as reflected in the Acts reference to ‘the breaking of the bread.’

What is worship? Here is a quote from a well respected book by Evelyn Underhill (a well-known spiritual director and writer from the early years of the last century):

• Worship, in all its grades and kinds, is the response of the creature to the Eternal… Worship is the acknowledgement of Transcendence; that is to say, of a Reality independent of the worshipper, which is always more or less deeply coloured by mystery, and which is there first.

In other words worship is what points us beyond the edge of the cosmos, towards what is unknown, incomprehensible, mysterious … the force of love, also known as God.

But what that quote doesn’t mention is that worship is also communal. It is, in Christian traditions, and in the Acts of the Apostles, the coming together of the Christian community in accordance with established ritual, It brings people together and, at its best, takes them outside themselves.

At its best worship is not only beautiful and uplifting. It is also good for you! A book I read recently – How Religion Evolved and why it Endures, by Robin Dunbar  – sets out in clear terms how important collective action is to all human societies.  We have minds which are shaped to work communally… and spirits which want to look beyond the everyday towards the infinite.  Acting in unison, singing together, sharing words and responses – studies have shown that it all produces physiological reactions which contribute to wellbeing and a stronger sense of self.  A door, if you will, to abundant life.

But worship on its own is not sufficient. The second essential factor is referred to in the Acts verse  – ‘the apostles’ teaching and fellowship’, which I take to mean service.  Service to one another, and service to the world.

As Martin Luther King said, ‘justice is the outworking of love.’ If worship takes us to a place where we can touch the hem of the divine, where love becomes in some mysterious sense real, then service is the living out of love in the world. Service is inclusive. All the sheep are brought into the sheepfold. And service is transformative. Christian service is about challenging everything which stands in the way of abundant life: hunger, poverty, bad education, racism, homophobia, misogyny, anything which undermines or belittles people’s full humanity, their creation in the image of God.

Service is the living out of love. Of course it’s true that the nu mber of people in the UK inspired by worship to carry out service in the community is very small … but, for abundant life, my own experience is that worship and service are inseparable.

But there is a third factor which holds up and undergirds worship and service, referred to in the Acts reading as ‘the prayers’ – by which I understand contemplation.

It’s very clear from the great spiritual thinkers and writers of the Christian tradition – indeed, of all religious traditions – that contemplative prayer is at the heart of spiritual practice. I have recently read the 13th century book called the Cloud of Unknowing. We don’t know the name of the writer, it could have been a man or a woman, but whoever wrote it is very clear that between us and God is a cloud of unknowing, and it is our responsibility to sit in silence before the cloud and allow God, the incomprehensible, to embrace us.

• Beat with a sharp dart of longing love upon this cloud of unknowing which is between you and your God.
• God can certainly be loved, but not thought. He can be taken and held by love but not by thought.
• Because it is not what you are nor what you have been that God looks at with his merciful eyes, but what you desire to be.

Another important 13th century preacher and teacher, Meister Eckhardt, said this:

• The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love
• Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.

And finally:

• Be willing to be a beginner every single morning.

My own practice is to try to spend at least 20 minutes a day in silence, either repeating a mantra along the lines of Christian meditation, or using centering prayer, or trying to imagine myself into one of the bible stories, or doing the Examen.. there are a thousand ways to pray, and I encourage you to find whatever works for you.

I encourage you to try it, if you are able to make the time – perhaps on your way to work, or during the evening, or first thing in the morning.

Worship, service and contemplation. Three interdependent ways to live out the promise of Jesus: I am come that they might have life, and have it abundantly!