Sermon for the Tuesday of Holy Week,

31st March 2026, at All Saints Church, Penarth

Isaiah 49.1-7

1 Corinthians 1.18-31

John 12.20-36

The story so far. Jesus and the disciples have been creating a big stir. Everywhere they go, miraculous things happen; people are healed, and there’s even a story of one Lazarus, who was dead, being brought back to life, and indeed the same thing about Jairus’ daughter, a little girl immortalised in my mind at least in those wonderful words from the old Bible, ‘Damsel, arise!’

It’s quite difficult to think of any parallels today. You can think of any of the big demonstrations that have happened; people walking to Cardiff Castle from Queen Street on May Day, or the huge demonstrations in support of Palestine, or if you go back a little further, for and against staying in the EU; but these crowds were rather different. The context here was one of occupation by a foreign power. The Romans had annexed the Holy Land and the Jews had only limited self government.

Again. I’m not sure the parallels with anything today really work. It isn’t a question of looking at the Senedd or the Scottish Parliament and imagining that the people of Israel had a similar limited autonomy, that they were bound by some millennial Barnett Formula. No, it was more basic than that, and most importantly the devolved power which they didn’t have was the right to impose the most severe punishment for the most severe crimes, the death penalty.

Only the Romans could exercise the death penalty. In those days the cruelty of it it was not controversial. Indeed if you look at the Jewish law, the first five books in the Old Testament, particularly Deuteronomy and Leviticus, you’ll see there are plenty of instances where the death penalty is called for, usually by stoning, which is a particularly cruel and inhumane practice. But at the time of Jesus, in Palestine only the Romans had the power to impose this ultimate sanction.

Think about the huge demonstration in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and the man who walked in front of a tank, or think of the people who came out on the streets in Tehran and were cruelly cut down just in the last few weeks. The people swarming around Jesus were, I think, doing something similar. They weren’t there to see a show.

It wasn’t one of those things where people tell you all about something extraordinary that’s happened, and you’re a bit stuck to know what to say about it, because you don’t really know what it was for; I put those sort of things into a category which I call ‘Cor, fancy that.’ Cor, fancy that: but that’s as far as it goes. That’s not what the people swarming around Jesus were all about. It wasn’t just a demo.

They were much more like the people who came out on the streets in Tehran, or the people who demonstrated in Tiananmen Square, because they thought that Jesus was the one who was going to make them free, free of the imperial yoke of the Romans. Because that’s how they understood what it was to be a Messiah.

I’m not sure how they thought that being the Messiah worked, but obviously they knew that part of being Messiah was that you were linked with God, you were blessed by God, you were anointed by God; but they saw God, I think, as perhaps not being quite such a big God as we perhaps do today.

When Kehinde and I got married last August, one of the songs that we had at the beginning of the service was a lovely worship song done by some Nigerian singers, ‘My God is a great big God’. Kenny and her ladies supporting her, her bridesmaids and relatives, came dancing down the aisle to that wonderful song. (I of course was stuck up by the altar in my penguin suit being very formal and certainly not clapping or waving my arms about – as you would expect of me). A very big God.

I think that, in the time of Jesus, people saw the divine in terms where talking about ‘my God’ made more sense than it does today. God was a power; a power which you could invoke on your side: if people were in the right, if people were following God’s commands, if they were righteous, then they could reasonably expect that God would support them, even to the extent of taking their side in battles.

Nowadays I think our understanding is a bit more complicated. If you are a very liberal theologian you may go as far as having difficulty with the idea that God is a thing or a person outside us in any way, because your understanding is that God is not only outside us influencing what happens, creating us and sustaining us, but also God is inside us and inside everything. He is at the ‘heart of our being’, as John Robinson put it in his great book, ‘Honest to God’, quoting the great theologian Paul Tillich; but equally many people often say they have heard from God or they’ve heard from Jesus, or even that Jesus has spoken to them. Or God has let them know what he wants, or he has answered a prayer, in a very direct and personal way.

Our powers of understanding are rather inadequate in this context. If God is ineffable, in everything, at the heart of our being, how can he talk to us or influence what goes on in the world in a sense of cause and effect? We believe that God is the ultimate cause, but there is a philosophical difficulty in that if He is in everything, how could he be outside, sufficiently to create the world from nothing?

It’s beyond us: but the people around Jesus, the disciples, the people who were swarming around with a strong sense that something extraordinary was going on, didn’t necessarily have that sort of rather nuanced understanding. Indeed, when St Paul comments on how Christians are or were at that time, he quotes a passage in Isaiah: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise’, and he says, ‘Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world’, and he pours scorn on various ways that people tried to understand what was going on and how God‘s power was at work.

Paul said, ‘Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom’; and both of them are recognisably like types of people today; but then he said, ‘We proclaim Christ crucified’. That’s not so easy to understand. Well, he was getting ahead of things a bit. Just like we do, Paul knew what happened; so to some extent our Bible readings are back to front. Perhaps we should have St John’s gospel first where we get the right chronology, so that we experience what it must’ve felt like in those few days before Jesus was arrested.

We’re told that some Greeks wanted to meet him; and this is a thread which peters out without coming to any conclusion – we don’t know whether in fact he met the Greeks and if he did, what they said to him and what he said to them.

I assume that John mentioned it in his gospel for much the same reason that Paul mentions the ‘wisdom of the Greeks’ and the Jewish appetite for miracles. He wanted to draw a contrast between the very rational approach of the Greeks, a philosophical approach which I think appeals quite a lot to us today; you remember also when Paul is preaching in Athens, he comes across a shrine ‘To an unknown God’, which seems to me to be a very Greek thing, very much in line with the enquiring sense, say of Socrates as reported by Plato. (You know, Socrates didn’t write anything but his student Plato did. Plato wrote up everything that Socrates said, or a large amount of what he said,) the great reliance on things making sense, being logical, being reasonable; that was one of the things I think we are meant to have in mind when we hear that some Greeks wanted to see Jesus.

How did Jesus stack up in philosophical discussion? Well we’re not told: it’s a dead end in the story. Instead Jesus answered Andrew and Philip when they were asking whether he would talk to the Greeks. Jesus answered them rather mysteriously, ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified’. I would have thought that that answer was right up there with a government minister on the Today programme at ten past eight – you know, almost as though Jesus had had a modern media training, which tells you not to answer the question, but to answer the question which you would like to have been asked, or simply to just keep banging on making the point which you came to make. I have to say that I think this sentence, ‘The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified’ is very mysterious. For sure, it’s not an answer to Andrew and Philip’s question.

Jesus goes on to talk about a grain of wheat germinating and becoming a fruitful crop. Again there are parallels with what St Paul says later. If you look at his first letter to the Corinthians, further on from the passage that we had in our lesson today, in chapter 15, again, he talks about life after death in terms of seeds, something being buried, dead and buried, then seeding and growing into a new form; coming back to life again.

So, it seems to mean that Jesus’ rather Delphic utterance about being glorified is actually a reference to his impending death, and he’s trying to reassure the disciples, and anybody else who’s listening, that his death will not be the end.

This theme of ‘glorification’, which could be be a short-hand for death and resurrection, comes up again with the voice from heaven: Jesus says, ‘Father, glorify your name’, and a voice from heaven answers, ‘I have glorified it and I will glorify it again’. It doesn’t make any obvious, literal sense; but I think if we look carefully at the context, it is all about death and resurrection.

Jesus talks about ‘When I am lifted up from the earth’, by which he means, hung on a cross. The business of being ‘lifted up’ was a trope in Jewish law; it meant a punishment that was particularly shameful; to be lifted up as part of your punishment meant that it was a particularly serious punishment.

So the crowd query this. They’re looking for a mighty warrior, to lead them to freedom, victory over the Romans, not somebody who’s going to be killed ignominiously as a criminal; so they say, ‘We’ve heard from the law that the Messiah remains forever. How can you say the son of man must be lifted up? Who is this son of man?’ They’re confused; and again, Jesus doesn’t answer. He says, in effect, make the best of what you have at the moment; get the benefits you can from me while I’m around. That’s not really an answer to what they’ve asked.

But I suppose it is well in line with a lot of things which Jesus has put forward. The last shall be first; the first shall be last; we should turn the other cheek; we should love our enemies. Jesus is nothing if not contrary; and Jesus having assured while they were with him they would be enlightened by him, he promptly disappeared.

This is Tuesday of Holy Week. It’s a really pregnant pause in the Easter story. Anything can happen. So while you have the light, believe in the light, so that you may become children of light. As they say in Yorkshire, think on.

A Sermon for Mothering Sunday

Preached at All Saints Church Penarth, at Evensong on 15th March 2026

On this fourth Sunday of Lent, which is also Mothering Sunday, I’m hoping that I can concentrate on other things than motherhood and apple pie, on the understanding that you have already done these bits; your mothers have had their flowers, and if you are mothers yourselves, you have had your Prosecco, and if you are particularly fortunate your offspring have been in touch and perhaps even been round to give you said Prosecco.

But now here we are at Evensong on the fourth Sunday of Lent, and before you get too sniffy about my reference to Prosecco I should point out that this Sunday is what is traditionally referred to as ‘Refreshment’ or ‘Rejoice’ Sunday – if you want to get extra points, you can use its original Latin name, Laetare. On this Sunday, according to tradition you are allowed to have a break from the fasting and self-denial of the rest of Lent, so if a glass of Prosecco has crept into your hand at lunchtime, that’s perfectly all right, and indeed you could take it as spiritual refreshment, very apt for Refreshment Sunday.

But the fierce gnomes in Montréal who compiled the Lectionary, according to the Consultation on Common Texts, don’t appear to be having anything to do either with the idea of Mothering Sunday or of refreshment and jollification, Laetare Sunday. In particular we’ve got a long passage from the prophet Micah – in fact it is the whole of the last chapter of his book of prophecy – which is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a matter of rejoicing.

J.B. Phillips has produced a modern translation of the book of Micah in his collection called Four Prophets where he has produced modern translations of the works of Amos, Hosea, what he describes as the First Isaiah, (the first 39 chapters of the book of Isaiah), and Micah. This is what J. B. Phillips says by way of introduction to the prophet Micah.

“Micah … is a countryman. … He has the sturdy independence of the man who lives on the land, and, being close to scenes of battle, he is contemptuous of those who “sit at ease in Zion” and do not see the dangers.

“Micah, … speaks for the poor, and speaks as one of them. He is horrified at the luxurious and degenerate life of the city, and realises that he and his fellow-peasants are paying for it. In another age he might have led a Peasants’ Revolt, although he was no mere political agitator.

“It is justice, justice between men and a right attitude towards God, which are his passionate concern.

“… His message is religious and ethical, and very much down to earth. He paints a terrible picture of the decay of ordinary justice, the abuse of power by the court judges and the prevalence of bribery. He speaks of the exploitation of the poor and needy, of the rich landowners who are squeezing out those who cannot pay their exorbitant demands.

“Consequently there is widespread misery and degradation. The lust for money has invaded the religious sphere and even priest and prophet have grown accustomed to favouring the rich and browbeating the poor.

“Micah is red-hot with righteous indignation. He sees the evils of society not only as the heartless exploitation of the weak by the strong, but as a failure to grasp the meaning of true religion.

“Obedience to the laws of God is binding upon rich and poor alike, and the people to whom he is speaking have an utterly wrong idea of God. Micah’s most memorable message is his famous epitome of true religion recorded in 6.8:

‘… for what does the Lord require from you,

But to be just, to love mercy,

And to walk humbly with your God?”

He describes the faults in society in Jerusalem, 3,000 years ago. The rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer. Immorality and lawlessness. You might say, little has changed.

Now James, in his letter – and again we have heard a long passage from it – again criticises society, especially the rich. It’s a social, political message. He is writing to ‘The Twelve Tribes dispersed throughout the world’, which might be a reference to the Jewish diaspora, but it seems more likely that James (whoever he was) was a man from a Jewish background, writing to the early Christian churches, which were spread surprisingly widely. Christians were in Rome, North Africa and the Middle East very quickly, within the first century after Jesus’ time on earth.

James gives a lot of practical advice. You will probably remember one of the ‘sentences’ which the minister may say at the beginning of the Communion service: ‘Whoso hath this world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?’ That’s from the first letter of John, but James has almost the same words in chapter 2:14 of his letter, before the bit we had in the lesson:

“What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but does not have works? Surely that faith cannot save, can it? If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food and one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill,” and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.”

For another day we must compare and contrast St Paul’s teaching, and indeed the teaching of the churches ever since, that salvation comes through faith, that you can’t earn a place in heaven by doing good works. That idea was called Pelagianism – but I would suggest that James’ and John’s teaching may not have much to do with getting to heaven, but it is squarely in line with Jesus’ commandment to love our neighbours.

Micah was a prophet. This means that people listening to him believed that God was using him as a mouthpiece – or rather, to the extent that people believed that he was speaking the words of the Divine, so they respected what he said as having divine authority, as being true.

We don’t know for certain who James was. The early scholars thought he was the brother of Jesus, but his polished use of Greek and sophisticated expressions seem to be a bit unlikely if he was a Galilean fisherman. His letter was included in the Bible because it does have a ring of authenticity, reflecting what the early churches believed and wrestled with in their faith.

What do we regard as authentic, as true, about how God regards our life today? One way of checking, of testing, what we might think is good, when on the face of things it isn’t, is what Pope Leo has just suggested.

Pope Leo has just been saying that world leaders ought to go to confession. This is what one report said.

“On Friday morning in the Clementine Hall, Pope Leo XIV looked out at a room full of priests and seminarians training to hear confessions and asked a question that would echo far beyond the Vatican walls.

“Do those Christians who bear grave responsibility in armed conflicts,” the pope said, “have the humility and courage to undertake a serious examination of conscience and confess?”

He named no one. He didn’t have to.

“The United States and Israel launched a joint military assault on Iran on February 28 under the Pentagon codename “Operation Epic Fury.”

“In the two weeks since, at least 1,332 people have been killed, including more than 160 girls in a primary school struck on the first day of the bombing.

“Six American service members have also died. President Trump, raised Presbyterian, has called for “unconditional surrender.” Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio — both Catholics — have defended the campaign without reservation.

…..

“Leo was speaking to the men who will sit behind the screen and listen when powerful people kneel down and confess their sins. The pope wanted those future confessors to understand the gravity of what they may one day hear — and to hold the powerful to the same moral standard as everyone else.” (Christopher Hale, ‘Letters from Leo’, see https://tinyurl.com/55wenrdz.)

You could be forgiven for thinking that the Jerusalem criticised by Micah hasn’t improved much. There is still a huge gulf between rich and poor. Laws – particularly international law – are ignored. There is widespread corruption. There are war crimes and genocide.

What do you think it might do, if President Trump, President Putin and Prime Minister Netanyahu had to go to confession? If they really felt that they had to confront their Maker? What would Mr Hegseth, who I think is another one who professes to be a Roman Catholic, say about his disdain for rules of engagement, or his praise for sinking an Iranian frigate in international waters as ‘silent death’ for the 300 sailors – who most probably were anything but silent as they died?

Is this a counsel of despair? Is there anything good to look forward to? We can see that Micah had a simple prescription for life, to be just, love mercy and walk humbly with God. And what marks out his prophecy is that it ends in hope. He says

‘Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity

and passing over the transgression

of the remnant of your possession….

not retaining his anger for ever,

because [you] delight in showing clemency.

He will again have compassion upon us;

he will tread our iniquities under foot.’

And Micah comments directly,

‘You will cast all our sins

into the depths of the sea.’

Let us pray that that still holds good. Let us have that hope, that Christian hope.

Sermon for Mattins on 11th January 2026, at All Saints Church, Penarth

The Feast of the  Baptism of Jesus

Isaiah 42:1-9

Acts 10:34-43

Why are we here? Don’t worry I’m not going to pick on you. I’m not going to ask you for a description, in scintillating detail, of your religious observance. But seriously, we have sung hymns, we will say prayers, we will make peace with each other – and I have to apologise to everyone who saw that it was a service of the word rather than Holy Communion and thought that, as one of the faithful at a church which I used to attend back in Surrey used to say, ‘I really like coming to Mattins and Evensong, because there’s none of that kissing nonsense’. 

Well, today we have kept the kissing nonsense, although being British we have watered it down into a handshake or even less intimately into a regal wave, to share peace with each other. But what are we doing? What are we doing when we say that we worship? At the heart of it must be God, and we think of God as having three aspects, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. 

In our first Bible reading from the book of the prophet Isaiah, God is speaking through the prophet and telling us about someone who represents him, ‘my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights’. And in the second reading from the Acts of the Apostles, in the first Christian sermon, St Peter sets out the story of that servant, who was Jesus. ‘God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, and he went about doing good and healing…’ He rose from the dead, which proved that he was divine, he was the one ordained by God. 

So we come to worship God, mainly the visible God, the human God, Jesus Christ. If we step back a bit, and imagine that we haven’t read those Bible lessons, or any other part of the Bible, what would we expect God to be like? Probably the only things that we could agree on would be that God is the ultimate creator, that without God there would be no world, and in the light of that, we could reasonably infer that God is all-powerful and all-knowing. 

But then go back to what we have read in the Bible; and as they used to say at school, compare and contrast: this God and his servant whom he upholds ‘will not cry or lift up his voice’; he will not ‘break a bruised reed’; he will not stub out a ‘dimly burning wick’, and he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will do everything to bring about a world where there will be light to ‘open the eyes that are blind’, where the prisoners are led out of the dungeon, where God has a covenant, a solemn agreement, to protect and support his people. It’s not naked power. It’s not unrestrained might.

When we look at how Saint Peter described him, again we are struck by how different Jesus looks from what you might expect God to look like. He wasn’t mighty; he preached peace; he went about doing good and healing all those who were oppressed by the devil. 

Incidentally I don’t think that this meant that there was somebody with horns and a trident wandering about. It simply reflects that at the time of Jesus they believed that, if you were ill, it was because you had done something bad and were being punished for it. (This of course may still hold good for heavy smokers and other people like me who have excessive fondness for steak and kidney pies and Côtes du Rhone). 

But compare and contrast. How do we square the difference – on the one hand the God of the Bible and the chosen one of God whom John the Baptist baptised, and whom at his baptism a voice from heaven explicitly identified: “This is my son, the beloved, in whom I am well pleased”? Compare and contrast with the situation today. How realistic is it today, that there is a God, gentle and peaceful, committed to justice, like the one that we have seen described in Isaiah and in St Peter’s sermon? 

Russia has invaded Ukraine; America has invaded Venezuela, killed dozens of people and kidnapped its president. America, in one case helped by us, has seized ships on the high seas. ICE agents shot an innocent lady in the same city where George Floyd was murdered by a racist policeman. All these cases challenge the God whom Isaiah says ‘…will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth’. 

They’re a challenge to the one who went about doing good and healing. Maybe that kind of challenge is even what resulted in his being put to death, and the kind of behaviour among nations which ignores law and justice and simply says that might is right is what led to the hideous death of Jesus on the cross, and in one sense he represented in his death all those people who have died as a result of injustice and evil. 

Is there no alternative? No alternative to the politics of power, of brute strength? How can we really compare the power politics of today with ancient prophecies and legendary histories about God and his chosen son, his Messiah, 2,500 years ago? Why are we here? Are we just going through a picturesque ritual, which really has no relation at all to our lives today? Where is God at the courts of Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump? 

But you mustn’t say things like that, at least from the pulpit, you will say. You mustn’t bring politics into our worship. But what are we saying, if that’s what we believe? Are we saying that God is all powerful, the creator and sustainer of life, omnipotent, omniscient, but still, somehow not relevant to today’s power politics? I would suggest that’s wrong, and if Jesus is our king, if we worship him as king and saviour, then indeed we do need to start to compare and contrast with what we are seeing in our world outside. 

Think about the context when Isaiah was prophesying. The people of Israel had been conquered, over and over; first by the Egyptians, then by the Babylonians, then by the Syrians; and then at the time of Jesus, by the Romans. ‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept’, they sang. And the Romans were not nice either. People who took delight in gladiatorial combat, with other gladiators and with wild animals, and whose method of execution was as brutal as crucifixion certainly was, were not particularly benign – even if there were great thinkers among them.

In Russia and America today there are plenty of people who write poetry and make beautiful music, who are learned scientists and talented physicians; but still, it’s all done against a background of overwhelming force, that might is right. But is it? Is might right? Just rehearsing the names of the different empires since the time of Isaiah, who exercised the rule of force rather than the rule of law, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Romans, the Greek colonisers, the Syrians; and then in the more recent era of colonisation, all the colonial powers including our own country, just naming them all, you realise they have one thing in common; and that is, however mighty, they have not survived. So let’s look again at ‘my servant whom I uphold, my chosen in whom my soul delights.’ Isaiah says,

He will bring forth justice to the nations.

He will not cry or lift up his voice,

or make it heard in the street;

a bruised reed he will not break,

and a dimly burning wick he will not quench;

he will faithfully bring forth justice.’

This is soft power, not military might; but he will ‘faithfully bring forth justice’. And when we hear what St Peter had to say after he was put to death by hanging on the tree, that God raised him on the third day, it gives us hope. We have the Christian hope, that the Hobbesian vision, of a life which is nasty and brutish, where might is right, is not a vision of the ultimate reality, of the divine. 

St Peter said it another way, that ‘He sent his word to the Israelites and gave the good news of peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all. (Acts 10:36, NEB, https://ref.ly/Ac10.36;neb)’. And that’s why we’re here. It’s because of Him. He, gentle Jesus, is Lord of all, not Trump, or Putin, or any other so-called great leader today.  Lord, we believe. Amen.

Sermon for Morning Prayer at Holy Nativity, Cogan, Penarth, preached on Bible Sunday, 26th October 2025

Isaiah 45.22-25, Luke 4.16-24, (see https://tinyurl.com/2nhd5rdf)

On Friday morning, when I started to write this sermon, everywhere I turned, whether on the wireless or in the pages of the newspaper or on social media, the airwaves were full of statistics: who was up, who was down, who had a future, and who was completely washed up.

It put me in mind of all the gloomy statistics that people have come up with in recent years concerning the church. How, particularly after Covid, attendances have been declining, and people have been beginning to speculate whether there would be any churches, or at least, churches with any congregations, in 50 years’ time.

But in amongst all this challenging and pessimistic statistical stuff, I experienced some much better numbers, which cheered me up a lot. That was when I went to Llandaff Cathedral on the Wednesday before last, for a presentation by the Bible Society called ‘Wales and the Word’, where, in preparation for today, which is Bible Sunday, they were introducing their work and their Bible Course – which some of the faith groups at All Saints are already following – and among all the various items, they reported that they had commissioned research by the pollsters YouGov, first in 2018 and then again in 2024, to ask a large sample of people in England and Wales about their perception of faith, the church and the Bible. The shift in attitudes noticed in the survey was remarkable.

The 2018 research reflected that ‘[t]he church is getting older and young people don’t go. But [the] Bible Society’s survey in 2024 revealed a turnaround. 16% of young adults are now saying that they go to church at least once a month. That was 4% in 2018. And if you poll just young men it’s gone up to 21%. 45% of people in England and Wales now believe there is probably or definitely a God or a higher power. 37% say they pray at least monthly. One in three people would like to go to church if only they were invited. And one in four are interested in learning more about the Bible.’ (Quoted from the Bible Society website on 25th October 2025, https://tinyurl.com/3rk2xczm).

The Bible Society has called their research ‘The Quiet Revival’. It would be interesting to see to what extent those numbers are reflected here in Cogan. It’s certainly true that, for example as I saw when I led a funeral here at Holy Nativity, this church is very much valued as being the parish church for Cogan and for that service the people of Cogan did come, in all their varieties and in numbers.

I suspect that quite a number of them do come at Christmas and Easter as well, and generally feel comfortable that their parish church is ticking over in the meantime. The Church is showing visible signs of life outside, with its beautiful new railings, and, looking inside, I think we must all be excited about the prospect of having a new vicar, (which is not to say anything negative about Father Mark’s work and the affection with which he was regarded here and in the other churches in the Ministry Area).

Will there be a quiet, or indeed quite possibly a noisy, revival here in Cogan, and the rest of Penarth? It’s interesting to look at what we are reading in our lessons today in that connection. Isaiah is prophesying the ultimate triumph of God, the true God as against false gods, human creations: the God to whom every knee shall bow and every tongue shall swear.

And then we have this fascinating story about Jesus, in St Luke’s Gospel, going to the synagogue and reading the lesson, (another bit of Isaiah), and then preaching on it. And although this lesson is supposed to be all about the punchline, about a prophet being without honour in his own town, it is interesting to see what he was reading and preaching about.

Good news to the poor; release to the captives; recovery of sight to the blind; freedom to the oppressed, and a proclamation of a ‘year of the Lord’s favour’, which is a reference to the idea of Jubilee, a year when debts are forgiven and people are allowed to start all over again without the burden of debt. In other words, all the key features of social mission. They are almost things that could go into one or other of today’s political parties’ manifestos.

Just think, if any of those standing for the Senedd in Caerphilly had offered good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind and freedom for the oppressed, and then ultimately to cancel all debts; I hesitate to identify which of the candidates or which of the parties could come closest to that. Not but what those are all great things to put forward if you are going to build a caring society.

‘Good news to the poor’ presumably includes the news that they will no longer be poor. Is ‘growth’ the answer? Or do we have enough – but need to distribute it more fairly?

‘Release to the captives’ – why is it that we lock up more people than anyone else in Europe? Does it do them any good and does it protect society? Probably not. What about all the people who are locked up in prison really because of mental illness rather than anything really blameworthy, what we used to say was mad, not bad?

‘Recovery of sight to the blind’ must be a supreme piece of medical achievement, but it must also stand for all the other good works that the health service can now do. For example, if you have been following the TV programme ‘Saving Lives in Cardiff’, I commend to you the episode about the Ear, Nose and Throat team led by the surgeon Stuart Quine [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0jq4m9j].

They are not necessarily bringing sight to the blind, but are able to use an amazing robot which you will see on the TV programme, of which Cardiff has the first example in the UK, which enables the surgeons to remove cancers located in places which previously could not be reached without damage to the patients’ brains or their eyes. So ‘recovery of sight to the blind’ stands for all healing and wholeness.

‘Letting the oppressed go free’. It’s still true in 2025 that there are what are called modern slaves, modern slavery situations. The church was at one stage promoting an app on your phone which was called the Safe Car Wash app, where you could assess the hand car wash which you were using to see whether there was any evidence that the people working there were in fact the victims of modern slavery, and, if you found any, it gave you ways to summon help for them. I’m not sure whether it is still going but we can have a look on my phone after the service. [https://clewer.org.uk/campaigns/safe-car-wash] Modern slavery is unfortunately still with us and any social mission should surely include its eradication as a key objective.

And finally the ‘Year of the Lord’s favour’, the idea of debt release, Jubilee. To some extent, that has been done in the past, most recently under Gordon Brown’s government, but surely the time is coming when, as between nations and perhaps even within nations, there should be a release from debts, so that people can start their lives again.

That certainly applies to the countries, in Africa predominantly, who have become indebted to the International Monetary Fund, which has required them to cut public benefits and public investment, simply in order to pay back the loans made to them, so the bit in Isaiah which Jesus was reading still speaks to us today. Poor countries, and poor people, need a Jubilee.

But then Jesus goes on to say that ‘this scripture has been fulfilled’; not surprisingly, the rest of the people in the synagogue were sceptical, because it looked as though the problems which he had listed still existed, (and indeed they still exist today). But what Jesus was driving at was that this was all to do with the coming of the Messiah, the chosen one of God, who was going to do the work of healing and social reconstruction – and he was it. Well, that was the bit they couldn’t take. If you read on, you’ll see that they were going to chuck Jesus off a cliff and stone him to death – but he managed to escape.

So what? What’s the message for today? If there really is a quiet revival going on, what will the quiet revivalists do? Will we be like the people in the synagogue who couldn’t take Jesus’s message, or will we pick it up and follow him? That’s the challenge. I wonder who you think is going to win that one. Let’s pray that it is us, the people of Jesus in the church, and that the Bible is there to guide us.

Amen.

John 16:1-11

It must’ve been impossibly confusing to have been one of Jesus’s disciples. He said, ‘Now I am going to him who sent me; yet none of you asked me, where are you going? But because I have said these things to you, sorrow has filled your hearts.’ Keep up, disciples! You’re sad that Jesus is going, but it hasn’t occurred to you to ask where he is going; and indeed, whether in fact it’s a better place. Oh, well.

Then, even more confusingly, He’s got to go because otherwise, he says, he couldn’t send somebody called ‘the Advocate’ to them. Even after a lot of thought and reading, I’m not sure that I’m any better off than the disciples were, in fully understanding the implications of these sentences. Who is or was the Advocate? Where was Jesus going? And what does it mean that Jesus was going to send the Advocate?

Today I want to concentrate not so much on where Jesus was going, because I think, with the benefit of hindsight, we are rather better off than the disciples at that point, although perhaps if you are tempted to say, ‘Oh yes, he was going to heaven’, one ought to pause and ask whether heaven is a definite place in space and time, because no one’s ever found it, and it looks as though in some ways they never will, because it’s not that kind of place. It’s not defined in time or space. Well, that’s for another day.

But what about the Advocate? It’s a funny word, and if you read the King James Bible you’ll see that he is described as ‘the Comforter’. If you remember that really ancient hymn or canticle called the Te Deum, at Mattins, canticle at Mattins, theTe Deum Laudamus, ‘We praise thee, O God,’ there is a line in there, ‘Also the Holy Ghost; the Comforter.’ This is the bit:

The holy Church throughout all the world doth acknowledge Thee;

The Father of an infinite Majesty;

Thine honourable, true, and only Son;

Also the Holy Ghost: the Comforter.

The holy Trinity, God in three persons. Father, son and Holy Ghost: the Holy Ghost: the Comforter.

And if you read on further in John chapter 16, beyond our lesson today, you will see that Jesus goes on to say, ‘There is still much that I could say to you, but the burden would be too great for you now. However, when he comes who is the Spirit of truth, he will guide you into all the truth (John 16:12–13, NEB),’ and the ‘Spirit of truth’ is clearly a reference to the Advocate or the Comforter.

The word in Greek which is translated as the Advocate or the Comforter is our Bibles, is Paraclete (παρακλητος). Sometimes people do talk about the ‘Holy Paraclete’ but that strikes me as being a bit of an ‘in’ word, in that only people in church, and only some people in church, know what it means. It’s a bit like the special language of railways. You don’t get off a train; you alight from it. To ‘alight’ is a railway word, an ‘in’ word for railwaymen. Similarly only nerdy vicars talk about paracletes.

The Greek word for the advocate, the comforter, has all sorts of connotations, probably starting with a courtroom meaning. It’s not quite an advocate in the sense of being a barrister or a KC, who speaks for you; it’s more a question of standing alongside you and supporting you, perhaps prompting you or passing you notes to help you in your case.

It definitely also has a context, outside the courtroom, of encouragement, of comfort, so the King James’s translation, the Comforter, is certainly a possible one. When you start thinking about ‘comfortable’ things in church perhaps you will remember the ‘Comfortable Words’ in the communion service; and interestingly, there is a quote in them, from not John’s Gospel but from St John’s first letter: ‘If any man sin, we have an advocate with the father, Jesus Christ the righteous.’ [1 John 2:1 – my emphasis]. That’s interesting. There, the advocate, the comforter, is Jesus, but here clearly the Comforter is standing in for him.

I hope it’s not a heretical thought, but it has occurred to me that if you were, say, piecing together the gospel story from fragments, so bits were missing, but you had to work back from an ending with the church believing that God is a God in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, (or Holy Spirit if you’re not keen on ghosts), you’d almost have to infer or make up the coming of the Holy Spirit.

If God created the world, and by sending his son Jesus demonstrated a continuing and personal concern and care for the world, there is no reason why, Jesus having ended his time among us as a man, God’s omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence should suddenly dry up; so it’s natural to expect that the divine presence would continue in some way. And Jesus seems to be saying exactly that, that God’s care for the world, his ‘comfort’ for it, will still be there, even when Jesus has gone.

Jesus says that he, Jesus, will send the comforter; so those of you who are connoisseurs of theology will realise that this might be one of the passages which people look at in connection with the anniversary of the Nicene Creed, where some people, influenced by the early theologian Arius (and it’s permitted by canon law in the Church of England, at least), can simply say, ‘…proceeds from the father’; whereas most of us include the words ‘and the Son… Who proceeds from the Father and the Son’. This passage in John 16 suggests that it is right to add ‘… and from the Son…’. It’s called the ‘filioque’ clause – which is just Latin for the same thing.

So the Advocate, the Comforter, is the divine Spirit of truth – but also the spirit of love as well, and hope; I’m thinking of Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans, where Paul writes: ‘… hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.’ [Romans 5:5]

We look forward to the events of Whitsuntide or Pentecost, where the Holy Spirit came in a spectacular way, making everyone able to speak in a multitude of languages and setting their hair on fire without burning it up, with a sound like a rushing wind. Like so much in the Bible, we could never prove that it was literally like that, but clearly something happened, and it was sufficiently well known to end up in Saint Luke’s account in the Acts of the Apostles. [Acts 2]

So what’s the relevance of this today? I’ve just been to a conference held by Modern Church, which despite its name is one of the oldest theological societies in Anglicanism. It was founded as the Modern Churchmen’s Union in 1898.This year’s conference was called ‘Enacting Hope in a Ruined World’.

Hope in a Ruined World: and the line from Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans which I’ve just quoted, about the Holy Spirit pouring love into our hearts, so that ‘…hope does not disappoint us,’ was the theme of the conference: how we could bring a Christian hope to bear in our communities and in our national life in the face of the rise of populism, nationalism, fascism, war and starvation.

In the face of all that we do need an Advocate, a Comforter, a spirit of truth. We need to know what is true and to remember that the spirit of truth is also the spirit of love.

Hugh Bryant

(Sermon for Evensong on the 18th Sunday after Trinity, 19th October 2025, at All Saints Church, Penarth)

Sermon for Evensong at All Saints Church, Penarth, on the 5th Sunday of Easter, 18th May 2025

https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=614076925

I am a cat person, although I am going through a period of deprivation, because of the lack of a cat in the Bryant household.

So when I saw that our first lesson today was ‘Daniel in the lions’ den’ I was thrilled, as you can imagine. I wanted to tell you about the king of cats, lions; about lions who had not eaten people – Daniel, for one – even though they were given a good opportunity to do so.

I thought I would spend a minute or two reminding you of the wonderful story of Christian the Lion [https://youtu.be/EZ-da0AZcRU?si=36ryLiiLebWvA_wy] I’m not quite sure how he got his name and I doubt whether there is any theological significance to it, so far as I know, but there is a wonderful film about him, which you can see on YouTube today.

It’s a film about two trendy chaps in the 60s, living – where else? – on the King’s Road in Chelsea, who went to Harrod’s, who in those days had a pet department, if you can believe this, where you could actually buy pets, obviously pets of the calibre you would expect from such a leading store; so you could buy a lion cub. These chaps indeed bought a lion cub, whom they christened Christian. They took him home to their flat and started to bring him up.

He was a very friendly lion cub who certainly hadn’t acquired a taste for eating people. And this isn’t a story that ends like the Hilaire Belloc ‘cautionary tale’ of ‘Jim, who ran away from his Nurse and was eaten by a Lion’. You will remember that

There was a boy whose name was Jim

His friends were very good to him

They gave him tea and cakes and jam

And slices of delicious ham ….

Anyway, he ran away from his nurse when visiting the zoo and

‘Bang!

With open Jaws, a Lion sprang,

And hungrily began to eat

The Boy: beginning at his feet.

Well I’m sure that you will know that gruesomely wonderful poem very well anyway, but this is not one of those tales. This is like the story of Christian the Lion. It is the story of a lion, or lions, who didn’t eat people. In particular they didn’t eat Daniel.

Indeed the book of Daniel is full of amazing stories and visions: before the story of the lions’ den there is the account of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, the three young men thrown into the furnace for refusing to worship the Babylonian king in preference to the one true God, whom God saved so that they emerged from the furnace unscathed.

Later on there are amazing visions which Daniel had, described as apocalypses, revelations: they are a bit like the book of Revelation, visions of the end time, how God will put things right.

Our second lesson is the end of St Mark’s Gospel, what is called the ‘shorter ending of St Mark’s Gospel’, which doesn’t go on to talk in detail about Jesus after he had risen from the dead. It simply ends with the empty tomb. How does this relate to the story of Daniel?

Who rolled away the stone? I think that’s the link, because Daniel was thrown into the pit of lions and the entrance was sealed with a big stone to prevent any escapes, just as Jesus’s tomb was sealed, also with a huge stone.

You will remember that at the end of St Matthew’s account of Jesus’s crucifixion [27:62-66], the chief priests and the Pharisees went to see Pontius Pilate and asked for a guard to be put on the tomb and for it to be sealed, because they remembered that Jesus had said that he would rise again after three days; and they said to Pilate, ‘Command that the tomb be made secure until the third day; otherwise his disciples may go and steal him away, and tell the people, “He has been raised from the dead”.

So the link between the two lessons is supposed to be somebody appearing alive even though they’ve either been put where nobody could possibly survive, like Daniel and the lions, or actually securely entombed and very dead, like Jesus: but in both cases the person who has been locked in behind the rock, dead, reappears, alive.

Two different accounts of how two people came back from the dead? I am not sure that’s right; because the only one who definitely was dead was Jesus.

The whole point about Daniel was that he wasn’t dead, that the angel protected him, or the lion made friends with him, if he was a lion like Christian the Lion, so it wasn’t really a question of resurrection from the dead.

Daniel writes about himself as though he was operating at the time of King Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon, about 580 BC, whereas he was actually writing 400 years later; so really, he was making things up, to produce an inspiring story to encourage the Israelites.

They had been overrun again – the first time had been in 587BC, when they were defeated by the armies of Babylon and they were taken off to Babylon as captives – Ps 137, ‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept’ – and in the time when Daniel was actually writing, about 165BC, Israel was under Persian occupation, as it had been invaded again, by the Persians, originally under Alexander the Great, in 330BC, and 150 years later, when Daniel was active, they were still being oppressed, at that time by King Antiochus, a descendant of Alexander.

Daniel’s book is effectively written in code; his dreams, predicting the downfall of the king, whom he names as king Nebuchadnezzar, (who was the king 400 years before), are code for statements against King Antiochus, who was his present company. It’s a political book. It’s a sort of tract, a revolutionary text.

Are there any parallels with the resurrection story in St Mark’s Gospel? The interesting thing that scholars always bring up is how abruptly it ends.

So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

That’s actually not a good translation. The Greek seems to end in the middle of a sentence. ‘For they were afraid’ doesn’t really give the full flavour of it. It’s really ‘…they were afraid, because…’ [εφοβουντο γαρ] Because what? It’s almost as though there is stuff missing. Indeed there are other manuscripts which do add bits, a couple more paragraphs.

One bit added to some manuscripts is this:

And they delivered all these instructions briefly to Peter and his companions. Afterwards Jesus himself sent out by them from east to west the sacred and imperishable message of eternal salvation.

That is described as the ‘shorter ending’ of the gospel: I think we might describe it as the medium-short ending, because many of the early texts don’t even have that bit. And some other manuscripts have an additional ten verses, which go like this:

9 When he had risen from the dead early on Sunday morning he appeared first to Mary of Magdala, from whom he had formerly cast out seven devils. 10 She went and carried the news to his mourning and sorrowful followers, 11 but when they were told that he was alive and that she had seen him they did not believe it.

12 Later he appeared in a different guise to two of them as they were walking, on their way into the country. 13 These also went and took the news to the others, but again no one believed them.

14 Afterwards while the Eleven were at table he appeared to them and reproached them for their incredulity and dullness, because they had not believed those who had seen him after he was raised from the dead. 15 Then he said to them: ‘Go forth to every part of the world, and proclaim the Good News to the whole creation. 16 Those who believe it and receive baptism will find salvation; those who do not believe will be condemned. 17 Faith will bring with it these miracles: believers will cast out devils in my name and speak in strange tongues; 18 if they handle snakes or drink any deadly poison, they will come to no harm; and the sick on whom they lay their hands will recover.’

19 So after talking with them the Lord Jesus was taken up into heaven, and he took his seat at the right hand of God; 20 but they went out to make their proclamation everywhere, and the Lord worked with them and confirmed their words by the miracles that followed. (Mark 16:8–Luke, NEB, https://ref.ly/Mk16.8-Lk;neb)

I think you could say straightway that, whichever bit is the real end of the gospel of Mark, he says enough to make us realise that something had happened, the like of which had never happened before and has never happened since.

But I think, with the greatest respect to Daniel, people’s lives haven’t been changed in the same way by his prophecies and the story of his escape from the lion. I’m tempted to say that Daniel’s story is just that, a story, albeit a very wonderful one; whereas Jesus’ is something else entirely. Perhaps that contrast helps us to appreciate just how amazing the story of Jesus is. Uniquely amazing.

But – you know, you can’t keep those lions out. After I’d finished composing this, I realised that there is still an important lion out there, who is still relevant today, and he is another link with Jesus. It’s Pope Leo – because ‘Leo’ is Latin for ‘lion’. Today he officially began his ministry, he went through the ceremony of his ‘inauguration’. Do watch it on BBC iPlayer. Let us rejoice, and let us wish Pope Leo, Leo the Lion, every blessing as he puts on the ‘Fisherman’s Ring’ as the successor to Saint Peter today. If I was a Rastafarian, I would say he was following the Lion of Judah.

Amen.

Hugh Bryant