Sermon for Evensong on the Festival of Christ the King, the 25th Sunday after Trinity, 20th November 2016
1 Samuel 8:4-20; John 18:33-37
Do you really want a strong man to rule over you? Someone who isn’t part of the ‘corrupt establishment’ in Brussels or Washington DC, someone who isn’t in that liberal elite who don’t know how we feel? We need to ‘take back control’: we don’t want all these foreigners coming and taking our jobs. Why are our factories closing and the business moving – to Mexico? Why is the Ford Transit made in Turkey?

But you Americans had such a thoughtful President, so careful to balance national self-interest with a care for the entire world: committed to countering climate change, and to providing proper healthcare for everyone. Are you sure?

And our British hospitals depend on doctors and nurses from abroad: our universities rely on the fees that overseas students pay, as if they just had what the government gives them, they would not be able to attract the top professors and researchers: restaurants, like Carluccio’s and Côte and Pizza Express, which we all love, have very few real Italians and French people working there – but they do have friendly and hard-working Poles and Romanians. We love our Lincolnshire potatoes and all the fresh fruit from Evesham: but it’s certainly not picked by Brits. Are you sure you don’t want people to be able to come in and work here?

What a can of worms to have opened. In the USA, Trump. Here, Brexit. And I suggest that in both scenarios, a factor is disillusionment with the people in government. Take back control, they say. Let’s have a businessman in charge. Let’s not have a general election. It’s more important to have stability, a safe pair of hands. We mustn’t show our hand in the negotiations, so you just have to trust the government to get the best deal. Are you sure?

Is anyone walking out yet? No, this isn’t a political speech. I haven’t strayed in from a meeting of Momentum or DiEM 25. I’m just struck at how the same sort of scenarios come up from time to time, over thousands of years. It wasn’t exactly like the movements behind Trump or Farage 3,000 years ago, but there were similarities. 

The tribes of Israel were suffering at the hands of the Philistines. They had had a wonderful prophet, Samuel, who had faithfully consulted the one true God and guided them by his prophecies. But he had got old, and his sons weren’t much cop as prophets. For a start, they thought that being a leader was a licence to make money from bribes, and that justice belonged to the highest bidder. You know, in ancient Israel the business of government, ruling, was called ‘judging’. 

But if the judges could be bought, there was no longer any proper government. So the elders of the tribes of Israel paid a visit to the old prophet Samuel, and they asked him to give them a king: ‘Make us a king to judge us’, they said (1 Samuel 8:5). Other countries had kings. Why not the Israelites?

Samuel knew that what they wanted was not good. He knew that, if the people listened to what the One True God would tell them, through his prophecy, God would want the best for his chosen people, and he would tell his prophets what they should do. Surely that would be the best form of rule.

But they didn’t want God to rule them any more. ‘They have rejected me, that I should not reign over them’ (1 Samuel 8:7). So God asked Samuel to spell out to the Israelites what a king would be really like. He would not rule for their benefit, but for his own. Trump University: learn to be a property developer like me – and pay me a fat fee. You can work in my factories; you can be my drivers and my cleaning ladies. You can be temporary help at harvest time: minimum wage, zero hours.

Look at the strange jobs the despotic king would give the people: wonderfully, ‘he will take your daughters to be confectionaries’; confectionaries, which I think is like working night shifts for Mr Kipling’s Cakes – on a contract copied from Sports Direct. Not much fun. ‘Ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you.’ 

But they thought Samuel was just a Remoaner. Now we live in the ‘post truth’ era, where you shouldn’t listen to experts. Just as they did: it’s nothing new. ‘-[T]he people refused to obey the voice of Samuel; and they said, Nay;’ nay, leave; leave that corrupt cabal in Europe; ‘but we will have a king over us’; we will have Trump, we will take back control.

Half way between then and now, Jesus was in front of Pilate. ‘Art thou the King of the Jews?’ he asked. Kings were an established fixture in Judaism by then. The Israelites had Herod at that time – probably Herod Antipas, who, by the way, wasn’t actually Jewish – but that’s for another time. By all accounts Herod was no saint. Think of what he did to John the Baptist. Jesus clearly knew that it wasn’t necessarily a good thing to be a king. He would have known what Samuel had said. 

If he had been king, in place of Herod, it would have been disruptive in the order of things. The Romans were in charge, and Herod was a client king. If Jesus had displaced him, obviously he might well not have liked it, and civil strife between his followers and Jesus’ might have resulted.

There was a bit of a worry that Jesus’ followers were claiming that he was more than just a claimant to the throne of David. The suggestion was that he was the long-awaited Messiah, the Anointed One of God: not just a king in the temporal, earthly sense, but somehow actually divine.

So Jesus rather let Pilate off the hook of his dilemma. He wasn’t a king, in the conventional sense. His kingdom was ‘not of this world’: if it had been, indeed ‘then would my servants fight’. But he wasn’t a terrorist, he wasn’t a threat to good order. Instead his role was to ‘witness to the truth’. And his followers would be attuned to his message. ‘Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice’.

I’m not sure where that takes us today. Where is the truth, where is the wise course of action? Do we follow Trump? He did after all get elected, albeit with a minority of the votes. Do we like Farage, who hasn’t managed to be elected to Parliament, but only to the European Parliament which he wants nothing to do with? Or Theresa May, who hasn’t been elected as Prime Minister? 

Or might it not be better, after all, to love our neighbours, as Jesus commanded? Even if they are, some of them, foreign? Yes, foreign – and still our neighbours. And perhaps we should listen to our prophets – are our bishops and archbishops prophets? Maybe the Pope is, too. And finally we should remember what Jesus himself said about how a king should behave, in St Mark’s Gospel, chapter 10:

Ye know that they which are accounted to rule over the Gentiles exercise lordship over them; and their great ones exercise authority upon them.

But so shall it not be among you: but whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister:
And whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all. For even the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.

Sermon for Mattins on the Feast of Christ the King, the 25th Sunday after Trinity, 20th November 2016
Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43

In all the column inches about Donald Trump which I have read recently, possibly one of the more interesting things was in the Evening Standard the other day. What the article said was that Donald Trump was behaving very like a king. [See http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/joy-lo-dico-it-looks-like-the-americans-have-their-king-after-all-a3398151.html%5D. Quite often you read that the Americans envy us our monarch, but I doubt whether the feeling goes much further than a general feeling of admiration, given the history of the United States – the Boston Tea Party and the War of Independence were all about getting away from being ruled by a king.

Whatever Donald Trump – ‘The Donald’, as he is known – is, the nearest I think he would come to kingship would be as the Great Pretender. But it is interesting to reflect on what we think about kings today, as we celebrate Jesus as King.

We Englishmen tend to think rather benignly about monarchy – or certainly about our own Queen. David Blunkett, Lord Blunkett, the former government minister, made rather a good joke on ‘Any Questions’ (BBC Radio 4, 18th November 2016) about the fact that the Queen is getting hundreds of millions in a sort of Housing Benefit in order to fix up her house, Buckingham Palace: ‘Just think’, he said, ‘what would happen if the Bedroom Tax were applied’! It’s a measure of how much we like our Queen that that’s just a joke.

One difference between King Donald and Queen Elizabeth is not in what they are, but in what they can do. Part of the trouble with The Donald is that he is going to be the most powerful man on earth, President of the United States America: and some of the things he said he would do when he became President are pretty worrying. 

By contrast, of course the Queen is a ‘constitutional monarch’; she a queen who is simply a figurehead, but without power. She couldn’t build a wall to keep out Polish doctors, nurses, plumbers and waiters; she couldn’t suddenly withdraw from NATO or the climate change treaties, or ban all Moslems from entering the country.

What about Jesus? Pontius Pilate had asked him whether he was a king, and Jesus had given rather an enigmatic answer. ‘You say so’. Over him as he hung on the cross, his executioners had put a sign in three languages, THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS. 

And it’s clear that in those days, a king was not there just for show, not just a constitutional figurehead. He was supposed to be powerful. ‘If thou be the king of the Jews, save thyself.’ They thought that if he were a real king, he would have royal powers. He would not be bound by the laws of physics.

Apart from the spoof King, Donald, in most civilised countries we don’t have kings who can do anything these days. It is a big change from the Jewish and Roman ideas, according to which it wasn’t just what the king was that mattered, but what he did, his mighty powers, his mighty acts.

In our system of government, we don’t just talk about monarchy, but also about democracy and, most important of all, the Rule of Law. ‘Be you ever so high, the law is above you,’ said that greatest of modern judges, Lord Denning, in 1977 [Goriet v Union of Post Office Workers], which was almost a quote of what the theologian Thomas Fuller had said two hundred years before. 

Tom Bingham, Lord Bingham, Lord Denning’s great friend, himself one of the greatest of modern English judges, in his classic book ‘The Rule of Law’ (2010, London, Allen Lane), explained that the ‘rule of law’ was based on the principles enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights 1950, itself reflecting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948.

In our world, the power, in government at least, is based on a set of principles. But in the time of Jesus – and throughout Jewish history beforehand – power was in the hand of rulers, kings. It’s true that, as you see time and time again in the Book of Kings in the Old Testament, kings prospered or fell in accordance with how well they followed God’s commandments and kept his covenant.

Originally in Judaism, God ruled his chosen people, through the prophets. The prophet Moses led the Israelites out of captivity in Egypt. But when his descendant, the prophet Samuel, was old and infirm, the Israelites started clamouring for a king, for an autocratic leader. As I will discuss tonight at Evensong, what they said was, ‘Give us a king to judge us’ (1 Samuel 8:6). In that context, to ‘judge’ meant to rule. Up till then they had been content to be guided and led by the prophets by God himself, but now they wanted a secular leader too.

The mechanism by which someone became a king was by being anointed, anointed with oil. The Greek word for ‘anointed’ is Χριστός, Christ. In Hebrew it is Messiah. By the time of Jesus, the Israelites were constantly looking for someone anointed by God, a Messiah, a ‘christ’, who, they thought, would be divinely powerful and would lead them again out of captivity, this time by the Romans.

This is where it gets interesting. The Jews – and Pontius Pilate – were concentrating, where Jesus was concerned, on what they thought a ‘King of the Jews’ would be able to do – and not on what he would be. Just as we might think about The Donald, they thought that, as a king, Jesus was a pretender – but they were worried that enough people might be taken in nevertheless, swayed by his rhetoric. They were worried that he would be able to persuade the ordinary people to rise up and revolt against the Roman rulers – and perhaps the Jewish leaders, including their king, King Herod.

But as St Paul says in the first chapter of his letter to the Colossians, one of his great ‘Christological hymns’, hymns about the nature of Jesus, the really important thing is not what Jesus might do, his deeds of power as a king, but what he was, what indeed he is: he is ‘the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: for by him were all things created …’ (Colossians 1:15)

This is a much bigger compass than just being able to win a few battles or do the odd miracle – wonderful as that would have been. ‘For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him..’

All things were created by him, ‘ … [W]hether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers..’ Jesus is much more important than any king. He made the kings, is what St Paul is saying. Father, Son, all together in creation – and then the body, the church. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit is what is with us, how the believers together in the church are animated, the Advocate, the Comforter. So together we have God in three persons, blessed Trinity. St Paul, in a way, is going back to the time of the prophets. We are ruled by God, and not by any temporal, earthly king. 

But what about The Donald? Well, perhaps we should leave him for future historians to deal with. But what about our, real, Queen? Underlying her power is the power of the people, democracy. Whatever you might think about the merits or otherwise of the recent referendum, democracy isn’t necessarily a perfect system. Winston Churchill is supposed to have said, ‘Democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others’. 

But remember Lord Denning. Even above the Queen, there is the law. In a Christian country, which ours still professes to be, the law, the law upon which the rule of law is based, comes from a doctrine of human rights. Philosophers have debated endlessly where human rights can be derived from. It’s not self-evident that a person has rights, just because they are a human being. 

But as Christians – and, because they too recognise the Bible, at least in the Old Testament, as Jews and as Moslems – we can trace our law back to the idea that we are all God’s creatures, and that God has laid down rules – the Ten Commandments – governing our life together. Human rights, for us, have a divine origin and sanction.

In the church, there is a king: Jesus, Jesus Christ, anointed. But as He himself said, his kingdom is ‘not of this world’ (John 18:36). It’s something altogether greater. Dare I say, watch out, Donald Trump?

Sermon for Evensong on the Third Sunday before Advent, 6th November 2016
1 Kings 3:1-15; Romans 8:31-39

King Solomon, as well as having 700 wives, was famous for his wisdom. In his dream he asked the Lord, ‘Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad: for who is able to judge this thy so great a people?’

He went on to demonstrate that God had granted his wish, when two women came to him, one claiming that the other had stolen her baby. Who did the baby belong to? This was before DNA testing, of course, and Solomon came up with the gruesome but effective solution that the baby should be cut in two, and each woman given half a baby. The real mother was so horrified that her baby would be killed that she offered that the other woman should have it – and the truth soon came out.

After the Exodus from captivity in Egypt, the twelve tribes of the Israelites settled in Canaan, and from time to time when a threat to their existence arose, a champion, a saviour, was found to lead them to safety. These leaders were called ‘judges’, and this, between 1200 and 1000 BC, was the time of the Judges. The Book of Judges, which records this history, is the seventh book in the Old Testament. 

So from their earliest history, the people of Israel identified their leader as a judge. A key feature of leadership was judicial ability. And when Solomon, great among the kings of Israel, inherited his father David’s kingdom, while he was ‘but a little child, … [who knew] not how to go out or to come in’, he asked God for an ‘understanding heart to judge thy people.’ To judge them: not explicitly to ‘rule’ them, although this was what he meant. A modern translation [NRSV] uses the word ‘govern’ instead of ‘judge’, which rather loses some of the subtlety of this.

For the Jews, the idea of the Law, the interpretation of the Law by scholars, rabbis, and its application in practice to situations in real life by judges, all go to make civilised life possible. Judaism, Biblical Israel, is a theocratic society. God gave the law through the prophets, and by God’s authority the law is interpreted and applied – by judges. Judging is, in the Hebrew Bible, the exercise of government. The New English Bible, which I still like very much as a modern translation, uses the as expression to ‘administer justice’ at one point, as well as the word ‘govern’. For the ancient Israelites, to govern meant to administer justice. And justice is administered by judges.

I couldn’t help thinking of this when I was following the story of the judgement in the High Court this week about whether the government can give notice of leaving the European Union without first obtaining the authority of Parliament. I expect that, if you have been following what the various papers say, you might have read some widely differing views about the judgement, which was to the effect that the government cannot lawfully give notice under Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon, without obtaining the consent of Parliament first.

Some newspapers have reacted violently; one even described the judgment as a challenge to Great Britain analogous with the Battle of Britain in 1940, and the judges who made the judgment, who are the Master of the Rolls, the Lord Chief Justice and the most senior Appeal Court judge, have been subjected to some extremely abusive criticism.

The judgement has been appealed to the Supreme Court, and will be heard in the second week in December, I understand. It’s not my place, in a sermon, to go into the merits of the case, save only to mention that the case was not about whether we should leave the EU, but was rather about whether, in carrying out the decision of the referendum to leave, the government could act without getting Parliamentary consent, by using the so-called ‘royal prerogative’ rather than an Act of Parliament. 

I’m sure you will have heard more than enough commentary and analysis, so I won’t add to it. Perhaps, though, you will allow me, as an old retired lawyer, to point out that the appeal, if it is to succeed, will have to show that this extremely distinguished panel, of our most senior judges, made a mistake in law in their judgement. We will soon find out if they did.

But my point, the sermon point, is that as a Christian country, we have been influenced in the development of our constitution by the Judeo-Christian tradition. Jesus said, ‘Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil’ [Matt 5:17]. We uphold the Rule of Law: ‘Be you ever so high, the Law is above you’ – said first by Dr Thomas Fuller in 1733. 

And the Law, in our country, is made by Parliament, at its deepest, reflecting our Christian heritage. There is perhaps an argument that our common law, the decisions of the judges, have added another source, so that our law is made by Parliament and by judges: rather in the way that in Judaism the law of Moses has been subject to rabbinical interpretation, recorded in the Talmud.

But whatever the sources of our Law, they do not include the monarch. The royal prerogative has been severely limited, since Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights. Parliament makes the law, and the judges interpret and apply it.

Well, so much for the Law. If our first lesson took us back to the beginning of Jewish history and the Law of Moses, once we hear that uplifting passage from the eighth chapter of St Paul’s letter to the Romans: ‘If God be for us, who can be against us?’ then, in the light of those glorious words, our mundane everyday concerns, about Brexit, or maybe our anxiety about whether Trump will become the President of the USA, all these negatives, are put completely in the shade by the splendid vision we see in St Paul’s letter.

This is a lesson, from the eighth chapter of the Letter to the Romans, which we often have at funerals, in the sadness of losing a loved one, when we might rail at what might look like cruelty on God’s part: why did He allow this sadness to happen? We have to concede that this passage doesn’t answer the so-called ‘problem of evil’: the question why God allows suffering to take place. Why does He allow us to suffer ‘tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword’? We don’t know.

The point, however, is that there is something altogether greater, altogether more important, than whatever we might suffer in our transitory lives. Whatever our trials and tribulations, God has made a greater sacrifice. God has shown that He is on our side. The fact of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection is a demonstration, a revelation, of our being destined for greater things. ‘If God be for us, who can be against us?’ We no longer need a champion in our earthly lives, a judge, in the ancient terminology. God is for us. We have Jesus, and Jesus is the ‘Judge eternal, crowned in splendour’.

Steeped in Jewish tradition, St Paul still uses the language of judges, of the courtroom. ‘Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth. Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.’ There it is. Being accused, having a charge laid against us. Justifying. Being condemned. But having Christ to speak for us. It’s the language of the law-court.

So perhaps if we are tempted to get hot under the collar at the decision of one of our courts, as Christians we should bear in mind Solomon the wise judge, and above all Jesus the Judge Eternal, before we execrate our judges. Let us pray instead that we also, like Solomon, should be given understanding hearts.

Sermon for Holy Communion at St Mary’s Stoke D’Abernon on All Saints Day, 29th October 2016
Ephesians 1:11-23; Luke 6:20-31

Yesterday morning there was a lot of gardening going on around our church, in two places: on this side of the churchyard wall, and around St Mary’s Hall. 

Around the Hall a group of people who had been sentenced by the magistrates to so-many hours of community service, for various misdemeanours, were working hard to tidy up the area in front of the Hall, which had been a bit of a wilderness. It now looks all nice and clear, ready for grass to be seeded.

In the churchyard, as you will have realised as you walked in, or if you were one of the stalwarts, our stalwarts who cut the grass and neatened everything up have done a wonderful job, for which we are all really grateful.

Revd Godfrey Hilliard told me yesterday that he had bumped into one of the community service people who, looking over the wall, and assuming that everyone working round St Mary’s on a Saturday morning had come there for the same reason, and pointing to the church working party, asked, ‘What did those guys do?’

Well, I don’t remember, Godfrey, exactly what you said in response, but I would suggest that a possible riposte might have been if you’d said, ‘They’re not naughty boys, you know. Those people are saints!’

Well, you saints know who you are, and you deserve a saintly glow for all your hard work. You might balk slightly at being called ‘saints’, but I assure you, there is a perfectly good Biblical sense in which you fit that description.

Look at the letter to the Ephesians, which was our first lesson. It’s probably by a scholar writing soon after St Paul’s death, rather than by St. Paul himself, but it is very much in his style. He praises the people in Ephesus for their faith, and ‘love towards all the saints’. Then comes his prayer, ‘that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints…’ 

It seems a little bit odd that the author, ‘Paul’, is so complimentary about the people in Ephesus, after the story in the Acts of the Apostles chapter 19 of St Paul and his two followers having a tough time there, because there were a lot of people there who worshipped the Greek god Diana, or Artemis: ‘Great is Diana of the Ephesians!’ they cried. It was a riot. No matter: even if Paul didn’t write this letter, the sentiments it expresses are completely in line with his theology.

The sense is that those who are Christians, those who have received the good news and believe, are set apart from the mass of humanity: they are consecrated, made close to God, sacred. There’s an additional sense, that the ‘saints’ are the ones who have made it to heaven, who are saved and with the Lord. ‘For all the saints, who from their labours rest’, goes the hymn. Those saints were not just resting on their gardening tools. They had gone to their eternal rest. But then at the end of the passage in Ephesians, we are brought back to what saints do on earth: they are the church, ‘which is his body, [Jesus’ body], the fullness of him who fills all in all.’ 

‘Saints’ are described in some Bible translations as ‘God’s people’ or ‘those who trust in him’. [New English Bible, Eph.1:15,19.] The Greek word for ‘saint’, Άγιος, goes back much earlier than Christianity. It means, ‘sacred’, ‘consecrated’, originally to the Greek gods: it means somebody intimate with the divine. It could have included those close to Diana of the Ephesians.

Of course we don’t always think of saints as being the same as ordinary church members – although that’s what I’m saying is the most important sense. People also think that ‘saints’ are especially good people, ‘saintly’: just like those of you who were giving up your Saturday to mow the churchyard, say. 

There’s another way to look at saints. Think of the Catholic prayer, ‘Hail Mary, … Holy Mary, Mother of God … pray for us.’ Think of what our church is called – Saint Mary’s. In the Roman church, saints are especially worthy church leaders and believers, whose witness to the Gospel was so strong that they were almost like prophets – through them, Christians could glimpse the realm of God.

This goes with the idea that God is so awesome that He can only be approached, only worshipped, through a mediator, through a priest. In Roman Catholic worship, the theory is that the priest is saying the Mass for the congregation, on their behalf. He stands between the believers and God. It harks back to the Jewish idea of priesthood where the priest was the only one who could enter the Holy of Holies in the Temple, once a year on the Day of Atonement, and come face to face with God, without being destroyed in the process, as ordinary humans would have been. You can look it up in the Old Testament, in Leviticus 16:2f.

Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformers were against the idea of venerating saints and almost worshipping their images. Article XXII of the 39 Articles in the Book of Common Prayer puts the Protestant position:

‘THE Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping, and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints, is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.’

That may be rather too fierce – but certainly the prohibition in the Ten Commandments against graven images, and the consistent theme in the Old Testament, contrasting the worship of pagan gods such as Baal, and sacred poles, and the downfall of Israel when they had made a golden calf and worshipped it instead of remaining faithful to the One True God – these are all factors in the Protestant rejection of the veneration of saints and of images of saints.

Also of course, that Protestant view was associated very much with the idea of the priesthood of all believers – following 1 Timothy 2:5, the only mediator between God and men is Christ Himself. No man or woman need stand between us and God.

I would suggest, however, that there is a sense in which we can still celebrate saints, without straying into idolatry. We can remember, we can commemorate, people whose faith was exemplary, perhaps because they were especially brave – enduring persecution for their faith, or because they provided such an inspiring example of Christian faith, so as to inspire others. Mother Theresa is an example.

The Roman church does still venerate relics and pray to God ‘through’ saints. They have a set procedure by which someone can become recognised as a saint, which involves their being the author of miracles. I suppose that this goes with the Roman Catholic idea that a saint has an almost prophetic role. God speaks through his saints. God is in them – so they can do miracles.

There are things to like in both the ways of looking at saints, the Protestant and the Roman Catholic. I wouldn’t want to be so trenchantly negative as Article XXII of the 39 Articles, but equally I am a bit sceptical about the way the Roman church produces miracles.

But really I think that doesn’t matter too much. More important is to move on from rather dry analysis of what a saint is, and what he does, to the real thrust of what I have to say this morning. That is, what must I, what must you, do in order really to become a saint?

That’s where our Gospel lesson comes in. It’s St Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount. We usually read it in St Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 5; but here it is again in St Luke. Love your enemies. Don’t worry about being poor. Worry a lot about being rich. Everything is upside-down, in the Kingdom of God. Go the extra mile. Turn the other cheek. Verse 31, ‘Do to others as you would have them do to you’ – the Golden Rule. You would indeed be a good person if you did all those things – you might even be a saint.

Sermon for Mattins on the 21st Sunday after Trinity, 16th October 2016

2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8 

Will it be a good thing to declare a no-fly zone over Aleppo? Should the houses of Parliament have a chance to vote on the question whether or not the British government should give a notice under article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon? Your last question for consideration is, are gay people to be allowed to marry in church? 

I don’t know whether you listen to a BBC Radio 4 programme called the Moral Maze. I like it very much. Ethical questions are debated in a sort of forensic format where the panel listens to various experts and witnesses who speak about the issues under consideration, and then they discuss the things which the various witnesses have said. 

You usually have on the panel Melanie Phillips, who at one stage wrote for the Guardian, but now has lurched to the right; but more importantly, she is a sincere and practising Jew. There is usually somebody from an organisation called the Institute of Ideas, someone who sees everything in market terms and one of my heroes, the Reverend Dr Giles Fraser, some time canon of Saint Paul’s Cathedral and now vicar of Saint Mary’s Newington, near the Elephant and Castle. 

He is sometimes portrayed as a sort of lefty vicar, although I think that’s an underestimate. Dr Fraser was for a long time the fellow and tutor in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford as well as being the vicar of Putney, and more recently he supported the Brexit campaign in a way which puzzled many left-wingers, myself included. He is a man of considerable depth of intellect.

That’s the Moral Maze. I commend it to you if you haven’t listened to it so far. But why is it that we decide to do the things that we do? What is a good thing so far as we are concerned? There are lots of moral questions which come up. Some of them one can deal with simply by saying that they are in fact also legal questions. 
The triggering of article 50, and whether or not Parliament needs to vote on it first, is certainly something which the courts are going to pronounce on. The hearings are taking place now in the High Court. But the decision of the court will also bear on the principle of democracy, a philosophical, political question rather than just a legal one.

Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics (1.1094b1), suggested that politics was the highest form of ethics, in the sense that the idea of the good didn’t just affect one individual but the whole of the state and all the population in it.

So where do we get our moral authority from? Do we look at what is likely to produce the greatest happiness – are we utilitarians? Or, do we think that the end justifies the means? I think there might be some circularity in that, because you still need to decide what is a good end to aim at. How would we decide between two conflicting good objectives? 

For example, in the question of possibly declaring a no-fly zone in Syria, one good objective would be to protect the people of Aleppo. But another good objective would be not to increase the violence in that area, that two wrongs don’t make a right.

In our Gospel reading, Saint Luke tells us about Jesus’ parable of the ‘unjust judge’: unjust, Jesus called him, because he ‘neither feared God, nor had any respect for people’. I think it is an open question whether in fact those qualities actually do make him unjust. But, leaving that on one side, he seems to have granted an ex parte injunction to the widow because of the number of times she had applied to him, and no doubt because of her eloquence as an advocate before him. It’s interesting that the story does not say that the judge gave in and granted what she wanted, irrespective of its being just or not.

She had asked, “Avenge me of mine adversary”; and he had said, “Because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her.” Modern translations say, “I will grant her justice; I will see her righted”. So the judge, although he doesn’t fear God or man, still gives her her just deserts. 

What standard is the judge referring to? In the second letter to Timothy, which was our first lesson, are the words, “all scripture is given by inspiration of God”. That’s a line which has created divisions among Christians ever since the time of the Reformation.

Martin Luther proclaimed the principle that ‘Sola Scriptura’, only Scripture, is the supreme authority in all matters of doctrine and ethics. Sola Scriptura doesn’t deny that other principles may bear on Christian life and worship, but the Bible is held to be supreme. The Bible is held to be literally the word of God.

In relation to my questions at the beginning, you can of course answer more or less all of those puzzles simply by reference to lines in the Bible, by so-called proof texts. The problem is that sometimes you come to conclusions that are frankly counter-intuitive. If every word in the Bible is true, how do we account for the age of Methuselah or indeed the date when the world was created, for example? How do we cater for some of the nasty things said about women in the Bible?

In the so-called Pastoral Epistles, (1 and 2 Timothy and the Letter to Titus), where we had a lesson from the second letter to Timothy, in the first letter you will find that the writer (said to be St Paul but probably not) said that women should “adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety, not with broided hair or gold or pearls or costly array, but (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works. Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.”

Really? I don’t think that we would find that literally true. We would tend to put it in the context of the 1st century AD, and Graeco-Roman society. Obviously, if you are a ‘sola scriptura’ Christian, you may well have difficulty with gay marriage. There are a number of sayings of St Paul and also in Leviticus which are condemnations of homosexual love.

Other people, just as in the way we look at the place of women today, would say that there is a perfectly good way of looking at homosexuals which is different from what is literally there in the Bible. My point today is not to debate the rights and wrongs of this, but simply to look at where we get it all from. 

If you are trying to make up your mind in some moral dilemma, what would you regard as authoritative? Would you even think in that way? Would you say, what is the right thing to do, what is the good? What makes them right and good? Is it maximising happiness? Avoiding pain? Or is it ‘the word of God’?

We could be believers in God, deists, without necessarily believing all the things that Christians believe. We could believe in God as a kind of blind watchmaker, who had made the heavens and the Earth and set creation in being, wound it up and set it going, but then had gone off to do something else, leaving creation to tick along by itself, perhaps using the mechanism of evolution as its governing principle; survival of the fittest. So that would throw up another possible principle, so called victors’ justice. 

But we as Christians believe that God actually took a much closer interest in his creation. He inspired the prophets. In the Nicene Creed, ‘He spake through the prophets’: and he sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to be a man like us and to share in our life and our suffering. As Anglicans, we don’t uphold the doctrine of ‘sola scriptura’: we’re not descendants directly of Martin Luther. We believe that there is a threefold source of authority. We learn what the will of God is, partly from the Bible, partly from ‘tradition’, by how the church has interpreted things down the ages, and partly by reason, by common sense.

One of the important things in Anglicanism, and indeed in the beliefs of all those Christians who don’t believe that the Bible is the only authority, is the thought that the Holy Spirit is at work, and has continued to be at work, since the time of Jesus. So although Jesus, in his three years of ministry, produced teachings which have changed the world, it didn’t stop there. Can you imagine the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for example, in South Africa, without the idea of loving your enemy in the Sermon on the Mount? But surely the Holy Spirit was there with Nelson Mandela, inspiring his generosity of spirit. He wasn’t just looking back 2,000 years in order to get his ideas from.

One way that we Christians can approach moral questions is to bring Jesus into it. “What would Jesus do?” Love God and love your neighbour: but also that he has ‘not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it’. The law being the law of Moses, the Ten Commandments and all the detailed rules that you will find in the first five books of the Old Testament. 

The pastoral epistles, the letters to Timothy and to Titus, have to be understood against the background of a lot of the writings in the New Testament, that people thought that the end of the world was very close. The second letter to Timothy is perhaps not quite as apocalyptic in tone as some other parts of the New Testament. Possibly 100 years had gone by since the time of Christ, by the time that the letter was written, and the end of the world hadn’t actually happened. 

Now, 2000 years on, we tend to look at predictions of the end of the world rather in the same light as lengthy and complex horoscope predictions. In popular journalism, it’s not very serious; certainly not something which would change your life. There’s surely an echo of what we read in 2 Timothy: “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers having itching ears, and they shall turn away their ears from the truth and shall be turned unto fables’.

What do you think? What does it look like? Tony Blair and his government famously “didn’t do God”. I’m not sure what they did refer to in order to take the decisions that they did. Maybe we can even say that they did not ‘endure sound doctrine’. Did they make moral mistakes as a result?

Maybe some of the new-age philosophies that some people pursue would come into the category of things that “appeal to itching ears”. Isn’t this rather more important than that? Isn’t it time that we actually thought, a bit more deeply than we have so far, about where laws come from and what the good is, and what we are aiming for in our lives?

Is it good enough, simply just to try to pass through life as pleasantly as possible without getting into trouble; to have enough to eat and a roof over our heads? Nothing wrong with that, but is that all there is? Look at what Jesus said. ‘When the son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?’ 

What do you think? What are we going to do about it?

Sermon for Evensong on the 21st Sunday after Trinity, 16th October 2016

Nehemiah 8:9-18; John 16:1-11 

Today in Judaism they are celebrating what they call Sukkot, which is the Feast of Booths, of Tabernacles. It began as a celebration of the end of 40 years wandering in the desert after Moses had received the 10 Commandments at the top of Mount Sinai. Last weekend was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and Sukkot begins five days afterwards. Leviticus 23:24 reads: ‘On the 15th day of the 7th month, there shall be a feast of tabernacles to God for seven days’, and in Exodus 23 Sukkot had evolved into a celebration of the summer harvest. It was – is – a harvest festival. So this a nice counterpart to our Harvest Festival season.

We have been amazingly fortunate in the Foodbank this year, in that a lot of churches and schools locally have given us their Harvest gifts. For the last two or three weeks it has seemed as though it was a constant Harvest Festival for us. We are for ever filling up the van and unloading all the goodies into the Foodbank warehouse.

We have slightly over 3 metric tons of food in our warehouse, compared with our normal 2 tonnes. We give out – if you’re interested – about 200kgs a week, so on average a tonne lasts us five weeks. So Harvest Festival has been really welcome and has enabled us to get really well stocked up.

We have given some away to the Women’s Refuge in Send, to the pop-up food bank and soup kitchen which the Methodists are operating in Leatherhead (to replace the ‘Pitstop’ that there used to be there), and we have given some food, from some of the church collections, expressly by permission of those churches, to a collection for the ‘Jungle’ refugee camp in Calais. 

So it’s good to be reminded of the origins of Harvest Festival in Judaism. Harvest Festival in Christianity, in English Christianity, is really a Victorian invention; but it is a nice time, a time of generosity, and it is perhaps a good antidote to all our worries over the consequences of the EU referendum, the crisis in the Health Service, and of course the dreadful foreign outlook, particularly in Syria and Haiti. Nice to be able to celebrate something at least, and Harvest is a very worthwhile celebration.

We can be grateful for God’s creation and for His bounty. We can make sure that we are generous with that bounty. This morning at Mattins I was exploring the ideas of the right and the good. When we say that we are pursuing the good and the right thing to do, what is it that makes that something right or good? In our second lesson today, this evening, we have part of Jesus’ farewell discourse with the disciples, where he is preparing them for his eventual Ascension, when they will not see him any more. 

And this passage in St John’s Gospel introduces us to the idea of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, παρακλητης, which literally means someone who comes and stands alongside you. It then came to mean an advocate, in the sense of a barrister in court, somebody who stood up for you and represented your cause. In some Bibles the word is translated as ‘Advocate’, but in the Book of Common Prayer – look in the Te Deum, for example – (in Morning Prayer) and the Authorised Version of the Bible, the word used is ‘Comforter’. 

I think you can more or less take your pick which is the better translation. The idea is not really a formal court appearance necessarily, but the Holy Spirit supporting us and being alongside us, although Jesus himself has gone, to the Father. This is the end of a Gospel, St John’s Gospel, which perhaps more than any of the others, concentrates on establishing the truth that Jesus was God in human form, God revealing himself to us. In John 20 it says, ‘These are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing, ye might have life through his name.’ 

That’s the purpose of John’s Gospel. It is, if you think about it, the ultimate sanction of everything. The reason why we should think about what God’s Commandments are, the reason why certain things are good, and right, and certain things are not, all comes down to the fact that we have faith in Jesus as the Son of God, as God on earth.

God is not the ‘blind watchmaker’. He didn’t just wind up the mechanism, set it going, and disappear. Instead he sent his son, as the ultimate expression of caring for us. It’s too big for us to understand completely, but it is certainly not something that we should ignore, as some people today, unfortunately, do.

It’s not good enough just to bumble along, vaguely doing good and avoiding pain: just having a vaguely ‘nice life’. The beautiful thing is that, if we do have faith, and if we do draw near to the Lord in our prayers, then He still sends His Holy Spirit, the Comforter, the Advocate, to stand alongside us and support us in everything that we do.

The Comforter is for us, and against the world. ‘He will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgement.’ The word ‘reprove’ has a meaning which is closer to ‘put to the test’: it’s a sort of general connotation of testing, perhaps testing in court, forensic testing. ‘He will test the world for sin, for righteousness and in judgment.’ The sin which the Advocate will expose will be the sin of faithlessness: ‘because they believe not on me’. The ‘righteousness’ is a shorthand expression. Righteousness, in the context of the New Testament, is the opposite of sin, and they both relate to closeness to God or separation from Him. So somebody who is ‘righteous’ is aligned with God, is close to Him: so the Comforter, the Advocate, will test the world to see how close it is to God. 

In the New English Bible this passage is translated as ‘he will convict them of wrong, by their refusal to believe in me; he will convince them that right is on my side [that’s the righteousness] by showing that I go to the Father when I pass from your sight, and he will convince them of divine judgement by showing that the prince of this world stands condemned.’ ‘The prince of this world’ is a name for the opposite of God, worldly, rather than heavenly, value.

We read these passages at the end of St. John’s Gospel often at funerals. This is the time, perhaps, when people are brought up short and they think more about what ultimate truth there is. I think it would be good if we could realise that this is not just something for special occasions, for Harvest Festivals, say. The Holy Ghost, the Comforter, is there for us, to stand alongside us. All we have to do is to open our hearts in prayer to Him. Let us pray that the Holy Spirit will come, to guide and support us in everything we do.

Sermon for Evensong on the 19th Sunday after Trinity, 2nd October 2016 at St Mary’s Church, Stoke D’Abernon, Surrey

Nehemiah 5:1-13, John 9

Last Sunday, very unusually, we we didn’t have evensong here at St Mary’s. I should assure you that that is really unusual, and that you can count on there being sung Evensong at Saint Mary’s every Sunday at 6. Instead last Sunday a number of us went to Guildford Cathedral to see our new suffragan bishop, Bishop Jo, installed. She has, of course, already been ordained bishop, consecrated, at Canterbury Cathedral in June. This was technically her installation as a canon of the Cathedral, and for most of us it was the opportunity to hear a sermon from her for the first time.

She preached on the second chapter of Nehemiah. Nehemiah was a Jew in the service of the Persian king Artaxerxes, the Persians having defeated the Babylonians, who had taken the Jews into captivity: ‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept’, you’ll remember in Psalm 137. So at this time, roughly 500 years before the time of Christ, the Jews were in exile and ruled by the Persians.

Bishop Jo took as her theme ‘a point of no return’. Nehemiah took a risk in asking the king for permission to visit the ruined city of Jerusalem: but once he had heard from one of his brothers, who had visited the city, what a dreadful state it was in: that those Jews who had survived there were suffering great trouble, and that the walls of the city and its gates had been broken down: once he had heard that, for Nehemiah there was no turning back. He had to go, and try to do something to put matters right – it was what Bishop Jo called a Point of No Return.

The Persian king did allow Nehemiah to go to Jerusalem, and indeed he appointed him governor of the province of Judah. So Nehemiah was both a man of God and a satrap, a provincial governor. It was a big challenge. Bishop Jo identified two particular things to note about Nehemiah’s mission to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem – which is what he did – that Nehemiah was ‘real about the mess’ – realistic about how bad things were – as well as being ‘real about God’ – that God was real to him; that he relied on God, he prayed to Him and God heard him.

So Bishop Jo talked about a ‘Nehemiah moment’: a leadership challenge, which she felt she was experiencing. She was inspired by Nehemiah’s story. As a bishop, as a leader in the church, she had to have similar qualities to the ones that Nehemiah had.

Tonight we’ve followed Nehemiah’s story along further. Nehemiah has got teams of people working on the walls of Jerusalem – but all is not well. Some of the people come and pour out their troubles. In line with Bishop Jo’s idea of being ‘real about the mess’, Nehemiah listened to the people’s problem and took it seriously. What it is, is that some of the poorer people, poorer Jews, are being seriously exploited by the richer ones. There is a famine, and people have had to borrow, and mortgage their farms and vineyards in order to be able to buy the food to live on. Some of their daughters have even been sold into slavery in order to raise money – slavery to their fellow Jews, the only difference being that one lot were richer than the others. As the poor people said, ‘Our flesh is as the flesh of our brethren’, meaning ‘our bodily needs are the same as other people’s’. It doesn’t matter whether you’re rich or poor, you both get hungry.

It’s a funny idea, I think, that somehow someone who’s worse off in some way, or in need, or suffering from a disability, or a disease, may somehow be represented as being less deserving, less entitled, than someone who’s blessed with enough money, or good enough health, or a bright enough intellect, to do whatever they want to. In the second lesson, from St John’s Gospel, Jesus’ disciples, seeing a blind man in the street, asked Jesus, ‘Who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?’ The disciples had been conditioned to believe that the man’s disability was the result of something which he or his parents had done wrong – and somehow, he had brought his misfortune on himself.

It’s something we have come across in running our food bank. You sometimes read in the newspapers, or hear on the radio, that a politician or somebody has suggested that, first of all, people don’t really need food banks, and that even if, in some temporary crisis, they actually do need to turn to a food bank, they’ve only got to be better focussed, to get their lives in order, to ‘get on their bikes’, as someone once said, and the hunger will go away.

The corollary of that is that if they are hungry, it is because they are feckless, or lazy, or just not trying hard enough. They need ‘tough love’, some of these people say, in order to avoid ‘dependency’. I say, from my own experience in our, Cobham, food bank, that it’s a cruel myth.

When Nehemiah found out how some of his fellow-Israelites were oppressing their fellow-countrymen by charging them extortionate rates for loans, he was very angry, and he did something about it. He got the moneylenders to cancel their loan agreements, and to give back any property which had been pledged or mortgaged. It was the old Jewish idea of the ‘jubilee’, debt cancellation. It’s still a current issue. Archbishop Justin has had the same attitude to Wonga and the other pay-day loan sharks.

The two biggest causes of people needing to come to our, Cobham Area, Foodbank, are low income and debt. Quite a lot of people find that the only jobs which they can get are paid at the minimum wage, £7.20 per hour, whereas the independent Living Wage Foundation says the rates need to be £8.25 outside, and £9.40 in London, in order for people to have enough to live decently on. What with zero-hour contracts and no limit to the amount by which rents can be raised, people often find themselves squeezed financially, so they have to choose between paying the rent – and two missed rent payments can have you evicted – and being able to buy food. If people have used their credit cards or pay-day lenders to tide themselves over, or perhaps to meet an unexpected bill, they can soon see themselves facing serious debts. They can be as hard-working as you like, but still in a mess. Bishop Jo says we must be ‘real about the mess’. We must deal with it, put it right.

Our brothers and sisters at St Andrew’s have just entered into a partnership agreement with the charity Christians Against Poverty, CAP, which works with people to help them to get out of debt. CAP will, if necessary, negotiate on someone’s behalf against a big lender – one of the credit cards, perhaps – in a way that, as individuals, they would find it hard to do. If you know anyone who is struggling with debts, CAP can help, and I’ll be happy to put people in touch.

Just as Nehemiah didn’t blame people for being in debt, or in difficulty generally, neither did Jesus. Talking about the blind man, Jesus said, ‘Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents..’ It’s certainly wrong, ever to think that people get sick, are in need, necessarily because they have done something morally wrong. It’s a mistake to look down on people in trouble, or think that they have in some way brought misfortune on themselves. People on state benefits aren’t feckless or somehow out to cheat the system, simply by virtue of being on benefits. The right way to look at them is to say, ‘There, but for the grace of God, go I.’ When Nehemiah reformed the lending practices in ancient Jerusalem, ‘All the congregation said, Amen, and praised the Lord.’

Amen indeed. 

Hugh Bryant

(Hugh Bryant is a Reader in the Church of England, and is General Manager and Trustee of Cobham Area Foodbank)

Sermon for Mattins at Harvest Festival, 18th Sept 2016
1 Timothy 2:1-7, Luke 16:1-13 

Today is Harvest Festival, as you know. I am under a bit of pressure to keep my sermon nice and short, so that we can go on soon to enjoy the harvest lunch. So here goes.

The lesson from St Luke’s Gospel is a lesson about stewardship – although it’s rather puzzling. On the face of things, we’re looking for teaching from Jesus to support the idea of our being good stewards, good stewards of God’s bountiful gifts: so we might think we are like the steward in the story, in the sense that God has entrusted to us his farm, and it’s up to us to look after it and make the most of it.

I don’t know how realistic that example is today. I think that tenant farmers simply rent land from a landlord, and then they do whatever they want on the land they’ve rented: either growing arable crops or raising livestock, cows and sheep and goats. This steward, in St Luke, is more of a manager, more of a managing director, put in by the shareholders, by the owner, to run the business successfully. 

When I was thinking about this at first, it occurred to me that a parallel which might appear to us might be something to do with the scandal of excessive boardroom pay: that the board members are like the steward, they’re the stewards of the shareholders’ business: and in rather too many cases, in recent years, they have rewarded themselves even when their performance has not been very good.

But whether you’re talking about a farm or a market garden or another type of business, and a manager appointed by the owner to run it for him, whether you’re considering that or whether you’re thinking of a company with shareholders and a board of directors, you can envisage a situation where whoever is the steward in those circumstances might not do his or her job very successfully or very well. 

They might be asked to account, perhaps to the annual general meeting. A shareholder might stand up – as for example they did at the recent BP AGM – in that case to enquire why the board have awarded themselves enormous pay rises, when the DEEPWATER HORIZON oil spill had cost the company over $50 billion.

It sounds a bit like Jesus’ story of the owner asking the steward to explain what he’s been doing. It’s not clear from the story whether in fact the steward has been doing a bad job, or whether he’s simply being accused by third parties of not doing a very good job.

But for certain he is worried. He’s been told that he’s going to get the sack. Then we get this very puzzling passage where, on the face of things, we’re supposed to applaud the fact that the manager is a cheat, and that he has defrauded his boss up of what he would otherwise have received, in repayment of loans which he had made. 

It almost reads like an example from a legal text-book. The manager, acting with ‘ostensible authority’, reduced the amounts shown as owed to his principal by various debtors. He wasn’t authorised to do that, by his principal, by his boss; but so far as the debtors were concerned, he had ostensible – apparent – authority from the owner to act on the owner’s behalf.

So, in English law, the deductions, the write-offs, would stand. But then you get this extraordinary passage where the boss finds out what his manager has been doing, and instead of firing him on the spot for gross misconduct, he is supposed to have applauded him for being very shrewd.

It’s dog-eat-dog out there, and perhaps you’re a bigger dog than the other one. The worldly wealth that the steward is not looking after properly is described in the passage as ‘unrighteous mammon’, dishonest wealth. I think that the right translation is the one that we had read out: unrighteous. ‘Unrighteous’ in the Bible means sinful; it means something that separates us from God.

So the idea is that worldly wealth, unrighteous mammon, is unrighteous because it tempts us away from proper respect for God. If you go shopping instead of going to church, clearly it means more to you to go shopping than to come to worship. It’s not righteous. 

Still, it seems odd that the master, the landlord, should praise the dishonest steward for being worldly wise, for being shrewd in a very dishonest way. Certainly by the end of the passage it’s quite clear that the sort of values that we would expect Jesus to uphold are indeed the ones that he puts forward. If you are honest in a little, you are going to be trusted with a lot. If you’re dishonest when you get tried out with a small amount, then nobody will go on and try you with big and responsible deals. 

It comes in the middle of a passage where Jesus, as he does so often, turns things upside-down. Just before in Luke’s Gospel is the parable of the Prodigal Son, where the brother left behind protests, in a way which we can sympathise with. He says, ‘Look: you know, I’ve been a good boy. I’ve done all the right things. I’ve stayed at home and taken care of things for you. But nevertheless, when he, my tearaway brother, came back, you killed the fatted calf for him. Jesus seems to be rewarding bad behaviour there too. 

But is it the same with the Dishonest Steward? Is he, like the Prodigal Son allowed into the Kingdom of Heaven and eternally pardoned? We don’t know. What happens to the dishonest steward? There isn’t necessarily any forgiveness in the story for him, just praise, praise for getting away with it.

Perhaps Jesus is pointing out that, if all you have is worldly standards, you can get away with what would otherwise look like very immoral results.

Are we good stewards? Are we operating on the worldly standard or the heavenly, and is there a fatal conflict of interest between the two? Jesus doesn’t give us easy answers.

What is the ‘mammon’? Is there a good mammon or a bad mammon? Is it always bad? If mammon is the wealth of the land, the fruits of the labours of the farmers, the husbandmen, is it ‘unrighteous mammon’?

There must be a sense in which some mammon is good, is worthwhile, because without some wealth, without some worldly wealth, people can’t be fed and clothed and housed: so there must in fact be some righteous mammon out there. Jesus is taking exception to the unrighteous mammon, although it does look as though he thinks that it’s possible to wink at outrageous behaviour, if it is actually good mammon, if it bolsters the success of the enterprise. Debt relief is sometimes a good thing, after all.

It’s quite a long way from ‘We plough the fields and scatter’. Next time I go to an AGM, and am inclined to say something about the fat-cats on the board, I think I may have to be more circumspect. Things are not always what they seem.

Sermon for Evensong on the 17th Sunday after Trinity, 18th September 2016

Ezra 1; John 7: 14-36. 

‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept’ (Psalm 137). The psalm recalls the exile of the Jewish people after Jerusalem was captured in 587 by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar. It was in fact Nebuchadnezzar’s second invasion of Jerusalem and of the kingdom of Judah.

From 587BC to 538 the Jews were in exile in Babylon. Although their original capture and defeat were brutal, they were not imprisoned and they were still led by their prophets, Ezekiel and latterly the ‘second Isaiah’, a disciple of Isaiah, so they kept their national identity. In 539BC Babylon fell to the Persians under king Cyrus in a bloodless invasion. It is thought that the Babylonians were fed up with their king Nebunidus, who was said to be incompetent, and that they admired the Persians, so they more or less invited the Persians in.

The Jews had generally admired the Babylonians, who were also monotheists, who worshipped a God called Marduk, and they had a national myth which was very similar to the Creation story in Genesis, called the Epic of Gilgamesh.
In the middle of the city of Babylon was a ziggurat, a tower, which was the Tower of Babel, from which Babylon gets its name. But although the Jews on the whole admired the Babylonians, they did not like the fact that they were captives in exile.

Cyrus was a friend of the Jewish nation too. So when Cyrus came along, and, as described in the the first book of Ezra, gave an edict which released the Jews from captivity, and undertook to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, when Cyrus did that, he was considered to be a possible candidate actually to be the Messiah, the chosen one of God, the liberator of the Jews. 

As we can see, he not only allowed them to go back to Jerusalem, but also he gave them back a huge amount of treasure which was originally taken by Nebuchadnezzar. And so under the Persians the Temple was rebuilt. 

Why was Cyrus in favour of the Jews? It seems that he saw them as people who could provide a buffer, a sort of human shield, at one end of his empire on the way to Egypt. He wanted to win their loyalty and favour towards him, and he saw letting them rebuild the temple as being important in this.

Well, this is all very interesting, but I’m not sure that it’s really sermon material, by itself. The clue to why we’re bothering with it now is in our New Testament lesson, where Jesus, according to St John’s Gospel, is asked where he gets his teaching from: where he was taught himself. And Jesus says that it’s not all about him, but about the one who sent him, about God.

He says, ‘Did not Moses give you the law, and yet none of you keepeth the law? Why go ye about to kill me?’ The Jews appeared to want to kill Jesus, because they felt that he somehow undermined their theological authority.

The point about Jewish history, the history of the Exile, was that it was about obedience to God. The idea was that when the Jews followed the Commandments, in particular the Commandment, the Shema Israel, to love the Lord your God, they prospered; but when they turned aside and worshipped foreign gods, the Baals, and made the golden calf, and worshipped it, then disaster struck and they were driven into exile. The Temple was sacked and destroyed.

Here in John 7 is one of the accounts where Jesus got into trouble as a result of healing a man on the Sabbath day. He turns the accusation back against the Jews by pointing out that, as they performed circumcisions on the Sabbath day, why not heal a sick person at the same time?

This is all to do with a theological doctrine which is called eudaimonism. If you do good things, God will smile on you: whereas if misfortune strikes you, you must have been bad, and are being punished by God. I think it’s fair to say that we see things as being more complicated than that. Why do good people not always prosper – indeed, why do good people sometimes suffer terrible hardship? Surely not because, or not necessarily because, they have done something bad.

It seems very cruel to think that anyone who is ill, is ill because they have done something wrong. In the Prayer Book service for the Visitation of the Sick there is a scarifying prayer for a sick person. 

‘Open thine eye of mercy upon this thy servant, who most earnestly desireth pardon and forgiveness. Renew in him … whatsoever hath been decayed by the fraud and malice of the devil, or by his own carnal will and frailness…’ You are ill because you were bad!

That’s not a view we would hold now, I can confidently say. But I will just leave you with this thought.

Granted that sick people don’t cause their own sickness by being, say, immoral: but what about poor people who are hungry? What about benefit claimants? There have been newspaper articles – and statements by politicians – suggesting that, if you are poor, it is because you are feckless, because you ‘have made bad life choices’.

Dare I mention the Foodbank in this context? When we first started, there were people who came up to me quite often asking how many people were cheating, and getting free food when they didn’t really need it. Politicians were saying that food banks had grown up, not because people genuinely needed them, but that they were used because they were there – they created a ‘pull factor’.

Another version of this concerns refugees. I have had letters from MPs saying that we should not save children (who are legally entitled to come to England, particularly following Lord Dubs’ amendment to the law), we should not save them from the camps in Calais and Dunkirk, until we can ‘balance out the risk of attracting more people to try to come here’.

All these are versions of the same thing. People are the authors of their own misfortune, and we should not help them for fear of encouraging them. Just think about the refugees. Did they have a real choice whether to flee when their homes were bombed? This eudaimonism is a cruel deception. I’m sure that, if one asks, ‘What would Jesus do?’, the answer would be very clear.

Just as some of the Old Testament morality, ‘an eye for an eye’, and so on, has been totally eclipsed by the Sermon on the Mount, so has this awful eudaimonism.

‘By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept’: we wept, we didn’t plan to invade Bradford. We should understand that, and have compassion.

Hugh Bryant is a Reader (Licensed Lay Minister) at St Mary’s, Stoke D’Abernon and General Manager, Cobham Area Foodbank